Agent Palmer

Magician, comedian, actor, writer, producer, musician, and author. Steve Martin is many things more than just a “wild and crazy guy,” and how that all came to be is found in his autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

This may be one of the more realistic show business books I have read in recent memory. This isn’t a book about name-dropping or what happens after success. This is a book about how Steve Martin reached the top. While you can take some of the lessons to heart on your own, this is not a how-to; this is just a how it happened.

If you enjoy films, Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, is a must-read. It’s also something I would highly recommend that aspiring filmmakers crack open.

Me? I’m not sure I fall into either camp, though I do dabble in film.

Squaring the Circle is a 2022 film about the story of Hipgnosis, the designers and the album covers they created.

And while you may have never heard of Hipgnosis, or their founders Po (Aubrey Powell) and Storm (Thorgerson), you have seen their work on the album covers of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Wings, Peter Gabriel, and many many more.

Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra is a tell-all book written by Sinatra’s long-time right-hand man, George Jacobs, and with the help, I suppose, of William Stadiem who also gets an author credit.

It’s not the type of book I would have normally picked up on my own, and I didn’t really know it was tell-all until I started reading it. It will, at least knowingly, be my last tell-all book. For every chapter except the Afterword, it felt like I was reading one of the weekly celebrity gossip magazines.

On at least three different occasions, I have picked up my parents’ hand-me down paperback of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and I have not gotten past page nine or ten yet. So I was happy to get a biography of the man and a cliffnotes of his career from of one of my favorite contemporary authors, Douglas Coupland.

Coupland was selected to write about Marshall McLuhan for the series Extraordinary Canadians. Now that I know more about McLuhan, at least more than I knew from friend Professor Sara Netzley and my parents, I now see the wisdom of series editor John Ralston Saul in pairing him with Coupland.