Industrial Books

This beautifully illustrated hardback book would be a wonderful library addition for anybody that loves all forms of literature and also biographies of famous writers.

This book was well researched by J.D. McClatchy and wonderfully photographed by Erica Lennard. And for once, it's so nice to read a book in which the photos go hand-in-hand with the prose and descriptions.

As stated by other reviewers, this book includes a short biography of many famous writers, such as: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Wm Faulkner, Louisa May Alcott and many more.

The author then visited all the places that each author has lived, and has shown the reader the rooms (& accessories) that made each home so special to each writer.

Many of these rooms and writing accessories might surprise the readers, since after reading some of the authors' famous works, one would think that each author/poet had created such amazing literary works in the most inspiring and comfortable surroundings. Not so.... because when you look at each photograph, the reader may notice that some of the rooms in which the authors wrote, looked rather dark and lonely and cold (also, some of the furniture looks so uncomfortable) . In addition, many of the authors/poets wrote their famous works snuggled in their beds, (not even on a desk & chair)! Thus, J.D. McClatchy showed the reader each bedroom that the author slept in, or wrote in, and sometimes even lived in. Through these photographs, the reader can imagine what it must have been like for these famous writers to create their famous poems or short stories or novels.

It was so interesting to read and visually see how each author/poet viewed their writing experience. For example, if a writer needed to be surrounded by gardens, then J.D. McClatchy made sure that chapter included photos of the author's yards. Or, if an author preferred to pace back and forth outside on their porch, then J.D. McClatchy made sure to include photos of that special porch. Or, if an author liked to eat a big breakfast before beginning to write, then of course, this book would include photos of the kitchen and eating nook.

I am going to refer to this book often, so that the next time I re-read THE SUN ALSO RISES or AGE OF INNOCENCE (for example), I can imagine how the author felt during that writing experience.

This is a very unusual and wonderful book that covers the working environment of American writers. The oldest writer in the book is Washington Irving who lived almost 200 years ago. The author has researched the environment and writing space of famous writers. This book looks at how the living & working conditions of the writers impact on their works. The book includes gorgeous photographs of the homes and writing spaces of the many writers covered in the book.

You unlikely would read it cover to cover. Instead, like the houses it explores, you would pop in for an occasional visit. And such wonderful visits author J.D. McClatchy and photographer Erica Lennard provide. Their words and pictures share similarities-soft and gentle in color yet detailed and realistic in portrayals so vivid you feel like a guest awaiting your host(ess) to step into the room and greet you. Poet McClatchy has woven details of the authors' biographies into a fabric of words about a central pattern of the homes where they lived and wrote. The 21 homes you will visit range from the austere farm house of Robert Frost to the Victorian elegance of Mark Twain's mansion to Hemmingway's Key West estate. As you travel from home to home-including those of Alcott, Dickenson, Emerson, Irving, Longfellow, Melville, and Welty-you travel, too, through time, from when pen and ink were the primary tools of authors into the era of the manual typewriter, but not beyond. McClatchy and Lennard have given us a romantic sense of simpler times and of the lives of the men and women who wrote our Nobel and Pulitzer winning classics, mostly while sitting at simple desks and tables. Surprisingly, many of them wrote in their bedrooms, perhaps further proof that really good writing comes from those who shorten the distance between an arduous task and creative rest. This book would have a proper home on the coffee table to the classroom.

-- Lowell Forte, Cupertino CA

I love visiting historic homes and especially author's homes like Cross Creek (Rawlings), the rowhouse in Baltimore (Poe) and on Prince Edward Island (L. M. Montgomery). Now this book can take me to other homes for that special insight into favorite authors. I particularly like seeing the photos of their writing spaces. For some it's a handsome desk, while another worked at a worn wooden table. Just being able to picture where Hemingway spent his days in Key West or Emily Dickinson lived her quiet life, adds dimension to their writing.
Although this book is not unique in covering this topic, it gives a quality tour of the homes of 21 writers. Other titles that might intrigue you are Writer's Houses and the book, Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own.
For each author, you get a brief background on that person and the house. There are photos, a listing of visiting hours, phone numbers and web sites.

I found this book to be quietly revolutionary in its very conception. The author and photographic collaborator set out to show how physical space influenced and stimulated various well known American writers. They look at both the writer's residence and personal writing space within that structure. As an archaeologist I spend much of my time looking at how artifacts once served to reproduce worldview. Much of that interest in my field has followed Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. This book does the same in that it looks at how home and writing space might stimulate both thought and words. And this is done in an absolutely stunning fashion with thoughtful text, quotation of relevant passages from the writer, and striking illustrations. Any one with an interest in writing, writers, history, photography, architecture, or material culture (as well as the just plain curious folks) will welcome this book as a holiday gift.

It might be appropriate that nearly 35 years later after the last Apollo mission (1972) names like Armstrong, Aldrin, and Lovell immediately conjour up images of the first moonlanding and the near tragic mishap of Apollo 13, thanks to Ron Howard. But if it weren't for people like Bales, McCandless, Underwood and Hatleberg - and the countless scores like them - the American public might not have even remembered the men that flew on the Apollo missions in the first place.

Watkins has done a great service to space history specifically, and this cultural experiment we call late 20th century America, by giving us fourteen glimpses into the lives of the unsung heroes behind the Apollo mission. One could only wish we had access to many more of the stories of people like Joseph Laitin, Joe Schmidt and Rodney Rose.

Knowing what the average person does about the Apollo heroes (i.e., the astronauts) gives one a foundation to appreciate what the Apollo missions accomplished and what they meant to our country. But knowing the contributions of the behind-the-scenes support people, like the ones profiled in this book, will make your understanding and appreciation of the Apollo missions go from analog to high-def plasma in 186 short pages.

Today in Space History (www.todayinspacehistory.com) gives it high marks and a must-read.

"The Unsung Heroes" is an easy read. Fourteen chapters of fourteen different people behind the scenes. From the "frogman" who was the first person to see the Apollo 11 crew after splashdown to the wife of an Apollo 14 astronaut, Billy Watkins covers a variety of backgrounds. Each 10-15 page chapter is a story unto itself, allowing a person to read a chapter at a sitting without being in suspense until the next time you pick up the book.

When you think there isn't anything more to write about Apollo and the whole moon program, this book shows how much more there might be. I don't know how Watkins was able to cut down the list to 14 but the ones selected sure show how many people there were working behind the scenes so that a few could walk on the moon. A really good read, I highly recommend it!

In Apollo Moon Missions: The Unsung Heroes, author Billy Watkins delivers 14 fascinating stories of little known people from the Apollo program. For those of us who read a lot about Apollo, this book adds some well-needed alternative views of the program. I've read most of the astronaut biographies and many of the histories of Apollo-after a while I'm looking for some nook or cranny of information that I did not know already.

The chapters in Apollo Moon Missions are similar to the wonderful 12 page riff in Stages to Saturn about the Super Guppy aircraft that was used to transport the Saturn S-IVB stage. In Stages to Saturn, this story is told partly by profiling flamboyant entrepreneur John M. Conroy and his company Aero Spacelines that built the Super Guppy. I like this kind of story because it personalizes the Apollo program. The accounts in Apollo Moon Missions of people like Sonny Morea, the lead designer of the Lunar Rover, Julian Scheer, the NASA publicist who got TV cameras onto Apollo 11, and Joe Schmitt, suit technician, who was often the last person the astronauts saw before the hatch was closed on the launch pad are fun and unusual.

The Apollo program that took Americans to the Moon in the latter 1960s and early 1970s literally involved a cast of thousands. At the height of Apollo NASA's civil servants numbered 36,000 people and its contractor workforce had 376,700. One estimate of the people associated with the program was one of twenty in the United States, when counting all aspects of the Moon landing program. That is a lot of unsung heroes. The astronauts who went there acknowledged as much, always remembering to thank the thousands of unnamed people who made it possible for them to journey to the lunar surface and return safely to Earth.

Billy Watkins seeks in this book to recount the story of a few individuals who made it possible to reach the Moon. He profiles fourteen different people who worked in the program in some manner. They include Bruce McCandless, an astronaut who did not get to fly on the program; public affairs official par excellence Julian Scheer; launch controller Joann Morgan; Navy frogman Clancy Hatteberg; mission control engineer Gerry Griffin, and others. These profiles are just a few of the thousands that could be offered about people who ensured the success of the Apollo program. They rescue from obscurity the contributions of these unique and unsung heroes.

Billy Watkins's book is celebration of the devotion of those who worked on the Apollo program. It is a welcome reminder of a single-minded devotion to duty. Our thanks are due to all those who took America to the Moon. This book helps to spotlight some of their stories.

