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 […]

The Book is more Interesting than the Content

The Enemies of Books by William Blades

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I picked this book up in an antique bookstore in Tokyo. I bought it mostly for the title, expecting a history of censorship, which is a topic I’ve always been interested in. What I got was more literally interpretation of enemies. Blades covers fire, water, vermin and dust as if they are free thinking enemies actively planning the destruction of books. His focus is entirely on the books as items that carry knowledge and not as special items in themselves. He says, “The value of […]

Very readable despite being a difficult topic

American Overdose by Chris McGreal

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This book was exactly what I expected it would be: a well-written, well-researched dive into the forces that combined to create the American opioid crisis. I knew the basic outline of those forces, but reading in depth was eye opening and I came away pretty angry. Basically big pharma, the FDA, and congress all had a greed fueled opiate money orgy and fucked over Americans in the process. McGreal does a great job of organizing the massive amount of content and complex timeline into a […]

Beware those who promise that they have the answer to everything

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen

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Perfect reading for cold, dark nights, Starvation Heights is a fantastic helping of true crime that reads like a thriller that will have you constantly scurrying to the kitchen for sandwiches, as well as giving a wide berth to anyone who sets themselves up as a health guru. In 1911, two wealthy British sisters – of the type that my line of work tends to call the ‘worried well’ – travelled to the United States in order to undergo the ‘fasting cure’ in the sanitarium […]

Also I just watched Girls Trip for the first time and it was pretty great.

The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

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This was a pretty good listen. There were parts during the first third or so where I was actually laughing out loud, and I don’t do that very much. Mostly it’s just inward laughter or maybe a small noise of some sort to indicate my own amusement to myself. She was cracking me up, though (definitely do the audio if you’re going to do it at all; the swamp tour story alone is worth it). But then a single chapter had to go and ruin […]

A surprisingly educational celebrity autobiography

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

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In this very engaging autobiography, Trevor Noah opens up about growing up in South Africa, born from a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time when this was literally a crime punishable with several years in prison. The Apartheid regime ended while Noah was still young, but his childhood was still deeply affected by the fact that he was a mixed race child in a society where the races were not supposed to mix at all, to the point where his […]



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