Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A bloody good time

Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment by Harold Schechter

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Kids see too much violence online/video games are too violent/TV is too violent/Comic books are too violent/Radio dramas are too violent/Dime novels are too violent/you get the picture! Harold Schechter provides a timeline of humanity’s fascination with violence from the era of oral storytelling to “today” (2005). I picked this up for research for a project, mostly because I wanted to learn more about true crime media, but it was a very good read. Granted, he didn’t have to convince me, but it was helpful […]

Ed Gein rocked 1950s America, and has left an indelible mark that has lasted 70 years

Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

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Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and basically the whole career of Rob Zombie owe a great deal to Ed Gein. Officially, Ed Gein was not a serial killer. Officially, he “only” killed two women: 58-year-old Bernice Worden, the owner of a hardware store, in 1957 and 51-year-old Mary Hogan, the owner of a bar, in 1954. The general baseline used to define a “serial killer” is three or more murders. But his brother, Henry, died suspiciously in 1944 following a […]

Episode 1-19: Going Insane, Got No Brain

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https://killingmykindle.com/2018/05/14/episode-1-19-going-insane-got-no-brain/ Wherein I review: 67. The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3) by Rick Riordan 68. Deranged: The Shocking True Store of America’s Most Fiendish Killer by Harold Schechter 69. Lies, Damned Lies, and History (St. Mary’s Chronicles #7) by Jodi Taylor 70. Oathbringer (Stormlight Archive #3) by Brandon Sanderson 71. Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh Lots of crazies up in this piece.  Apollo finds his third Emperor.  Harold Schechter scribbles about Albert Fish.  Jodi Taylor soldiers on through the time travel.  […]

Triflers need not apply

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I had no idea until someone mentioned it that Amazon Prime members get to buy four (I think it’s four) pre-release books for nothing throughout a year – Hell’s Princess was my first free prime e-book as well as the first kindle edition I’ve ever seen that includes moving artwork, with newspaper photos and articles that zoom in to the pertinent parts and illustrations based on some of the content. While the newspaper parts worked well for this book, I’m not sure that the illustrations […]

Never trust a big nurse and a smile.

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    It’s not so easy to get away with poisoning someone in 2016. Modern medicine can typically detect any poisons that can be obtained by the average human. Additionally, we’re not so blinded by antiquated ideas of femininity that we’d fail to consider the possibility that a mother could poison her children or a nurse the patients in her charge. However, as Harold Schechter illustrates in Fatal, it was almost too easy for a woman in the late 19th century to get away with […]



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