Agent Palmer

Mel Brooks is a legend. And he spent the pandemic doing what writers do… writing. So in addition to The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and many others, you can now add the autobiography “All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business.”

As much as this is your standard autobiography written by someone famous who came from nothing and made their mark, this is comedy icon Mel Brooks, and while not all of his stories are funny, they all involve funny and talented people. You can’t help but smile as you read it.

You know the movie, and perhaps you know the series. Both of those, however, were based upon the best-selling Tom Wolfe penned The Right Stuff. The book, as the movie and the series are, is based around the early beginnings of the space race, and it follows the exploits of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, test pilots, and the cultural issues surrounding the men and engineers tasked to get it done.

Wolfe paints the portraits of the Mercury program as a large landscape on which he can include a little editorial here and there as trees that dot the scope of the picture.

Do you know who Terry Fox is? If you live below the 49th Parallel there is a good chance you don’t. To the North, however, he’s not only an inspiration, he’s on the money.

Terry: Terry Fox and His Marathon of Hope by Douglas Coupland is so much more than another coffee table book. Yes, it’s the same size as the two previous Coupland coffee table books, Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2, but there is so much more.

This isn’t just a book about Terry Fox, even though he is the titular man.