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:

To Do And Do Not

A Promised Land by President Barack Obama

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It’s tough to put aside my feelings on President Barack Obama and his politics and just rate this on its merits alone but I’ll try. I feel like I was capable of doing so with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened, though Obama obtains far more space in my imagination, having served as President and having been the most historic one of my lifetime. This isn’t as candid as HRC’s book but it’s candid enough. Obama starts from his childhood years, goes quickly through his early time […]

Murder, They Wrote (And Directed)

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas by Glenn Kenny

The Big Fix by Roger L. Simon

The Damsel by Richard Stark

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I went on a bit of an unexpected reading tear these last few days, which is good because I need to clear some space off the TBR pile in advance of reading Barack Obama’s new book.   Moonflower Murders 4 Stars ::Trigger Warning:: Tragic homosexual plot And how sad it is because the book didn’t need it. I was curious as to how Anthony Horowitz was going to follow up with his superb Magpie Murders series. He does so by giving us most of an Atticus Pünd novel, […]

Famiglia

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab

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After reading Michael Cannell’s A Brotherhood Betrayed, I had an itch to scratch for mob books. I read a few others but all roads led to me finally tackling Selwyn Raab’s massive tome on New York’s famous five families. Let’s just say the itch has been scratched…raw. This is as good of a book as could reasonably be expected, considering its ambitious and unwieldy goal of writing a narrative about all five New York mafia families. Having read a lot of mob origin stories lately, I’m […]

Nazis? I Hate Those Guys

The Book of Lamps & Banners by Elizabeth Hand

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I used to binge watch the tv show 24 with friends from college. In the beginning of the season 1 episodes, Jack Bauer would mournfully reflect on his circumstances and say, “I’m Jack Bauer, and this is the longest day of my life.” To which one of my friends joked: “What about season 3? Is that the third longest day of his life?” Generation Loss was published in 2007, which feels like an alternate timeline to what we’ve been through these last thirteen years. Yet Elizabeth Hand has […]

Casino

The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice by David Hill

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Part of my family is from Arkansas. I never knew Hot Springs to be such a den of vice! This is about as entertaining as true crime can get, especially if you like mob tales as I do. There are three running threads in the story: Dane, Owney, and Hazel. Dane becomes the top man for gambling in the city almost by accident but does all he can to legalize it. His ideas are actually ingenious but he’s consistently working against Arkansas’ theocratic bureaucracy. Owney, […]

King Her

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shrugged off my manly man view of what real sports are. Cheerleading is a sport. Golf is a sport. Bowling is a sport. And for God’s sake, chess is a sport. I’d rather get sacked by Aaron Donald than try and sit in front of a grandmaster and play them at chess. A few years ago, I read Michael Weinreb’s entertaining The Kings of New York about a chess team at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School. Weinreb, a writer who usually entertains me, […]



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