The Medium is the Massage
by Marshall McLuhan | 
Understanding Media
by Marshall McLuhan | 
Mythologies
by Roland Barthes |
Minima Moralia
by Theodor W. Adorno | 
Seven Nights
by Jorge Luis Borges | 
Writing and Difference
by Jacques Derrida |
Signposts in a Strange Land
by Walker Percy | 
Literature and Evil
by Georges Bataille | 
Existentialists and Mystics
by Iris Murdoch | 
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
by Doris Lessing | 
The Space of Literature
by Maurice Blanchot | 
The Transparency of Evil
by Jean Baudrillard | 
Another Turn of the Crank
by Wendell Berry |
Break Every Rule
by Carole Maso | 
The Form of Things
by A. C. Grayling |
Philosophical Essays
by Bertrand Russell |
Hopes and Impediments
by Chinua Achebe | 
The Limits of Interpretation
by Umberto Eco | 
The Examined Life
by Robert Nozick | 
The Heart of Things
by A. C. Grayling |
This is the devastating book which first established Marshall McLuhan's reputation as the foremost (and the wittiest) critic of modern mass communications.The Mechanical Bride is vintage McLuhan -- so aptly illustrated by dozens of examples from ads, comic strips, columnists, etc., that those who were stung by McLuhan were hard put for rebuttals. It shows how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware, how Orphan Annie still keeps the world on track, and how an Arabian Nights wonderland of mass entertainment and suggestion makes information irrelevant, and sends us to bed at night too dazed to question whether we're happy or not. We live in an age in which legions of highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of getting inside the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting and controlling.