Twenty-one critical essays on the ideas and works of Marshall McLuhan are offered in this review. In the course of the essays, McLuhan is characterized alternately as a genius, an extrapolator, and an oracle; a defender of the choice of choicelessness; a generalizer who rearranges, misinterprets, and misreads the facts to support his theses; an idealizer of twelfth century philosophy; a prophet who would use television for providing future educational relevance; a technological determinist; an exaggerator of insights into generalizations; a mythicizer of process in the form of media; an original, stimulating prober; an overexplainer and oversimplifier; and an index to the cultural permissiveness of mid-century America. McLuhan's ideas on the effects of the new media on society, such as his hot-cool media dichotomy (especially in relation to television), his sense ratio theory of media as an extension of man, and his thesis, "the medium is the message", are subjected to detailed analyses, as are his literary style (his mosaic, non-linear approach, his point of view, and his lack of constructive suggestions for dealing with media effects) and the people (including Sigmund Freud, Norman O. Brown, James Joyce, and Harold Adams Innis) who influenced his thought.

This collection was the second volume of essays on McLuhan's ideas to be published in the late 1960s. Compiled by Raymond Rosenthal, the twenty-four texts date from between 1963 and 1968, and include essays from popular and academic journals, magazine articles, TV reviews, and a number of specially commissioned commentaries. The essays are in fact predominantly con.