Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there.”

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese

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This was a Christmas present from last year due to my interest in Frank Sinatra and other complicated mid-century men with bad tempers. It then sat for a while until I re-entered my interest phase, which only apparently took about a year. The titular essay is extremely well known as one of the main pieces of “New Journalism” and is hugely influential on celebrity profiles to this day. I used to get Esquire for many years and the profiles all sound like this. It was […]

Corona Days

Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost

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After two-plus years of successfully evading the coronavirus, it finally caught up to me last week. Fortunately, my symptoms were mild (vaccinated and boosted), the only one lingering was fatigue. That and family responsibilities left me little time to write reviews this past week. So I decided to put these three here instead of my monthly dump because they were all worthy of longer reviews, two good, one damn fine. Honor Thy Father **** One of the things that made The Sopranos such an excellent television […]

Take my wife….go on, take her.

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I first heard about Thy Neighbor’s Wife when watching Netflix’s Voyeur, a documentary about author Gay Talese and a man who’d bought a motel solely so he could peep on the activities of those renting rooms. I found Voyeur fascinating, and so when I came across this on offer, I thought I’d give it a go. Thy Neighbor’s Wife is a big, fat book, delving into the sexual mores of the American public, and the efforts of lawmakers to govern these, from the mid-twentieth century […]



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