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More than just a detailed life story, this fine and carefully written biography actually does justice to McLuhan's ideas. Gordon evocatively portrays McLuhan's central place in the ferment of the 1960s and explains the formation of his brilliant insights into the media. Escape Into Understanding is a discriminating and passionate portrait of one of the 20th Century's truly great men. It traces McLuhan's life from its beginning in the prairie city of Edmonton, Alberta, through his education at Cambridge and his teaching career in America to his startling breakthroughs in communication while at the University of Toronto. Wherever he went, McLuhan left the indelible memory of his passion for learning as a vital legacy among colleagues, friends and acquaintances. This is the man Gordon successfully evokes in this superb biography. ... Read more

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For the generation born after World War II, Marshall McLuhan instilled an urgent awareness of the media environment as a basic force shaping the modern sensibility. "If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves."--Marshall McLuhan. ... Read more

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Communications thinker and prophet Marshall McLuhan gave us the phrases "the medium is the message" and "global village". Today, with the explosion of electronic technologies and on-line communication, his ideas are more relevant than ever. Forward Through the Rearview Mirror is an evocative and visually exciting exploration of McLuhan's life and work in the context of the information age. The book consists of short prose passages, aphorisms, interviews, letters, and dialogues by McLuhan -- many never before published -- interwoven with biographical text by his biographer Philip Marchand and commentary by such cultural critics as Louis Rossetto, Neil Postman, Camille Paglia, and Lewis Lapham.The book is organized into four parts: Global Village and Identity, Medium is the Message, and Extensions of Man. In keeping with McLuhan's style of speaking and writing, the text consists of a series of brief entries, ranging in length from a single line to a page. The entries have been selected and positioned so that they can be read consecutively as a narrative or randomly as individual ideas. Throughout, the material by McLuhan appears in a different typeface and color from the material by others, to make the two clearly distinguishable. Part book, part magazine, part storyboard, this multidimensional look at the ideas and life of the patron saint of Wired magazine will appeal to anyone interested in technology, contemporary thought, and popular culture.Amazon.com Review
Sixties media theorist Marshall McLuhan understood theimplications of emerging mass media on society. This book revisitsMcLuhan's insights in the wake of our digital communications andtechnological progress. How have his concepts held up? Very wellindeed, apparently, as we see in this book, which presents excerpts ofMcLuhan's work and commentary from today's thinkers about media,including Lewis Lapham, Neil Postman, and Robert Fulford.McLuhan hasbeen called the patron saint of the digital revolution, and this bookis a testament and proof that he deserves the title. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

It is a coffee table book. About Marhall McLuhan's ideas. Interesting to flip through.
It is a nicely designed book.Nice Images and quotations from Marshall McLuhan.It is fun to flip through though it is not a book in a tradtional sense.Very McLuhan that's all I can say really.

Now that you know, go use the knowledge.
Without trying to undermine the insights of McLuhan himself, I think that this book represents just another episode in the `everybody loves Marshall' series. Similar to `Digital McLuhan' by Levinson, this book is crawling with remarks stating how great and wonderful McLuhan was and that it issuch a big loss for the world as we know that he's dead. I sincerely wishthat - as McLuhan put it himself - the comments would engage more in adynamic discours on his insights and thoughts and would try to makesomething out of it. But no, I find myself flipping through oodles of pagesfor the simple reason that it just contains one of those trivalMcLuhan-anecdotes/memorabilia.Supposedly McLuhan made it to the top tenof all-time thinkers - such as Nietzsche, Kant, Plato etc. Sure, theinsights provided by him are pretty slick, but one has to look for themsince most of the books concern the opinions of others that would also liketo say a thing or two. It's like a bunch of groupies standing at the farend of a stage thinking that they now too are famous.As far the rest ofthe book is concerned, there are some nice quotes from McLuhan himself thatcould very well change your perspective on things happening in our worldtoday. It provides some interesting insights and line of thought forfurther study. Respect goes out to the extensive bibliography that make iteasier to trace back his work. It is truly `McLuhan for the coffee-table',but mind you, there might be a lot of uninvited guests.

A Book, A Hot Medium
Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan can be considered one of the greatest tributes McLuhan could haveever received. By preserving the particular organization, writing style,and design McLuhan used in The Medium is the Massage and Global Village,editors Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart are able to keep his soul andideology alive. Insights not only from McLuhan himself, but also from manyother media theorists who react and share their experiences about thereadings, are the editor's elements to explain what was going on deeplyinside McLuhan's mind.

As the MTV programming, this book has acontinuous flow in which each chapter looks like a new video clip, which istotally related with the preceding, and flows directly into the following.However, instead of creating these connections with complete paragraphs andnice connectors, the editors choose to throw isolated pieces of pictures,paragraphs and quotations. It is the inner most meaning of every writtenand visual piece what makes a unified theory out of this book. A new way ofcommunication which McLuhan would define as "Any new structure forcodifying experience and moving information, be it alphabet or photography,has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon alllevels of our private and social lives" (106). Therefore, a chapter named"Violence and Identity" will start with a two-page-black and white pictureof a Ku Klux Klan's ritual followed by a quotation: "Violence, whetherspiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The lessidentity, the more violence." On the next page, a picture of a ten-year-oldchild wearing latex gloves and a gun in each hand; then, McLuhan's theoryis introduced with big blue letters: "IT'S WHY THEY HAVE TO KILL," and soforth. This continuous fluidity of meaningful images and writings, involvesthe audience in an exciting rhythm, making it interact and experience whatMcLuhan was trying to say by "The Medium is the Message."

Instead of having a defined introduction, body and conclusion, Forwardthrough a Rearview Mirror is composed of three different types of writing:biographical information, writings by McLuhan, and writings on McLuhan.Each one of them is placed by the editors to ease the reader'sunderstanding of McLuhan's speech. Information about his background, life,and surroundings is provided by a timeline that covers his most importantyears: his experiences at different stages of his career, the birth of hisown family, and his social life. All these factors influenced his way ofanalyzing our culture. From interviews, speeches, and books, Benedetti andDeHart quote McLuhan to provide objective information about his insights.Because most of his citations are abstract aphorisms, the audience can readhis words either superficially or deeply, stimulated by the adventure ofdiscovering his hidden insights, always present in his works. However, thereader is not alone in this adventure. Other media theorists such as JohnFraser or Lewis Laphom share their experiences when reading thephilosopher. Moreover, as the biographical information, these mediaproducers also help to guide the reader by providing him/her with differentanalysis and points of view towards McLuhan. Although the book doesn'tfollow the conventional three-part linearity, it seems custom made for therushing reader of the nineties. It doesn't matter on which page we openForward through the Rearview Mirror. It can always provide an interestinganalysis of our own society.

However, Paul Benedetti andNancy DeHart do not only keep McLuhan's organization and writing style, butalso preserve his idea of convey insights using the visual medium.Therefore,Forward Through the Rearview Mirror is designed to the image ofMcLuhan's major works The Medium is the Massage and Global Village. Thesetwo books submerge the reader into a multidimensional medium of meaningfulabstract and figurative visuals. For instance, the editors create the sametype of metaphors that McLuhan employed in his publications, by explainingthe world's current globalization with ten bottles of Coca-Cola all writtenin different languages. Moreover, as Marshall McLuhan's last works, theunconventional format of this book also stands out in the reader's library.While both the medium is the massage and Global Village are smaller thanany standard size book, Forward through the Rearview Mirror is wider andshorter than any conventional book.

Forward through theRearview Mirror shows the complete involvement of Paul Benedetti and NancyDeHart in McLuhan's life and ideas. Following Marshall McLuhan'sguidelines, they carefully place each element in their book to create anoutstanding piece. From its outside cover to its inner most meaning, thisbook breaks all standards, thus, draws the attention from an audiencewilling to find a new and high-quality product. Guided by McLuhan's printmedia by juxtaposing significant images and phrases to create movement andrhythm. When experiencing this book, the reader combines the sound of hisreading and the meaningful visuals inside his mind, creating anaudio-visual medium out of Forward the through the Rearview Mirror. If thisphenomenon is achieved, McLuhan's theory is confirmed: "It is man who iscontent of the message of the media, which are extensions of himself"DeHart and Benedetti understand McLuhan, preserving his thoughts alive, andhonor him in their piece of art.

The Concice McLuhan
I think the reviewer below summed it well in his subject line saying "McLuhan for the coffee table." Essentially this book is a list of one-liners and ideas of McLuhans. Snippets and paragraphs from books andarticles. Could very well be for the beginner, but without explanitorynotes (but with pictures); while it could also be for the person alreadywell versed in McLuhans thoughts. Either way, I found it a great book as Ifind his thinking fascinating, curious and many times humerous. Wellpresented in large paperback format with slick paper and color photos, thisbook is a quick and easy McLuhan treat.

