Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Doomsday with a Smile.

The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

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Every beginning has an end, and every end has a beginning. For some of the more mundane everyday things around us, their existence from conception to completion is not too much of a mystery. However, things are not so straightforward when it comes to the cosmos. The universe may be one of the biggest and most complicated thing that we can conceptualise. So is it really that surprising that trying to understand both its beginning and it’s end is also big and complicated? I loved […]

cbr12bingo – How To!

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

A Less Charismatic Malcolm Gladwell

Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter

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Published in 2013, Drunk Tank Pink feels like an attempt to capitalize on the same popular science wave that brought us Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics.  Like the former, Alter summarizes other people’s research for his own conclusions, without giving real credit to the researchers whose work he uses as a jumping off point.  In other sins (that may not be his fault- see my own delay in reading this book, which has collected dust on my shelves since I bought it back in 2013), he […]

If you don’t love science yet, Sam Kean will win you over

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Drama, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

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CBR12 BINGO: Gateway Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, and his books don’t get any better than The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I’ve previously reviewed The Disappearing Spoon and Caesar’s Last Breath for CBR, but I decided to re-read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons because it’s a perfect “gateway” book into both Kean’s work and popular science. Plus, I’ve had a hankering lately to read some brain stuff. The title refers to a pair of doctors who tended to King Henri II of France after […]

I have spent a good deal of 2020 in a cadaver-shaped hole.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

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And no, I do not mean an open grave. The more we hurtle towards impending doom- pandemics! global warming! world war!- the more solace I seek in, well, death. I didn’t set out on the morbid marathon on purpose, but here I am! It was not my intention to get down and dirty (ha!) with death this year, but I am enjoying the ride. I have been a long-time fan of Mary Roach since Spook, but for some reason I forgot to start at the […]

Kids ask the darnedest things about decomposing bodies

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death by Caitlin Doughty

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I am always on the lookout for science-y books that make science accessible to literature majors like myself. Bonus points if the topic is slightly quirky, such as brain abnormalities, digestive processes, or corpses. Because I’m a lucky gal, my husband also stays on the lookout for these types of books, and for Christmas he bought me Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? (Eat your hearts out, ladies!) I wasn’t familiar with Caitlin Doughty, but I soon learned that she is a New York Times best-selling […]



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