Before he became an eye and ear man, the transcendental mahatma of radio-TV-film-Mad Ave. ("With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing..."), Professor Marshall McLuhan used to write learned articles on Eliot and so forth in obscure journals. This never seemed to get him anywhere, so onwards he pressed into the electric age, strewing conciliatory notes along the way. "It is not that there is anything wrong with the old environment, but it simply will not serve as navigational guide to the new one." The McLuhan future (which is of course the present we refuse to acknowledge) consists of ceaseless innovation, a global culture, total involvement, and mass sensory awareness, all supported, programmed, and blessed by the wonders of technology, including such "cool" media as the tube in your living room, so much more emotion-engaging (even the commercials have that subliminal effect) than such dated "hot" media as the Times on the breakfast table. Through the Vanishing Point is nominally a study of "space in poetry and painting." Actually, it is a collection of pigrammatic campaign speeches in which McLuhan endorses his own brilliance in the guise of commenting on Western culture. On one page M.M. presents the opening stanzas of Gray's "Elegy," On the next page he makes his first observation: "The elegy walks backward into the future." After two inches of space, we get the second: "Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture." More space, then the final remark, which we've yet to figure out. There are also two "straight" essays. Sparkling.
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1968
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1968
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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