Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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This is going to be a careful balancing act of a review (and it’s almost definitely going to fail)

Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad

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Going into this book, I wasn’t sure what I was going to get from it. I am a white, middle-class, cis, hetero man from the global North and I’ve definitely f**ked up not recognizing the privilege that one or many of those things has given. I’ll also f**k up again (guaranteed) but hopefully I’ll keep learning. Think about the role my ethnicity has played in my life is something I tend to face most days, and for the last decade or so I’ve reflected a […]

“Beginnings and endings are arbitrary; they frame the story that the narrator wants to tell.”

The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele, David M. Perry

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The Bright Ages has an interesting premise with merit – that the popular understanding of the Dark Ages is the effect of an effort to create the myth of darkness from the past century, and it obscures the truth of this period in human history. The Bright Ages attempts to show the Middle Ages for what it was, a much more nuanced time than the general perception. To do that it examines the histories of many of the known, including Charlemagne, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the slightly less known –the multi-religious experience of Iberia, and the genius of Hildegard of Bingen and the power of queens.   I wanted to love this book, but I just liked it. There […]

Mention it all

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

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The book: Cue the Sun! is a definitive history of reality television, beginning with “man on the street” radio shows and ending with The Apprentice in the early aughts. Most chapters are devoted to a single show or creator who was revolutionary within the genre, like Cops, Survivor, The Real World, or Chuck Barris’s 70’s game shows. In addition to high level overviews of the development and reception of these shows and trends within reality TV, Emily Nussbaum also interviewed cast and crew members from countless reality productions. Why I read […]

The Latter Day Wild West

The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land by Sally Denton

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When a caravan of women and children were ambushed by masked gunmen on a remote Mexican road, it sent political ripples through both Mexico and the United States. But this is not the first time the LeBaron and La Mora communities have been in the headlines. Though this book uses the 2019 killings as the entry point into the story, it more broadly chronicles the history of this particular branch of the fundamentalist Mormon LeBaron family, which is well known for its polygamous practices and […]

Shine On, You Crafty Diamond

Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World's Most Notorious Jewel Thief by Doris Payne, with Zelda Lockhart

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When I say I love true crime, I don’t mean “they found her in pieces in the basement” true crime.  Heists, cons, grifts, and capers are more my speed, which is what drew me to the story of Doris Payne, an international jewel thief who got away with robbing some of the world’s best jewelers for over sixty years. “Diamonds” by qthomasbower is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 . Payne was born in West Virginia, lived in Cleveland, and made her first big score in […]

A childhood idol turned into a real person

Say Everything by Ione Skye

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I was probably about twelve years old when I first watched Say Anything with John Cusack and Ione Skye, and it made a deep impression on me. In fact, it shaped my goals for most of my teenage years. I still have a very clear memory of Ione Skye’s character, Diane, marking every word that she looked up in her giant dictionary. I thought she was beautiful and smart, and I wanted to be just like her. In fact, because of Diane, I was intent on becoming […]



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