Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


What This Cruel War Is About

El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord by Noah Hurowitz

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I’ve long avoided books about El Chapo, Mexican drug cartels, and other similar subjects because I think most US citizens have an outlandish view of how the drug trade actually works. In the brief encounters with Mexican drug cartels in fiction, the gangsters are portrayed as overly-tattooed, desperately violent and almost amoral. While there are, of course, shades of that in real life, it also shows a cartoonish image as an avatar for the average North American citizen’s inability to grapple with how its racist drug […]

Christmas in June

Christmas Romance by Catherine Hart, Betina Krahn, Linda Ladd, Barbara Dawson Smith, Katherine Sutcliffe

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Because why not kick off the summer with Christmas romances? A Christmas Melodie (Catherine Hart) – 2.5 stars Melodie is a mail order bride on her way out to Colorado, but when she is snowed in with a handsome widower and his four children, she gets rather side-tracked. I found Melodie likable, but the hero David to be rather annoying with how pushy he was. I also didn’t love that a child-free heroine ended up changing her mind merely on a few days acquaintance with […]

Soldier For Fortune

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler and the Making and Breaking of the American Empire by Jonathan M. Katz

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An excellent read and an infuriating read. Worth all five stars. And like Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction and Ackerman’s Reign of Terror, you’re guaranteed to be peeved on every page. I knew the United States had a colonizing history dating back, well really to its foundation through the US-Mexican War of the 1840s, but more specifically from the end of the 19th century onwards. I knew that we captured many islands in the Caribbean and Pacific respectively, even if I didn’t know the hows-and-whys. Jonathan M. Katz does […]

The Re-Birth of a Nation (and what came after…)

Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois

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I had been meaning to tackle this legendary W.E.B. Du Bois’ tome for years, finally deciding to do it this month. It wasn’t what I expected, in many ways. Those expectations came with my own ignorance in not knowing a lot of Du Bois’ work. I’d read little of him before getting to this. I knew that despite his status amongst the Black intellectuals and historians of his time, he was outcast near the end of his life for leaving the NAACP because of his […]

We the President: Behind the scenes and then some

We the People and the President: An Infographic Look at the American Presidency by PJ Creek and Jamie Creek

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We the People and the President: An Infographic Look at the American Presidency is an interesting book. I only had a sample of what the final will be of PJ Creek and Jamie Creek’s creation, but it was packed with goodies. This is a non-fiction book and partly because the sample I had was online, it was not easy to read. The other part is there is a log of information to process. Diagrams, graphs, text and more filled this (assuming picture book sized, but […]

Take a trip to the other side of the world and find yourself

Ichiro by Ryan Inzana

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What is this book? Well, I can tell you what it is not. It is not easy. It is not straightforward. And it is not something to rush through. Our hero Ichiro must deal with life, death, family, moving across the ocean from New York to Japan and will begin learning what is right and wrong. We see history (American, Japanese, even a bit of Chinese), mythology (I am assuming Japanese as while I know some, I am very lacking in my Asian cultures) and […]



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