Agent Palmer

While not entirely applicable, the word that kept coming into my head as I read “The Laptop Millionaire: How Anyone Can Escape the 9 to 5 and Make Money Online” was “shyster.”

Author Mark Anastasi’s 2012 book feels like a novel in that it is a bunch of regurgitated buzzword internet money-making schemes that feel more about making money than the “value” he claims they represent. Adversely, he never actually represents that value with anything more quantifiable than overusing the same word.

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.