Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I'm trying to catch up with my reading And my writing And my everything, really. Not actually a platypus (Learn more about this Cannonballer: LittlePlat's Quick Questions interview.)

LittlePlat's Reviews:

Yes, There Are No Scripts. So It Is Written in the Script

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

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Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Award, which is Australia’s most prestigious literary award. It had also been sitting on my reader long before it got nominated. Reading about Lu’s win was the kick in the pants I needed to pick the book up and give it read through. And I’m really quite ashamed that I hadn’t done it sooner.  Ghost Cities is an imaginative and bonkers novel weaving together two tangentially related plots. The first unfolds in a […]

We’re Traveling, We’re Traveling—Off the Page and Down the Rabbit Hole

Conspiracy Nation: Exposing the dangerous world of Australian conspiracy theories by Ariel Bogle; Cam Wilson

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I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. Cookers, sovereign citizens and conspiracy theorists can be a fascinating bunch, albeit in the same way a train wreck is fascinating. Yes, it can be very amusing to watch them try and ‘pseudo law’ their way out of trouble when they caught doing something very stupid, but there’s often something darker lying under the surface. For every giggle you get from listing to some SovCit proclaim ‘I’m traveling, I’m traveling!’ after being pulled over by […]

Come Fly With Me

Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life we Breathe by Carl Zimmer

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Taking a quick step away from genetics and genetic engineering for a moment to write about a slightly different field of biology—aerobiology. A somewhat obscure field of biology that really should not be; if aerobiology had been a more widely recognized and respected field in the 20th and 21st centuries, a major event from five years ago may have played out very differently. I am, of course, talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea that diseases like COVID could spread so easily through the air […]

Why You Shouldn’t Cut-and-Paste a Genome Like a Word Document

CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans by Henry T. Greely

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I made quick promise at the end of my review of Gene: An Intimate History, that I would be reviewing a number of books about a certain individual who wanted to ‘win’ the gene editing arms race. And how very reckless he was. That man, of course is Hè Jiànkuí. This is the man who tried—and succeeded—in inducing heritable CRISPR-mediated genome modifications in human embryos that then resulted in live births. Hank Greely’s CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans is a rather […]

‘The Idea Is, Even if I Do Explode, I’m Only Going to Be a Risk to Sheep’

Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch

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Been a while! I can’t believe that we are at now ten books into the Rivers of London series. This is another one of those urban fantasy-slash-detective series that I’ve been enjoying over the years. And like some of the others, Rivers of London has 1) experienced a bit of a gap between novels (three years) and 2) reached a bit of a pivotal point in the over-reaching narrative.  Let’s get the biggest thing out of the way first: Stone and Sky is a Rivers […]

No One Else Can Come in and Copy You

Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology by Jorge Goldstein

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Ok, keeping with the gene-theme this summer, I’ll now be briefly turning my attention to gene patents. Jorge Goldstein’s Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology is a great introduction to biological patents in the US (and beyond). It’s also a rather personal narrative; Goldstein entered the field of patent law at a time when biotechnology was experiencing some rapid advances (many of them mentioned in the previous book I reviewed), and he describes his career as like […]



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