Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About jeverett15

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40 years old. New Jersey resident. Fan of mystery novels, classic literature, and non-fiction about movies, television, sports, and American history.

jeverett15's Reviews:

The Only Mystery is, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke

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This book is nothing. I know that’s a bold claim, but I’ve racked my brain since finishing The Ending Writes Itself, the new book by Evelyn Clarke, a pen name for the collaborative work of V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, and I can’t come up with anything that accurately categorizes it. The publishers call it a mystery novel, and on the surface it’s easy to see why. It’s about a dead mystery writer, after all, though his death is not mysterious at all. He’s drowned […]

Murder in a Made-Up State

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

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In Francis Spufford’s imaginative Cahokia Jazz, life in the United States in 1922 is not as we remember it from the history books. The “Cahokia” of the title refers to a state run largely by and for Native Americans, as a partial monarchy informed by Catholic teachings. As a thriving state, Cahokia is attracting more residents from outside the indigenous population, and relations are getting tense. Detective Joe Barrow of the Cahokia P.D. is a man in the middle. A half-Black, half-native orphan from Nebraska, he […]

Last Kings

The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer

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The story of how Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg met, befriended each other, and worked in frequently close collaboration as they took over Hollywood in the 1970s is a subject tailor-made for a great book. Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood, however, is not that book. While he studiously chronicles the events of the time period, he fails to capture or transmit any excitement for it. You know that line from Good Will Hunting about an education you could have got “for $1.50 in […]

A Strong Second Act

Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway by Michael Riedel

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In his previous book, Razzle Dazzle, Michael Riedel chronicled Broadway history from the 1960s through the ’90s, mainly through the lens of the Shubert Organization and the two men who took control of it in order to save the company and their industry as a whole, Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs. Financially, Broadway was in a good place at the end of the book, buoyed by the British mega-musicals, like Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera. There were problems visible on the horizon, however, especially […]

College Friends

So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder

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If I had to say something in it’s favor, I guess I’d tell you that I flew through Grant Ginder’s So Old, So Young, a novel about college friends that follows them from their days just after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania into their forties. Of course, that’s largely because of how insubstantial and weightless it is. The main characters are Mia (journalist), Marco (finance), Sasha (gallerist), Theo (lawyer), Adam (something, but mostly defined as “gay”), and Richie (also gay, but defined more frequently […]

Broadway Through the Decades

Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway by Michael Riedel

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Fittingly for a book about Broadway, Razzle Dazzle takes a big swing. It’s an incredibly ambitious project, covering a wide span of territory, in time if not geography. Geographically, Riedel’s main focus is on a slice of West 44th Street known as Shubert Alley. That’s where the Shubert Organization, owners of seventeen Broadway theaters, conduct their business. Founded as a family business by Sam Shubert and his younger brothers Lee and J.J., the company had many up and down periods under their control, which formally […]



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