Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Snatch, Lewks, Shade, and Werk (an no, there are no typos here)

Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life by Tom Fitzgerald, Lorenzo Marquez

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Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life covers a wide range of subjects in shallow depth. The introduction is open about this, and the authors suggest you go ask Youtube and Google about further details. On the one hand, this is a good goal, to encourage people to further explore things of interest. On the other hand, it can also be a problem such as when a queen named Michelle is important but not discussed much […]

“This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves.”

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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I am finally getting around to read my second Cannonball Read book exchange gift book this year from Bonnie (thanks Bonnie!) I don’t know what took me so dang long because I loved the first book she gave me, Red White and Royal Blue, and it wasn’t even on my radar to read, and neither was Homegoing and I should have known that Bonnie knows her book business and BOY. DOES. SHE. Homegoing is definitely in my top books of the year, and one I’m […]

The People Don’t Get Their Way

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

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This should be required reading. It was a bit of a coincidence that the hold I had on this volume at the library became available as the new year rolled around. I listened to the audiobook on my daily walks and was continually struck with the thought of “history repeats itself, history repeats itself.” There were many declarations made by Howard Zinn that could have easily been applied to life in America today. I also coincidentally read the chapter about the end of World War […]

Putting Black women back into the historical narrative.

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

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This was a really good book for what it was—a survey of Black women’s roles throughout 400 plus years of North American history—but the relatively small 219 page count just wasn’t enough space to really get into the sorts of details I really love when reading about history. I don’t think we can discount the impact of the purpose of the book, though, since its entire aim is to place Black women back into the historical record, and it very much succeeds in that goal. […]

Was It Really Friendship?

Mrs. Lincoln & Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave by Jennifer Fleischner

Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave & Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley

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  While noodling on the internet one day, I came across an article about Mary Lincoln’s personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. A former slave from Maryland who’d bought her own freedom, Keckley was a master mantua-maker who got herself the coveted position of dressmaker to the president’s wife. There was a little link at the bottom of the article about Keckley’s memoir, and it was too enticing to pass up. Happily, even though it was published in 1868, my library had a copy of it! The […]



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