Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

Spoiler Free Review

Reading Player One Post-Pandemic Challenges Its ‘New Normal’ Narrative

What happens when one of the most inventive novelists of contemporary modern literature writes about the future in the context of new ideas and their future repercussions in a five-chapter book, each representing one hour? In this case, you get Player One: What Is to Become of Us (The CBC Massey Lectures), which was created for the 2010 lectures.  “Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her…

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Mr. S is a Tell-All for the Chairman of the Bored

Mar. 28, 2024
In: Media, The Written Word
Mr S Book Review George Jacobs

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.

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A Perfect Pairing of Extraordinary Canadians, McLuhan and Coupland

Feb. 29, 2024
In: Media, The Written Word
A Perfect Pairing of Extraordinary Canadians, McLuhan and Coupland

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.

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Spoiler Free Review

Caught Stealing Might Be the Most Violent Book I’ve Ever Read

Caught Stealing is Charlie Huston’s debut novel. It is a very graphic thriller that doesn’t skimp on the violence. In truth, it may be one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. The nature of the “wrong-man” story that unfolds in this novel is chaotic and changes directions in such divergent ways it singles itself out as a mysterious thriller in every sense of the phrase.

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