Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Between the Accident and the Incident

Curse of the Blumenthals by Phyllis Karas

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Three generations of journalist Phyllis Karas’s family are marked by two great tragedies – the car crash which killed six members of the family, and the murder committed by the first grandchild born after that accident hardly twenty years later. This is an interesting mash-up of a book – part family history, part true crime, and sometimes even a scrapbook. Karas dives into the crimes which impacted her family, whether they were those who committed them or the victims, studying how their effects rippled through […]

Mention it all

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

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The book: Cue the Sun! is a definitive history of reality television, beginning with “man on the street” radio shows and ending with The Apprentice in the early aughts. Most chapters are devoted to a single show or creator who was revolutionary within the genre, like Cops, Survivor, The Real World, or Chuck Barris’s 70’s game shows. In addition to high level overviews of the development and reception of these shows and trends within reality TV, Emily Nussbaum also interviewed cast and crew members from countless reality productions. Why I read […]

The Latter Day Wild West

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

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When a caravan of women and children were ambushed by masked gunmen on a remote Mexican road, it sent political ripples through both Mexico and the United States. But this is not the first time the LeBaron and La Mora communities have been in the headlines. Though this book uses the 2019 killings as the entry point into the story, it more broadly chronicles the history of this particular branch of the fundamentalist Mormon LeBaron family, which is well known for its polygamous practices and […]

“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”

Hiroshima by John Hersey

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Originally a long-form article written in 1946, this is the story of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with a follow up from decades on documenting the ups and downs of the survivors’ lives. This far on from the event, the enormity of the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is commonly known, even if it’s still playing out even today. As such it’s rather hard to fully understand how much of a sensation this book was at the time […]

“The chief wrong which false prophets do to their following is not financial… but the real harm is on the mental and spiritual plane.”

Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile

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CBR17 Bingo: Borrow – Support your local library! Like many of my reads, I borrowed this book from my local public library. The story of cult leader Amy Carlson and Love Has Won burst onto the news due to the unusual circumstances surrounding her dead, but she and her group are just the latest incarnation of New Age new religious movements in the United States. I have a bit of a fascination with new religious movements (which are not always cults, though all cults are […]

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo

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CBR17 Bingo: N – Re: the title. The obsessive collector in history has worn many faces – a magician, a scientist, a connoisseur, a madman – but whether they are a force for good or evil in their societies is a more complicated question. When I think of collectors I usually think of the modern kind who collects some specific category of kitsch because they like them, be it stuffed animals or porcelain figurines or Stephen King novels. As someone who dislikes clutter and has […]



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