Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Stingers

Scorpions' Dance: The President, The Spymaster, and Watergate by Jefferson Morley

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Hmmm. This is tough. I was loving the first part of this book. It was maybe my favorite non-fiction read of the year. It almost read like a thriller. It traces the early political careers of Dick Helms and Richard Nixon respectively, along with the trajectory that would lead them to Watergate and the close of their careers. Then it got to the Kennedy stuff. And I realized Jefferson Morley is a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. Not a hardcore one. He doesn’t seem to believe anything […]

To Play the King

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate, An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

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The Trump era made me a Watergate junkie. It’s as simple as that. If there’s a new book on Watergate, I’m reading it. I’ve become fascinated with the twisted story of Nixon and his cronies, especially how power can imbue one with a sense of dignity and grace, at least in the public eye. Most of us need to go to bed at night assuming our leaders are competent adults who wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it was absolutely necessary and who have it all […]

Okay, I’m cheating. The second image belongs to book one. I just like it!

The Time Museum V02 by Matthew Loux

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I read books one and two of The Time Museum graphic novel series several months apart. This made a few bumps in who was who; I had forgotten a character and a few character points/personalities and some of the adventures previously had. Therefore, it is best to read the series by Matthew Loux back to back. We continue the adventures of the Time Museum and our plucky time travelers with a new adventure that has some unusual twists and turns. Along with some new friends. […]

Keep A Diary

Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall by Elizabeth Drew

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Read as part of CBR11 bingo: History Elizabeth Drew’s Washington Journal is making me wish I had kept a diary about the Trump era to document these last few years. I often talk about how the Trump Era is the “lol nothing matters” times of nihilism and obstinance. Seems like a lot of that was going on in 1973-1974. Drew covers the last year of Nixon’s presidency from the perspective of an insider journalist living in the hermetically sealed bubble of Washington, DC. She did a great […]

Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]

I kept expecting a wizard, but all I got was Richard Nixon.

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The aura that surrounds John F. Kennedy is, by itself, worthy of enough attention to warrant a book all by itself. From his familial history to his infamous relationship with women to his storied political career and untimely, traumatizing assassination, few Americans are both so well known and mysterious. I’ve stated before my intention to read a biography on every president. This goal grew out of a plan to rank every president (plus Jefferson Davis) by various criteria. I generally have that done already, but […]



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