Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Pivotal but not admirable

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham

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I’ve read a lot about how awful Andrew Jackson was, especially the last four years. Jackson owned slaves and believed unequivocally in the “supreme race”. His racism almost certainly fueled his desire to remove Native Americans from their homes and force them away from white settlements. This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for what author Jon Meacham’s hometown newspaper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press call “an unflinching portrait of a not always admirable democrat but a pivotal president, written with an agile prose […]

In Putin’s Russia, Donald Trumps YOU!

House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger

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First of all, much love to this book for having a clever cover. Donald Trump and the Putin nesting dolls…it gave me a laugh every time I looked at it, especially the Putin face sticking out of an oversized body. Second, and more important…this book should have been much better than it was given the subject. I’ve explored some of the connections between the Russian organized crime unit and Donald Trump. I was anticipating this book would make those links more clear. Instead, it’s basically […]

Pearl Clutching

Rage by Bob Woodward

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Apparently, it took Bob Woodward 3.5 years and close to a thousand pages to deduce that Donald Trump is unfit to be President. Good job, Bob. Here’s a cookie. Like Fear, his other work on the Trump Administration, this is less a book with a narrative thread and more a collection of scattered anecdotes from various sources cobbled together the way someone cuts and pastes articles from a newspaper for a scrapbook. In reviewing a bad movie once, Jamelle Bouie said that the film was “the […]

Brexiteers

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

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In a world of constant change and rising menace, it’s good to know that John Le Carré still has it. This won’t go down as one of his great works but it’s still a pretty sharp take on the western world post-Brexit/Trump through the eyes of a disaffected anti-Russia SIS operative who has been mothballed for most of the last two decades while Britain and her American ally swung their swords in the middle east. With Vladimir Putin leading the digital charge to break up […]

Nepotism

American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein

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On her popular podcast Gaslit Nation, Sara Kendzior repeatedly talks about how the biggest indicator of America’s descent into authoritarianism would be Jared Kushner walking scot free of any potential prosecutions. I knew Kushner was a nepotistic failson whose outsized power comes from his father-in-law’s office and an indifferent Republican Party but of all the crooks in this organization, he’s probably the one who I know the least about or am the least offended by. That changed with this book. Telling the Kushner story concurrently with […]

More Vacation Reading

Black Edge: Insider Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Attack on the West by Luke Harding

Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8? by Ethan Brown

The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block

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I was on vacation last week (with all the requisite social distancing procedures) and I did a lot of vacation reading. I’m not sure why but lately I’ve been on a non-fiction kick, thus, three out of the four books I read were non-fic. Fortunately for me, everything I read was at least good and all merited the coveted 4-stars. Black Edge I became interested in this story when I learned that Steve Cohen and Preet Bharara’s relationship was the basis for the hit Showtime […]



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