Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Troubles

Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Read as part of cbr12 bingo: Pandemic! I’ve wanted to read this one for a bit and it doesn’t really fit in any other category. Few books have had the kind of hype that Say Nothing has been getting the last 12-18 months. It wound up on dozens of “Best Of” lists in 2019. It was recommended by Barack Obama. Friends who read it gushed about it. Given that’s a history tale (yes) about a subject I know little about but am curious of (uh-huh), I knew […]

We have to be better than this

Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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An incredibly well-written account of yet another shameful episode in how white people treat others, Killers of the Flower Moon looks at the systematic murder and robbery of the Osage Indians in 1920’s Oklahoma. Having forced the Osage on to what was thought to be useless, unfertile ground, white Oklahomans were pissed when it turned out that said land turned out to be incredibly oil rich and that the Osage had retained the rights to the fortunes reaped from this in the original agreement to […]

True Criminal

The Last Stone by Mark Bowden

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The Last Stone isn’t a typical true crime novel. It doesn’t lay out the crime itself in great detail, along with the perspectives of aggrieved parties and dogged investigators. Instead, it covers the pursuit a cold case squad did on one subject based off an obscure interview that wasn’t given much credence at the time, since it was seen as a crank in the hazy days after the crime was committed. I’m somewhat familiar with the famous story of the abduction of two girls from Wheaton […]

Good, but Forgettable

Grace is Gone by Emily Elgar

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Based on the real-life story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Grace is Gone tells of a Mother and daughter duo, Meg and Grace, that are bound at the hip. Grace suffers from debilitating diseases that leave her wheelchair ridden and utterly dependent on her mother. At first their relationship feels pure and inspirational. The pair are the darlings of their town, until one night, Grace’s chair is found toppled over while Meg lies bludgeoned to death nearby. Jon, a disgraced local journalist joins forces with Grace’s […]

fun fact: name dropping Joan Didion no less than 45 times in your 270 page book does not make you Joan Didion

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

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You know that dream where you realize that you have been in assigned to a class for an entire semester, but you have never once attended the class? You “wake up” on the day that your final is due and panic, then cobble together whatever previous assignments that you have scattered about that might be able to pass for whatever you were supposed to do in that class? I am fairly sure that’s what happened to Alice Bolin when she woke up one day, book […]



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