Carbon Dreams by Susan Gaines, Creative Arts Book Company, $17.25,
ISBN 0887393063
Edison: Inventing the century by Neil Baldwin, University of Chicago Press,
£11.50/$18, ISBN 0226035719
Understanding Media: The extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, Routledge
Classics, £10.99, ISBN 0415253979
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FANCY beginning the month with a novel about global warming? Even if you’re
suffering from post-Kyoto depression, don’t be put off: Susan Gaines’s
Carbon Dreams will banish your blues. Her beguiling heroine stubbornly
pursues the big, sprawling questions in oceanography, exploring odd bits of
evidence and giving her curiosity rein as she pieces together a revolutionary
way to plot ancient climates. It’s all here: the fight for grants, intellectual
ownership, a triumph at a conference (dream scene for any researcher), an affair
or two and inevitable heartbreak as work edges out the lover. Gripping
stuff.
The real-life Thomas Edison knew what it was to jockey for position, not to
mention a thing or two about intellectual property. Neil Baldwin’s biography of
this “technological folk hero” is out in a new paperback edition this month.
Edison: Inventing the century is, said our reviewer, “a fascinating and
refreshing critical biography” (91av, 23 September 1995, page
46).
Marshall McLuhan is famous for championing a notion that’s the polar opposite
of Edison’s. He dismissed all the clever devices by pointing out that the real
invention was the medium—electricity. Its content—Edison’s
telephone, say—was irrelevant. Narrative, dialogue and instruction exist
whether they’re written or spoken downline. It was electricity as a medium that
transformed society, permanently altering the relations between people. We’d add
the Web these days to McLuhan’s model. Get in touch with the old master in
Understanding Media, part of a new classics series from Routledge.
