A quarter century ago, media guru McLuhan (d. 1980) wrote his famous Understanding Media. Now, in a posthumous volume cowritten by McLuhan's friend Powers (Communications Studies/Niagara U.), the premises of that work are updated. This collaboration stems from research undertaken by the authors at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. Their analysis of the worldwide impact of video-related technologies takes the myth of Narcissus (central to Understanding Media) a step further. McLuhan was struck by the fact that when men first went to the moon, we expected photographs of craters but, instead, the quintessential symbol of that adventure was the dramatic picture of earth—ourselves: "All of us who were watching had an enormous reflexive response. We 'outered' and 'innered' at the same time. We were on earth and the moon simultaneously." The authors refer to this kind of moment as a "resonating interval"—"the true action in the event was not on earth or on the moon, but rather in the airless void between. . ." In their analysis, this resonating interval represents an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space. The distinction between the two "spaces" marks the major premise here, with visual space representing the old traditions of Western Civilization—left-brain-oriented, linear, quantitative reasoning—and acoustic space representing right-brain, pattern-producing, qualitative reasoning. Because of electronic communications, the authors believe, these two mind-sets are "slamming into each other at the speed of light." While most societies view themselves through the past, usually a century behind, present-day changes occur so rapidly that this "rearview mirror" doesn't work anymore. By use of what they call the "tetrad," the authors contend that they can postulate four stages in any invention or trend to determine what the final result will be—what it will "flip over" into (e.g., money flipped over to credit cards; the telephone to "ominpresence." as in teleconferencing; cable TV should flip over to home broadcasting; electronic-funds transfer should flip over to "an intense state of credit-worthiness as pure status"). Dense, heavily technological writing—but with the occasional insight that reminds us of what once brought such renown to McLuhan.
Pub Date: June 1, 1989
ISBN: 19-505444-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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