Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I know something no one else in the world knows.”

The Forever Witness by Edward Humes

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As a case on its own this wouldn’t have been as interesting, but combined with the focus on DNA technology and how it’s changing, this really worked for me. The murders of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook in 1987 went unsolved until 2018, when the cold case detective, Jim Scharf, decided to use genetic genealogy on the case, and suddenly within weeks they had a suspect and an arrest. But the suddenness of events in 2018 was based on decades of cold case detecting, […]

Game, set and …

The Match by Harlan Coben

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Several decades ago, a young boy was discovered living alone in the woods. The boy was put in foster care; the authorities assumed the boy would eventually be claimed. But no such thing happened. The boy, nicknamed Wilde, grew up and became a… PI? Enforcer? Jack of All Trades in the security business? We don’t know, we don’t care. All we know is that the boy’s memories never came back, save for one: a red banister, a portrait of a man, and the sound of […]

DNA and Genes Broken Down

The Violinist's Thumb by Sam Kean

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Bingo Square: Science! I quite enjoyed Same Kean’s previous book, The Disappearing Spoon, so I am not entirely sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this – The Violinist’s Thumb was published in summer 2012 and I have a hardcover, so I’ve obviously had it for a while.  I will say, at least part of the blame goes to the fact that around 2014/2015 I transitioned to primarily reading Kindle books so it hasn’t helped diminish the stack of physical […]

A Who-Done-It Modeled on Greek Tragedy

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I was expecting another courtroom drama, which Turow is famous for, but instead got a complicated who-dun-it which meshed power struggles and politics with family feuds and Greek mythol0gy. As Turow himself admits in his concluding notes, inspiration for the story came from the Gemini myth of Castor and Pollux, twins who shared in each other’s fates and spent half their time in Hades and half on Mount Olympus with the Greek Gods. Knowing that myth before reading the book gives added dimensions to Turow’s […]

A superb layperson’s guide to DNA and genetics, told with a smile and charm.

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It starts with a papercut. The book that is, not the origin of life. Rutherford starts by breaking down exactly what happens when you cut your finger in a jaw-dropping three-page extravaganza of cells, electrical signals and scintillating prose that puts you in a state of awe. Awesome is a word that is regularly overused, but one that really does apply here when we are talking about such astounding ideas and realisations, with this minute level of detail illustrating just how finely tuned every little aspect of […]



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