Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Does Crime Pay?

Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins and Joseph F. O'Brien

Sacred by Dennis Lehane

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I hadn’t meant to review these books together but I finished Sacred sooner than I anticipated and it just makes sense to cover them both in one review…   Boss of Bosses I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in […]

The Book We Need For This Moment

Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman

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The best, simplest review I can give it is to quote from political operative Robert Wheel (@bobbybigwheel on Twitter): You know it’s a good book because every page pisses you off. I was 17 years old when we invaded Iraq. At the time, I was a champion for the war because I believed our government. Why would our government lie? Even as I began to question things in 2003 and 2004, I still voted for George W. Bush in my first presidential election. I was […]

“The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.” (Bingo #6!)

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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American History is chock full of tales of terrible people doing terrible things protected by terrible governmental structures or terrible public servants. One of the benefits (drawbacks?) of my History degree and work in History museums is that I am not often surprised anymore with how terrible it truly all is, and I’ve got at least a passing familiarity with many of the darker chapters in our history. A few years ago when reviews of Killers of the Flower Moon started showing up on Cannonball […]

Less thriller, more meditation

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

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American Spy opens with a literal bang, the way most spy novels do. But then it becomes something different – more of a memoir, more of a reckoning with the past that led to the opening shot. Marie, the titular spy, is the lone black female employee in her FBI field office. Attacked in her home, she flees New York to her mother’s country of Martinique; meanwhile, she reflects on her girlhood with her sister, now deceased, and her time as a spy during the […]

Apparently The Abyss isn’t a big deal.

Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI by Robert K. Ressler

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  This book was the January non-fiction selection for the book club I run on Goodreads.com for fans of the My Favorite Murder podcast. Fans of the show Mindhunter on Netflix may recognize bits of this book from the show (as well as the book of the same name, obviously). This should not be surprising since both Ressler and John Douglas, the author of Mindhunter were founding members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico and have traveled extensively interviewing some of America’s most […]

It’s a David Grann-onball

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I’m reviewing two books by the same author because I am so far behind in my reviews.  In fact, I finished my cannonball last month but I need to make it count by getting these reviews submitted.  Plus, what a great post title!? So, I first read Killers of the Flower Moon because it seemed like everyone I knew was reading it.  That wasn’t quite true but it started feeling ubiquitous so I started it in July and finished it in a few days.  David Grann […]



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