Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Genre: Non-Fiction

Tears and Anger

A Murder on W Street: The Death of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy by Andy Kroll

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR14Bingo: new. This book just came out a week ago and it was the newest book in my personal library once it arrived at my house.  One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life was to get off Facebook. There were numerous reasons I did it, most of which had to do with personal mistakes I made and not wanting to subject myself to it anymore or be forced to have an opinion when I didn’t. But another reason is […]

Witches and Jesuits

Witches and Jesuits by Garry Wills

by Leave a Comment

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 […]

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

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

by 1 Comment

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 […]

The moments of his life, shaping us all

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson

by Leave a Comment

I bounce between a 3.5 and 4 with All Boys Aren’t Blue as the flow of things sometimes was off for me. However, the subject is very good, and I think could be valuable to even those who have not/or will not follow a similar path as George M. Johnson. Even though his intended audience was not exactly aimed at someone like me, I was able to appreciate his voice and his story. For sure this is not for the very young due to language […]

“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

by Leave a Comment

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 […]

Tyrant

Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt

by Leave a Comment

I love a good subtweet. This is probably the most elaborate subtweet I’ve ever read too. In the book, Stephen Greenblatt looks at several examples of Shakespeare writing about tyrants, using a wide definition of what exactly makes a tyrant as his model. In general, he’s thinking about rulers who do not represent the will of the people, who work in self-serving ways, whose rise might be illegitimate in various ways, who are ill-equipped, who are morally compromised, who are mentally compromised etc. Hmmmmm. Anyway, […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo