Agent Palmer

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.

Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy and other rules to live by is a collection of columns and essays written by comedian David Mitchell.

A lot of these columns take a satirical or humorous look at things that inspired the writing of the column in the first place, be it a news event in Great Britain or across the globe, from entertainment to science, politics to religion, or any number of things. So in my best attempt at a Mitchell-like column, I’m going to comment on the back cover paragraphs to explain more about what this book is about, why you may be interested in it, and what’s in it for you.