Philip Marchand

Good introduction to McLuhan's thought. The author seems just a bit removed from his subject, which I suppose is partly good with biography, though he does admit in the introduction that he doesn't agree himself with all of McLuhan's thoughts (though he isn't specific). I was a little confused when he would gloss over one of McLuhan's later work in a single paragraph (there's a particular book which escapes me now that he handled like this). He first says that it was quite an important book in spite of the limited reception it got. But then he moves on. Rather than elaborating on a book that might have been personally important in McLuhan's intellectual trajectory, he limits his comments to the same amount of attention the general media gave it while saying that it received less attention than it should have. What am I supposed to take from this, but that Marchand is trying to create an accessible portrait of McLuhan without boring folks with details. Along this line, at one point he mentions the ridiculous amount of material McLuhan wrote and journaled, and yet the amount of direct quotations from McLuhan are limited. I'm surprised their are not more excerpts from his diaries, for example. By far the best parts are detailed descriptions of McLuhan's actual conversations with people, which are abundant but still somehow lacking given his prolific (if somewhat disorderly) output.

My intuition tells me there is room for another biography of this truly eccentric and under appreciated genius.… (more)

Good introduction to McLuhan's thought. The author seems just a bit removed from his subject, which I suppose is partly good with biography, though he does admit in the introduction that he doesn't agree himself with all of McLuhan's thoughts (though he isn't specific). I was a little confused when he would gloss over one of McLuhan's later work in a single paragraph (there's a particular book which escapes me now that he handled like this). He first says that it was quite an important book in spite of the limited reception it got. But then he moves on. Rather than elaborating on a book that might have been personally important in McLuhan's intellectual trajectory, he limits his comments to the same amount of attention the general media gave it while saying that it received less attention than it should have. What am I supposed to take from this, but that Marchand is trying to create an accessible portrait of McLuhan without boring folks with details. Along this line, at one point he mentions the ridiculous amount of material McLuhan wrote and journaled, and yet the amount of direct quotations from McLuhan are limited. I'm surprised their are not more excerpts from his diaries, for example. By far the best parts are detailed descriptions of McLuhan's actual conversations with people, which are abundant but still somehow lacking given his prolific (if somewhat disorderly) output.

My intuition tells me there is room for another biography of this truly eccentric and under appreciated genius.… (more)