Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About Halbs

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I'm left-handed! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Halbs's Quick Questions interview.)

Halbs's Reviews:

No Stranger to the Vine

Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste by Bianca Bosker

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The main two things you need to know when considering my review is that (1) I don’t know anything about wine and (2) I do like witty, smart writers. If you know a lot about wine and you don’t like journalists inserting personal asides into non-fic, your feelings about this book will probably differ from mine. Writer/sommelier Bianca Bosker’s book is educational, funny, and at times inspiring. It pairs nicely with A History of the World in Six Glasses. That work gives you a great introduction […]

An Homage to an Homage to Twin Peaks?

The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh

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I added The Blinds to my Goodreads list a couple years ago when writer Adam Sternbergh gave an intriguing interview to Texas Monthly magazine. It was all about his travel through Texas to research what West Texas was really like so he could nail it in the book. Since The Blinds was recently a Kindle deal, I nabbed it and gave it a go. At times, the writing is fantastic – fatalistically and pithily humorous. Kind of like a mix of Raymond Chandler and Catch-22. Unfortunately, the back […]

A History of the Quirks of the Church of Christ

Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America by Richard Hughes

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Like many millennial Christians, my faith is central to my life but I don’t identify strongly with any particular sect or denomination. In fact, the whole denomination issue seems to me to be at worst be divisive, and at best a sort of menu of preferred “flavors” of church. That being said, I did grow up in the “Church of Christ” tradition. For the unfamiliar, CoC  can be quickly described as “Baptist, but with more communion and fewer guitars” or “libertarian church”. Since I’ve never […]

Disturbing and Beautiful

The Crow by James O'Barr

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On the sunshine-iness spectrum ranging from Morissey to Kimmy Schmidt, I place myself towards the left, somewhere around the Joseph Gordon-Levitt dot. I enjoy poetry and creativity and thinking Thoughts, and at the same time I also try to find joy in life. If you’d put yourself in a similar position, if you’ve had someone taken away from you, or if you are a fan of the comics genre, consider The Crow. The graphic novel looks and feels familiar to anyone who has seen the […]

“Let us be what we are.”

The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky

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Several of my most recent reviews have been related to adoption and self. That’s on purpose. I’ve recently discovered both sides of my biological family through AncestryDNA, the research of an “adoption angel”, and some amateur online sleuthing. It’s hard to describe in text what it’s like to finally name your biological heritage as an adult. It feels like coming home, maybe. One of the most interesting parts for my and my kids is that I found out that a large chunk of my heritage […]

Read “The Primal Wound” Instead

Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up by Nancy Newton Verrier

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A few months ago I reviewed The Primal Wound, Nancy Newton Verrier’s book about the unavoidable impact that separation from the biological family (especially mothers) places on adoptees. I mentioned that while the book was a bit dated since it was written in the early 1990s, there was a lot of value in it because it articulated and normalized things that many adoptees feel. One of the primary complaints of Verrier’s first book is that it of lays out a problem without a solution. (This wasn’t […]



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