TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1141 claim that this essay is about Nazi biomedical technologies is, however, tendentious at best. There is a baffling essay by Carl Mitcham about “going to Church.” Mitcham argues that the church offers us a kind of counterexperience to the kind technology typically presents us. This may be so, but it could equally be claimed for lots of other experiences. I would love to write about going to a cricket match, but I remain unconvinced that my experiences could justifiably merit inclusion within a collection of essays on technology. One of the main faults of the philosophy of technology is its lack of engagement with the content of technology—it rarely seems to get inside the black box and tell us anything interesting about how machines or artifacts work. This collection by and large continues the tradition by looking at how we experience technology as consumers, for example, buying a car, watching music videos, and so forth. Where the content of the technology is addressed it tends to be in the softer areas such as architecture or the development of writing. The notable exception is a crisp essay by Edward Constant on how the invention of the turbojet fits various models of technological discov ery, but Constant of course is no phenomenologist. It would be a pity if the phenomenological project was judged by this collection. What is surely needed are phenomenological accounts of the life world as experienced by the people who bring technology into existence—the engineers, designers, testers, and important insti tutional actors, such as advertisers, financiers, generals, and so on. A collection on that theme might just shake philosophy of technology out of its present doldrums. Trevor Pinch Dr. Pinch is associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Cornell University. He has written extensively on the sociology of science and technology. Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. Edited by George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1989. Pp. xii+ 230; notes. $17.95. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. By Philip Marchand. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989. Pp. xiii + 320; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $11.95 (paper). The two volumes under review tell us everything we need, or might want, to know about the author of Understanding Media. Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message consists of reminiscences about McLuhan by his friends, colleagues, and son and widow, interspersed with excerpts from various of his articles and interviews. The consen sus seems to be that while McLuhan was eccentric, he was kind and generous to those around him. 1142 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Many of the people who contribute to Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message appear in Philip Marchand’s exemplary biography, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium, and the Messenger. Although this is not an autho rized biography, the author had access to extremely intimate material, such as McLuhan’s early diaries, and he uses it with taste and restraint. Marchand, an American journalist now living in Canada was (briefly) McLuhan’s student in the late 1960s, and he manages to combine sympathy for him with a shrewd assessment of his shortcomings. We can understand some of the eccentricities of his work as well as of his personality by remembering that he was from the provinces— Winnipeg, to be exact. As Marchand says, “McLuhan felt that his upbringing on the prairies provided him with a kind of natural ‘counterenvironment’ to the great centers of civilization” (p. 5). He came to modern art, learning, and Catholicism relatively late in life, and retained the convert’s enthusiasm for them throughout the rest of his life. Marchand ably chronicles McLuhan’s intellectual and spiritual odyssey from the University of Manitoba to Cambridge University to St. Louis University to Assumption College to, finally, the University of Toronto. In the process, he had to make himself over completely. Marchand points out that “during the two years he spent at Trinity Hall at Cambridge University in the thirties, McLu han virtually unlearned everything he had absorbed about English literature at the University of Manitoba” (p. 30). McLuhan’s life experiences thus prepared him to understand the need for...