This is a great book on hydrology, the author is very famous in both hydrology and hydraulics area.

This is a well-written and fairly comprehensive textbook for the science and engineering of hydrology, suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses. I used it for a class taught by one of the authors (David Maidment), so it was a natural fit for the class, but I believe that any competent teacher could make good use of it. The example problems are useful and the explanations are clear.

I took a hydrology course taught by one of the authors (Larry Mays) using this book. Advantages of this book lies in (1) the arrangement of the contents is very logic-oriented, you don't feel aburpt jump from one chapter to another one, (2) the theory addressed in the text is concise, easy to read and understand, (3) the examples used to illustrate the theories are very correlated. Other books may be good too, however, in terms of "hydrology" alone, I haven't seen a better one. It is a useful reference for your understanding of hydrologic design manual, creteria.

A must have reference for those of you guys in the field of Applied Hydrology. If you are tackling the task of modeling some particular hydrologic process, you will find the detailed descriptions and flow charts very handy. Step by step derivations of equations, excellent referencing and convenient chapter setup makes this book a first-to-look reference. Although it is a 1988 print, you will hardly feel it unless you really dig into details like flow routing in meandering rivers.

I believe you will enjoy reading this book...

I use this text to teach a first-semester graduate class for civil engineers who are targeting a graduate degree with emphasis on hydrology. I've been using the text for nearly ten years. It might be a little advanced for undergraduates, but certainly is in the grasp of advanced undergraduate students.

Applied Hydrology is the text I wanted way back when I was in graduate school. Chow was still alive but had not finished the book. I was introduced to his writing in his open-channel hydraulics text, which I thought (and still think) is the best. Applied Hydrology was assembled posthumously by Maidment and Mays, who did a good job putting together whatever remained of Chow's work. I'm very glad they undertook the process and published the work. It's an important text for my discipline specialty.

Part 1 of the text covers the basics and does it well. This material is timeless and will not change much as new research comes available. Part 2 covers analysis and shows its age, just a bit. Unit hydrographs and lumped-flow routing are old technologies and while updates are inevitable, the basic technologies will not change. Chapters 9 and 10 are a bit dated as substantial work has been done over the last 15 years. They're still good, but require supplementation. Chapters 11 and 12 again contain great fundamentals but the technology is changing. The theory of linear moments (L-moments) is working its way into hydrologic statistics for fitting distributions to datasets. Furthermore, there is a trend toward using resistant statistics (median, inter-quartile range, and others) for description of the statistics of hydrologic datasets. Part 3 on hydrologic design is still good, but is also showing its age just a little. Again, the basics are great and well-explained. However, as new data become available and new analyses of those data are accomplished, new interpretations also become available. This is true especially with precipitation atlases and the estimation of n-year precipitation events, and hence n-year hydrologic events.

My observations are not an indictment of Applied Hydrology; it remains my favorite engineering hydrology textbook and I will continue to use it to teach engineers about hydrology. In my opinion, this is the best upper-undergrauate/graduate engineering hydrology text available. Like all textbooks, it is beginning to show its age because technology is not stagnant. But its descriptions of core concepts and the application thereof remains top notch.

Forget how great the book is, the author is one of the best guys I know. Buy it because he is one of the best architects out there, insightful, concise and germaine - no frills, just functionality. He is also a price of a guy. I know, we went to high school together.

It is and excellant planner. I have one on my desk. The cartoons are great. I know a lot of time and thought went into this product. I hope it is the first in a line of many.

Concisely arranged, with elegant graphics. The book is chocked full of unusual, architect-specific information. The Construction Documents, ADAAG Compliance, and Environmental Design Checklists are especially handy.

As someone with a busy and varied schedule, tools such as this are necessary to help maintain control. I even enjoyed the sense of humor included in the planner. It is rare that you find an item that is as on target as this book.

Wonderful book. It is obvious that the authors did months of research

The ARRL Antenna Book: The Ultimate Reference for Amateur Radio Antennas, Transmission Lines And Propagation (Arrl Antenna Book)

This is the bible for ham radio antenna design. Also covers transmission lines and propagation. Both theory (at graduate EE level) and practice (at the level of mere mortals). -- ws2i

I agree totally with the text on the cover, this is the ultimate reference on antennas. I had a specific target in mind when I bought it and as expected I found the topics I was looking for but also and to my surprise found the other chapters very interesting to read and I am now reading the book from cover to cover - really enjoyable, interesting and packed with info.
Especially I appreciate the fine balance between theory and practical info
Further it's a great feature to get the complete book on a CD in the PDF format - great!

Ejner Nicolaisen OZ9EU

The Arrl Antenna Book is a must have for any antenna designer. Amateur radio operators, shortwave listeners and commerical users will benefit from both the theory provided and the practical examples of proper design executions.

The definitive book on antennas theory, design, and construction. If you're serious about building your own antennas then you need this book as part of your collection!

Apollo may have landed men on the Moon, but the real story is the shear audacity of a nation to dream and implement a program that has yet to be repeated. That nation was America, but without the inspiration and toil of thousands of people - the engineers - of which many of the key personel were Canadian and British, this venture would have faded slowly in the early sixties. This author has provided priceless first hand histories of the people that made the program, and created a narrative that is entertaining and informative to both the casual reader and the serious Lunar Program researcher. This book is about the circumstances that sent some of Canada's and Britain's brightest minds to America to join that nation in one of the most epic adventures in the history of mankind. Highly recommended reading.

Given that I am interested in both the space program and advanced aircraft projects like the Avro Arrow, I picked up this book hoping to maybe pick up a few tidbits on both projects. Boy could I have been more wrong (but in a very pleasant way) as this book more then surpassed my expectations. It turned out to be a very enjoyable read like pretty much every other publication offered by Apogee to date.

For those expecting a lot of technical details on the Arrow, unfortunately you don't get much. The Arrow book by Boston Mills Press would be a better starting point for that program (buy both books if you can).

This book is mainly a history and somewhat biographical account of various Avro engineers (Canadian and British born) who found themselves out of work when the Arrow was cancelled. These individuals eventually found themselves working for the fledgling NASA organization at a time when engineers with practical experience in aerospace projects were very much needed. Once there, they helped to design and build the spacecraft and associated hardware needed to first get men into space and eventually the moon. Not all of them went to work for NASA though as a few went to work for the contractors as well. Others returned to Canada after a short time to work for companies that would go on to help with Canada's satellite industry, contractor contributions to the US program and ultimately the Canadian Space Program. But this book is more then that as it doesn't just cover the Avro engineers. Other Canadian contributions by those who made the trek south (and who didn't work for Avro) are covered as well. It puts into perspective the truely international scope of the manned space program both during the 1960s and today.

I personally think this book should be required reading by both Canadian and English engineering students as this book allows them to take pride in the accomplishments of their countrymen and it can perhaps inspire them to accomplish greater goals. We can all take pride in the contributions made by our neighbors to the north to help us get to the moon.

I grew up with the space program and have read every book I could get my hands on concerning the early space programs. This well-written and extensively-researched book covers a topic I hadn't considered: the contributions to the American space program made by the Canadian and British engineers and scientists who lost their jobs when the Canadian Avro Arrow was abruptly cancelled just as the space race was heating up. Many of these highly-trained workers made their way south, signed on with NASA, and made significant contributions to every manned space program from Mercury to the ISS. This is the definitive story of these people. Highly recommended.

Most people know that German rocket engineers led by Wernher von Braun helped build the rocket that put Apollo astronauts on the Moon. But few have heard about the Canadian and British engineers who also made a big contribution to the success of Apollo. Now their story is told for the first time in "Arrows to the Moon." This excellent book starts off with the story of how Canada scrapped the Avro Arrow, the most advanced jet interceptor of its time, and how NASA scooped up 32 of Avro's top engineers. This book follows their work in the U.S. space program from the early Mercury flights right through to the International Space Station. It includes stories about Jim Chamberlin and his design work on the Gemini spacecraft, John Hodge's efforts as the flight director when America faced its first emergency in space on Gemini 8, and Owen Maynard's contributions to Apollo. And there's much more. Top NASA officials were unanimous: the group from Canada was a "godsend" to NASA. Now, for the first time, their story is told in Arrows to the Moon.

This hidden gem of a book is one of the best there is on the space program. Its main purpose is to explore a little-known but important corner of space history - the Canadian contribution to the space program. But it is so masterfully written, it manages to summarize the entire feeling of the Apollo program incredibly well - a feeling I remember from my many years working on the project. If you read one book on space history, this should be it.

Thomas Graham's Aurora Model Kits is an informative tome fill with models of cars, planes, tanks, and the like; but it was the monster/ sci-fi kits that brought back many nostalgic remembrances of my childhood days- most of which was spent reading monster comic books like Dick Briefer's The Monster of Frankenstein and Zombie Factory, while waiting for the paint to dry on my glow in the dark monster models. If you were a kid in the 60's and want to see some of the kits you begged your mother to buy you at Woolworth department store, this 160 page "time machine" is for you!

Wonderful value for the price. SRP is $29.95 and got it for $19.77 through Amazon. Tons of great historical information and lots of fabulous color photos of build-ups and original boxes. Price guide is "okay" as many prices are pretty far off compared to what they sell for on ebay, for example. All things considered, it's a great book!

Highly recommended to any afficiando of Aurora kits, particularly those who wish to recall the deeply statisfying pleasure of finding those great Aurora art work boxes under their Christmas tree in the 1950's!

Apart from its enormous appeal to nostalgia,the serious student will find the work very well organized and a most reliable reference guide well worth the outlay.
Dave Owen,
Stevensville, Ontario, Canada

I was so happy that Schiffer brought Dr. Graham's Aurora book back out. In fact, I sent in a card requesting they do so a few years back after I bought his Revell Model's book. I just loved the memories, especially seeing that just horrible "Yak-25/Mig-19" kit Aurora put out. Of course it was totally fanciful, but I remember 51 years later the day I bought it. There are kits in here that have disappered from existence for so long, like the model knights and the USS Halford, which I had thought was a Revell model until Dr. Graham was kind enough to answer an e-mail a few years ago. For any of us who grew up in the 50's making models, this book is a must. It is amazing, it brought back friends, times, feelings, the whole 9 yards. Dr. Graham is an excellent writer and obviously historian, you won't be sorry. Get this and his Revell book and just be 8,9 or 10 again.

I should mention that if one is not interested in model aircraft, particularly the models built in the fifties, you should skip along to something else, but for someone who actually built many, if not most, of the kits in this book, this was a marvelous gift, memories of days when fun was the order of the day.

The historical information was most welcome, and Graham gives the reader a look inside the business of a model company in the fifties, a company that made some great strides in some areas but whose products were never considered the meat of "true modelers." The kits may not have been accurate -- the Me-109 was simply awful, and cast in a metallic burgundy besides, and the "Mig 19" resembled no aircraft ever flown by the Soviets -- but they were invariably fun. They were actually better in terms of fit and casting quality than some products presently on the market. And as a special treat, they were the only source for armored knights, gladiators, and movie monsters. Even the movie monsters issued by other companies were actually molds from the defunct Aurora line.

The only question is whether the book was more fun to read or to look at for the pictures.

The articles and contributors to this book represent the story of an industry undergoing significant change and should be read by anyone interested in the impact technology has on them, without their awareness, while also showing how this industry is part of the global investment and economy. Pinto's observations and commentary on the industrial automation world as it enters the 21st century in a state of transition and some say turmoil also provides insight into other industries as well.

If you are entering into, departing from, or interested in today's networked world as an engineer, sales person, or investor this book provides a glimpse of how it all relates in a very readable way.

Jim's collection of essays, many updated for this book, will cause you to stop and think about the state of the automation industry, as well as manufacturing in general, today. He is not afraid to take a stand, and in fact, delights in stirring up readers and getting intelligent feedback.

Although many people seem to think that his views are limited to attacks on the Yurko-era of Invensys and predictions of Rockwell's sale, very little of the book concerns those topics. This series of articles touches on technologies and business topics with a wit designed to cut through the clutter of your mind and get you to think. I wish more people were thinking deeply about the business impact of automation these days.

Read this book not as a text book of what was, but as a starting point for your own reflections about the state of manufacturing. Pinto will get your "juices flowing." You may find that you care more about the state of manufacturing than you thought.

Usually, when I read "This is a must-read book," I put it down to publishers' hype. Now that I have read Automation Unplugged, I will say that a person in the instrument/control system business should read it. The book gives some history that provides insight into the present conditions in the systems business.

The marketing section is truly required reading for today's environment in the systems business. When you finish reading, you say to yourself "I knew that," but you had not developed the thesis as logically nor as completely. As to the forecasting of the future, if only 50 percent of Mr. Pinto's predictions come true, major changes in management thinking will be required.

Dick Caro's introduction to the Fieldbus chapter clearly explains why the ISO and IEC standards are as irrational as they are. The chapter titled "How do I catch the Fieldbus" presents a logical explanation of all the varying standards for the buses.

Put this book in your library for reference along Bella Liptak's series of books.

For those of us outside the close knit world of automation, Jim Pinto is at his futuristic best in his poetry and political commentary. He rebels against the trend toward group think and bland commentary. He offers a prismatic view of the industry of automation which is neither too focused nor too general nor, we come to understand, viewed from every angle captured by Mr. Pinto. He has more facets of his intellect to share (perhaps political commentary will make up all or a larger portion of his next book?).

Mr. Pinto writes unselfconsciously and without apparent concern for the backlash that might face anyone less well regarded in the industry. In twenty years, Mr. Pinto built Action Instruments from nothing to industry greatness. That is to say, it was a great company until he sold it five years ago.

His entrepreneurial success, financial independence, and intellectual prowess are readily evident in his seemingly unguarded and thought provoking views. I found it refreshing to read intellectual commentary from a man with a sense of humor.

Wade Lovell
President & CEO

Ski Tote LLC

You haven't heard anything til you've heard industry pundit Jim Pinto jump on his soapbox. The Founder and former CEO of Invensys' Action Instruments, Jim takes a hard look at what's working and what's not in the industrial automation market.

He asks...and answers...the right questions. Who are the top 10 suppliers in the industry and will any survive? Who's best managed, who's mis-managed? What's the Achilles heel of the top players (hint: it's spelled M-A-R-K-E-T-I-N-G)? What does the future hold? Is Microsoft about to take over Fieldbus?!?! This book is a must-read for anyone in the business.

While this book offers an excellent collection of images related to the Bauhaus, it traces the history and the development of the Bauhaus comprehensively as well.
This book, alongwith Eva Forgacs' Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics can give you a general idea about what the institution was all about.

Its an amazing read.

You can know lots of new details. It helps you to study not only design but art itself.

Bauhaus was one of the most important movements in design-history.
Magdalena Drosta describes the ideas, the people, the work and the spirit of the Bauhaus. The best thing: It is never boring. The book does not only concentrate on the art taught at the Bauahaus but also describes its political problems.
A lot of excellent pictures in a good priniting quality (especially in relation to the price) make this a book, you always like to look at.

If you want a comprehensive historical information as well as tons of full color photos of all sorts of Bauhaus inspired works -from architecture to practical objects - this is the book you should have. Open it and read a single article, think about it and close the book. Or browse through the photos and marvel at the teapots, the furniture, the architectural style.

You can savor this one slowly (and I think you should) rather than trying to read it through all at once. If you do that, you'll start to get a sense of the Bauhaus style and how it fits into the particular period when it came into being - and how it grew and evolved from there.

This book has great studies. Lots of new details for me are in it. It helps you to study design and art histry.

I am happy that Gingko Press has brought out this handsome 50th anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan's _The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man_, and I am looking forward to seeing _The Complete Mechanical Bride_ that Gingko Press plans to publish in the near future. I'd like to provide some background information here regarding McLuhan's first book.

It is hard to say exactly when Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) started gathering the materials and writing the short essays that were published as _The Mechanical Bride_ in 1951. However, Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), has reported that McLuhan was working on this project when Ong studied under him at Saint Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this same period McLuhan was also working on his Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts in his time, which was accepted in 1943 and published by Gingko Press in 2006.

Because rhetoric has long been understood in Western culture as the art of persuasion, we need to take into account that McLuhan was studying the history of rhetoric in detail when he was assembling the artifacts of American popular culture and writing the witty commentaries about them that came to be published in _The Mechanical Bride_. To spell out the obvious, the artifacts aim to persuade us to buy a product and to imagine ourselves as associating with and perhaps even identifying with the imagery employed in each artifact.

But why bother to write witty commentaries about the artifacts? McLuhan was under the influence of the New Criticism he had studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis at Cambridge University. Thus the short essays in _The Mechanical Bride_ can be understood as exercises in practical criticism (to borrow the title of Richards's most widely known book). To be sure, McLuhan is critical of popular culture, but he takes it seriously enough to write intelligently about it. His short essays are witty and amusing.

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

This, McLuhan's first book, serves as a good introduction to him, since he has not yet begun to formulate his theories about media that would later make him so famous. Consequently, it is easier to read than, say, The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media. It is also much more fun.

The reader should keep in mind that this is still premature McLuhan, for he had not yet read Harold Innis's 1950 classic--which represents the true birth of media studies--Empire and Communications. This book hit McLuhan like an atomic bomb, for it completely ruptured his thinking regarding media. In The Mechanical Bride, he is still analyzing the content of the media, deciphering what the subliminal messages are saying to us unconsciously; but after reading Innis, he realized that it was not the message that was important (at least not for him) but rather the type of medium through which the message was conveyed, for Innis's discussions of how particular kinds of media affected the nature and structure of ancient empires caused McLuhan to realize that it was actually the medium that was the important thing. Whether a culture used clay or papyrus as its means of communication, Innis asserted, determined much about the fate of that culture.

With that caveat in mind, then, the reader is free to roam through these pages, observing a McLuhan that would never exist in the same way again. He comments, sometimes hilariously, on one advertisement, movie poster or magazine after the next. He has interesting things to say about genres like the Western or the soap opera (for instance, he says that the Western is the masculine equivalent to the soap opera, for its values are the opposite of those of the domestic drama) and we also find here, for the first time, his speculations on Sherlock Holmes, a theme that will recur in many of his later writings.

McLuhan at this point had read and metabolized such key thinkers for him as Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion, and they are referred to often in the body of the text. (There even occurs a reference to Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces; apparently the only book he ever read by Campbell, his Irish intellectual colleague who was more concerned with deciphering the messages than the media themselves). McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, is still feeling his way, and he is not yet sure of himself. But it is a delight for the reader to watch this great American thinker--the equivalent, easily, of any of the great French postmodernists (this book bears certain similarities, for instance, to Barthes' Mythologies)--tentatively poking his way about in the middenheap of popular culture, looking for ways in which to organize it into something one can get a grasp on.

I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I did. But do let me know if you don't.
--John David Ebert, author
Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

The "modern gal" knows that "getting ahead" means being the first on her block to articulate the ways her body and cultural practices are transformed into parts and routines -- she reads The Mechanical Bride to "stay in the know" regarding the ways that reflection on the discourse of her body can be used to advance her academic career! And "guys on their way to the top", in academic circles ranging from media history to cultural studies, tune into The Mechanical Bride to find out the latest "swinging styles" in everything from discourse analysis to popular tropes for identity production. Keep it in mind, all you Sirens and Sages of the Academy: When it "comes to success" there is "deep consolation" in knowing that the "cream of the crop" always "rises to the top" because it never "falls out of step" with the latest critical styles -- in a liberal era and place, such as our own, this really is Freedom "American Style"!

This is McLuhan's first book, originally published in 1951 and has been long out of print. It precedes his second book and cult classic 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', by a decade and a half. This is also quite unique in that it has no relationship with McLuhan's more famous theoretical ramblings.

In this book, McLuhan takes on myth-making in US society by showing how film posters, comic strips, advertisements, magazine covers, newspaper layout and articles etc., try to persuade people into something, and yet a close observation of their inherent contradictions allows you to escape their machinations.

The book celebrates deliberate misreading of commonplace things like advertising to show how the persuasive trap of mass culture/consumer culture can be escaped.

All articles in the book follow the format of article/poster/ad, its analysis and some sharp witty aphoristic observations in a boxed area that serve as liberating repartees against the messages that these products of consumer culture intend to send.

The philosophy of the book is derived from McLuhan's premise (borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Maelstrom') that to escape a maelstrom you need to study things going down and things that resurface and align yourself with things that resurface.

In this respect, it can be considered a jargon-free precursor of latter-day deconstructive literary and cultural criticism. And it is much more liberating and enlightening to a lay reader than jargon ridden discussions or purely vehement denuciations of the power of mass culture which don't help laymen liberate themselves anyway, because of their highly inaccessible prose.

Originally published in 1951, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore Of Industrial Man by the influential philosopher and cultural observer Marshall McLuhan is a thoughtful and thought-provoking treatise that seeks to unveil the subtle and sometimes venomous effects of media and modern mass communication. Thoughtful, sometimes philosophical, sometimes prediction with deadpan seriousness, The Mechanical Bride is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago and highly recommended reading for students of Mass Communications and Journalism, Contemporary American Sociology, and Modern Philosophy.