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dessa's review against another edition
3.0
The first time I read this book, I really loved it. Rereading it in 2016, I found the first half dragged and at the same time didn't give me enough detail; I loved the last quarter of the book and flew through it, and sort of wish the whole thing was dedicated to Coupland interpreting McLuhan's work instead of trying to sum up his life.
jennycazzola's review against another edition
5.0
Blurb:
Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is remembered now primarily for the aphoristic slogan he coined to explain the emerging new world of global communication: “The medium is the message.” Half a century later, McLuhan’s predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of “electronic inter-dependence” have become a reality—in a sense, the reality—of our time.
Douglas Coupland, whose iconic novel Generation X was a “McLuhanesque” account of our culture in fictional form, has written a compact biography of the cultural critic that interprets the life and work of his subject from inside. A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global village—now known as the Internet—has come to pass in the 21st century.
My Opinion:
Well, I have to say, this short read was quite a bit of a rollercoaster-ride for me. But before I start going into details, I have to tell you a few things about myself, even though I always try to avoid putting myself in, when it comes to writing reviews: I’m a 23-years-old Italian university student with a disability that bounds me to the wheelchair. Back in high school, I desperately wanted to study molecular biomedicine (or genetics, if you want it in less fancy terms), but life threw me some big fat juicy curveballs and after the death of my mother made me a de facto orphan, I winded up studying Communication Science in Culture in my hometown instead. In my fourth semester, I came across Marshall McLuhan and his genius and even though I’d heard of him in other classes before, I was star struck. Somewhat depressed (because I have a lot of mommy issues, daddy issues, trust issues, anxiety issues, anger issues and unresolved grief issues going on) and somewhat sleep-deprived (a consequence of the aforementioned issues), one day I asked my professor (amongst seven other things) how the hell Marshall McLuhan became Marshall McLuhan. On the spur of the moment, I didn’t think much of this question. However, it must have impressed said professor (who’s a nuthead by the way), because not only did he agree to grade an E-Mail instead of a term paper, but he also immediately sent me a PDF of this book.
And so, I came to read “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” by Douglas Coupland. And I honestly have to say, my first impression was: “This book needs trigger alerts!” Because after reading the first chapter, the one about the fact that this greater-than-life person had to end his life unable to speak his wonderful mind, I sat in my kitchen, crying and furiously remembering why I wanted to study genetics in first place: to avoid that such cosmic insults on the bravest and the brightest people on earth ever happened again.
Somehow, I managed to keep my aching heart together and to read on. Yeah, to be honest, I did not only read on, but I did so with a feverish, nearly maniac intensity, that surprised me a bit. And I managed to find, what I was looking for: the answer to my question how McLuhan became McLuhan. Namely by having a differently wired brain and by wanting to please his terrific and demanding mother throughout his whole life. But my mind was also swarming with more and more questions, the more I read on and I started to feel like one of McLuhan’s students coming out of one of his classes: intrigued, fascinated, stimulated, but also irked, confused and very tired. In this period Douglas Coupland’s writing style and approach towards this book annoyed me quite a bit. I found it too superficial and bashing, too fast and fragmented, too mosaic-like. Just like a book written by McLuhan himself. It was not what I expected from a biography. In my opinion, a biography has to be something intimate, something that gives you a feeling of knowing the person you’re reading about quite well. In this case, it was the opposite: the more I read on, the less I felt I knew and understood about McLuhan’s work. So, I dropped the book more or less halfway through it, exhausted and still none the wiser.
The semester went on. Life too. My depression gave me a (small) break. I had some good days. Some less good days. Some fights. Some apologetic E-Mails I had to write. I partied hard when the end of the lessons finally arrived and studied even harder during exam period. In the meantime, “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work” has been sitting silently in a corner of my desktop, waiting for me. August came and I decided to give it another try.
Okay, to be honest, this didn’t come completely out of the blue. Summer and vacation time is not an easy period for me. Finding a summer job when you cannot wait tables is a nightmare and so during summer I often have too much time to think about my future, my past, my problems and my parents, whose deaths fall into this time of the year. Currently, I’m going through another load of weird, depressing and nerve-wracking co-dependence and grief shit and I started to wonder if Marshall McLuhan ever managed to free himself of his overbearing mother Elsie and her expectations of him. So, I picked up this book again, hoping to find a little comfort and hope nestled within its pages. But, as I couldn’t remember where I had left oft, I decided to start from anew, this time trying to read it all in one night (because I didn’t want to sleep. Just four words for you: Nightmares. Of. My. Mother.)
This time around, I happened to appreciate Douglas Coupland’s writing style and approach to the subject much more. I liked the fact that he tried to make someone as shrewd and strange as Marshall McLuhan to appear a little more human and approachable. I caught on the author’s subtle and quirky type of humor and it made me smile to myself quite a few times. I got a clearer picture of who Marshall McLuhan was and why he thought the way, he thought, even though a lot of questions remained open. I would have liked to know more about McLuhan as a father, as a family man. And about those people that lived in his exorbitant shadow: his wife Corinne, his brother Maurice and his eldest son and co-worker, Eric. Especially Eric is mentioned more times towards the end of the book, but he always remains a very vague and shadowy character. It’s a pity.
