Industrial Books

Bruce Watson's "Bread and Roses" tells the captivating story of the 1912 textile stirke in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Now known as the "bread and roses strike", it united dozens of communities of immigrant workers under the leadership of the radical anti-capitalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to win a months-long struggle against all odds. One of the IWW's greatest victories, it also proved to be a short-lived one. In less than a year, the union in Lawrence had been all but exterminated, victim of a violent reaction the likes of which wouldn't be seen again until the jingoistic hysteria of the First World War and subsequent red scare.

Watson's telling of the story is a beautifully written, meticulously detailed and documented account. His fast-moving, journalistic history stretches beyond the strike itself in frequent tangents, to provide a glimpse at labor organizing and class conflict in early twentieth century America, starring Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "Smiling Joe" Ettor and hometown organizer Angelo Rocco, with cameos from Gene Debs, Joe Hill, Clarence Darrow, "T-Bone Slim", Morris Hillquit, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Teddy Roosevelt, Nicola Sacco, and many others.

My chief criticism of Watson's account is actually that he makes it too much a story. He gets swept up in the romance and legend of the "Wobblies", which leads him to neglect a serious analysis of their program and goals. Watson never really comes to grips with the radical anti-capitalist agenda of the IWW and the strike itself, characterizing it merely as part of the "struggle for the American dream".

Although Watson tries to maintain journalistic neutrality, it becomes clear that his sympathies lie with the strikers, if not their self-proclaimed "historic mission... to do away with capitalism". This is especially the case when he discusses the aftermath of the strike, when the union was violently suppressed and equal violence was done to history. In the sanitized history of the strike that was then established, Lawrence was a peaceful, idyllic town, with no poverty, no slums, no hunger, no low wages, no oppression. Then a handful of outside agitators descended on the town, exploiting flighty and feeble-minded immigrants, to manufacture a labor dispute where none truly existed.

Nonsense, of course, and Watson does a good job of demolishing it, and an even better job of telling a more accurate tale. The story of the Lawrence strike is one we all should know, and even those already familiar with it are not likely to find a more engaging account of it than "Bread and Roses".

I saw this reviewed on one of the public television shows. I read it, then passed it on to my Union to add to their library. Excellent work, very informative.

I was raised in Lawrence. My grandmother was a polish immigrant weaver at the Wood Mill and my grandfather was an Irish plant foreman at the Arlington Mills as was my father. I have been reading and researching Lawrence for some time. In fact in my book about growing up in Lawrence "A Summer with Charlie" now listed on Amazon, I include a short synopsis of the Strike of 1912. When I saw Mr. Watson's book advertised, I had to have it. He did an excellent job as did Mr. Moran on "The Belles of New England". If you really want some fun books about Lawrence get Images of America, Lawrence Massachusetts by Ken Skulski and friends. These are two volumes full of old pictures and descriptions of good old Lawrence. Whenever I get nostalgic and lonely for the old days and the good times I go over and start browsing through one of these volumes.
Bruce Watson's book is much the same - I loved walking with the strikers up and down all those familiar streets and learning about the history of my old hometown. This book should be a required reading at Lawrence High and Central Catholic, that's for sure.

I grew up in Lawrence and had several members of my family work in the woolen mills....

Although the strike was not talked about, I was very aware of how hard the work was and how much sacrifice was made by each family.

Sadly, the history of the strike was not taught in our classrooms - I strongly believe that it is as relevant today..... I urge everyone to read this book and to take it to your heart. Bruce Watson did an extraordinary job presenting this story.

I always was and always will be proud to be a member of one of those hardworking immigrant families.....and continue to be proud to have been raised in Lawrence.

This is a surprisingly exciting read. A 10 star book, at least. I can't imagine this history being told better although I don't know what others have written about this strike, other than a brief reference from the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Watson captures the importance of the IWW to this strike but also shows the great problems that the IWW had in holding on to the strikers after the strike ended.

So much detail but it flows so well. Watson seems to largely let the details tell the story rather than editorialize. This is history with the emphasis on history and not salesmanship. This is effectively a "you are there" episode accomplished in text.

What motivated Bruce Watson to do such exceptional work? I suspect that, unlike the author of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, And Got a Life", Bruce Watson did not get anything like a $500,000 advance for "Bread and Roses". We need more people like Bruce Watson. And more money directed to support them: so buy this book!

So much about U.S. History I'm ignorant of. That a Kansas Socialist newspaper was our most popular weekly. That the IWW, afer having so much success in Lawrence, would be nearly crushed by the federal government. That one young man of the IWW, Joseph Ettor, would have such a profound influence of the Lawrence strike but die largely forgotten. That so many women would play important roles in a strike at this time. That within a year of the 1912 strike, the Lawrence strikers would be in denial as the IWW membership in their city plummeted: but there was a lasting impact on the strike on wages and working conditions in other cities, afraid of what the IWW and people of Lawrence had done.

The strike went from just Jan 12, 1912 to March 14 of the same year. But so much happened that it is amazing Watson was able to present it all clearly.

Imagine that after holding to such a hard position in 1912, the mill owner William Wood, would, about seven years later give his employees insurance, maternity benefits, sick pay, help them buy homes, provide English lessons. Yet die by suicide within another decade after losing his children.

These are powerful facts powerfully presented. At a time when globalism is weakening labor in the U.S. and everywhere else in the world, it seems worthwhile to learn what people did. And don't forget what Bruce Watson has done, by bringing that event to life again.

Inspiring view into the brewing techniques of the Belgium beer. Outstanding historical look along with what is going on today. A must read if you are into the Belgians.

I highly recommend to this anyone who wants to learn more about Trappist and Trappist inspired ales. Very accessible and thorough.

If you've ever wondered how people brewed beer in centuries gone by this book's for you! There are few, if any, modern conveniences in use in the Abbey breweries around the world and yet the Monks continue to produce some of the best brews available anywhere. A great read for those dreaming of making good beer with minimal equipment! It's also a great read for those interested in life in a monastery as there is a lot of information given concerning the living conditions, activities, expectations, etc., of the Monks who inhabit those facilities. It's a sad thing, but the very folks who brew those liquid treats are themselves prohibited from consuming more than just a sampling of their work. On the other hand, that is good news for the rest of us. We can sample lots of their handiwork!!! If you like beer (you do, or you wouldn't be interested in this book!) and if you are even remotely interested in its production, then, by all means, buy this volume. You won't be sorry!

