Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I don’t feel anything

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

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I was really, really, really hesitant to start this book. I am an anxious person by nature. There’s not a single phobia I have, I’ll move your spiders and snakes out of the way and go on all the roller coasters or in any confined space, no problem. But uncertainty? That turns me into a plague demon. No one likes Anxiety Octothorp, including Octothorp.  So even though this book has been recommended to me a dozen times over years, it was a solid year between […]

No is a complete sentence

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

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I spend far too much time on Reddit threads about real life creepy encounters, which is how I learned about this book. Written by an apparent security expert, De Becker takes a look at the various ways in which we discount our intuition and how paying attention to it instead could save your life. While in some ways this book is kind of workday, and the advice can sometimes seem a little common sense, it’s also the kind of book I wish I’d read when […]

Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them

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It’s not every day that I hear about an almost twenty-year-old book from both Mrs. Julien and Amy Poehler. Yet that’s how I came to learn about The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. I’m pretty sure Mrs. Julien mentioned it in an offhand manner in a comment at some point. And then Amy Poehler cited it as her most-quoted reading material in Yes, Please. I didn’t realize it was written way back in 1997 until I went and found the book at the […]



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