I’m not sure if I understood much of McLuhan’s work and theories reading this book. Hell, I’m not even sure if I understood anything about McLuhan or communication during my studies so far. “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work” certainly is not an introduction to his work. Douglas Coupland tries to explain a few things, like “the medium is the message”, the global village, or McLuhan’s theory of hot and cold media. But the truth is, I’m not even sure that people who spend their lives reading McLuhan get a full grasp on his work. So, I can’t blame neither Mr. Coupland, nor myself for failing in this, can I? But as Douglas Coupland mentioned too, “The Medium is the Message” is probably a much better (and hopefully easy to read) introduction to the Planet McLuhan.
Nonetheless, Douglas Coupland managed to create quite a full and fascinating picture of who this great man was. Some details were funny and interesting, others rather annoyed me, like the street directions in the middle of the book that seemed to have no sense, or the open product placement for McLuhan’s book taken directly from Amazon.
What prompted me to give this book a full five-star rating in the end was a rather personal story the author told. He compared Marshall McLuhan to his grandfather and it was this that made me realize why the fascination for a crusty old vehicle for new ideas is still unbroken, even nearly forty years after his death and it made me understand my own fascination for McLuhan a little better. McLuhan was a strange guy with lots of strange ideas. Most of them came true only after his death. He was an outsider, a medical and personal curiosum, someone who never fit in anywhere. He was the classical geeky, nerdy and insufferable clever kid in high school. And as such he became a holding center, a sort of an anti-hero for all the other shrewd, weird, differently wired, aliens from outer space kids that somehow managed to grow into adults and by destiny, by design or by disaster (in my case) started to look into this banal and fascinating thing that communication is.
So, thank you, Mr. Coupland. Boy-oh-boy, you wrote a bombastic book. A book that was able to inspire me, much like McLuhan inspired his students and co-workers. A book that brought back someone, who has been gone for a long time and has nearly been forgotten. However, I hope neither you nor Marshall McLuhan mind, if I now concentrate on something else for some time. Because all your talking about time and space put me in the mood to revisit some notions of physics and quantum mechanics (even if I hated physics back in high school). But, before I finish this review and put Marshall McLuhan back in the hole of my brain, where he came from, let me ask you one last question: Nearly forty years after his death, what do you think is left of his work?
Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is remembered now primarily for the aphoristic slogan he coined to explain the emerging new world of global communication: “The medium is the message.” Half a century later, McLuhan’s predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of “electronic inter-dependence” have become a reality—in a sense, the reality—of our time.
Douglas Coupland, whose iconic novel Generation X was a “McLuhanesque” account of our culture in fictional form, has written a compact biography of the cultural critic that interprets the life and work of his subject from inside. A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global village—now known as the Internet—has come to pass in the 21st century.
My Opinion:
Well, I have to say, this short read was quite a bit of a rollercoaster-ride for me. But before I start going into details, I have to tell you a few things about myself, even though I always try to avoid putting myself in, when it comes to writing reviews: I’m a 23-years-old Italian university student with a disability that bounds me to the wheelchair. Back in high school, I desperately wanted to study molecular biomedicine (or genetics, if you want it in less fancy terms), but life threw me some big fat juicy curveballs and after the death of my mother made me a de facto orphan, I winded up studying Communication Science in Culture in my hometown instead. In my fourth semester, I came across Marshall McLuhan and his genius and even though I’d heard of him in other classes before, I was star struck. Somewhat depressed (because I have a lot of mommy issues, daddy issues, trust issues, anxiety issues, anger issues and unresolved grief issues going on) and somewhat sleep-deprived (a consequence of the aforementioned issues), one day I asked my professor (amongst seven other things) how the hell Marshall McLuhan became Marshall McLuhan. On the spur of the moment, I didn’t think much of this question. However, it must have impressed said professor (who’s a nuthead by the way), because not only did he agree to grade an E-Mail instead of a term paper, but he also immediately sent me a PDF of this book.
And so, I came to read “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” by Douglas Coupland. And I honestly have to say, my first impression was: “This book needs trigger alerts!” Because after reading the first chapter, the one about the fact that this greater-than-life person had to end his life unable to speak his wonderful mind, I sat in my kitchen, crying and furiously remembering why I wanted to study genetics in first place: to avoid that such cosmic insults on the bravest and the brightest people on earth ever happened again.
Somehow, I managed to keep my aching heart together and to read on. Yeah, to be honest, I did not only read on, but I did so with a feverish, nearly maniac intensity, that surprised me a bit. And I managed to find, what I was looking for: the answer to my question how McLuhan became McLuhan. Namely by having a differently wired brain and by wanting to please his terrific and demanding mother throughout his whole life. But my mind was also swarming with more and more questions, the more I read on and I started to feel like one of McLuhan’s students coming out of one of his classes: intrigued, fascinated, stimulated, but also irked, confused and very tired. In this period Douglas Coupland’s writing style and approach towards this book annoyed me quite a bit. I found it too superficial and bashing, too fast and fragmented, too mosaic-like. Just like a book written by McLuhan himself. It was not what I expected from a biography. In my opinion, a biography has to be something intimate, something that gives you a feeling of knowing the person you’re reading about quite well. In this case, it was the opposite: the more I read on, the less I felt I knew and understood about McLuhan’s work. So, I dropped the book more or less halfway through it, exhausted and still none the wiser.
