Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Envision that Circumcision and Feel that Eel

Under the Knife by Arnold van der Laar

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I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. That didn’t pan out, and I’m fine with that, but the interest in all things medical has lingered. Because I was planning to read more non-fiction anyway, I picked up this book on a whim, and although I wasn’t disappointed, it lacks a certain degree of depth. More subcutaneous than intraosseal, if you please. Van de Laar – who is a surgeon himself – takes us through the history of medicine, and specifically surgery, but instead of telling […]

And not a duck to be seen!

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Quackery: A Brief History on the Worst Ways to Cure Everything is indeed what it says on the box.  We have an intro into what each method is, and then how awful it was and why.  It’s very informative, but for each thing it comes across as a Very Big Deal. Each of these methods were indeed used, but it seems like the authors over-inflate their importance.      Mercury (I’m sure everyone knows by now that medically, Mercury is a Very Bad Thing) Antimony […]

Not just a plot twist, but an entire genre twist!

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Full disclosure: I don’t know how to talk about this book without spoiling something about it, but it will be a general spoiler, not specific at all and I think that knowing this thing going in may actually improve your enjoyment of it (it would’ve improved mine, anyway). This is another recommendation from my grandmother, aka the elderly badkittyuno, and it was a major improvement over the last one. (If you’re assuming it’s a medical memoir like I did, nope. It’s a novel.) Dr. Heaton […]

Take A Walk on the Wild Side

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“So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?” After a decade spent as a paramedic, it’s a question Kevin Hazzard loves to hate. Which stories should he tell? Should he talk about the gunshots, the cardiac arrests, the overdoses, the man swarming with maggots? Or should he lighten the mood and talk about the fake suicide attempts and the surprising amount of nudity? Either way, he knows that people will be listening. Because the dirty secret is we’re all rubberneckers, slowing down to stare at […]

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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Anna Lyndsey lives in the darkness. Although she was once an average person with a job, a boyfriend and a new apartment, in 2005 her skin began to feel like it was burning while she sat in front of the computer. At first she just rigged a fan to her desk. The fan didn’t help. She just got worse, and soon the condition spread and all forms of light affected her entire body. She ended up confined to her bedroom, covering the cracks in the […]

The horror of losing yourself

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I’ve seen Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (2013) by Susannah Cahalan around in bookstores and it caught my interest. So I finally picked it up. This was a fast read and a fascinating true story of  a 24-year-old woman who loses her mind, without warning and without explanation. Susannah Cahalan is a reporter at the New York Post when her life starts slowly unraveling. It starts with a little paranoia, acting odd, and missing deadlines. Susannah’s symptoms quickly progress to where she is […]



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