If you are a regular viewer of this blog, you may be thinking to yourself, “Palmer reviewing a Coupland book about Marshall McLuhan? Hasn’t this already been done before?”
It has! Back in February of 2024, I reviewed Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland. But the thing about reading through an author’s biography is that sometimes they cover a subject more than once.
This would be like Len Deighton who wrote extensively about World War II, but specifically twice about The Battle of Britain in both The Battle of Britain and Fighter: The True Story of The Battle of Britain.
So I have been here before, reading another book by an author I love about a subject they have already covered. So what is different about Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!?
Let me consult my notes and compare…
There are four quotes
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. M.M.
Art is anything you can get away with. M.M.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think. M.M.
Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools–with yesterday’s concepts. M.M.
And this Chestertonism (from writer G.K. Chesterton):
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
That overlap! Looking back on my notes from Coupland’s Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan, I see things I saw in the book that didn’t hit me the second time around. I’m also aware that I’m a different person a year later. While both of Coupland’s releases about McLuhan came out in 2010, they had different things to say.
Yes, they covered the man. They covered his history and his concepts, from birth to death. But Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! spends more time connecting the dots, even where there is overlap, to the then-present day of 2010.
On a whole that might be why You Know Nothing of My Work seems slightly more modern and editorial, drawing more connections than Extraordinary Canadians did. And while the two books overlap enough for me to tell you that, unless you are a fan of Coupland like I am, either is fine.
It’s also funny in an interesting way, at least to me, that I have made one half-hearted attempt at reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media but I have thrown myself with gusto into the reading of two similar McLuhan biographies. Perhaps my media is Coupland?