Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Very readable despite being a difficult topic

American Overdose by Chris McGreal

by Leave a Comment

This book was exactly what I expected it would be: a well-written, well-researched dive into the forces that combined to create the American opioid crisis. I knew the basic outline of those forces, but reading in depth was eye opening and I came away pretty angry. Basically big pharma, the FDA, and congress all had a greed fueled opiate money orgy and fucked over Americans in the process. McGreal does a great job of organizing the massive amount of content and complex timeline into a […]

This egg is a little rotten

The Good Egg by Jory John

by Leave a Comment

Sadly, The Good Egg by Jory John and illustrations by Pete Oswald, is a preachy story about being the “good egg” but then learning to “take care of yourself” and it is okay to “not be perfect.” It is a very modern story that you are going to love or hate. It is in the same vein as the authors other book, The Bad Seed. There is not a lot to say about this book, except the negatives. I am not a fan of the art […]

Diets Don’t Work

The Metabolic Storm, 2nd Edition by Emily Cooper

by 6 Comments

The beginning and end of this review are going to be fairly personal because the topic is very personal to me. I’ve been overweight for most of my life. After years of being in and out of therapy for food and body issues, I finally recently got around to seeing a nutritionist. She recommended this book to me. Author Emily Cooper makes a point of classifying overweight/obesity as a disease and believes that it should be recognized and treated as such, especially since various medical […]

Blowing smoke up your ass used to be literal

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen

by Leave a Comment

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything reminded me a lot of Jennifer Wright’s Get Well Soon; they both tackle the history of early medicine and make you happy to live in the modern age. Quackery is brief, each chapter is essentially an extra long Cracked article, but Kang provides a lot of information in a short amount of time and if any topic really intrigues you it would probably be easy to discover a more in depth article on the Internet. Sure, we all know […]

And the Headstones Climbed up the Hill

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

by 1 Comment

Last year I read Nicholas and Alexandra and discovered a whole new, extremely specific genre that I love: nonfiction books about some point in time where everything came together in a very particular way that changed the entire course of history. I’m very pleased to say that Dreamland is now the second book I can add to that category (which really needs a snappier name). Dreamland is actually two stories which fit together perfectly to create something really terrible: it’s the story of Purdue Pharma’s […]

If you find me mainlining a baguette in February, this is why

The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom by Melissa Hartwig

by 3 Comments

  I’m not a “diet person” and I’m especially not a trendy diet person. So it’s kind of surprising that I even latched on to this plan. However, as Melissa Hartwig will emphasize throughout the book, this is not a diet or a weight loss plan. This is a 30 day “reset” to help you change your relationship with food an understand how different foods affect your body. This resonated with me as someone who immediately begins stress eating as soon as things get tough. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo