Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

How does your island grow?

Stranded!: A Mostly True Story from Iceland by ÆVar þÓr Benediktsson

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CBR15Passport other country (Iceland) What would you do if you were stranded on a brand new, active volcano?  Well, I do not know about you, but I do not think I would fall asleep like the two characters of ÆVar þÓr Benediktsson’s book, Stranded!: A Mostly True Story from Iceland did. You see, back in the mid-to-late 1960s a volcano was created off the coast of Iceland. This brand-new island was really hot stuff (literally)! It was still flowing molten lava to the point if you […]

We can’t go faster than light but maybe spacetime can!?

The Science of Sci-Fi: From Warp Speed to Interstellar Travel by Erin Macdonald

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This year is my “No-Buy Year,” so I’m trying (and mostly succeeding!) to cut way back on buying books in any form. I already have so many that I haven’t read! So right now I’m going through a backlog of Audible books on my now-defunct account. (I switched to Libro.fm last year to support local indie bookstores with my audiobook purchases. Highly recommend!) A benefit of the No-Buy Year is rediscovering the myriad things you previously thought highly enough of to purchase, but then shortly […]

Brains, not just for zombies anymore

Battle of the Brains: The Science Behind Animal Minds by Jocelyn Rish

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CBR15Passport already own   Do you want fun facts about brains? And about animal minds in particular? Then you need the picture book by Jocelyn Rish and David Creighton-Pester that is called, Battle of the Brains: The Science Behind Animal Minds. And while it could have used some more humor (though brains are hard to be funny about, since they are seriously interesting), it still has some funny moment and is an interesting book to read. We follow a handful of different animas (from a […]

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I had such a good time with it.

Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke

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I haven’t written it yet, but I’m fairly certain this review will mostly be made up of quotes. That’s the reason I have been letting it hold up my review queue, because I haven’t had enough spoons to sit down and go through all my tabs [see below for picture] for my favorite bits, and then organize the bits into some sort of order, and then finally think up smart things to say about them. And if not smart, then at least entertaining. I picked […]

Cheetos, Yes or No?

Ingredients, The Strange Chemistry of What We put in Us and on US by George Zaidan

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George Zaidan is a chemist, not a nutritionist. Faced with so many contradictory claims about foods and cosmetics, he brings his scientific experience to explore what is good or bad for us. If you’re looking for answers that confirm your beliefs: “Cheetos are poison” or “Cheetos are harmless” this is not your book. Rather this is a light science book that tries to be funny with lots of young boy humor (he likes to say “shit” a lot) that sets out to help the reader […]

Not for bedtime reading or the faint of heart or stomach

The Icepick Surgeon Murder Fraud Sabotage Piracy and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science by Sam Kean

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The Icepick Surgeon is not bedtime reading, unless you want really weird dreams. I enjoy popular science reading, especially when there’s some narrative, and this book is both those things. Basically it’s a review of mostly the past 275 years of medical history and the ugly things people have done and tried to justify in the name of science or helping people in the future. There’s a lot of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century piracy and grave robbing involved, a good bit of slavery and racial history, […]



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