Very informative book on the belgian styles in question. The best in the series.

Brew Like a Monk, the third book in a series about Belgium brews, hones in on the strong ales of the country famous for its diverse styles of beer. The first chapters look at the six Belgium Trappist breweries, providing a sense of place, some points of history, details of the beers produced, and comments about the brewing processes.

The next chapters are devoted to the brewery Duvel, the producers of abbey ales, brewers of strong ales, and prominent makers of these Belgium styles in America. A reader interested in brewing can get a sense of visiting each brewery and asking questions about the beers made.

Accompanying the discussions of the beers are lists of ingredients, hop levels, alcohol levels, and other brewing specifications, surmised or known. The lists are somewhat general but enough to enable an experienced brewer to experiment with replication. Specifics about recipes and brewing methods are, understandably, guarded by the breweries.

The later chapters discuss malts, sugars, hops, yeasts, and bottling processes for these Belgium beers, before a final chapter on recipes. Rather than presenting many recipes, the chapter pulls the book together by defining each of the strong ale styles, with comments on brewing and charts showing original gravities, alcohol percentages, color ranges, bitterness levels, and ingredients.

If the "customer is always right," the next question is, "Why do so many customers stop doing business with companies?" The answer is, "bad service." Customers refuse to buy from companies that render unsatisfactory service and ignore their complaints. Sadly, managers usually sound the alarm and demand new customer service initiatives only after the customers have fled. Author Jeanne Bliss, a veteran chief customer service officer, tries to explain the problem and to suggest ways to correct it. She offers so many detailed trees - in the form of questionnaires, bullet points, details and checklists - that you risk losing sight of the practical forest: the motives and methods for implementing better customer service. There is valuable information here, even if it is a bit shaded. For this reason, we particularly liked her clear, helpful and revealing chapter of first-hand stories from the field of customer service.

Jeanne writes a book for now on a role that too many people will say is before it's time. It is always about the client and yet organizationally no one puts enough emphasis on the client voice within organizations. Jeanne clearly shows her battle field experience in helping those that embrace the client, get input, direction and organizational buy-in to doing what is right for the client and thus the firm without being shot as the messenger.

Jeanne Bliss' book, Chief Customer Officer, is a "must have" for any business that wants to pay more than "lip service" to customer retention. There are great examples throughout from someone who obviously has been in the trenches. This is a fun book to read, not some academic tome doomed to gather dust in a dark recess. Get it, read it, and share it with others in your organization.

Not that I have an opinion.

Jeanne Bliss has done a fantastic job of breaking down the challenge of actually "walking the walk" of a customer centric organization in a book that is informative, thought provoking and easy to read. Her concepts are spot on, based on real life experience during her very successful career. I highly recommend this book!

Jeanne Bliss articulates not only the importance of putting customers at the center of your business, but conveys the challenges that prevent most companies from successfully delivering great customer experiences. The real-world techniques she introduces are essential reading for senior executives aiming to succeed by improving the delivered customer experience.

Planguage is a word and concept that combines Planning and LANGUAGE and is rooted in the author's experience since 1960. The core tenant of Competitive Engineering is that well structured specifications have a dramatic cost reduction over down-stream error correction. The defect prevention process (DPP) is used to clean up early stages specs, or preferably measure defects and motivate lower defect injection, in specifications and the attendant issues instead of relying solely on defect detection andcorrection once actual development has begun. Competitive Engineering provides focus and skills to dramatically increase how productive many of us have been in the past.

The centrality of quality specifications means significant gains for the broadest spectrum of stake-holders who stand to win with the System Of Interest (SOI). Take this specification as an example to clean up:

"The new system will use Foo language running on OS Bar and ensure top industry quality response time on web requests."

People in the field have seen specs like these. Hopefully you aren't writing them. There are what Gilb classifies as "Major defects" in this spec. Which web requests, the front page or all of them pulling from the various databases? Can the old system be incrementally upgraded instead of an entirely new development environment? Why use Foo and Bar if something else gets the job done better, faster, and with less resource utilization? Just how fast is "fast", anyway?

In Competitive Engineering you're told to get measureable quality requirements, record who requested that requirement, and exactly what "success" is defined as. That allows you to go back to the requester with notes such as "If we use OS Baz we'll get a 27% increase in CPU performance" and let them make a decision or escalate to the project funder. You're also encouraged to weed out "design constraints"; at least out of the mandatated and into the labelled area "Design Constraint". Wouldn't it be great if you got a specification that let you design the best you could without technical input from someone that can't use a web-browser?

See if you can understand my re-write of the above spec into Planguage.

Response Time on Front Page of Company Website.

Type: Performance Requirement
Version: 1.2
Status: Draft
Owner: F. Flintstone

Stakeholders: Marketing, Server Support, Corporate Intelligence, ,

Ambition: The front page of the corporate website should respond fast enough to keep the viewer's attention.

Description: Marketing research indicates the typical business website viewer makes an opinion on the website, and thus the company, within 20 seconds. Our corporate site pulls data from three different databases and a sizeable image library, taking an average of 26.87 seconds on a home DSL/Cable modem equivalent network. Marketing advantage can be gained if we can grab viewer attention noticibly faster than our two nearest competitors who average 23.43 and 26.09 seconds, respectively.

Vision: Enough accurate information provided quickly enough to keep the customer on our site.

Scale: Time, in Seconds, to a complete front page load on the equivalent of a 250K network connection.

Past [Front page, 1 Apr 07]: 26.87 seconds

Goal [1 November 07]: 19 seconds <- Marketing Director: BR

Stretch: 15 seconds

Wish: 9 seconds

Design Constraint: Supportability <- Server Support Manager WF Must utilize .

Design Constraint: Security <- Corporate Intelligence BB Must meet .

------------------------ end of spec example --------------------

Probably the only thing that might confuse you about that specification is the use of text within "<...>". Planguage uses that to denote a "fuzzy requirement"; something that is defined but not with the concreteness you'd like. In this example, however, it would be relatively simple to query B. Rubble for the specific guidelines her team seeks to enforce. The use of fuzzy requirements also allows for change over time; more OS versions may become supported while others are obsolete.

When I read part of an electronic copy of the text I had a problem. My antiquated home printer could not print it and if I used the work printer I view the output as a possession of my employer. The book is written as part instruction, part reference manual; I bought my own copy because I know I'm going to use it for the next few years and several employers.

This is one the books which has caused a great impression on me. It helps to get away from high-level, gut-feeling, fuzzy goals and descriptions to very concrete targets, unambiguous requirements and rational decisions. This strikes a chord at the heart of systems design and architecture, which consists in maximizing a set of business goals with limited resources (time, budget, personnel). I highly recommend it.

Building software systems is not easy, this book can help you to do a better job.

In a period where the trend is to follow agile approaches with condensed guidance (see the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto for instance), it could seem strange to publish a book on software development with more than 500 dense pages. You should however not be frightened by this book. Beneath the size and the structured form lies an approach based on practical experience that incorporates change and flexibility without abandoning the quest for precision and delivering value.

The main concept of Competitive Engineering is Planguage, a word created mixing plan and language. Communication is the basis for working together. This is why Tom Gilb emphasises first the creation of a common vocabulary. He states that his glossary could be considered as the best contribution of this book. Beneath the definition of a common language, for me the "hidden agenda" of the book is to help us to think... further. The common language is only a tool that helps us express our thoughts more precisely and completely.

Fortunately for us, Tom Gilb didn't only write a dictionary of system engineering. A large part of the book is devoted to the activities of system engineering and project management. Based on Planguage, Gilb gives us a framework to elicit clearer requirements. He emphasises a measurable vision ("bad numbers beat good words") and presents tools to achieve this objective. He also helps us separate requirements from design. He devotes an entire chapter to quality control. Finally, there is a presentation of the techniques of evolutionary project management that supports incremental development based on the priority and impact techniques described in previous parts of the book.

In every chapter you will find examples and case studies that help to visualise how the concepts translate into practice. There is also an "additional ideas" part that presents material for further thinking. Beneath the seriousness of the topic, Gilb also manage to place some lighter parts and you will find how to compare seriously apples with oranges.

At the end, your realise that you have a book where process is not opposed to people, structure is not opposed to flexibility, precision is not opposed to allowing change, documentation is not opposed to active refinement, Gilb's proposed solution is not opposed to customisation for your needs. It is just a book that gives you new inspiration to deliver better software solutions to your customer.

If you are interested in software process improvement, you can read this book from the beginning and find practical material to examine your current practices with a different vision. If you are a lonesome project manager or developer, you could begin by just using the index to get Gilb's view on your current activity or problem. Be cautious, because there are many chances that you will be tempted to read more material ;o)

After reading this book, I browsed again my old copy of "Principles of Software Engineering" that I bought when it was published in 1988. I saw that many ideas from "Competitive Engineering" were already presented in this book. Tom Gilb just applied to his ideas the same concepts he proposes for system engineering. He refined, expanded and structured them to get a better product. The printing industry has just prevented evolutionary delivery, but you can bet that he will find a way to include this in the future.

My interest in the topic of competitive engineering (CE) was piqued several years ago when I heard very favorable comments about Tom Gilb's tutorial on that subject at the INCOSE 2002 Symposium in Las Vegas.

The book's subtitle is "A Handbook for Systems Engineering, Requirements Engineering, and Software Engineering Using Planguage". The term "Planguage" is central to an understanding of the book. Planguage, which is derived from a union of "plan" and "language", is the methodology for implementing CE. Much of the book is devoted to describing the generalized processes, rules, and vocabulary of Planguage. Tom notes, "Planguage should be viewed as a powerful way to develop and implement strategies that will help your projects to deliver the required competitive results." Fundamentally, the book presents a new take on best practices in systems engineering and management.

The book is useful on several levels. For organizations without a formal or documented process, tailoring of Planguage would jump start the process at a high level of maturity. For organizations that have achieved CMMI level 3 status, Planguage by itself is not as useful. However, many of the ideas of CE-the Planguage methods-are worth considering for enhancement of existing organizational processes. Tom states that CE is "about technological management, risk control, and breakthrough improvement in complex business systems, projects, and processes." CE is a believable approach for delivering complex projects on time and within budget.

The book passed my value-added test, when I realized that I was photocopying several pages for future reference, to be part of my "toolkit" of helpful tips and techniques. I particularly enjoyed reading the 10 often witty, summary principles in each chapter. Two examples are:

* The Principle of `Storage of Wisdom': "If your people are not all experienced or geniuses, You need to store their hard-earned wisdom in your defined process. Capture wisdom for reuse, Fail to write it, that's abuse!"

* The Principle of `The early bird catches the worm': "Your customers will be happier with an early long-term stream of their priority improvements, than years of promises, culminating in late disaster."

About 30% of the book is the Planguage Concept Glossary, which Tom views as a central contribution of the book. I focused my attention on the other, more interesting, parts of the book, which describe the main CE/Planguage methods of Requirement Specification (RS), Design Engineering (DE), Impact Estimation (IE), Specification Quality Control (SQC), and Evolutionary Project Management (EVO, also known as Evo). RS describes an approach for identifying all types of requirements while avoiding ambiguity and also planning for change. Functional and performance requirements are distinguished. DE deals with identifying, choosing, and prioritizing the order in which design ideas are implemented and delivered. In conjunction with Evo, DE selects the design ideas most likely to provide a significant benefit for early delivery.

SQC is an eminently practical approach for evaluating the quality of any technical document via sampling measurements. An hour of SQC early in a project can save almost 10 hours of rework. SQC also provides a means to assess the success of process improvement efforts. IE provides a realistic method for evaluating-in quantitative terms-the effectiveness of designs in meeting both the requirements, especially critical performance attributes, and the resource budgets.

Evo focuses on early, frequent delivery of project results via a series of high-value, small evolutionary steps. An ideal Evo approach would divide the project into a series of cycles. Each cycle would consume 2-5% of the total financial budget and 2-5% of the total project time-while delivering some measurable, required results to the stakeholders. The next cycle is selected to deliver the best stakeholder value for its cost (highest ratio of value to cost, or highest ratio of performance to cost). Although an ideal approach can't always be realized, Tom provides some convincing examples to argue that there is always a solution to making a project evolutionary (small steps with critical deliveries first).

Perseverance pays off with Competitive Engineering. The book is not a quick read, which Tom acknowledges. You have to carefully study some of the pages to understand the concepts being presented. The reward occurs when you glean the nuggets of wisdom from the numerous practical examples, case studies, and Planguage examples. Tom's way of presenting the CE concepts makes the book a useful addition to the systems engineer's library.

This book is outstanding. Excellent real world examples. Takes readers from top to bottom through the industry. Really geared toward the whole independent/amature film community and how to achieve professional results working within the industry. I highly recommend this book cover to cover.

Being a skeptic, I tested Mark's capsule exercises on a script I was preparing for the IFP Spotlight Award. The results were unnerving - I discovered buried treasure I didn't know I had within my story and eliminated an entire subplot that didn't service the STORY. Mark demystifies the concept of marketing, asking simple, direct questions. By asking "why would anyone want to see your film?" Mark goes past just marketing and addresses the issues that draw people to filmmaking in the first place. When I put the book down, I had a clear vision of the kind of filmmaker I want to be - and a great set of tools to get there.

In the course of making a film, we found this book to be very helpful. It organizes info about the business side of the filmmaking process.

A lot of people throw the title "guru" around, but Bosko's the real deal. As a filmmaker, if you've ever wondered how to: get press coverage, create a media kit, find an attractive title; identify your movie's hooks, locate distributors, exploit the power of the web, get audiences and distribution and actually sell your movie or video...then GET THIS BOOK! Bosko "tells all" in an easy-to-read style that gets the creative juices flowing. No filmmaker should go anywhere near a camera without reading the hard-core, straight-up instruction and advice in this book.

This book is so great! I got a copy after reading a review and it lived up to every claim. The techniques in the book's "Self-Distribution" section showed me how to set up regional sales for a film that otherwise has not made any money up until this point! I can now proudly say that my DVD is available in 17 video stores in Pennslyvania and New York thanks to the tips in this book! Get Bosko's book if you want to sell your film - it is that simple.

A tour de force in Industrial and Engineering History that remains a model for charting the evolution of a complete technology between two book covers. Though 'Copper Wire -' makes no direct appeal to the lay reader, this was never the intention. Nevertheless, it has an informative and fluent style and for those outside this discipline it provides a highly educational text, sufficiently well composed to make it a work of reference as well as a comprehensive and contiguous history. This is a technological history, and the author is at pains to concern himself with the progressive development of wire technology and the changes needed to meet the demands of electrical conductors. This, for me, is the fascinating aspect, though those with a mechanical background and interest will not be disappointed. Similarly, the history is well managed and constitutes a highly credible and admirable excercise in historical research. All told an excellent example of engineering history at its best.
N.R. Ramsden, Lecturer - Economic History, May 25, 2006,

Reviewer, Economic historian, April 29, 2005,

A deeply insightful and well argued monograph in economic history which at once provides a superb perspective on the exigencies in 19th Century industrial development and at the same time structures the research and history so well that there are times when the subsequant analysis - impecable though it is - seems superfluous. As said by other reviewers, Blake-Coleman's Copper Wire stands as a model in this sector of economic and industrial history.

There is little that can be added to the earlier reviews - all the superlatives are in place and as a latecomer to reading this title I can only contribute my agreement. As an engineer working in the wire industry I found the material not only fascinating but a reflection on the authors real command of the technology and the historical exigencies involved. It was a revelation in exposing just how advanced the production methods had become at the end of the 19th century, and just how difficult the path to making high quality electrical conductors was from the advent of submarine telegraphy. I congatulate all involved in the production of this book - wonderful.

Copper Wire and Electrical Conductors : The Shaping of a Technology

Author: B. C. Blake-Coleman
Format: Hardcover Textbook
Published: December 1991
ISBN: 3718652005

This is a definitive work which critically examines the principal events and circumstances which influenced the evolution of copper wire as a crucial component in modern electrical technology.

Now established as a milestone in the publishing of technological histories, Blake-Coleman's 'Copper Wire-' provides the template for all subsequent authors in the field. Highly readable, yet completely authoratative in the depth and breadth of its research, this book went even further in showing how careful editing can enhance the way information is conveyed to the reader. (All footnotes and citations for example are given on the page where they appear. This is of enormous value; given that typically citations are confined to the end of a book, requiring the reader to constantly flick through pages).

The structure and content of 'Copper Wire-' is of itself a lesson. To avoid the problem of intermingling the use and application of Copper wire with the technology of wire making itself, the opening chapters cover the history of wire making technology and then proceed to focus on copper wire per se. This arms the reader at the outset with an understanding of the slow development of wire making technology from ancient times up to the end of the 19th/early 20th century when automated techniques were virtually mature.

The traditional applications, trades and supply chains for copper wire are given a full treatment in the middle sections. Not only in terms of markets and uses but the organizations and companies that developed on the specific businesses of the day. This extends to the single tradesman supplying copper articles for the local market and drawing his own copper wire, to the dockyard industries providing the massive levels of copper and copper wire for both naval and private vessels. We see how slowly (but inevitably) the provision of materials for the traditional markets slowly make available a commodity that could be used in early electrical work.

Electrical science is then shown to be an overwhelming force for change in the copper wire industry - not least because (as we are suprised to find) the traditionally made copper wire does not have the qualities and attributes appropriate for electrical applications. Indeed, iron and brass wire are at first the primary choice as conductors in telegraphy and experimental applications.

How electrical science and the acceleration in telegraphic and telephonic communications came to change the manufacture and properties of conventional copper wire is a fascinating story, and is not only well told in this book but told with an emphasis that conveys vividly the trials and tribulations of those individuals who made our modern electrical systems what they are. Having read the later sections of 'Copper Wire-' one is left in no doubt that dismissing the current monopoly of copper wire in electrical technology as purely an evolutionary step ignores the fact - as this book clearly recounts - that there was nothing natural or evolutionary about it!

Not only is this book a prime example of good scholarship and pragmatism in approaching the problem of presentation, but the wealth and quality of research leaves one admiring the persistance of the author. Few would see the subject as compelling. There is after all no central character or single historical perspective and technological histories are hardly the best platform for getting to grips with the economic and social conditions which prevail. Yet the author does turn a potentially turgid subject into something truly engaging.

There are many criticisms to be made about this book (mainly editorial and typographical) but this remains the definitive technological history. Copper Wire- is recommended to anyone who is embarking on a similar task. Not only as a model for writing this kind of material but as an example of understanding what makes a complex and highly technical subject easy to understand and assimilate.

I believe many will agree that this book deserves its longevity. Having obtained a copy on the strength of the Amazon reviews (below) I have (for the first time) no argument with the reviewers. Those who have praised the scholarship, structure and insight of Blake-Coleman's work were right to do so. Verso, the criticisms where they occur are justified. Particularly in the light of the fact that much of the research dates back some 20 years! Yet there is little extant that supersedes any of the book's contents, and that speaks volumes!

As a study in how economic and industrial history should be written 'Copper Wire - ' has few equals, as a research excercise and a marvellous story of industrial and technological change it is peerless.

If you decide to buy this book take a good deep breath. You should be good enough in algebra, and you should be quite comfortable with some six sigma basics. This book gives a good explanation in TRIZ and in the DFSS algoritm.
The axiomatic design could be better (lack of examples). It is well written.

This is a book with a lot of information. Each chapter can be used as a starting point for a specific six sigma technique. However, this is the worst edited book I have ever read. You can hardly find one page without errors/typos.

While the concept of six-sigma is a very popular one, it is not often that one can find such a comprehensive yet clearly-written volume devoted to the most important topics of six-sigma. A book that contains so much information and not just hot air is especially hard to find. Yang and El-Haik have successfully written one of the most impressive and useful reads I have ever encountered within this field. Especially intriguing and novel concept of TRIZ. A very worthwhile book, in any case.

I have not found such a comprehensive book for design of six sigma. I started using this book for advanced experimental design and taguchi methods, but ended understanding the complete roadmap for design of six sigma. The systems approach allows an enthusiast reader to start anywhere, without having to spend time refering back to earlier chapters. The relatively newer trends as TRIZ and axiomatic design have also been nicely dealt with.
Overall, this is a very nice and easy read book, with excellent and well defined examples. A must for everyone who wants a quick refresher on the design principles of six sigma.

This is an outstanding DFSS book for production development. It contains integrated information and some of which you could hardly find anywhere else, thus with one book in hand, you have all the tools to get to your destination. This is also a easy to read book providing the reader with a solid understanding- Concepts are clearly defined, real world examples/ case studies are fully described and the chapters are well organized. It can serve as a textbook for students/beginners and also can serve as a handbook for experienced engineers.
The title says it all- this is a roadmap for you to find the way correctly and easily. I am reading the book right now, and the book is really beneficial to me.

The author, a passionate practitioner of the teaching arts in an inner-city classroom, has, amidst the ruins of print-based culture, rediscovered how to connect with the the fullest possible range of a would-be reader's senses. This is all the more timely, given what the rising generation internalizes as the normal way of information-processing. A. Bartlett Giamatti spotted the trend in the 1980s, and noted in "Take Time for Paradise," his ode to baseball, that the young were even them mentally imaging things as if on a screen - that their experiences with computers and video games dramatically altered their basic preception of knowledge transmission. (My son made the same observation - he learns more from the Discovery and History Channels than from text.)
Beyond that, the written word is not even what it once was: the plague of Newspeak-style bland language has all but extinguished the supple verve of good English prose in everyday usage. Business, newspapers, and textbooks, among other venues, are in the thrall of dumbed-down, disposable writing of a most forgettable kind. (Example: Compare a King James Bible with the New International Version, and try to find one memorable phrase in the latter that is not a leftover from the former.)
Ms. Kirschenbaum passionately wants to rescue our culture from irrelevance in the eyes of her students. Despite what she reports as indifference from academics more interested in pedigree than in the power of ideas, she gathered the panoramic sweep of how non-Gutenbergian cultures transmitted information - in vivid color, shaped in every way imaginable, as opposed to block text, with assistance from everything that two-dimensional art can offer to stimulate the brain (she discusses the science of that, too) to be receptive to the meaning conveyed by the author.
Ms. Kirchenbaum re-discovered the importance of color. In doing so, she stands in the center of a long tradition, sidetracked by the limitations of Gutenberg's printing press, but not entirely forgotten. The author is probably correct in thinking that black-on-white block text held sway for as long as it did because of the near-monopoly that it had in conveying printed information. The advent of multi-media and desktop publishing means that A.) Old-style text is not the only game in town, and B.) One must ask how anyone used to high levels of stimulation via television, the Internet, etc., can otherwise be induced to use unexercised imagination to make reading attractive.
The book is sprinkled with quotes from classic writers - Horace, Mencius, Hugh of St. Victor, etc., and experts in the field of graphic design, to bolster the author's case. That case rests on foundations as old as Plato: the preception of reality gained through reading may be as imperfect as the shadows on the wall in his famous anology of the cave; using art and color to enliven words can only help bring that image into sharper focus, and thus the phantasms of memory when the reader recalls it at a later date. In a post-literate world, such writing serves such as Gothic architecture once did for Christianity - a sermon in stone. To use a secular example, Shakespeare meant for his plays to be seen, not read; adding something to black-on-white block text brings the reader nearer to what the playwright wanted to convey, in terms of total, felt meaning.
The power of Ms. Kirchenbaum's message stayed with me as I read deeper into her book: While watching, "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding," I connected the Orthodox use of icons ("Written," not painted - every stroke had specific meaning to the believer), incense, chanting, and candles - all elements absent from American Prtoestant Christianity, to the Eastern way of engaging all the senses in a religous experience.
In closing, while Ms. Kirschenbaum does not cite Thomas More, he wrote in support of her ideas, when he said, as quoted by Sister Miriam Joseph in her classic, "The Trivium" - "Images are necessary books for the uneducated and good books for the learned, too. For all words be but images representing the things that the writer or speaker conceives in his mind,... and so conceived in the mind, is but an image representing the very thing itself that a man thinks of."
What Ms. Kirchenbaum is attempting is not a revelolution, but a restoration, reconnecting us with the timeless knowledge of the ages. For that she deserves our approbation and active support.
-Lloyd A. Conway

Valerie Kirschenbaum is a woman with one modest goal: she wants to start a revolution. "The Designer Revolution: The Marriage of Art, Literature, Education, Technology" is the opening shot in her quest, drawn in good part from her experiences as a New York City high school teacher. Why, she asks, in this era of marvelous computer graphics should we continue to read the printed page in the same manner we have done so since the days of Gutenberg? Just as Henry Ford is reputed to have said that you could get a Model T in any color you wanted as long as it was black, so publishers have traditionally told us we can get a book in any color as long as it is black (and white).

