Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Longing for the sound of an electric guitar

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I finally put this on my reading list after one of the CBR13 happy hours. Someone mentioned that Emily St. John Mandel had a new book coming out that they were looking forward to, and somehow I pulled that thread and made my way back to Station Eleven. I had been aware of it before that conversation, yet the blurb had never struck my fancy, likely because I have a very complicated relationship with dystopian fiction. Frankly, and as has been noted on this site […]

The World’s Deadliest Animal

The Fever: How Malaria has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah

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CBR Bingo: The Wilds (all about malaria, mosquitoes, and pesticides) There’s nothing I like reading about more than infectious disease. I’ve read books about rabies, smallpox, influenza, cholera, plague, and lots of others, but I’d never found one about malaria before, so I was really excited to read The Fever. Sadly, I had a lot of trouble getting into this book. Malaria is really hard to understand. It has a complex disease process, and while Shah breaks it down in the first chapter, I still had trouble […]

Real Life Nightmare Material

Pandora's Lab by Paul A. Offit, MD

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Pandora’s Lab is one scary book. It includes seven times when so-called scientific advances led to disasters, most of which are still affecting the world today. There’s a chapter on opioids, of course, and one on lobotomies. He also discusses the DDT ban, trans fats, chemical fertilizers and mustard gas, eugenics, and vitamins and supplements. All of these things seemed like great ideas at the time, but had far-reaching and, in many cases, terrifying consequences. The one that struck me the most was the chapter […]

“Health and dignity are indissociable in human beings.”

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It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how interesting a book like this may be to someone else, because when asked about my fantasy dream career, I say epidemiologist. And not the fun kind – the data wonk kind. I think objectively, this book is objectively “exciting” if you have a tolerance for fairly dry excitement, and a lot of details on slow, frustrating, painstaking searches for pathogens, outbreaks, sources of contamination, and underlying causes of the things that plague us. Despite the rather dramatic […]

“These are the frail, imperfect ways of ordinary human beings in the teeth of a great epidemic”

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I finished reading this book a week ago today, and I’m still not sure how to write about it. I found it deeply moving, but it may still be too soon to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and anything I write here can only scratch the surface. Jonny Steinberg has packed so much into the 326 pages of Three-Letter Plague (published in the U.S. under the title Sizwe’s Test). He writes about his own literal and figurative journey to try to learn how […]

This Book has Everything: Buboes, Iron Lungs, a Kennedy, and a Vegan Teetotaler Who’s Actually a Pretty Cool Guy

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I wish I could remember what it was that first sparked my interest in communicable diseases (and some noncommunicable), but I’ll tell you, there are just not enough books out there to quench my thirst on this topic. I’ve read just about every public health book on the subject that I can get my hands on (and if anyone out there has read a great book on malaria, please send it my way. I’ve been looking for one for a few years now). Get Well […]



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