Cannonball Read 11

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Shades of grey in Afghanistan, where the truth is elusive

No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

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Man, I’ve been terrible at this reviewing thing, hey? No better way to get back into it than to just jump straight in. Close to a decade ago, when I was agitating to do “real journalism” I was semi-obsessed with reading books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I was more concerned about the writers’ inner lives, and yearned to understand how they handled these stressful situations — against the backdrop of devastating American-backed wars. And now, I have little patience for such naval-gazing (Jeffrey Gettleman’s saccharine-titled “Love, Africa” comes to mind), likely due to a niggling sense of discomfort when reading […]

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5/2/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:1 |

Read It Here First

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

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I won a free ARC from Goodreads in exchange for this review. Thanks Goodreads! Laura Lippman’s been on a bit of a roll with her standalone novels. Wilde Lake was really good and Sunburn is, in my estimation, the best thing she’s ever done. Most of what I loved about reading Lippman’s Tess Monaghan novels growing up was the Baltimore tourism. Being a native of the city, it’s fun to see a bestselling author talk about places I know like they’re real. But her standalone works show how she has evolved as a writer, forsaking the familiar private eye tropes and Baltimore fetishism of […]

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4/1/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:35 |

Luke Cage meets noir meets The Diviners meets more please!

Abbott by Saladin Ahmed, Sami Kivelä

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Abbott is a brief, five-issue series set in 1970s Detroit about journalist Elena Abbott, lone black female reporter at the Detroit Daily. Abbott prefers to delve into the stories the paper’s board would rather not see printed. She’s recently getting heat for her piece on the death of a black teen at the hands of police, but so far she’s been protected by her loyal boss. She has a new case on the horizon and it’s a grisly one.  A mutilated police horse is found and the Detroit PD claims the crime stinks of the Black Panthers.  As Elena digs […]

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  • Abbott by Saladin Ahmed, Sami Kivelä

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3/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:19 |

True Journalist

Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace

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Well I guess I know what a British James Ellroy would read like. The only other book I read of David Peace’s is his fun and hilarious soccer send-up The Damned Utd., which was the basis for a fun and hilarious soccer movie. I tried Red or Dead but found it’s repetition too cloying and it’s 600+ pages too daunting. Still, I think he’s a talented writer. It took me several tries to get into this one; I had to get used to his writing voice. But I’m glad I did because this is a wild noir. I love journalism fiction and conspiracy […]

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3/12/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:27 |

Meg Ryan Rom-Com: I should have bought the Kindle edition (now $1.99!)

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

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Picking out a book is like dating before computers: all you’ve got to go on is cover and genre. Let’s say bleak non-fiction is your wheelhouse. Today you’re not feeling it—hundreds of pages about the Holocaust is enough for one week—so you think, hey! time for something new. Look at this handwritten recommendation on the bookstore shelf. Look at that cute paperclip…aww, it’s a workplace romance. Not my type, but maybe I’ve changed! Maybe there’s still feeling left in my pessimistic soul! I breezed through this book in 24 hours, waiting for stirrings or longing in my lions (not a […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

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2/10/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:12 |

It’s Not Just You, The World is Collapsing

The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time by Brooke Gladstone

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I idly picked up this slim book—tract? broadside?—at the local bookstore while waiting for my daughter to browse all the new graphic novels. This quick read is probably more potent now than it was upon its original publication in May 2017. The premise: many Americans living in the age of Trump the primary candidate, Trump the Republican nominee, and Trump the President *rightly* feel unmoored from reality. How could we [liberals] so badly misunderstand our fellow Americans? be surprised that our government can be so quickly dismantled? How do we know what’s actually happening when “truth isn’t truth” and everyone […]

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1/30/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:8 |

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

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Orwell is a man of strong convictions. He believes so passionately in the fight against fascism that in 1936 he travels to Barcelona to fight in the revolution. Homage to Catalonia is a detailed account of the politics surrounding the revolution, a fervent defense of the working class and a witness of war from the trenches. “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” I will be honest and say that the politics interested me very little and I much prefered the first-hand accounts of the terror of war, of […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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1/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:2 |

An illuminating book about the grossness of human behavior.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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I went into this expecting the corruption, murder, institutional racism, etc. against the Osage Indians to be very bad, and I still somehow managed to come out of this book mindboggled. This book should be taught in schools, and it is heinous that these terrible things happened, and just as heinous that so many people covered it up, and practically erased it from history. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the US were the Osage. By sheer coincidence, after their tribe was displaced from their ancestral lands, they chose new, rocky, inhospitable lands that they believed white […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

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1/8/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:4 |


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