Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“a human looking glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those facing her” CBRBINGO – Golden

Q: A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. I’m so glad I took a chance on this one and requested the ARC. It was so much fun! It avoided literally everything that usually makes me avoid reading biographies: the tedious linear structure, the grandiloquence and navel-gazing that comes with writing about a much-lauded (or controversial) figure (and the author trying to “earn it”), and to be honest, the dull bits. Q: A Voyage Around the Queen is not […]

Camelot Was Always a Lie

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan

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CBR16 Bingo: Golden – Callahan attacks the golden myth of Camelot and the Kennedy family, revealing the dark and dangerous truth underneath. Lurking in the darker corners of the Kennedy family legacy are the many women whose lives turned out worse for the association. In this book, Maureen Callahan tries to bring them to light. I’m familiar with many of the people and stories in this book, but Callahan does an excellent job of placing them in context of each other, weaving across generations and decades to […]

Finance Bro Mass Delusion

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend by Rob Copeland

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Ray Dalio became globally famous as the head of an innovative hedge fund and his Principles, which he purported would lead to inevitable success when followed. But behind the scenes at Bridgewater Associates was a bizarre, dysfunctional workplace culture. I vaguely remember hearing about the utter weirdness of Bridgewater Associates before, but Wall Street is not really an area of interest for me. I picked this book up though because of this review by J, which whetted my appetite with promises of crazy workplace drama […]

Mothers and Daughters

My Mama, Cass: A Memoir by Owen Elliot-Kugell

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Cbr16bingo Celestial (bingo)    Cass Elliot was a rock star and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Owen Elliot-Kugell is Cass Elliot’s daughter, orphaned at the age of 7 after Cass’s tragic and unexpected death in London in July of 1974. Now in her 50s, Owen has spent many years missing her mother and trying to learn as much about her as possible from those who knew her — family, friends and people who worked with her in the music business of […]

Let’s Go, Bananas

The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen

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Read as part of CBR16  Bingo: bananas. The biography is on the life of Samuel Zemurray, the notorious “banana king” of United Fruit whose pursuit of wealth and product led to political destabilization in central America and the Caribbean.  It’s a shame that Samuel Zemurray has such an interesting story and yet only a so-so biographer. Rich Cohen takes on compelling subjects such as Zemurray and Albert Hicks (The Last Pirate of New York) but he tells their respective tales in such a slipshod and […]

“A peace based on injustice is a treacherous sleep whose waking is death. Your honor lies in waking out of it.”

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore

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This book was infuriating, but very interesting. If you’re looking to rage-out at the patriarchy, The Woman They Could Not Silence will certainly do the trick. But also, because Elizabeth Packard was a badass who changed things for thousands of people in her lifetime and many more into the future, you get a happyish ending as well to lift you back from your cleansing rage. Elizabeth Packard was committed to an asylum in the 1860s by her husband; because he said she was insane, she was […]



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