Marshall Mcluhan: Escape Into Understanding : A Biography

by W. Terrence Gordon

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773730451
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Basic Books.
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

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.