Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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If our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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I’ll start with the bottom line: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in years. Author Rebecca Skloot not only explains the science in a compelling, accessible manner, she also explores the ethics of the medical research and devotes at least half the book to the people that were touched by Henrietta Lacks and her legacy. Five enthusiastic stars! It’s hard to say where this story “begins,” because it really depends on whether you are talking about […]

Another Infuriating Debacle.

Doctored by Charles Piller

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This ended up being another one of those books I had to read over an extended period of  time due the stress it gave me. This book shares some similarity to John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood in a way, but it covers a field that I am somewhat less familiar with, which also contributed to it becoming a stressful read. In addition, unlike the Theranos story, you also can’t just lay blame here at the feet of a small number of individuals. The issues here are […]

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

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CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death. The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them. The Black Death is one of those things […]

The review with no name

My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s by Peter Dunlap-Shoh

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This GN is this year’s  Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli The Language of PD  The Spandex Angel One Order of No Vomit Coming Up I Hate Running I could call this review any of the above and a hundred other things. Such as, “I tried not to cry as I was reading as I was at work and it reminded me of my friends who passed from complications of the disease (and one of whom also had complications from Alzheimer’s).” […]

Coming into the Light

The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake

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I enjoyed this novel both because of its heroine, Nora Beady, but also for all the interesting details about the practice of medicine in the mid 19th century–fascinating and horrifying in equal measures. Nora is the ward of a famous British surgeon, Horace Croft, who saved her from a cholera infection that killed her whole family when she was a child.  Croft is brilliant and eccentric and that may be why he encourages Nora’s interest in biology, anatomy, and medicine, even though in mid 19th […]

A History of Royal Intermarriage and its Consequences

Royal Inbreeding and Other Maladies by Juliana Cummings

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Royalty was supposed to rule by divine right and meant to preserve their bloodline, but in their zeal to do so lay the seeds of the madness and maladies that plagued many royal houses. It’s always fun to read about mad royals. Removed by time and societal changes, they don’t feel real enough to be sorry for, and so you can fully indulge in ogling at the bizarre stories without shame. And with unlimited money and power at their disposal, there’s a lot of bizarre […]



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