Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Be Takei and you know, do stuff!

It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger

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Cbr17bingo White  It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger took me over a week to read. This is not because it was a bad graphic novel, but for three main reasons. First, it is actually on the longer side. Second, because it has heavy subjects it deals with. And finally, the pages can be a bit crowded, making images and text blur together and/or making it hard to follow at times, so I just took my time with […]

Maisie Dobbs and the Case of the Dubious Highlighter

Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqqueline Winspear

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cbr17bingo Family Back in the day, I read quite a few Maisie Dobbs books, and thoroughly enjoyed them.  The first I read was Birds of a Feather, bought purely because of its wonderfully evocative cover art, and then went back to read the first of the series, and any others I could find in book stores.  She went off my radar for awhile, but she is definitely back on again now. The period is post WWI Britain up until the 1930s.  Maisie signed up as […]

“Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.”

The Warm Hands of Ghosts: A Novel by Katherine Arden

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They are fighting their war in the last world, but we’re dying in this one. January 1918. Laura Iven, a revered field nurse, wounded when the Germans bombed the munitions depot her field hospital was next to, is discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Months later, back home in Halifax, Canada, Laura lives assisting three elderly mediums after the deaths of her parents. On the night that Pim Shaw, a young widow seeking to connect with her son, […]

From Mummies to Tattoos to Eunuchs

Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations by Sam Kean

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Sam Kean also loved the idea of archeology, but never the actually practice; all that digging for a couple of pot shards was not his idea of a good time. Then he discovered experimental archeology: people attempting to recreate the foods, clothing, weapons, architecture, and medicine of ancient civilizations. This book is the record of his foray into the field, organized chronologically from 75,000 years ago in Africa with a spear hunter to the 1500s in Mexico with an enemy of the Aztecs assisting the […]

“For I was indeed a student of human nature, as every orphan and hooker and unwanted kid must be.”

Vera by Carol Edgarian

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CBR 17 Bingo: Family – Central to Vera’s story is a desire for a family in which she can truly belong, and her outside status with both her birth mother and her foster family. Vera has always lived under the shadow of a great secret – though raised as the younger daughter in a Swedish household, she is actually the daughter of San Francisco’s greatest madams. In the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1906, these worlds come tumbling together. I remember it was a […]

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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