Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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It’s A Cookbook

The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

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Hampton Sides is the author of maybe the best narrative non-fiction work I’ve ever read, Hellhound on his Trail, his book about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr and the subsequent manhunt for the assassin, James Earl Ray. I haven’t given any of his other books a try until now, largely because their subject matter didn’t seem like topics I definitely wanted to read about. At first blush, I felt the same way about The Wide, Wide Sea, which covers the third and final voyage of […]

A Lonely Grave in a Far Land

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides

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Captain James Cook was already a world-renowned explorer when he set out on his third great voyage around the world. Over the course of three years, he’d touch down on the shores of Tasmania, be the first European to come in contact with the people of the Hawaiian islands, and nearly destroy his ships and sailors in the search for the fabled Northwest Passage – and meet a grisly end in a strange murder that is still being debated to this very day. I read […]

Blood and Thunder

Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides

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This book takes place circa 1845 during the Polk presidency, who is oddly obscured in history because of his status as president prior to the US Civil War, but this relative obscurity belies just how instrumental he was to the westward expansion of the US and to a kind of preparatory set of exercises for the Civil War. If you were to view the US-Mexico War merely as the crucible through which most of the primary figures of the US Civil War were forged and […]



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