Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: non fiction

Murder most historical

Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present by Peter Vronsky

by 6 Comments

Sons of Cain is the third book on serial killers that I’ve read from Peter Vronsky, having previously read about Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters and Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters. This time, the angle taken is a historical one, with Vronsky looking at serial killing trends from the Stone Age until now, while also theorising about the potential future of these types of crimes. Serial killing is in no way a modern phenomena, and this book looks […]

“Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.”

The Stonewall Reader by The New York Public Library

by Leave a Comment

This is a book that has immense historical value, but I had a very hard time paying attention to it. Partly, this is due to my own expectations, and partly due to the format. I was expecting a book mostly about the actual events of Stonewall itself, first of all. That’s not really what this is. Only about a third of it focuses on the actual riots, the middle section. The first section focuses on pre-Stonewall writings by queer authors, and the final third does […]

I can see why she won the Pulitzer for this, but it wasn’t completely to my tastes.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

by Leave a Comment

I’m really glad I did the audio version for this one, because I’m not sure my raccoon brain (shiny things only!) would have had the patience to sit through it otherwise, and it’s worth sitting through. Robin Miles is, as always, a great narrator. This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting, either. I had actually never learned about the Great Migration in all my many (many) years of school, which is not really surprising, but is disheartening, so I was excited to get into […]

Readers bring a lot of baggage to their reading material

The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein

by Leave a Comment

I wish I had listened to the age-old adage: don’t read the comments. But that’s exactly what I did after I finished reading The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein; I opened the book in Goodreads to see what others had to say. Of course, a lot of people don’t like to read books that have unlikeable, or less than perfect, main characters. (I feel a bit weird using the word ‘character’ about a biography, but let’s go with it anyway.) I knew this already, but I […]

True crime and queer history.

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green

by Leave a Comment

Thanks to Celadon Books for the ARC! It has not affected the content of my review. I wish I had gotten to this book before publication, but better late than never. I was offered an ARC and accepted gladly, as I’d wanted to read the book anyway. It then arrived weeks late, presumably because the USPS is having some capital ‘I’ Issues right now. The book was worth the wait, though, even if I was sort of unsettled and left a bit unsatisfied at the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo