Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.”

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

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This was extremely informative, and I should have read it sooner. More info and developments have come out about the opioid epidemic since this book was published in 2015, but this book itself won’t ever really be dated, because what he did here was to investigate its origins. No matter what happens down the road, this will always be how it started. (I’ve heard that Empire of Pain is a good follow up, but I don’t know if I have the emotional fortitude to tackle […]

Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

And the Headstones Climbed up the Hill

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

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Last year I read Nicholas and Alexandra and discovered a whole new, extremely specific genre that I love: nonfiction books about some point in time where everything came together in a very particular way that changed the entire course of history. I’m very pleased to say that Dreamland is now the second book I can add to that category (which really needs a snappier name). Dreamland is actually two stories which fit together perfectly to create something really terrible: it’s the story of Purdue Pharma’s […]

Dreamland

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We’ve heard a lot about the opiate/opiod crisis. “Dreamland” takes readers on a journey of how this crisis began and what factors contributed to this health emergency. Sam Quinones takes a journalistic approach to exploring the roots of the crisis. He begins in a Mexican state, Xalisco. In there state there’s not many job opportunities outside of farming/ranching. At the same time, there’s a very competitive socio-economic culture where everyone is trying to beat the Jones’s next door. Some have immigrated to the U.S., particularly […]

An eye-opening expose of the opiate crisis

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Right now, I’m on a “read books for book club” streak, so my personal reading project is on hold for a few weeks. My library GenLit book club voted on its second-half-of-the-year selections a few months back, and Sam Quinones’ Dreamland was one of the winners. I don’t know too much about the opiate crisis in intimate detail, so I thought I would be informed. I had no idea how illuminating this book turned out to be. Quinones is a journalist, and you can tell […]



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