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tion ("just what is it these people are teaching our youngsters?") and
losing, running for Whittier Town Council ("let us cancel the urban
renewal program and each of us do our own housekeeping") and, the
ultimate repudiation, losing. But now, as Harris notes on the jacket to
this memoir of the Nixon-Brown gubernatorial contest, which was written
before Dallas, "the likelihood appears that we shall be required to judge
him once more in the year ahead, as we judged him in the nation in
1960 and in California in 1962."
Whether or not we shall have to judge Mr. Nixon again will be
decided, fittingly, in California this July, for it is the California back–
drop that lends weight to Harris's effort to say something memorable
"about American politics, American life, and American feeling along the
lines of a grand perspective." California, of course, has become America
apotheosized. Our biggest state now, it harbors the best and worst of us
in great quantities: the lush vistas and the looted ones, a genuinely
aroused social consciousness tilting with virulent political extremism,
taste mortally embattled with Goliathan tastelessness-and the over–
whelming loneliness amid the multitudes.
Harris set out to cut through political flimflam to the human
predicament of two candidates trying to make themselves heard above
the din: "I wanted to see what they did with the sweat of the voter's
o
2
:llli
A new look at the processes
of human communication
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
The Extensions of Man
By Marshall
M
cLuhan
Director of the Center for Culture and Technology,
Univel'sity of Toronto, author of
The Mechanical B"ide
and
The Gutenberg Galaxy
Professor McLuhan's premise is that the
form
of
any medium, rather than its
content,
determines
what is being communicated. Analyzing such media
as speech, writing, printing, art, photography, radio,
TV, movies, and other electrical technological de–
velopments, he has made a highly original, brilliant
contribution to man's understanding of the nature
of social change. $7.50 at bookstores
McGRAW-HILL
o
