Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Getting paid to stand around being scary

Standing Heavy by gauZ'

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: Africa; Postcard: Côte d’Ivoire In Nouchi, the popular slang of the Ivoirian city of Abidjan, standing heavy means a lowly paid job that keeps the employee on their feet.  This witty novel takes us into the heads of young men from Côte d’Ivoire at the end of long chains of Parisian subcontracted security services, their lack of papers overlooked so long as they meet the racist morphological profile – heavy-set, tall, strong, deferential, and scary.  Getting paid for standing is not as easy as […]

Actual value versus the perception of value

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington

by 3 Comments

CBR15Bingo: Politics square This book is dense with a capital D, with a seemingly never ending list of examples. It walks the reader through a comprehensive study of how the modern consulting industry came to be. The authors offer up dozens of specific examples warning against the proliferation of consultants replacing full-time employees and in-house brain power. More specifically, it explains in detail how using highly-paid consultants in lieu of experienced civil servants led to empty coffers and unsuccessful schemes meant to run governments like […]

Don’t Become the Story

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

by Leave a Comment

CBR 15 Bingo: On the Air – This book is about a pair of authors in pursuit of the truth about a twenty year-old murder-suicide case – but what information will be revealed to the public is still up for debate. Amanda is a well-known true crime author who has been invited to write a book about the mysterious case of the Alperton Angels, a small cult which twenty years ago committed mass suicide after attempting to sacrifice an infant they believed to be the […]

Through the Desert

Frontera by Julio Anta, Jacoby Salcedo

by Leave a Comment

CBR 15 Bingo: Guide – Guillermo has spent his afterlife guiding migrants from Mexico safely across the Sonoran Desert. Mateo is desperate to return to his life in Arizona after he and his family are deported back to Mexico, but that desperation makes him reckless. Lost in the desert, he must rely on someone he’s not even sure exists if he’s going to make it to safety. This is a graphic novel about Mateo, a teenage boy who is trying to cross the border into […]

How incompetent must a man be to turn a simple hymen breaching into one of the biggest Society scandals in years?

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

by Leave a Comment

CBR15 PASSPORT (Stamp #14 : Books From Different Countries. International Waters count I think?) CBR15 BINGO (Relation “ship” Square: Takes place on an actual ship, all sorts of relationships: mother/daughter, romantic, friendship) The seventh novel in Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series is steeped, as they all are, in gender and class politics. Reputation goes hand in glove with those themes and this book really does a deep dive into those murky waters. Again, this is the 7th in the series so spoilers abound. On the run from […]

You weren’t a son, but you are everything you ought to be.

Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls

by Leave a Comment

CBR15 BINGO: (Politics Square: the politics of prohibition, organized crime, and a family dynasty running ALL of the politics of a rural Virginia town) I’m a big fan of Jeannette Walls so this one was put on hold at the library before its publication. Set in rural Virginia during Prohibition, it seemed right up my alley. Give me a flapper, some bathtub gin (or in this case, moonshine), some small-town organized crime, and digging in! Walls’ does write about what she knows in terms of setting. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo