Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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WTF Indeed

The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker

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A couple of years ago, a movie came and went starring Tina Fey called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the military call letters for WTF. I didn’t even remember the movie until I went looking for reviews for The Taliban Shuffle after I’d read it. I sometimes like to read reviews after I’ve finished a book, just to see if my thinking is in line with the critics’. One thing I discovered while doing so this time, apart from the fact that the book was made in […]

This book was not for me. Maaaybe it would be for you?

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Not quite sure what to say about this book, because not quite sure what to think about it. This book was written after a Buzzfeed article detailing Nico Walker’s life (soldier in Iraq, has PTSD, comes home gets hooked on heroin, starts robbing banks to fuel heroin habit, goes to jail) piqued the interest of a book editor, who began pursuing him to write a book. So this is basically a fictionalized version of Walker’s own story. Which is one of the problems I have with it. […]

The Ghosts of Anti-Semitism Haunt Holland Through Soccer

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Read for Cannonball Run Bingo. Category: White Whale. The World Cup was on this past summer and anytime I see it, I’m inclined to read more books about soccer. I’m a big sports fan but my interest in soccer really only begun about 12 years ago when, bored out of my mind for the summer of 2006, I watched the World Cup fastidiously. Soccer is now perhaps my fourth favorite sport after baseball, football, and basketball and I’m wearing a New York City FC shirt […]

Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]

A war, depression, and a sociopath. And three other books not about the 2016 election.

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64. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll (5 stars) The Pacific Crucible examines the naval war in the Pacific theater of WWII from Pearl Harbor to Midway, and traces its origins back to the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s seminal book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. This is the first in a nonfiction trilogy about the Pacific theater of WWII. The second, The Conquering Tide, was published in 2015. I think it’s a fairly stellar book about […]

A Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi

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I absolutely hate reading books about war because they upset me so much. I usually end up angry and crying.  Or angry and with a headache because I’m trying not to cry.  Basically, it all just upsets the crap out of me and I don’t like it. The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, is no exception. I didn’t think it would be and although it was on my To-Read list, I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to reading it if it wasn’t selected by my book […]



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