Kirschenbaum believes that color is one element that should be explored and exploited to make reading come alive, not only for students but for all of us. Color is a tool for emphasis and engagement. Centuries ago in the era of hand-written manuscripts (that is, after all, what a "manuscript" is), color was an integral part of their creation - color not only for illustrations, but color of text to literally illuminate its meaning. With the dominance of mass printing of books on huge, inflexible presses, it made sense that color evaporated for entirely practical reasons. But we are now in another time when such limitations need no longer limit us. If one particular word or a special phrase or sentence or paragraph would benefit from color to emphasize it, then why not apply color?

Of course, the color of ink to print the text upon paper is only one aspect of Kirschenbaum's revolution. Integrated illustrations - and not just for children's books - are equally within reach of the computer-equipped author, illustrations that are intimately partnered to the text and not isolated to separate insert pages, corralled together away from words.

The third leg of Valerie Kirschenbaum's revolution is the shape of letters themselves, the font with which the words are printed. With computers we have become familiar with the notion that, if we choose to, we can select whatever style of "print" suits our purposes - Arial, Times New Roman, Century Gothic - whatever we want from that pull-down menu from the toolbar on our computer screen. Perhaps without thinking much about it, we are all aware on some level that the design, the "look", of font is important in how we relate and react to what is on the printed page. The shape of the letters speaks to us in an unconscious voice, aiding - or hindering - our reading. Pick up a dozen books and magazines and look at the font. They are not all the same. They speak in different tones, some more friendly, others more formal. But Kirschenbaum goes beyond merely advocating an informed selection of pre-made fonts to suit your purposes. With modern computer graphics, personalized, unique fonts tailored to individual preferences are within practical reach of each computer-savvy author.

At the heart of Kirschenbaum's revolution is the realization that computers can erase the line between author and publisher, allowing a unified creative process so that the final product is wholly within the control of a single creator.

The physical book "The Designer Revolution" is an embodiment of Valerie Kirschenbaum's writing/publishing ideas, a marriage of color, illustration, and font. Open it and let yourself swim in its visual variety. Open yourself to the idea that computers do not spell the end of the printed page, but its blossoming.

I finished this fascinating book later the same day I had read in my local daily newspaper that in 2001 a former assistant basketball coach at the University of Georgia had given a final exam for the only grade in a "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball" course that consisted of 20 multiple choice questions. Two of the 18 questions included how many goals are on a basketball court and how many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a basketball game. So learning about teachers like Ms. Kirschenbaum provides a much needed antidote for the latest news item about education in Georgia. She begins this beautiful book with the following statement: "I will never forget the day that changed my life forever. [With the exception of the wondrous first letter "I" which I cannot describe, I believe those words are in burnt sienna] I was teaching The Canterbury Tales when one of my students raised her hand and asked, 'Ms. Kirschenbaum, how come our books are not in color, like they used to be?'" The author, for ten years a teacher of English at the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities, located just a mile or so from Ground Zero, set about to find an answer to that question. The result is this beautiful book of many colors, designed, written and printed in a "feminine" very reader-friendly font that Ms. Kirschenbaum herself designed.

Ms. Kirschenbaum has certainly done her homework. There are 363 pages of text and another 50 or so footnotes. The book is filled with quotations from artists, writers and scientists about the significance of color and all its ramifications. The writer discusses the books before Gutenberg, though not accessible to common people, that were always in color. She also refers to the ancient Greeks, Chinese and Eqyptians who invariably wrote in color. She gives anecdotal evidence from her own teaching experience that an overwhelming number of her students would prefer reading, for instance, Homer, Poe et al in "living color." I think the writer's two stongest points are (1) we are fast losing a whole generation of nonreading students to television, video games, and movies, all in color and (2) because of digital printing, books in color can now be produced economically.

Ms. Kirschenbaum discusses many writers, some who used color effectively in their prose, and others whose works cry out for it: the artist and writer William Morris, and William Blake, whom she describes as the "only instance after Gutenberg of a great poet and a great painter married into one magnificent soul." On Emily Dickinson: "Her manuscripts are bubbling with body language [in red letters] -- long dashes, short dashes, angled dashes, crosses, pluses, minuses, waves, curves, line breaks. . . " Finally the writer makes a good case-- Faulkner himself wanted it-- for THE SOUND AND THE FURY to be printed in color.

Ms. Kirschenbaum's theory of designer writing has been well received except by some "academics." (The quotations are mine.) "Some people in the academy have refused to take me seriously because I teach high school and not college; because I have only a master's degree and not a doctorate; because I am not an Ivy Leaguer; and God knows what else." One professor even called her "Madame Nobody." She's in good company since Miss Dickinson would say, "I'm nobody/who are you?" And Robert Frost didn't have a Ph.D as I recall.

In addition to the brilliant illustrations and colored images here, the text, almost all of it in color, is clear and well written. And Ms. Kirschenbaum is a great punster, both verbal and visual. She sold me on this book when, in first thumbing through it, I found a delightful visual pun at the beginning of the footnotes.

What comes through in every page of this book, which I cannot adequately describe, is that Ms. Kirschenbaum is the most dedicated of teachers and decent of people. "Whenever I visit a museum, I seem, unavoidably, to be reminded of my mortality and of the precious chance [red letters] I have been given, as a young American woman, to make a difference in the lives of others." Chaucer would have said of her, "gladly did she learn and gladly did she teach."

You must see this book for yourself. I am at a loss as to how to best describe it.

This is quite simply one of the most fascinating books I have read this past year. It touches on History, Design, Literature, Creativity and so many other areas with a zeal and passion that is rarely seen these days. It also is one of the most beautiful books just to page through as well. I have had several people pick my copy up and browse it briefly, only to get enthralled in the text and illustrations.

Ms. Kirschenbaum has written and designed a masterpiece that I hope will soon become a standard on the shelf of every design school, and it should be in the library of every graphic designer as well. Editors and publishers could also benefit to see that today's technologies need not only yield the standard black and white of yesterday's printing techniques-and all could benefit from books that engage the readers as actively as television and computers do at the present.

Beautiful, thoughtfully written, and quite engaging. Highly Recommended reading.

From her unique perspective as a high school teacher, Valerie Kirschenbaum has made some stunning discoveries about learning - that children learn much better when teachers use body language, that body language can be brought into writing with color and image which excite different groups of cells in the brain, that emotional arousal amplifies memory, that there is such a thing as visual thinking, and that word and image used simultaneously integrates brain operations and allows the student to come to a higher level of understanding more quickly. "Especially today," says the author, "if we don't immediately grab them, we too often lose them. Colorful visuals are a way of grabbing their attention, arousing their emotions and of sustaining their interest."

In researching the subject, Ms. Kirschenbaum discovered, for example, that "...the image of a Buddha can trigger the release of hormones such as epinephrine and norepinephrine, causing them to interact with nerves in the body and travel to the brain. Literally, the image opens the mind and heart of the reader." And in Tibet, the sight of an image that the viewer perceives as sacred can trigger electrochemical responses in the brain, i.e. readers could SEE concepts. "With the designer word," Valerie maintains, "we can transform traditionally verbal techniques into visual techniques. Rhyme, repetition, metaphor, figures of speech, characterization, tone, simile and symbolism can all be visual. We can foreshadow, change moods, express irony or sarcasm and allude and alliterate visually. The possibilities are endless..."If we cannot always make this exquisite avalanche of consciousness sayable, then we can at least make it showable." Amen to that.

It's not exactly rocket science to realize that this could be an incredible aid to reading and therefore to learning in our technological society, but as far as I am aware, nobody has connected these particular dots before this particular young woman came on the scene and pointed them out.

Before the advent of Gutenberg, Medieval illuminators used ornament and decoration to create "multiple simultaneous meanings." After Gutenberg, when block black-and-white printing became the norm, "...writers couldn't synthesize their verbal and visual innovations. They couldn't write outside the box and think outside the box simultaneously. They were stuck between word and image, seeing and thinking, left brain and right brain." And while Medieval denial may have been rooted in religion, our modern denial is rooted in an antiquated technology that insists that black and white blocks of texts are the only proper form for serious scholarship and that images, different fonts and color should be relegated to children's books.

As Leonard Shlain observed in his groundbreaking work, *The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image*, our era is evolving toward a new integration of left and right brain functions with keyboards, computers, TV, movies, etc. Why cannot that integration be extended to the printed word?

This book realizes left and right-brain integration in a most delightful way. I especially enjoyed the color graphics where Medieval, Greek and Renaissance characters are shown to be writing and on closer inspection, you see that they're using computers. I would have liked a snappier title for the book but have to admit that upon this writing, I haven't thought of any.

"First a new theory is attacked as absurd," says William James in *Pragmatism's conception of Truth.* "Then it is admitted to be true but insignificant. Finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it." One can only hope that Valerie Kirschenbaum's name will still be remembered long after her thesis has become a new canon. But as she herself admits, in the long run it doesn't matter as long as the new canon is adopted, because "...no matter how much I may have blossomed, I could never stand up before other teachers and writers and designers and not invite every one of them to surpass me."

"We will not join the ranks of the Old Canon. We will create a new Canon...."We will seek the rose in the prose. We will find the light in delight." And finally "incipit liberi besti" -"begin beautiful books." I believe this is an idea whose time has come. Bravo!

This is a beautiful book of photographs and text that allows the reader an intriguing view of the home in which Edward Gorey lived and the collections of curious objects, books, and cats he filled it with.

The photographs are large and beautiful - haunting even - and there are lots of them. There is just the right amount of text to cast some light on the man behind the house and his elusive character - anecdotes about his life, his work, his friends and the things that inspired him.

If you are fan of Edward Gorey, or of eclectic interior decorating and design, and displaying collections of antiques, this book will be a treasure in your library.

That's really all I can say. I have been waiting for this book for a long time, and it was the most incredible thing. Amazing photos. Read up on Gorey first, though. The details are some much better when you get the little visual jokes Gorey set up in his day-to-day life.

This book wouldn't mean much to anyone who isn't already a Gorey fan. I own (and love) the compilations 'Amphigorey', 'Amphigorey Too' & 'Amphogorey Also', so have a head start. I also have the auto(?) biography 'Ascending Peculiarity', which is almost a necessary co-requisite to this book - it helps explain the cats, and many other Gorey details. Now that the individual books are available again, I'm tempted to get them too, because they are such nice objects - but only if the kids promise to share with me!

If you are an Ogdred Weary fan...this is a truly wonderful book. Photographs of the exterior (peeling paint and kind of saggy porch) and the interior rooms of the house on Cape Cod in Gorey lived and worked, along with his cats and figbashes, piles of thousands of books, assorted rocks and oddish things, and the expected miriad of curiosities. Alas, or delightfully...just the environment one would expect of the eccentric Edward. A cabinet of curiosities...a delight!

Even dedicated fans of Edward Gorey will probably know very little about his personal life: he was an enigmatic recluse and few were permitted past his front door. Photographer Kevin McDermott's Elephant House will delight students of architecture and photography, providing rich duotone works of Gorey's intriguing home and its contents. A specialty item for the true Gorey collector, Elephant House is an impressive photographic showcase and a welcome addition to both architectural studies and photographic studies reference collections.

Marshall McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man_ (University of Toronto Press, 1962) is 45 years ahead of its time because not very many persons have understood it very well. With bold strokes, McLuhan has delineated how Western culture is different from other cultures in the world today. For Western culture is still a residual form of print culture, whereas other cultures in the world today are to one degree or another residual forms of oral cultures.

Drawing on Walter J. Ong's account of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought in _Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason_ (Harvard University Press, 1958; 3rd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2004), McLuhan also calls attention to visualist tendencies in Western thought.

