Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Jake

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I love reading! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Jake's Quick Questions interview.)

Jake's Reviews:

The Bad Knights

The Lost Order by Steve Berry

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: golden. The book centers around a fictionalized version of the Knights of the Golden Circle and the book has a quest for gold.  First of all, I had no idea that a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle actually existed. Formed in 1852, they had a goal of expanding a slavery empire through the southwest United States, into Mexico and central America, and including the Caribbean. All of this happened before the Civil War and they […]

Stingers

Scorpions' Dance: The President, The Spymaster, and Watergate by Jefferson Morley

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Hmmm. This is tough. I was loving the first part of this book. It was maybe my favorite non-fiction read of the year. It almost read like a thriller. It traces the early political careers of Dick Helms and Richard Nixon respectively, along with the trajectory that would lead them to Watergate and the close of their careers. Then it got to the Kennedy stuff. And I realized Jefferson Morley is a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. Not a hardcore one. He doesn’t seem to believe anything […]

All In, This Family

The Devil At His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty by Valerie Bauerlein

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While I enjoy true crime with the best of them, I tend to avoid the True Crime Podcast Industrial Complex, which has turned a bunch of amateur know nothings into wannabe Hercule Poirots with cameras. The field is currently saturated with amateurism, leading people to consider and conclude the most ridiculous things. It also turns the crimes they cover — most often homicide — into a carnival and ignores the fact that these are real people with real tragedies and our justice system is ill-equipped […]

The Future Is Bleak

Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: Tech. In addition to some of the tech developments set in this near-future pre-apocalyptic tale, one of the main subplots is an interactive video game the characters play that features heavily in the narrative. This book started out interesting enough: we come upon a disaffected broke upper class Brooklyn couple, trying to recover from infertility and the loss of an infant. The husband has lost their money at a time of a bad economic downturn but is trying to […]

No, Not You. We Named the Monkey Jack!

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: first. This is the first of two Carl Hiaasen novels to feature criminal food inspector Andrew Yancy.  I wanted to read this before I saw the TV show since it’s received good reviews and seems like the kind of thing that is for me. I have mixed feelings on Carl Hiaasen, though I always enjoy reading his books. They start strong as he lathers on all the Florida-ness he possibly can. The line in this one about how the […]

Someday, He Will Be President

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

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Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson series has always been honest about what it is. Ostensibly, this is true about every biography. A book about the life of Amelia Earhart should be just that. Only, every biographer, no matter how well-intentioned, objective, clear-eyed or distant brings with them an angle. Perhaps a person was under appreciated in their time. Maybe they were overrated by the laudations of historical standard. Possibly they had a hidden back story that impacted their life. Caro has been clear that these books […]



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