Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Three-Four-One

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Despite the backlash due to Coates’ writing and speeches on his time in Palestine, there are really three narratives in this travelogue. The Palestine one is the third one and it’s the one I’m going to spend as little time as possible on because I don’t want this page to be a forum on what’s happening there right now. I actually think the best essay here is the first one, where Coates finds himself in Dakar, Senegal. He has written at length about the rejection […]

That’s What Friends are For

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This is my second Senegalese novel (the first was the amusing Xala, last year) and so far one of my favorite African novels of the 13 or so I’ve read. So Long a Letter is the story of two Senegalese women, friends living in post-colonial Dakar, written in the form of a long letter from Ramatoulaye to Aissatou.  Ramatoulaye is grieving the recent death of her husband Modou. We gradually learn that Modou was no saint, however, and that Aissatou also is without her husband, Mawdo Ba–because she divorced […]

This is a story about post-colonial economic impotence–literally.

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El Hadji Abdou Kader is a rich and powerful man in the emerging middle class of 1970s Senegal, who got that way through some…creative…business practices.  A member of the showy “Businessman’s Group” who considers the President a close friend, he lives in post-colonial luxury: two wives, two villas, a chauffeur, etc.  El Hadji decides to take a third wife, N’Gone, to the dismay of his first two wives and their children, and throws an ostentatious celebration.  But things go wrong on his (third) wedding night: he has […]



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