In the late 1950s, McLuhan, a Canadian convert to Roman Catholicism, read _Insight: A Study of Human Understanding_ by the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan calls attention to the tendency in Western philosophic thought to equate knowing with "taking a good look." Thus McLuhan was drawing not only on Ong's account of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought, but also on Lonergan's.

In the 1994 "Introduction to the Transaction Edition" of his book _Belief and Unbelief_, Michael Novak, who studied under Lonergan as a young seminarian in Rome, nicely paraphrases Lonergan's critique of visualist tendencies in his own words:

"Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the human eye. We do not know simply through "looking at" reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) of the bodily senses. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction." (p. xv)

In summary, Western philosophical thought from antiquity down to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450 carried a strong visualist orientation, as Ong has detailed. Then with the advent of the Gutenberg printing press visualist tendencies were much more strongly culturally conditioned than ever before. As is well known, print culture in the West with its strong orientation toward visualism saw not only the spread of the Protestant Reformation, but also the emergence of modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement. Thus the strong orientation toward visualism in the West has helped set Western culture off from other cultures of the world.

However, today modern capitalism as developed in print culture with its strong orientation toward visualism is being globalized through economic globalization. Thus capitalism today is making inroads into parts of the world where print culture did not have the historical impact that it had in Western culture. To varying degrees, the other cultures are residual forms of oral culture, as McLuhan describes oral culture in this book.

Thus McLuhan's pioneering study of print culture can enable us to better understand the world situation as we live through the upheavals of economic globalization.

--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

Definitely more of an academically written book than McLuhan's more famous "Understanding Media." For new McLuhan readers, I recommend reading "Understanding Me" or "Understanding Media" first.

This book expands on the views of McLuhan's teacher Harold Innis, who distingusihed oral and written cultures. The book argues that oral cultures are synaesthetic and work with synthetic logic, while cultures of writing push the mind toward singulation of senses, logic and 'perspective'.

McLuhan 'glosses' through a wide range of scattered historical pieces of information to show how oral, written and print cultures have different patterns. He ably shows how printing also transformed art, architecture, society and industry.

The book is thoroughly historical, dense and rich in informative detail. It forms the foundation for McLuhan's clearer theoretical articulation of his ideas in 'Understanding Media', but is more accessible to the layman.

This book belongs to a pantheon of books that revolve around similar ideas like Harold Innis's 'Empire and Communications' & 'The Bias of Communication'; Walter J. Ong's 'Orality and Literacy' and William J. Ivins's 'Print and Visual Culture' and 'Art and Geometry'. But this is the most sweeping, convincing, dramatic statement of the common theory proposed by these various writers.

And for those who love theory with a dose of history, this makes for really delightful reading.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan's second book, is one of his best, but the reader should be forewarned that it is also one of his most difficult to read and does not make a good introduction for the beginner. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that it is written in mosaic style, in which McLuhan -- like Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project -- creates a text that is largely composed of quotations from mostly obscure authors stitched together with his own commentaries in between. These quotations are from works written in classical academic style, and none of them are easy reading. They require concentration and the book itself takes time to read carefully.

The book is a cultural archaeology of the effects of the rise of print upon Western society in the period between 1450 - 1850. It is concerned with analyzing the new kinds of social and cultural structures which typography brought into being, such as nationalism, the concept of individuality, the idea of authorship and intellectual private property, new genres such as the literary essay and the novel. The rise of the printing press, McLuhan points out, was coincident with the rise of the mastery of depth perspective in Renaissance painting, and this is not an accident, for both the new Euclidean space conception and typography had in common an emphasis upon the organization of the world around the eye favored as a sense organ at the detriment and exlusion of all the other senses. During the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, the senses were still synesthetically woven together like a tapestry, and no single one of them was favored to quite the degree of exclusion which the favoring of vision brought about in the Renaissance. Illuminated manuscripts, according to McLuhan, have a textural feel to them that still relies heavily on the sense of touch, and Medieval art, with its disproportionate sense of space in which one character -- such as Christ -- will be represented as larger than everyone else primarily due to the emphasis upon his spiritual importance rather than his inclusion as one individual among many occupying the same field of homogeneous space, is similarly haptic. Gothic lettering, he points out, is hard on the eye and difficult to read because it is tactile and still appeals to the sense of touch. Roman lettering, together with Arabic numerals, was favored by print, and this had the effect of streamlining the ability to read such that silent reading became common. Printers began to do new things like number the pages, create indices and Tables of Contents, and this had the effect of emphasizing authorship since it now became possible to track citations properly. Typography, McLuhan never tires of pointing out, favors the eye at the expense of all the other senses, and it tends to favor an abstract view of space as a container within which objects are placed in an arrangement that takes all spatial relations into account.

All of this began to change in the nineteenth century with the rise of electric technology and the favoring of discontinuities brought about by the telegraph and the newspaper. This kind of syncopated feeling for space, in which each object begins to occupy its own space no longer held in relation to other objects, began to erode and change the old typographic world of the Gutenberg Galaxy. Electric culture, which McLuhan does not discuss much in this book, favors tribalism, spatial discontinuity, erosion of individuality and the rise of corporatism, decentralization and so on.

This book should be read together with Understanding Media, for the latter volume picks up where The Gutenberg Galaxy leaves off, at the threshold of the Electric Society.

It is a masterpiece of scholarship by one of the greatest intellects America has ever produced, an intellect that easily puts the French po-mo philosophers in the shade. You will get more useful ideas out of any one of McLuhan's books than you would out of a whole crate of books by postmodern French philosophers.

--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

This is the first McLuhan book I read, back in the late 1960s. It took me about a month to get through, because each short chapter contained so many new ideas and insights I had to think about them before going on. I didn't always understand them, but what I did comprehend was intoxicatingly exciting.

Many readers of McLuhan treat his probes as absolute statements of truth. Then, if they disagree with him, they reject his whole approach. One important fact to keep in mind while reading this or any of McLuhan's books is that he himself refers to the clever slogans which sum up many of his insights ("The medium is the message" being the best known, of course) as "probes", not facts. Their purpose is to explore an idea in order to stimulate thought. Even if you ultimately disagree with the concept set forth, if it makes you think about it, the probe has accomplished its principal purpose.