Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton

by 5 Comments

A lifelong Jaws fan, the most I ever really knew about the USS Indianapolis was what was related by Quint in one of my favourite scenes in cinema, so when I spotted this book, complete with its same-surname-as-me author, it was a must buy. It turns out – as always –  that reality is far, far more horrifying than any Hollywood blockbuster could ever wish to be. For those who don’t know what happened to the Indianapolis and her men, a brief synopsis. Fresh from […]

A Gut-Churning Good Time

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul by Eleanor Herman

by 6 Comments

What a ride! Big thanks to badkittyuno for putting this gem on my radar. Or, in the parlance of this book, allowing me to seek of the poisons of this tome via unicorn horn. We, as humans, have done some pretty vile things to ourselves and others since…pretty much the dawn of time. The Royal Art of Poison illustrates-in graphic detail- the poisonous things that people (mostly royalty, but the common man is capable of critical nastiness as well) have been doing intentionally and accidentally to […]

Making me feel glad to feel the wind on my face

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

by Leave a Comment

It seems that the things I’m most fascinated by are those that also frighten me the most. Afraid of the deep sea, I’ll spend months reading about naval horrors, devour tales of explorers (whether they survived or not) while also preferring to not really leave my house, and frequently consider booking a trip through the Paris Catacombs despite being somewhat claustrophobic with a face-clawing terror of actually being underground. Perhaps that’s why I found this book so deeply interesting – an exploration of places I […]

“A Table of Alphabetical Hard Words”: Our First English Dictionary

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

by Leave a Comment

Quite a bit has changed since this book was written; language has changed, attitudes towards language have changed, and culture overall has changed. Some pieces from this book have not aged well; it’s rather dismissive of some languages and cultures (weirdly judgmental over Japanese writing, for example) while being aggressively defensive of others. There is also little-to-no attention paid  to the many additions given to English by marginalized communities; I was surprised to come across very little about the contributions of people of color have […]

Attention all people who love Jane Austen, I have a good book for you.

Jane Austen: The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly

by 7 Comments

I was just sort of expecting a fun book where the author points out passages in Austen’s work that adds credibility to the idea that Jane Austen was a radical thinker for her time. And that does occur here. (Radical, by the way, has a bit of a different usage here, in that it mostly means someone who is open to new ideas, and to rejecting the old if that is the right thing to do. That word has a negative association now that isn’t […]

Part history of mental health, part investigation into an infamous mental health study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

by 9 Comments

When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo