Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Witches and Jesuits

Witches and Jesuits by Garry Wills

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Garry Wills has a Phd in Classics, but has mostly spent his public career writing about politics, religion, and history. He’s most famous probably for a fallout with the “intellectual Conservatism” movement in the early seventies when he wrote a polemic against Nixon. He also won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1990s for a book about the Gettysburg Address. In this book, he begins his study of Macbeth by asking the question: why do so many performances of Macbeth fail? He doesn’t exactly ever […]

The Gates of Europe

The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy

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This book was on sale on Audible a while back and seemed like the perfect kind of book to settle up my sense of Ukranian history. This part of the world as a whole is a big hole in my knowledge and for obvious reasons I wanted a separate history of Ukraine. The book is about as straight-forward as you could want, and the publication is timed with the recent Maidan Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, which was in reaction to a series of corrupt […]

All the good stuff that wasn’t in your history books

Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving by Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg

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Cbr14bingo Bodies – Bingo Mobituaries is a fascinating, eminently readable collection of humorist Mo Rocca’s obituaries for people and phenomena that didn’t get the attention they deserved at their passing. It’s the kind of book you can just pick up, open at random and immediately be drawn in. Certainly, some of the subjects of Mobituaries are people you have heard of (Audrey Hepburn, Herbert Hoover) but Mo Rocca will reveal things about them that might not have been featured in a traditional obituary or that […]

Images chosen can be disturbing

After the Rain by John Jennings

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This is one messed up book.   Yet, After the Rain based on the Nnedi Okorafor short story, is powerful and probably something we need to read. Violence, graphic image of torture and even rape imagery could be triggers. I would not recommend for under age 14 and I still think that might be too young. KNOW your reader. This is not for sensitive readers as even adults could be disturbed. And no, this should not be read at 11:30 at night because you couldn’t […]

“In some ways, Richard’s argument about OxyContin mirrored the libertarian position of a firearms manufacturer who insists that he bears no responsibility for gun deaths. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

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This is an absolutely fascinating work of family history, that just happens to also be a searing indictment of that family’s contribution to the opioid crisis. The first chunk of this book details the origins of the Sackler family. In some ways, it’s a truly American success story: the three brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond, were the children of immigrants. All became doctors. The three brothers purchased a small pharmaceutical company in the early 1950’s (Purdue Pharma), which Mortimer and Raymond mostly ran while Arthur […]

The sunshine and the grumpy one – now with added crime!

The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian

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CBR14 Bingo: Gaslight (Marian was lied to and manipulated by the duke, book also set in the Georgian era) Spoiler warning! I’m going to do my best to review this book without spoiling major plot points from The Queer Principles of Kit Webb or this book, but if you want to remain fully unspoiled, you’d probably want to skip this review until you’ve actually read the book. Which you should (read the book, I mean), it’s absolutely marvellous. Marian Hayes, believed to be the Duchess […]



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