Though McLuhan now apparently repudiates its essentially hostile and derisive tone, many will feel that this devastatingly witty and high-spirited work is his finest achievement. The Mechanical Bride is a brilliant application of the techniques of iconography and literary criticism to such hitherto neglected phenomena as advertisements, comic strips, and newspapers. He began as a relatively conventional observer of the mass media. Understanding Media contains the mixture as before. Even a strong sympathizer is likely to find irritation and illumination fairly evenly blended in his books. His cocksure wisecracking manner, his extravagant generalizations, and his maddeningly repetitive style tend to repel fastidious readers. For all that, McLuhan is a somewhat lonely figure with many admirers but few disciples. I have been shamelessly pilfering his work for years, and others have been doing it too: it is easy for a practiced eye to discern little bits of McLuhan nestling like fossils in the gritty prose of many a literary critic or sociologist. On the contrary, Marshall McLuhan is one of the most brilliant socio-cultural theorists writing today. They are not the eccentric maunderings of a madman. These conclusions are forced upon anyone who accepts the main argument of Understanding Media.

The ads are the best part of the journal. As for the magazine itself, it is an extremely hot medium (much hotter than Playboy) perversely devoting most of its space to matters which are peripheral to the real problems of modern culture. The typical reader of COMMENTARY is living in a numbed and somnambulistic trance, self-hypnotized by his visual, linear bias.

Marshall mcluhan 1964