Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Thanks to all the Cannonballers who reviewed this. I picked it up way sooner because of that than I would have otherwise.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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You guys gotta read this shit. I listened to the audiobook version, and I kept looking for reasons to listen, it was so compelling. Just really solid investigative journalism into a story that seems unbelievable when you string it all together. By now, not many people haven’t heard of Elizabeth Holmes and her sham Silicon Valley start-up company, Theranos, but just in case you haven’t, Holmes started Theranos in 2003 just after dropping out of Stanford. Her dream was to produce a medical device that […]

“We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality”

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

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With the best bit about my last, ultimately disappointing read turning out to be the actual climbing of Mount Everest, I decided to stick with that theme but turn to real life for my next read. I’d enjoyed other books by Jon Krakauer and so decided that he’d make a good guide for me. Into Thin Air did not disappoint. Sent by the magazine he was employed by at the time, the story Krakauer came home with was very different to the one he’d intended, […]

Shades of grey in Afghanistan, where the truth is elusive

No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

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Man, I’ve been terrible at this reviewing thing, hey? No better way to get back into it than to just jump straight in. Close to a decade ago, when I was agitating to do “real journalism” I was semi-obsessed with reading books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I was more concerned about the writers’ inner lives, and yearned to understand how they handled these stressful situations — against the backdrop of devastating American-backed wars. And now, I have little patience for such naval-gazing (Jeffrey […]

Read It Here First

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

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I won a free ARC from Goodreads in exchange for this review. Thanks Goodreads! Laura Lippman’s been on a bit of a roll with her standalone novels. Wilde Lake was really good and Sunburn is, in my estimation, the best thing she’s ever done. Most of what I loved about reading Lippman’s Tess Monaghan novels growing up was the Baltimore tourism. Being a native of the city, it’s fun to see a bestselling author talk about places I know like they’re real. But her standalone works show how she […]

Luke Cage meets noir meets The Diviners meets more please!

Abbott by Saladin Ahmed, Sami Kivelä

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Abbott is a brief, five-issue series set in 1970s Detroit about journalist Elena Abbott, lone black female reporter at the Detroit Daily. Abbott prefers to delve into the stories the paper’s board would rather not see printed. She’s recently getting heat for her piece on the death of a black teen at the hands of police, but so far she’s been protected by her loyal boss. She has a new case on the horizon and it’s a grisly one.  A mutilated police horse is found […]

True Journalist

Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace

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Well I guess I know what a British James Ellroy would read like. The only other book I read of David Peace’s is his fun and hilarious soccer send-up The Damned Utd., which was the basis for a fun and hilarious soccer movie. I tried Red or Dead but found it’s repetition too cloying and it’s 600+ pages too daunting. Still, I think he’s a talented writer. It took me several tries to get into this one; I had to get used to his writing voice. But I’m […]



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