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 […]

An Adults Only Lord of the Flies

Batavia by Peter FitzSimons

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The Batavia, the pride of the Dutch East India Company, is on its maiden voyage from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies when it wrecks off just off the coast of western Australia. But the tragedy of the Batavia stems not from the forces of nature, but from the evil in men’s hearts. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about this story in the last couple years, and was so curious about this strange, dark story, part survival story and part true crime, that I decided […]

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 […]

A mixed bag of people who maybe, sorta, could’ve been famous

Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins

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Paul Collins is one of my favorite writers of historical true-crime, as seen in his wonderful books Blood & Ivy and Duel with the Devil. When I learned about his first book, Banvard’s Folly, I knew I had to get my hands and eyes on it. The subtitle promises a fascinating collection: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck. The book jacket positions it as a story of antiheroes: people who “might have claimed their renown but who, whether from ill timing, […]

The Power of Audacity

The Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth

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Victoria Woodhull started life being paraded around as a child psychic by her conman father and marrying an alcoholic twice her age, but through a lot of work, luck, and audacity, she lived many lives as a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, a suffragette, the first female presidential candidate, and much more. Victoria Woodhull is one of those interesting American characters that’s been popping up in books I’ve read set in the Gilded Age for several years. She was eccentric and scrappy, but in many ways […]

Object Lessons

Blue Jeans by Carolyn Purnell

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Blue jeans are a practically universal garment, but their sheer ubiquity belies their relatively short history and the staggering path they took to hit the mainstream. Blue Jeans is a short non-fiction book from a series called Object Lessons, which dives into the histories of the everyday objects in our lives that we’re so used to that we hardly consider them in any depth. I certainly look at my blue jeans now with fresh eyes, which is entirely the point. The book is divided into […]



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