The semester went on. Life too. My depression gave me a (small) break. I had some good days. Some less good days. Some fights. Some apologetic E-Mails I had to write. I partied hard when the end of the lessons finally arrived and studied even harder during exam period. In the meantime, “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work” has been sitting silently in a corner of my desktop, waiting for me. August came and I decided to give it another try.
Okay, to be honest, this didn’t come completely out of the blue. Summer and vacation time is not an easy period for me. Finding a summer job when you cannot wait tables is a nightmare and so during summer I often have too much time to think about my future, my past, my problems and my parents, whose deaths fall into this time of the year. Currently, I’m going through another load of weird, depressing and nerve-wracking co-dependence and grief shit and I started to wonder if Marshall McLuhan ever managed to free himself of his overbearing mother Elsie and her expectations of him. So, I picked up this book again, hoping to find a little comfort and hope nestled within its pages. But, as I couldn’t remember where I had left oft, I decided to start from anew, this time trying to read it all in one night (because I didn’t want to sleep. Just four words for you: Nightmares. Of. My. Mother.)
This time around, I happened to appreciate Douglas Coupland’s writing style and approach to the subject much more. I liked the fact that he tried to make someone as shrewd and strange as Marshall McLuhan to appear a little more human and approachable. I caught on the author’s subtle and quirky type of humor and it made me smile to myself quite a few times. I got a clearer picture of who Marshall McLuhan was and why he thought the way, he thought, even though a lot of questions remained open. I would have liked to know more about McLuhan as a father, as a family man. And about those people that lived in his exorbitant shadow: his wife Corinne, his brother Maurice and his eldest son and co-worker, Eric. Especially Eric is mentioned more times towards the end of the book, but he always remains a very vague and shadowy character. It’s a pity.
I’m not sure if I understood much of McLuhan’s work and theories reading this book. Hell, I’m not even sure if I understood anything about McLuhan or communication during my studies so far. “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work” certainly is not an introduction to his work. Douglas Coupland tries to explain a few things, like “the medium is the message”, the global village, or McLuhan’s theory of hot and cold media. But the truth is, I’m not even sure that people who spend their lives reading McLuhan get a full grasp on his work. So, I can’t blame neither Mr. Coupland, nor myself for failing in this, can I? But as Douglas Coupland mentioned too, “The Medium is the Message” is probably a much better (and hopefully easy to read) introduction to the Planet McLuhan.
Nonetheless, Douglas Coupland managed to create quite a full and fascinating picture of who this great man was. Some details were funny and interesting, others rather annoyed me, like the street directions in the middle of the book that seemed to have no sense, or the open product placement for McLuhan’s book taken directly from Amazon.
What prompted me to give this book a full five-star rating in the end was a rather personal story the author told. He compared Marshall McLuhan to his grandfather and it was this that made me realize why the fascination for a crusty old vehicle for new ideas is still unbroken, even nearly forty years after his death and it made me understand my own fascination for McLuhan a little better. McLuhan was a strange guy with lots of strange ideas. Most of them came true only after his death. He was an outsider, a medical and personal curiosum, someone who never fit in anywhere. He was the classical geeky, nerdy and insufferable clever kid in high school. And as such he became a holding center, a sort of an anti-hero for all the other shrewd, weird, differently wired, aliens from outer space kids that somehow managed to grow into adults and by destiny, by design or by disaster (in my case) started to look into this banal and fascinating thing that communication is.
So, thank you, Mr. Coupland. Boy-oh-boy, you wrote a bombastic book. A book that was able to inspire me, much like McLuhan inspired his students and co-workers. A book that brought back someone, who has been gone for a long time and has nearly been forgotten. However, I hope neither you nor Marshall McLuhan mind, if I now concentrate on something else for some time. Because all your talking about time and space put me in the mood to revisit some notions of physics and quantum mechanics (even if I hated physics back in high school). But, before I finish this review and put Marshall McLuhan back in the hole of my brain, where he came from, let me ask you one last question: Nearly forty years after his death, what do you think is left of his work?
fugue's review against another edition
4.0
Cory makes Marshall take off his shoes to reveal his feet of clay, but at the same time reveals a new side of this man who may answer so many questions about who we are now and where we're heading.
jennicakes's review against another edition
5.0
An absolute delight to read, if Coupland gets a little sentimental at the end. Totally accessible; basically, if you get the title reference, you are morally obligated to read this book.
MORALLY.
OBLIGATED.*
*Don't worry - it's short.
MORALLY.
OBLIGATED.*
*Don't worry - it's short.
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