McLuhan for the coffee table.
If McLuhan is new to you, and/or if you have a short attention span, this is the one to pick up. McLuhan's timeless insights into the evolution of man's synthesized environment are juxtaposed with in-your-face photographsand artwork that serve as indisputable evidence of the truth of hisanalysis.Reading this book at 30,000 feet, I was struck at just howclearly McLuhan is able topenetrate the distraction, distortion, and pre-conceptions endemic to modern technical civilization. The book is indeedlike a high altitude surveillance flight over the electomagneticinfrastructure of our age. The combination of images and text have asynergy imploring the reader to understand the accelerating importance ofman's media in shaping his behavior.Serve with "Propaganda", byJacques Ellul, and "Manufacturing Consent", by Noam Chomsky andEdward S. Herman. ... Read more

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Marshall McLuhan made many predictions in his seminal 1964 publication, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. Among them were his predictions that the Internet would become a Global Village, making us more interconnected than television, the closing of the gap between consumers and producers, the elimination of space and time as barriers to communication, and the melting of national borders. He is also famously remembered for coining the expression: the medium is the message. These predictions form the genesis of this new volume by Robert Logan —a friend and colleague who worked with McLuhan. Logan argues that these predictions are more pronounced today than when McLuhan first made them in the 60s. In Understanding New Media Logan expertly serves to update Understanding Media to analyze the new media McLuhan foreshadowed and yet was never able to analyze or experience. Understanding New Media is designed to reach a new generation of readers as well as appealing to scholars and students who are familiar with Understanding Media. The volume comes with an accompanying website. Visit understandingnewmedia.org for the latest updates on this book. ... Read more

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Coiner of the famous phrase "the medium is the message" and author of two widely read, controversial volumes--The Guttenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media--Marshall McLuhan was one of the most talked about personalities of the 1960s. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek and The Saturday Review, was written about in Time, Life, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The National Review, was the subject of an hour-long documentary on NBC, and had an unforgettable walk-on role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, playing himself. A seminal thinker, he introduced popular culture as a subject for serious thought, and started people thinking about how technology--especially electronic media--shapes the way we perceive the world.
McLuhan corresponded with a vast number of people, from Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter to popular advice columnist Ann Landers.Indeed, his correspondents amount to a Who's Who of western culture, both high and low, including Duke Ellington, Woody Allen, Jacques Maritain, Rollo May, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Bob Newhart. At times playful and at times profound, his letters offer an invaluable commentary on McLuhan's work and, in some instances, the most lucid and detailed explanation of his ideas available.
A brilliant letter-writer and a genial man who made friends all over the world, Marshall McLuhan left behind a correspondence that brims with insight, good humor, and the love of language and word play. His letters offer an invaluable glimpse of the private life and inner thoughts of one of the great minds of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

To the point of absurdity, but still true enough
McLuhan is a comic hero for me.What seemed mysterious about McLuhan's mirth, when I was merely reading his books, might be even worse, now that I can`t stop thinking about how he topped everyone else, driven, as only a McLuhan fan would be, into trying to explain how Marshall McLuhan writing letters, attempting to explain his wildly radical ideas to the people of his world, ought to be understood as being comic, like a light-saber stab at grasping things that extended far beyond irony.Collapse might be the word that is used so often in this book that, if it had been listed in the Index, the Index would have been more than 15 pages.

To understand modern society as a comic society, it helps to get beyond the famous comedians, movie stars, and around the little kid characters of `South Park' who attempt, in a thoroughly juvenile manner, to create their own involvement in modern life.In the intellectual direction, Marshall McLuhan stands as a character possessing a level of thought which allows LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN to be a prime example of humor in action.This might not be the perfect book for every reader, but it coincides nicely with my appreciation of how entertainment values resonate with real life.This review is not an attempt to achieve some overall evaluation of this book.Out of spite, I will try the opposite approach, emphasizing the idiosyncratic abuse of intellect as a weapon used by Marshall McLuhan to attack everything which any superpower would attempt to do while disguising itself as ordinary.

There are several dozen references in the book to Canada, CBC, CBC-TV, and CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television Commission).McLuhan certainly felt enough at home there to enjoy himself by sending Pierre Elliott Trudeau a letter on January 5, 1973, which began:

Dear Pierre,
A one-liner that is very flexible in its use goes:"As Zeus said to Narcissus:`Watch yourself!' "(p. 461).

At a time when the major powers were moving towards signing a ceasefire agreement in Paris, McLuhan was trying to draw attention to Viet Nam as a resonant interval, where the action is, a gap, an interface, understood as the political game, which is considered a game because it "would seem to be rooted in the awareness of `play' as crux in all forms of social action.It is a basic feature of play that it keeps us in touch, and is also extremely involving of our facilities."(p. 461).One of the key failures of the United States in Nam was the lack of success in imposing the official American policy on the views of those who were totally involved.Policy was set by top officials in meetings in which the top priorities were more concerned about global geopolitics, which is bound to stumble in a world that McLuhan was trying to describe to Trudeau as being much more complex, especially to individuals:

"When we are using only a small part of our faculties, we are working.When we are totally involved, we are playing.The artist is always at leisure, especially when most intensely engaged in making."(p. 461).

What kind of an artist was Marshall McLuhan?The easier question is how comic was he?He could easily picture people sitting at home, within their own four walls, raging at the world outside, and he wasn't afraid to mention ongoing events to tell people what he thought.After going to a dinner in Washington, D.C., at which he sat next to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and "jokingly explained the advantages of living in a backward country like Canada." (p. 342), McLuhan sent Humphrey a letter on February 9, 1967, thanking him for "sending me that splendid picture of us both."In case Humphrey wasn't quite sure what people were thinking, McLuhan also wrote:

"Viet is our first TV war.TV creates an audience involvement in depth that automatically creates alienation of the public.The same news covered by the old hot media like press has a very different effect.

"While we are Westernizing the East by our old technology, we are Easternizing ourselves by the new technology.TV is an orientalizing force, taking us all on an `inner trip' that blurs the old idea of private identity altogether."(p. 342).

Calling attention to such forces, McLuhan expected radical changes to come about.In a letter arranging a discussion in Maryland in 1969, McLuhan even predicted:

"By the same token, if the slaughter houses were on all media every day, meat would disappear from our diet at once.Photographic news coverage killed public hangings.TV coverage makes the Viet business difficult to get on with. . . . The interface between print culture and electronic culture not only creates student unrest, it creates a collapse of all existing organizations in business and other establishments of the world.This has nothing to do with ideology or concepts."(p. 389).

Students certainly aren't as big an issue since the 1960s ended and they rested, whether it was because the draft ended or the philosophy of political change dropped into some hole that McLuhan thought was already there.Second guessing how McLuhan was wrong about some of our own current events merely avoids a larger question that no one is showing any willingness to face, if a comic society is finally going to realize that a few ideas have to make sense, after the economic collapse follows the financial collapse that may come if owning stock becomes worth less than having a job or social security.Imagining the doom of American policy in Nam produced more mirth than we are likely to feel at the ultimate demise of everything we face today, but McLuhan ought to get credit for making us think about going off in this direction.After the laugh, how many of us have really been there, done that? ... Read more

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In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was promoted as the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin and Einstein. Yet when he died in 1980, his explorations of media were perceived as irrelevant and naïve. In recent years, however, McLuhanism has been resurrected. Why?

This book argues that radical transformations in media and technology have reinvigorated debate about McLuhan’s famous dictum, ‘the medium is the message’. Today, his views on ‘the global village’ and ‘hot and cool media’ have been drawn into discourses on the sensory, psychological and social impact of virtual reality and cyberspace. Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality examines McLuhan’s thought in relation to the information revolution, assessing his ‘probes’ into aural and visual culture and their problematic relation to the global and corporate matrix of the Web and Internet. It also discusses his claims in relation to postmodern theory and considers how McLuhan’s renaissance connects with the posthuman ‘cyberbole’ of disembodiment and virtual identity. ... Read more

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Gaining fame and controversy in the 1960s with his proposal that television was creating a "global village" and that the medium itself, not the messages it carried, was influencing the public, media critic Marshall McLuhan was idolized by some and vilified by others. He died in 1980. As a mascot for today's cyber-set, this is the perfect time for this thoroughly researched re-evaluation of his writings and teachings photo insert. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Great Book about a Great Thinker
I read this book ten years ago, cover to cover, and it stays with me.

McLuhan is undeservedly a forgotten thinker today despite his prescient ideas about technology and media. We neglect his classic "Understanding Media" at out peril, especially his account in it of the paralyzing numbness that follows the discovery of any technology and that precedes human understanding and mastery. This includes the numbness that keeps the human race from seeing or understanding itself in the mirror of mass TV and mastering the technology in ways that benefit the human race.

McCluhan never saw a PC but he would surely rejoice at the invention of the digital, interactive PC. His spirit lives on in another oddly forgotten yet prescient little book: George Gilder's "Life After Television: the Coming Transformation of Media and American Life." (1988)

Back to Terrence Gordon, who fully understands all this and offers a warm and nuanced picture of McLuhan's. Few things have made me respect the Catholoic faith as much as Gordon's account of the faith and daily devotion that McLuhan practiced throughout his life.

