Agent Palmer

Len Deighton’s Blitzkrieg is a focus on the many pieces of innovation, lessons learned, battles fought and won that lead to blitzkrieg, which “was quite different from anything ever experienced in previous wars.”

Deighton doesn’t go into much about the origin of the word, but he doesn’t mince words when describing what the short success of the blitzkrieg has been made of in hindsight where he writes “German triumphs in this campaign have caused their military recklessness to be hailed as genius, their dangerous gambles to be thought of as miracles.”

I always take notes when I read a book. Part of it comes from wanting the ability to add quotes to the reviews I write, but the bigger picture reason is because sometimes I like to go back to those notes and see them at a later date. By actually being able to read through a small document with all the quotes I pulled, I’ll find the one I remember, and it’s easier than paging through and rereading a whole page.

I bring this up because the notes I collected from reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson are more than a lot of the other books I have recently read, even some on the same subject.

Edith Head famously said, “You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it.” Well, then Michael Caine was destined for success. In this book, Michael Caine: 1960s by Graham Marsh, the style of the era and of the man coincide with some of the most classic photo representations of the swingin’ sixties.

Now, there aren’t a lot of words in this book, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot to say. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this book is longer than Moby Dick!

It took Marc Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald 3,478 days to amass 1,000 episodes of one of the most revered interview podcasts. That’s more than the twice a week release schedule that is now the norm for WTF with Marc Maron. Broken down that’s nine years, six months, and ten days, and more importantly, that’s 1,000 episodes of one of the mediums original pillars.

It’s easy to get caught up in the math.

There is something more authentic and honest about this book than most biographies or autobiographies. Perhaps it’s the fact that this book is a collection of essays, stories, pictures, lists, images, and other ephemera created by Mike Diamond (Mike D), Adam Horovitz (Ad Rock), and their friends, assembled together in chronological order.

Or… Perhaps it’s just the fact that the Beastie Boys are the Beastie Boys.