Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I always get the shakes before a drop.

Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein

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I read this years ago, I think in high school or college and thought it was great. I don’t think it’s nearly as great, but it’s still very good. This is a book about endless war, asymmetrical war, and the dehumanizing process of war on both soldiers and enemy combatants — as well as the cynical ways in which participation in war is seen as a legitimizing, if not the only legitimizing, active part of citizenship, despite how empty warfare is (especially post-WWII). Johnny decides […]

Point Counterpoint, or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Show

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Like the two disconnected eyes of some monstrous oracle, these books look out of their respective time periods, casting forward to try and envision a future that could arise from contemporaneous events. One sings of nationalistic pride in service to the state, while the other firmly declares that war is a pointless and exploitative endeavor whose only benefit is the fostering of an unwieldy bureaucracy feeding on the health of its people. These books are diametrically opposed to one another, but each also serves as […]

The movie is better.

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How often can you say you liked the movie better with a straight face? Not often. Here’s what the movie has going for it: 1. It’s fun and watchable. 2. It has pretty people in it. 3. Horrible things happen to those pretty people. 4. It takes parts of this book and ignores the rest. 5. It completely subverts the pro-military message of the book into a satire. 6. It has Neil Patrick Harris in it as a psychic. 7. It’s cheesy and violent and tries […]



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