Agent Palmer

This book may have been written about one campaign, but it is timeless in the way that “the more things change the more they stay the same.”  Too many parts of this book are relevant to all of the subsequent elections since. Even worse, most of this book is remarkably relevant to all of the elections from 2000 onward. The book chronicles author Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s on-the-ground coverage of the 1972 campaign. It begins with the Democratic primary race,…

Magician, comedian, actor, writer, producer, musician, and author. Steve Martin is many things more than just a “wild and crazy guy,” and how that all came to be is found in his autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

This may be one of the more realistic show business books I have read in recent memory. This isn’t a book about name-dropping or what happens after success. This is a book about how Steve Martin reached the top. While you can take some of the lessons to heart on your own, this is not a how-to; this is just a how it happened.

If you enjoy films, Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, is a must-read. It’s also something I would highly recommend that aspiring filmmakers crack open.

Me? I’m not sure I fall into either camp, though I do dabble in film.

Squaring the Circle is a 2022 film about the story of Hipgnosis, the designers and the album covers they created.

And while you may have never heard of Hipgnosis, or their founders Po (Aubrey Powell) and Storm (Thorgerson), you have seen their work on the album covers of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Wings, Peter Gabriel, and many many more.

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.