Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

The Cap is more about life than it is about survival

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.

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Coupland Uncovers the Future of Bell Labs and More in Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

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.”

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A Complete Unknown does justice to Dylan’s electrified 1965 revolution

For those unaware, A Complete Unknown is a 2024 film based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. They both focus on the events leading up to the evening of July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band. If you don’t know why that seems worthy of an entire movie or book, then it’s likely you are under the age of 50. The good news is…

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Zinoman’s biography of David Letterman should make your Top Ten list on Late Night

I was too young to experience the Late Night Wars. They were well over – or at least not as hostile – by the time I was able to stay up late enough to watch any of the Late Night offerings, but I did choose a side. I was a Letterman guy.  At the time, I just preferred Letterman to Leno. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his post-Late Night era Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.”…

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The Catcher Was A Spy isn’t just for Baseball and Espionage Fans

I enjoy baseball, and I enjoy spy and espionage books, films and series. It would seem, then, that The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg was bound to not only interest me, but intrigue and entertain me as well. I would argue that sociologists and psychologists would also enjoy this book, as the curious case of Moe Berg is more than what it seems.

Despite the research completed here by author Nicholas Dawidoff and other books written about him, the constant in this book is what we don’t know.

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