Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Caitlin_D

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I skipped CBR for 2020 because I was expecting my first child and knew time would be finite. Then the world imploded and I missed the crap out of y'all. Plus I read so much less without y'all's recommendations! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Caitlin_D's Quick Questions interview.)

Caitlin_D's Reviews:

Learning a lot about my own personal Kryptonite

Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine by William Rosen

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It is so hard to write a review on such a dense book this far removed from having read it but I have been woefully tardy in my review writing so bear with me… Doctor’s weren’t alone in benefiting from the people-getting-better phenomenon, or, as it is formally known, ‘self limited disease.’ It may be hard to believe that less than one hundred years ago a simple bacterial infection would realistically kill you. Modern medicine the way we know it really began in earnest in […]

I always feel like somebody’s watching me/ And I have no privacy/ Woah, I always feel like somebody’s watching me

You by Caroline Kepnes

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I binged You on Netflix after reading an article about how Penn Badgley was imploring that young women stop romanticizing his character, Joe, and see him for the psychopath he is. You by Caroline Kepnes is the novel the first season of the TV show is based on, there is a sequel that the upcoming second season will cover, about a book store clerk named Joe Goldberg who develops an unhealthy obsession with a young woman, Beck, who comes into his shop. You didn’t walk in here for books, […]

“The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance.”

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero, Tom Bissell

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The Disaster Artist, the book and film, were everywhere in late 2017 and early 2018 before fading into a distant memory when James Franco’s inherent creepiness turned out to be the sexual predatory type of creepiness and not just quirkiness eventually quashing the film’s Oscar dreams. While scrolling through Overdrive recently I came across Greg Sestero’s memoir and, vaguely familiar with the story, decided to give it a shot. “What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I’d never seen in anyone else: a […]

“Microbes do more than infect us, however; they are us, in the sense that we harbor more microbes than human cells”

Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness by Harriet A. Washington

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I was really excited to read Infectious Madness and while Washington makes some interesting points she fails to stick the landing. I would also caution anyone whose loved ones, especially their children, have any of these afflictions to take the contents of this books with a grain of salt. Essentially correlation is not causation and sometimes the sound of hooves is just a horse. Schizophrenia, for example, has been traced to waves of influenza epidemics as well as to infections with bornavirus; species of adolescent anorexia […]

Female memoirs about growing up in California and then moving to New York written by actresses!

Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame by Mara Wilson

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

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Where Am I Now? 3.5 Stars I enjoyed Where Am I Now? back in CBR8 and decided to revisit it this year as an audio-book. Mara Wilson narrates her memoir which threw me off because the Mara Wilson of 2016 does not sound like I imagined. It’s not like I was  expecting her to still have her 1993 lisp but it was still jarring to my auditory system. Most people have embarrassing videos of themselves as children. Few have theirs copyrighted by Twentieth Century Fox. Wilson’s […]

“Staying alive, as it turns out, is mostly common sense.”

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek MD

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Working Stiff is a fascinating look at the inner workings of a real forensic pathologist. While Judy Melinek’s day to day job scarcely resembles the medical examiners you’ve see on TV her memoir is ten times more interesting that any Law & Order episode I’ve seen recently. Judy Melinek went to medical school with the plan to become a surgeon but the unrelenting schedule and her boyfriend’s hesitation to marry a surgeon led her into forensic pathology (and a happy marriage!) Mine is a gruesome job, but for […]



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