Reviews and Comments

im afraid to say i could make neither hide nor hair of this book or heidegger's thought, even if it was a secondary source. best to leave heidegger for another time and just, not read more after this book?

i think it's interesting how the foreword by A. Postman is essentially half justifying the book for the "modern" (2006) condition of film and entertainment. i fail to necessarily see the use in that, though maybe the average reader is less convinced of that point.

it's pretty good, and it (obviously) argues well the points it makes, though it's quite american-centric, not only in terms of references, but also in terms of how it relegates the ways that Orwell's predictions have actually come true, and it is certainly a product of a more optimistic viewing of the media culture where 1980s US news media wasn't under the thumb of the White House.

the introduction of this book is, for some reason or another, filled with testimonials from students. unclear if they were taking an advanced high school course or were in college, but, i must wonder, is that what Andrew thinks the target audience of this book in 2006 must have been?

there were a lot of theorists, and theories, for that matter, included name-dropped in the book (Ong, McLuhan, several early media theorists, Mumford), but they, aside from maybe McLuhan and Ong, don't get much more mention in the book. this is probably a good thing overall for the book's readability, but it frustrates me because Mumford, somebody who i'll definitely find interesting provided i actually read him, is barely mentioned.

another incoherent review. ah well.

it has some pieces of interesting analysis, but it turns into a slog quite quickly and quite frequently. whatever adorno was trying to do, it quite clearly didn't work here. also salty because i thought it was going to be "philosophy of" "modern" "music", not "philosophy of" "modern music". book spends too long on "modern music" and not long enough on music proper.

while the page count goes over 300, it feels like no more than 100, the print on this thing is really large and i could read all 300 pages in a few hours, and a lot of the information is redundant for anybody with even a cursory understanding of us imperialism. it probably shouldn't be marketed so broadly either, considering "analysis of country" is far less common in this book than "analysis of country through the lens of american interventionism", and you're painting yourself into a corner there.

i suppose it could stand to be shorter in some areas, but i get that this was one of the first popular books to actually talk about this shit so chomsky and herman will have undoubtedly felt a lot more pressure to flesh out their arguments. it does absolutely take advantage of chomsky's writing in some areas, though, so it doesn't seem that long.

its quite nice, i can't speak to accuracy because i have a limited knowledge of cuba (the reason i read this book!), but chomsky's good writing is exemplified here, and i'm glad the president could add a foreword

it's fine. the description hypes it up way too much for essentially just being a compendium of short poems about rain, and the translation should not have been praised so extensively, even if it would have been ostensibly difficult, since the original material is lacking in the substance that would have necessitated such a methodical transformation

this book is also completely unknown to goodreads, which made looking for anything about this book an absolute joy(!)

the only article about the book online is a short review which somehow got published by Frontline, so ???

also the book has the gall to quote early wittgenstein and imply a failing of his philosophical capability on the empty space and i'm not sure what that intends to do or critique considering wittgenstein and everyone of his successors or followers had stopped believing that for decades