Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

State of Terror

State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny

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Don’t be mad at me. But this book was not good.  It did not help that then we have Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines come into play which makes me shudder about where Penny plans on taking that series. The characters were not developed very well (and this is in a 500 page book). The writing was repetitive and I honestly don’t want to read the words Madame Secretary for like a fortnight. The flow was awful. The setting of the White […]

THIS is my jam!

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

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I became aware of the author, Steve Kornacki, on election night 2016.  He was the very excited NBC analyst covering the races on the “big board” all night.  Steve was the guy who would zoom in on a state and recall, by district or city, where votes were likely coming or outstanding.  I tried for years to deny my love of politics and my innate desire to be a full-on political junkie and I found a kindred spirit in Steve Kornacki.  I started following him […]

Can We Talk About What Happened?

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I didn’t want to read Hillary Clinton’s take on the 2016 election.  I didn’t want to relive November 9th, 2016, the day I woke up with tears in my eyes and my stomach in my throat because I knew that an unmitigated jackass had won the U.S. presidency the night before.  I didn’t want to relive the gut-churning fear I felt for my children and the grief I felt for my country that day. But I’ve admired Hillary Clinton since I was in elementary school, […]

A war, depression, and a sociopath. And three other books not about the 2016 election.

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64. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll (5 stars) The Pacific Crucible examines the naval war in the Pacific theater of WWII from Pearl Harbor to Midway, and traces its origins back to the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s seminal book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. This is the first in a nonfiction trilogy about the Pacific theater of WWII. The second, The Conquering Tide, was published in 2015. I think it’s a fairly stellar book about […]

Plenty of explosions, but not as many sweeping camera angles.

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Bravely etched into the opening chapter of this book is the proclamation that the harrowing account of the attack in Benghazi will not include a rundown of the crimes, real or imagined, of the Obama administration. This is not a political book. And thank Christ for that. Don’t get me wrong, I love history, and I see politics as history experienced unclouded by the mists of time. I enjoy reading about political machinations, and try to view the world through various partisan lenses. But there […]



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