Books: Blowing Hot & Cold

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA by Marshall McLuhan. 359 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.50.

Every so often, the semi-intellectual communities at the fringes of the arts, the universities, and the communications industries are hit by a new book, which becomes a fad or a parlor game. This summer's possible candidate, with what may be just the right combination of intelligence, arrogance and pseudo science, is Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.

Seamless Web. Author McLuhan is a University of Toronto professor and literary critic, who writes books (first was The Gutenberg Galaxy) to prove that books are responsible for most of the ills of modern man. Nationalism, war, industrialization,...