Agent Palmer

Interspersed with Douglas Coupland’s essays and a Tomb Raider history lesson are actual video game walkthroughs. Step by step instructions for some levels of Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, and Tomb Raider Gold. This is more than your average video game guide, this is what video game guidebooks should strive to be!

The fact that a writer like Coupland could write a first-person Lara Croft essay, as well as his additional thoughts and short history of a game and franchise back in 1998 is amazing.

The Cap: The Price of a Life is Roman Frister’s autobiography, written in a nonlinear fashion of his survival through horrendous situations throughout concentration camps and hate during the Holocaust.

I don’t know about other Holocaust survivor autobiographies, but Frister has somehow found a method of lightening the load of this heavy story while also expanding the poignancy to greater heights.

The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”

“Chasing Black Unicorns: How Building the Amazon of Africa Put me on Interpol’s most wanted list” by Marek Zmyslowski is entertaining, educational, and more vain than you would expect.

It’s equal parts tell-all, vanity press, and fish-out-of-water. This is, after all, the story of a Polish entrepreneur in Nigeria.