Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bandaids don’t fix bullet holes

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

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I enjoyed this book immensely, and appreciated the factual and as unbiased as possible approach the author took, as his investigation of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos eventually made him a part of the story once Holmes began to view the journalist as a threat.  Carreyrou’s level headed reporting was a necessity given Holmes’ view of him as someone with a vendetta against her personally, and he admirably sticks to what can be factually confirmed, making allowances any time he draws a conclusion that […]

So take a look what you’ve done/ ‘Cause, baby, now we’ve got bad blood, hey!/ Now we’ve got problems/ And I don’t think we can solve ’em

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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Bad Blood is the story of Theranos and its founder’s, Elizabeth Holmes, fall from grace following the revelation that the whole company was built on secrets and lies.  I was aware of Holmes and Theranos from the countless articles written about her before and after the truth came out but it wasn’t until I saw the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood that I really grasped how deep her deception went. By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled […]

“And never underestimate the importance of even just a little bit of progress.”

Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better than Your Mess by Rachel Hoffman

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I’ve intended to read this book for some time. Down in the depths of my depression fellow Cannonballer Siege mentioned on Facebook one of Rachel Hoffman’s tips to Unf*ck Tomorrow Morning – put a little toilet cleaner in the bowl before bed. It was such a small thing, but cleaning my bathroom had become my Impossible Task and it helped get that under control that week and lift the cloud of depression just a little bit.  I knew instinctively that any author who would a) […]

Learning a lot about my own personal Kryptonite

Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine by William Rosen

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It is so hard to write a review on such a dense book this far removed from having read it but I have been woefully tardy in my review writing so bear with me… Doctor’s weren’t alone in benefiting from the people-getting-better phenomenon, or, as it is formally known, ‘self limited disease.’ It may be hard to believe that less than one hundred years ago a simple bacterial infection would realistically kill you. Modern medicine the way we know it really began in earnest in […]

Step By Step

Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess by Rachel Hoffman

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Several lovely people on this site have reviewed “Unf*ck Your Habitat” with rave reviews, and I’m totally a sucker for a fun title and I hate cleaning, so I decided to give this book a go. And it’s every bit as good as everyone says. Hoffman breaks cleaning down into short bursts of what she refers to as 20/10s or 20 minutes of doing something and 10 minutes of rest. That way something is always getting done, but it never feels overwhelming. It starts to […]

“Microbes do more than infect us, however; they are us, in the sense that we harbor more microbes than human cells”

Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness by Harriet A. Washington

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I was really excited to read Infectious Madness and while Washington makes some interesting points she fails to stick the landing. I would also caution anyone whose loved ones, especially their children, have any of these afflictions to take the contents of this books with a grain of salt. Essentially correlation is not causation and sometimes the sound of hooves is just a horse. Schizophrenia, for example, has been traced to waves of influenza epidemics as well as to infections with bornavirus; species of adolescent anorexia […]



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