Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The Bad Knights

The Lost Order by Steve Berry

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: golden. The book centers around a fictionalized version of the Knights of the Golden Circle and the book has a quest for gold.  First of all, I had no idea that a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle actually existed. Formed in 1852, they had a goal of expanding a slavery empire through the southwest United States, into Mexico and central America, and including the Caribbean. All of this happened before the Civil War and they […]

“Didn’t you know the insides of dogs and cows and birds and fish are exactly like that of man? The only difference is the clothes we wear!”

The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales by Vasily Eroshenko, Adam Kuplowsky (translator)

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CBR16 Bingo: Dreams – Eroshenko’s fairytales give us glimpses of his dreams for a more compassionate and peaceful future where all are respected no matter their gender, race, class, or ability – and the fears he has about what may have to be done to achieve them. Fairytales as oral traditions bear the stamp of the cultures that tell them; fairytales when written by an individual bear the stamp of culture channelled through that individual, which is a different thing altogether. There really are some people […]

Whitewashed Histories and Walls

White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port by Kate Storey

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CBR16 Bingo: Cult – The Kennedys have rather a cult following, and in this book particularly we learn how many people were so fascinated they swarmed their homes in Hyannis Port. When the Kennedy family decided to make their summer home in Hyannis Port, MA, they little suspected how strongly associated the place would become with their aspirations and their scandals. I’m a Massachusetts native, but my family’s roots there don’t go back long enough to have really witnessed the heyday of the Kennedys in […]

Someday, He Will Be President

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

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Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson series has always been honest about what it is. Ostensibly, this is true about every biography. A book about the life of Amelia Earhart should be just that. Only, every biographer, no matter how well-intentioned, objective, clear-eyed or distant brings with them an angle. Perhaps a person was under appreciated in their time. Maybe they were overrated by the laudations of historical standard. Possibly they had a hidden back story that impacted their life. Caro has been clear that these books […]

Rolling Heads

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

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What you must never forget about this one is that you’re still in Wolf Hall. That’s trite, I know! But I can’t think of what else to say because as I reoriented my perspective on reading this, its power really hit me. I read Wolf Hall five years ago, at a different period in my life and thought it was just ok. Appreciated what it was doing but I didn’t have the focus to engage with it like I should have. Time and age tend to confer […]

I Tried

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles

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I’m going to try and review this book as dispassionately as possible in the beginning. I’ll save my personal comments for the end. Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times writer who now works for The Free Press on Substack, found herself dismayed in the aftermath of lefty uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s death. She’s a liberal, a woman, a lesbian no less and she suddenly found her words and identity out of step with what she saw as progressive overreach. So she attempted to […]



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