Agent Palmer

Did you know that magazine writers and short story crafters can have greatest hits collections, just like any band? That’s what The Thurber Carnival is for prolific writer James Thurber.

There is something wonderful about Thurber’s prose, as well as his drawings, his perspective, his personal history, and his humor.

Richard Robinson’s “Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Scientific Reasons Everything Goes Wrong” is a book that rationally explains the science behind Murphy’s law.

For the uninitiated, Murphy’s law is the pessimist’s go-to vibe. It’s essentially boiled down to the idea that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Daniel Lang was a journalist and author for The New Yorker, and From Hiroshima to the Moon is a collection of his stories for the magazine about the birth of the atomic age and the space age, as written at the time of their origins. 

Lang is an on-the-ground journalist. These stories from the front lines of atomic scientists and rocketry geniuses are not only unique to other histories you may have encountered, but these are raw.

The Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success by Penelope Trunk is two-thirds of a great book. The good parts are about finding a job or career and then finding success therein in the new world with new goals, objectives, and dreams.

The other third of it is dated, because it was written in 2007 and things have changed. In reality, this book is great to read and then promptly discard in favor of finding an actual mentor.

Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century by Douglas Coupland is eye-opening. While the writing and delivery is very Coupland, the medium this time is unique.

This collection of essays isn’t random. It all belongs together and reflects where Coupland and we as a human species were when this was published in the fall of 2013.