Jim Korkis's collection of deeply researched vignettes on obscure corners of Walt Disney's career, assembled from archives and original interviews. Rather than a chronological biography, each chapter is a focused deep-dive — Disney's reading habits, his city-planning research for EPCOT, projects that never made it to screen, and the true stories behind familiar legends.
Korkis's research is where many of the details about Disney's reading documented in the founder library originate. The book records that **Walt spent time on deck with books about city planning and universities as he developed his plans for Epcot and CalArts including Garden Cities of To-morrow by Ebenezer Howard** — a glimpse into how a founder researches a new domain by going directly to primary sources rather than relying on experts.
The book's value for founders is methodological: Korkis shows how to reconstruct a founder's thinking from marginalia, library records, and the testimony of people who worked directly with them. For anyone trying to learn from historical founders, his approach — chasing primary sources, questioning received narratives, paying attention to the books on their nightstand — is a model worth imitating.