Fine intellectual biography
Mr. Gordon concentrates on Mcluhan's intellectual development and shows McL.'s work as a single work in progress built on a unique foundation.It is not as merely gossipy as Marchand's biography, and not for the reader unfamiliar with the world of ideas McL. dealt with.There is nothing of the pop celebrity here, but a serious presentation of the intellectual ground under all of McLuhan's work.

I Was Tempted To Escape Into Sleep Far Too Often
I purchased this book because I was interested in learning as much as I could about the enigmatic Marshall McLuhan. Unfortunately, Mr. McLuhan has failed to find his ideal biographer in this work. Marshall McLuhan was the media intellectual from Canada who wrote, taught and spoke presciently of the effects of media on ourselves and our culture. Much of his work was rather heady stuff, and out of the reach of the dillettante. Even his most famous phrase, "the medium is the message" is poorly understood by many, including some who are thought to be blessed with large portions of gray matter. And the author of this biography W. Terrence Gordon can't seem to find the formula for delivering palatable explainations of McLuhan's catchphrases. The book unevenly shifts from the recounting of McLuhan's life, to the development of his groundbreaking research and novel ideas on everything from the ancient Trivium to electronic media, and he never settles into a comfortable pace. One can sense that McLuhan's life was unique, compelling and interesting, but it is rendered dry and antiseptic in this telling, and our author fares even more poorly in attempting to school us in the intellectual legacy of McLuhan, never properly defining terms in some instances, jumping way over our heads in others, and most maddening of all, sticking 80-some pages of notes at the end of the book which would have served us far better as foot-notes or inclusions in the main text. All this having been said, the subject was interesting enough and the materials included specific enough, where I was able to find many interesting paths for further exploration, which made slogging through this ponderous book, worth the effort at the end... But as I said, this fascinating man's life is deserving of a far more interesting and organized writer's efforts. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of Communication and Information, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1264 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.This broad-based set surveys clothing, body adornment, and examines the origins of clothing, the development of fabrics and technologies, and the social meanings of dress. It also presents information on representative costumes from a wide variety of historical eras, which are frequently the topic of student research. Topics range from the bustle, sari, and toga to Polyester and body piercing. The short entries explain the history of garments (necktie, codpiece, cocktail dress, bathing suit, burqua, Nehru jacket), techniques and manufactures (batik, dry cleaning, zipper, stone washing), body adornment (makeup, mask, tattoo, wig), and important persons and institutions (Coco Chanel, Edith Head, Yves Saint-Laurent, Fashion Institute of Technology). The longer essays provide cultural context: class, gender, sumptuary laws, costume design for stage and screen, advertising; fashion careers; ecclesiastical dress; military uniforms; etc. ... Read more

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This book details the history of the spread of printing and literacy in eighteenth century Ireland. In addition to being a historical survey, it is also a study, in the "media ecological" vein, that explores what happens when a new technology is introduced to a given culture. This work answers three key questions: first, why did print technology take so long (300 years after Gutenberg) to become a cultural influence in Ireland; second, why was there an "explosion" of printing and presses in Ireland between 1750 and 1800; and finally, why, when a printing industry had been established, was almost the entire output of printed literature in English rather than the Irish language? ... Read more

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Carefully selected from the voluminous output of the past 40 years, this collection reprints the key critical writings on Canadian communications thinker Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan's famous aphorisms and uncanny ability to sense megatrends are once again in circulation across and beyond the disciplines. Since his untimely death in 1980, McLuhan's ideas have been rediscovered and redeployed with urgency in the age of information and cybernation.

Featuring critical introductions to each section by the editor, materials include:

- Interpretations by globally significant writers and theorists such as Tom Wolfe, Raymond Williams, Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, and reveals the contours of McLuhan's reception in France, as well as skirmishes with his leading ideas by journalists and postmodernists throughout the world.
- Essays by noted communications theorists such as James Carey, Donald Theall and Derrick de Kerckhove, linking McLuhan's influence across the arts and in relation to critical theory, literary theory and recent literature on postmodernism.
- The McLuhan renaissance of the 1990s in the rise of cyberculture, touching upon his elevation to patron saint of Wired magazine, providing a foundation for Paul Virilio's theses on speed, and interpretative framework for theorizing new technologies from geographic information systems to the Internet and cyborg life. ... Read more