Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


He was headed for Wall Street and had been sidetracked by the money. Only the money.

The Firm by John Grisham

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I don’t know if this was true for you, but my childhood home was absolutely dominated by John Grisham. It sort of went through my home like the flu with probably my oldest sister bringing home a copy of The Firm or maybe A Time to Kill…one of those two, but eventually others. Everyone, including my mom and brother (both big readers) and my dad (not a big reader), passing the books around. My brother was not allowed to read A Time to Kill because […]

I Blame TV

The Cadaver King and Country Dentist by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

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You will never look at science the same way after reading this book. Even if you know that the shows like C.S.I. are science fairy tales what Balko and Carrington chronicle isn’t so much a miscarriage of justice but a deliberate hoodwinking by a group of men (the two in the title are the most important but hardly the only ones) who didn’t give a damn about the truth because those accused were poor, or black or the forgotten or all three. The book focuses […]

Lawyering, fast and loose, like old times

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Back in the day I devoured John Grisham books like candy. The “classics” I remember fondly, aka, The Firm, The Client, The Pelican Brief, The Runaway Jury, and, a departure from the thes, A Time to Kill. For no real discernible reason, it’s been about a decade (whoa) since I have picked one up and a quick pass over the “hot and new” section at my local library grabbed my attention as unsurprisingly, John is still at it. A few of my book clubs are […]

Never thought a John Grisham novel could make me cry

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Becoming a parent (which my wife and I did two years ago) does some strange and unexpected things to your brain. I’ve spent the entirety of my time on this earth identifying with the kid in every parent-child relationship. I’ve always seen myself as the kid. I had no other perspective from which to peer at the world. And then…..it shifted. Given those same parent-child situations, I now see it from the other side. This is such a simple shift in perspective, but there’s a […]

You can’t handle the trials (heh) and tribulations of the 1%.

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The Firm (1991) Not reviewed previously on CBR. In many ways, this is the perfect book to adapt into a Tom Cruise movie. The main character is young, cocky, great looking, and he has to run. The only difference, really, between Mitch and Tom Cruise is that the character is taller. So, he looks more like Patrick Bateman. The image that kept recurring to me, in fact, was Christian Bale in American Psycho. Sexy. The problem here, for me, is that he isn’t an every […]



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