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:

Here’s to the Ones that We Lost on the Way

Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner

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Peter Blauner’s Casino Moon was an unexpected hit with me last year. Richly created characters all down-on-their-luck in loser-town Atlantic City. I enjoyed it from start to finish and thought I had discovered a new voice. I tried twice to read his Lourdes Robles series but I couldn’t get into it. Everything that popped in Casino Moon felt lank there: the characters, the setting, the mystery, etc. Slipping Into Darkness was the one I really wanted. No less than Stephen King hailed it as one of the best books he’d read […]

Brexiteers

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

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In a world of constant change and rising menace, it’s good to know that John Le Carré still has it. This won’t go down as one of his great works but it’s still a pretty sharp take on the western world post-Brexit/Trump through the eyes of a disaffected anti-Russia SIS operative who has been mothballed for most of the last two decades while Britain and her American ally swung their swords in the middle east. With Vladimir Putin leading the digital charge to break up […]

Technocracy

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

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By design, I know as little about the tech world as possible. I’ve never spent time in northern California, rarely read tech articles (except if they’re bashing the gaetekeepers of social media), and just generally avoid news of that world. I’ve been dipping my toe in the water lately, first with Bad Blood and now this one. That has less to do with curiosity about the world they depict and more to their popularity. I’m glad this one was written by someone my age because I don’t […]

A Decade in the Life

The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke

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The David Robicheaux series is beloved in mystery circles and it’s one I’ve always mean to come back to after having read In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead ten years ago. I liked the writing well enough and I especially enjoyed the south Louisiana setting. New Orleans makes for a great mystery location. But I don’t know; I just made excuse-after-excuse not to return to it. Yet I set those aside when I randomly grabbed the first one from the library. And despite a massive library […]

The Firm

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

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That Elizabeth Holmes was able to dupe such noted luminaries as Joe Biden, the Clintons, Rupert Murdoch, James Mattis, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger should cure you and anyone else who suffers from imposter syndrome. Bad Blood is one of those books I’ve seen lauded in every corner of literatti space. For months, stacks of them were available at local stores. I probably wouldn’t have had interest in the story otherwise but since it’s been everywhere, I decided finally to pull it from my local library. […]

Nepotism

American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein

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On her popular podcast Gaslit Nation, Sara Kendzior repeatedly talks about how the biggest indicator of America’s descent into authoritarianism would be Jared Kushner walking scot free of any potential prosecutions. I knew Kushner was a nepotistic failson whose outsized power comes from his father-in-law’s office and an indifferent Republican Party but of all the crooks in this organization, he’s probably the one who I know the least about or am the least offended by. That changed with this book. Telling the Kushner story concurrently with […]



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