Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Voices of the Ignored

The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History, Immigrants, women, & African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle by Margaret S. Creighton

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Until I joined a reenactment group about 6 years ago, I’d never had any interest in the Civil War since its most popular focus is white men shooting each other. Now, this isn’t to say that the experiences of the white, male soldiers consumed by the jaws of war aren’t important, it just means I don’t particularly care what Gen. So-&-So did at noon on July 2nd, 1863. And unfortunately, at least at Gettysburg, ninety-nine percent of the focus is what white men did in […]

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad…House

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

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A knock at the door. A series of frantic knocks at the door. Yes, It Will Just Be Us  nearly starts with “it was a dark and stormy night”. Our narrator, Sam, is a down-and-out adjunct professor of archeology barely hanging onto her sanity. After a series of upsetting events, we find her moving back to her crumbling, ancestral mansion in on the edge of a foreboding Virginia swamp. The mansion is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. It’s haunted by the living specter of her […]

“Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to anti-racist policies” – CBR12Bingo “How to”

Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

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This book fits the “How to” square by teaching me how to be a better anti-racist.  It is not enough to be against racism, one must be actively anti-racist, which is different.  I am a white woman and in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, came to realize that I was woefully under educated about the problem of racism in America.  At the time all sorts of recommended reading lists came out and Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas […]

The Union Forever

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

The Golden Gizmo by Jim Thompson

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Reviewing two books here, one of which I have a lot to say about and do, the other I have little and do not… Battle Cry of Freedom 5/5 Unquestionably the ur-text on why the Civil War happened, McPherson examines all angles, the social, political and military. Not a stone is left unturned. Yet this book is remarkably readable. Very few parts of it dragged and the ones that did were the ones that I wasn’t particularly interested in in the first place. McPherson doesn’t set […]

Too Much and Too Little

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon tells an unflinching tale of slavery and survival, set in a future that is horrifically similar to both America’s dreadful past and terrible present. They sugarcoat nothing; what else would you expect from a story that starts with a gruesome amputation? I have to applaud Solomon for writing a brutal and gut wrenching story. They shout out the horrors of racism, giving graphic depictions of brutality. Black women are tortured, raped, and publicly executed, and Solomon makes you stare at these scenes of […]



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