Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

How the World Works

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell & Kit Chellel

The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré

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Finished two consecutive books on how the world works. Both are good and devastating in their own respective ways Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy When the cargo ship Dalit hit Baltimore’s Key Bridge last year, I felt it deeply, not just because I’m a Baltimorean but because I’ve worked with seafarers in the past. It’s a hard life: dangerous labor with little pay and almost no labor protections. Away from your family months at a […]

Lost Paradise or Far Flung Trailer Park

The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific by Brandon Presser

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CBR16 Bingo – Bananas: A lot of people eat a lot of bananas across several centuries and a number of South Pacific islands. Also, this story is utterly bananas. Several centuries after the mutineers from the HMS Bounty settled Pitcairn Island, author Brandon Presser goes to visit this isolated place, where he tries to understand how the bloody and conflicted past has shaped the present day lives of the descendants. Considering how much I enjoy true crime and strange stories, it’s probably odd that I […]

What if she doesn’t want to remember?

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You know how sometimes you keep trying to read a book, but you aren’t feeling it so you put it down indefinitely and then when you pick it up again, you can’t believe how much action there is and you just plow through the end as if you’d never put it down? Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God was like that for it. It’s the first book I started reading in 2017, and one of the last that I finished. I don’t think I read a […]



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