Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Theodore Dreiser

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

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“Dusk—of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.”   One of the more interesting things about this novel is that it came out in 1925, a few months after The Great Gatsby. I don’t think it’s likely, but I would be curious to know if Dreiser made any changes to this text in response. The two books are not hugely similar in terms […]

History began to exert it fascination upon me when I was about six, through the medium of the Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins.

Praticing History by Barbara Tuchman

A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

Deadlock by Sara Paretsky

The Sweet Science by AJ Liebling

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

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Practicing History – 4/5 Stars This is a collection of essays, mostly about history writing, by the American historian Barbara Tuchman. This is my third Tuchman book, and the least “history” one. Her other two books, The First Salute and March to Folly, were both history driven, but also argument driven. This book’s essays cover a wide ranging set of essays, some specifically focused on historical questions like Mao and figures connected to WWI, while the bulk (or at least it feels this way) were mostly about the […]

The American Dream, deconstructed

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Whew. I have spent the evening blogging about books. I did not mean to let myself get this far behind in my reviews, but Christmas vacation happened, and travelling made it much easier to read than to blog. And travelling makes me nervous about having a lack of things to read—so I loaded up my Nook with borrowed library books and sat by a charger at the airport so I would not be bored or bookless (which is kind of the same thing, ya know?). […]

A Tragedy of Psychological Proportions

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On July 11, 1906, Grace Brown, a skirt factory worker, was killed after she was evicted from a boat and fell into a lake in upstate New York. Her body was found the next day, and her lover was targeted as the chief suspect in a homicide. Grace had been pregnant, and letters to Gillette proved that their relationship had been covert and tempestuous. Gillette was convicted of her murder and later executed after an appeal and appeal to the governor failed. Theodore Dreiser’s An […]



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