Agent Palmer

When you want to know more about The Beatles and James Bond, two of Britain’s largest popular culture exports, and what both meant to Britain and the rest of the world, you need to reach for John Higgs’ Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche.

This book starts on Friday, 5 October 1962, when The Beatles’ first record, ‘Love Me Do,’ and the first James Bond film were both released. As Higgs states, “The Beatles were about to become the most successful and important band in history. Not to be outdone, James Bond would go on to become the single most successful movie character ever.”

Richard Robinson’s “Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Scientific Reasons Everything Goes Wrong” is a book that rationally explains the science behind Murphy’s law.

For the uninitiated, Murphy’s law is the pessimist’s go-to vibe. It’s essentially boiled down to the idea that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

There are plenty of films and documentaries about Steve Prefontaine.

I have not watched any of them.

There are also more than a few books on him, and I just read my first, Pre: The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend by Tom Jordan.

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post is not my usual reading. It’s extremely contemporary and is perhaps the most recently published piece of non-fiction I’ve ever read.

But as a former student of journalism, and as my friends currently introduce me as a “Features Writer & Documentary Conversationalist” which could arguably be at least tangential to journalism, this is a book that’s about much more than the sum of the three elements listed in it’s subtitle.

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman looks back at the last decade that actually felt like a decade. It’s hard to view this book as anything other than a transformation, but it’s also hard to ignore that reading this book puts you back there.

This book is a time capsule with the perverse insights that make you wonder about your own memory, the collective memory, and all with a sincerity, exuberance, and authenticity that feels proper.