Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Murder on the New Frontier

Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution by Katherine Grandjean

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CBR18 Bingo: Map – We follow the Harp brothers’ rampage across maps of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi – and the brothers’ troubles started with land ownership disputes. On the heels of the American Revolution, Wiley and Micajah Harp went on a violent rampage across Tennessee and Kentucky, but while their crimes may have seemed inexplicable to their contemporaries, they may be tied to the dark realities of the newly promised American Dream. I had never heard of the story of the Harps before, and I knew […]

Hack Your Way Out of Your Troubles

Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James

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CBR18 Bingo: Repair – The axe is a tool used to fix a lot of things – houses, sheds, ships.  In this book, it can provide a murderous solution to people’s problems too. The phrase ‘axe murder’ conjures images of a brutal, gruesome, and somewhat old-fashioned crime. The history of the axe murder is much longer than its presence in newspapers though, and more intimately intertwined with the lives of its perpetuators and its victims than one might think. Firstly, Whack Job is a truly excellent […]

Prisoners of the Self

The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult by Harrison Hill

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CBR18 Bingo: 26 – Published April 7, 2026. Also, Sarah Green escaped her mother’s cult at the age of twenty-six. When Sarah Green escaped the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult, she was running away from not only the violence of the group, but from its leader, her own mother. I came across this book by reading an excerpt in the news – drawn in by the story, I right away went out looking for the book at the library. Most cults […]

Get Off My Island!

Eden Undone by Abbott Kahler

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CBR18 Bingo: Sheep – The doctor and Dore, and later the Wittmers, all come to Floreana hoping to live simpler, more rustic lives, growing their own food and tending to their own animals. When Friedrich, a German doctor, and his former patient and lover Dore decide to move to an uninhabited Galapagos island in search of a pastoral setting for their self-improvement, they did not know the publicity and violence that would follow. I had a vague recollection of this bizarre story from hearing about […]

CBRBINGO: Friends—”I was most flattered when I was called the Steven Spielberg of Sitcoms, and in response to that, Steven called me and told me that he wanted to be known as the James Burrows of movies.”

Directed by James Burrows by James Burrows

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I bought this at Book Outlet earlier this year (or late last year? what is time) and didn’t feel any particular rush to get to it. Then James Burrows died in June, and now just felt like the right time. This is a career-focused memoir told by James Burrows to Eddy Friedfield, who compiled it all into a book. You can definitely tell that Burrows is not a writer (a fact that he opines at least four times throughout the book—is this irony or what?) […]

Colonies, Cults and Crimes

The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land by Sally Denton

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I have the Harris County Public Library to thank for this recommendation.  Before jumping into The Colony, I have to confess, I wasn’t really aware that the Mormon Church had much of a significant presence in Mexico. But it turns out there a number of prominent  fundamentalist Mormon families have been established there since the US outlawed polygamy in the 1880’s.  The book opens with the 2019 murders of three women and six of their children as they drove through Northern Mexico. While initial reports […]



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