Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Them

Them by Jon Ronson

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This is Jon Ronson’s first book, appearing in 2001 after a few years of writing and research (and hijinks) gathering materials. The book involves Ronson spending time with various extremists of multiple bents, but especially Islamic extremists and Right-Wing extremists, with some ??? extremists thrown in. On this last point for example, Jon spends a long part of the book with an extremist who really seems to be using anti-Semitic codewords about new world orders and lizard people, but also really might possibly be talking […]

The Age of Napoleon

The Age of Napoleon by Alistair Horne

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Like a lot of generally well-educated people I FEEL like I know a lot about Napoleon. But as a person who knows me, I actually know that I don’t actually know very much about Napoleon. It’s possible that a significant amount of my knowledge of Napoleon comes from fictional sources like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Assassin’s Creed: Unity. And more to the point, a lot of what I know about Napoleon come from British sources. This led me a question I still don’t […]

The Devil’s Highway

The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea

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This book is an investigation into a disastrous border crossing into the deserts of the southern US where 14 men died, and 13 were severely harmed and also nearly died. The book looks at this specific event in close detail while also spending investigating the broader political and financial realities and polices that shaped it. At times the book reads like a true crime book, which also speaks to the kind of horror of true crime books, which are often wildly entertaining because the exceptionality […]

Growing up Absurd

Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman

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It’s impossible to deny the influence this book had in its day. It’s referenced by numerous writers who became famous later on as one of those books that helped to open their eyes. It still does have a lot of good and important ideas, and like many other important ideas, those inspired by the book took the ideas to places that elevated them. The book is a kind of polemic against the uselessness of modern life to the youth of America circa 1958 or so. […]

Democracy in Chains

Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

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Some of the reviews for this book, those not ideologically or politically driven mention some potential out of context or overly emphasized quotes. Fair enough. We should aim to do good history when we write and read history. What I can’t deny about this book is the analysis of the information that is already publicly know, but often hidden and obscured, and the vision that this book paints about the future. What seems to me the most important idea presented here is that even with […]

The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr

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Something like a Neil Postman book, and this book also reference Postman a few times, this book tries to answer the question what exactly are the ways in which the use of the internet affects our brains? The approach to this is through biology and neuroscience and history, and using the author’s own personal story not to explain the answer, but to model the type of user he is and to provide a kind of narrative history of what this question looks like on the […]



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