Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.” (Bingo #6!)

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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American History is chock full of tales of terrible people doing terrible things protected by terrible governmental structures or terrible public servants. One of the benefits (drawbacks?) of my History degree and work in History museums is that I am not often surprised anymore with how terrible it truly all is, and I’ve got at least a passing familiarity with many of the darker chapters in our history. A few years ago when reviews of Killers of the Flower Moon started showing up on Cannonball […]

I’m waiting for it; that green light, I want it (CBR12Bingo2: The Roaring Twenties)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I don’t think that there is a single take on The Great Gatsby that hasn’t been done, overdone, flipped and reversed. But there’s a reason that so many people have written about this damn book – it’s a marvel of precision. There are no words wasted. This is particularly awe inspiring for me, who has never met a five word sentence I couldn’t torture into twenty. In my desperate attempt to say something fresh about a book I’ve read a hundred and eleventy twelve times, I […]

Pretty young things solve supernatural murders in 1920s NYC (Complete bingo card!)

The Diviners by Libba Bray

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#CBR12 Bingo: The Roaring 20s (could easily be used for Violet as well)   17-year-old Evangeline “Evie” O’Neill can sense people’s secrets if she holds a personal object belonging to them and concentrates hard on it. She becomes decidedly unpopular in her home town when she gets drunk at a party and reveals that one of the town’s golden boys knocked up a hotel maid and paid her to have the problem “dealt with”. He accuses her of slander and threatens to sue her family. Evie […]

Wets, Drys, and Hypocrites

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent

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In January 1920, the 18th Amendment went into effect, prohibiting “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes.” Daniel Okrent describes how it came to this point, and what happened during the 13 years it was in place. This is a very well-researched book with tons of facts about the era and the people that were most involved in the […]

cbr12bingo – The Roaring 20s (and two more “bingos”)

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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Oh, Hemingway. You dirty old dog. I have a soft-spot for the Lost Generation, and a sentimental attachment to The Sun Also Rises. While plenty of this novel- and his writing in general- has aged poorly, there is still value to be found. Hemingway was plenty of things as both an author and a man, but here I will choose to focus on the story and the broken people within- and the story of my attachment to this book. My first read was back in […]

I became an engineer.

A Single Pebble by John Hersey

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CBR Bingo 12 – The Roaring 20s. A 1955 novel by John Hersey, who is most well known for his small book Hiroshima, a nonfiction accounting of the atomic bombing and for his Pulitzer prize winning novel, A Bell for Adano, this book follows a young American engineer on a boat moving up the Yangtze en route to a job. So Hersey was born and grew up in China, and part of this book seems to be a kind of reckoning with that childhood, but also maybe a […]



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