Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“There is no necessary tradeoff between empathy and assertiveness.”

Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level by James K Sebenius, R. Nicholas Burns, Robert H. Mnookin

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This is a nice little gem of a negotiation book. Harvard Negotiation Project’s James Sebenius and his co-authors spent a lot of time and research delving deep into the subject and the mind of the man. They look not just into the substance of Henry Kissinger’s negotiation history but also into his specific tactics and philosophy of negotiation. Kissinger himself wrote the foreword to this book and apparently was pretty candid with the authors as they researched and interviewed him. Perhaps most importantly, they also […]

Sometimes your mom does know best

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

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The Bride Test is the second romance from Helen Hoang. I had to figure out what all the buzz was about for myself and was not disappointed. I absolutely love the illustrated cover. Definitely don’t want this trend to go away. I haven’t gotten around to her previous book, The Kiss Quotient, but thankfully, this series can be read as stand-alone books. The characters simply inhabit the same universe. After a tragic loss, Khai Diep believes he can’t feel emotion because his grief didn’t follow […]

The Past Is Not Through With Us

Shadow of a Tiger by Dennis Lynds (Michael Collins)

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The influence of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series is what originally drove me to this series. Dan Fortune can kind of be seen as Archer’s east coast counterpart, only he’s missing an arm and we know more about his personal life. In this one, Dennis Lynds (writing under the nom de plume “Michael Collins”) treads familiar territory for both he and his influencer: exploring the dirty deeds of a family. A recurring theme in many of these stories is the past often catches up to us. […]

Army Chief of Staff Reading List

Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

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I read all three of these books as they are on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List.  That list is a bi-annual list the highest ranking member of the Army publishes for professional development.  Sometimes the lists are highly curated and you can see the purpose and direction intended.  Sometimes, they are just a huge collection of non-fiction books that people have been told to read for years.  The current list has 120+ books and seems to have no defining theme.  The books in […]

Male, Pale, and Yale

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

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Or Harvard. Or West Point. Texas State. But the point remains: this book is about how liberal elites got us into an imperial war. I don’t know how you write a history text better than this. It has exactly what I look for in its subject’s great works: to be good, thorough, and damning. By the end of reading this, I was relieved to be done but thoroughly exhausted at the week-long endeavor, which I was only able to finish in seven days thanks to […]

Robert, have done with nursery pap, Write like a man.

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Country Sentiment – 2/5 Stars Here’s the poem that ends this collection: A FIRST REVIEW. Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys Are here discreetly blent; Admire, you ladies, read, you boys, My Country Sentiment. But Kate says, “Cut that anger and fear, True love’s the stuff we need! With laughing children and the running deer That makes a book indeed.” Then Tom, a hard and bloody chap, Though much beloved by me, “Robert, have done with nursery pap, Write like a man,” says he. […]



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