Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

You know the cliche about history…

A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

by Leave a Comment

Yeah, the one about not knowing it and being doomed to repeat it? Well, here’s exhibit number bajillion, Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. This likely sounds familiar to you: a man of ill repute, shady origin, and gross appetites seeks to capitalize on the population’s racist and xenophobic impulses by becoming the head of a large organization; along the way he makes a lot of money by extorting […]

Like so many things, this could’ve been better with Charlize Theron in it

1989 (Allie Burns #2) by Val McDermid

by Leave a Comment

The year is 1989, and journalist Allie Burns isn’t enjoying life. She’s moved from Scotland to Manchester with her girlfriend and fellow journalist Rona. The newspaper she works for has been bought by a media magnate named Ace Lockhart (named in the novel as Rupert Murdoch’s main competitor but for all intents and purposes, he is Rupert Murdoch), which means than rather than write the well-researched think pieces Allie used to do, she is now chasing juicy athlete divorce stories and covering disasters like the […]

Another Western take on Russian history, but a worthwhile read

Russia: The Wild East: A History, Part Two: The Rise and Fall of the Soviets by Martin Sixsmith

by Leave a Comment

I didn’t care for the flavour Sixsmith added to his take on the far history of Russia, yet here I am reading his sequel, covering the entire Soviet empire, start to finish, and enjoying it. In his first book, Sixsmith wrote from the perspective of “Western” approach = good, “Eastern” approach = bad. Everything bad about Russia was therefore the result of the Mongol occupation and its lasting effects on the Slavic mentality. But there are no Mongols here, and Sixsmith actually lived through the […]

Delightful Murderous Jaunt

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon

by Leave a Comment

Homicide–the deliberate, willful killing of another person–was embedded…deeply into Roman daily life. Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a fascinating, witty, detailed book about murder in Ancient Rome. Southon makes a distinction between homicide–the killing of someone under any circumstances–and the variable ways society defines murder. In the case of Rome, only a select few deaths were considered murder, where all others–of the enslaved, of criminals, of prisoners of war–were of little note, the Romans considering such people […]

The Hanged Man: Murder and Tarot

Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris

by Leave a Comment

This is the 20th novel in the series about a crime solving nobleman in Regency England, and the series continues to go strong. This one is more of a straight up murder mystery – some of the middle novels in the series got a bit wrapped up in French espionage story lines. I would even say this one would actually even be approachable to someone that hadn’t read any other novels in the series – of course, you’d be missing some of the complexity of […]

You know it’s good if they don’t want you to read it

Angel of Greenwood by Randi Pink

by Leave a Comment

Angel of Greenwood is an outstanding YA novel about teenaged love and community set against the backdrop of the 1921 Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood, the “Black Wall Street”, was wiped out in a vicious act of race-based terrorism with businesses looted and destroyed, houses burned to the ground and an actual bomb dropped on the community. This novel came to my attention because a local school district removed it from the 9th grade reading list, sparking protest from students, their parents and faculty. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo