Rating: 
Summary: Apocalypse now
Review: The New Yorker has turned the entirety of its magazine over to a single work four times. John Hersey's Hiroshima, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, cautionary and apocalyptic all, were three. The fourth is this book.Within the Context of No Context went out of print almost instantly after it was published in 1980. Nobody got this book in 1980. It's a difficult read, in a voice that is diffuse, associative, and allusive, and at the same time makes direct assertions about the way things are, which few of us are comfortable reading. It's not a book that people were quite ready to read in 1980. Except for newsmen. People who made their living by drinking out of the firehose and transforming the experience into column inches understood this book right away. (These are the same people who don't need anyone to explain the first sentence of The White Album to them.) Trow put their unease into words. And for 15 years Within the Context of No Context existed in a kind of samizdat, a thick sheaf of photocopied pages handed from one reporter or columnist or editor to another. You shouldn't buy this book, ideally. Someone should give you a copy of it, Xeroxed from The New Yorker, saying "Read this. This makes sense. This makes everything make sense." 22 years later, it's much easier to read and understand, to criticize and quibble with. It's no longer prophecy. Unlike the apocalypses that John Hersey and Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell were warning us about, the one Trow outlined has already happened. We've even gotten used to it.
Rating:
Summary: Apocalypse now
Review: The New Yorker has turned the entirety of its magazine over to a single work four times. John Hersey's Hiroshima, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, cautionary and apocalyptic all, were three. The fourth is this book. Within the Context of No Context went out of print almost instantly after it was published in 1980. Nobody got this book in 1980. It's a difficult read, in a voice that is diffuse, associative, and allusive, and at the same time makes direct assertions about the way things are, which few of us are comfortable reading. It's not a book that people were quite ready to read in 1980. Except for newsmen. People who made their living by drinking out of the firehose and transforming the experience into column inches understood this book right away. (These are the same people who don't need anyone to explain the first sentence of The White Album to them.) Trow put their unease into words. And for 15 years Within the Context of No Context existed in a kind of samizdat, a thick sheaf of photocopied pages handed from one reporter or columnist or editor to another. You shouldn't buy this book, ideally. Someone should give you a copy of it, Xeroxed from The New Yorker, saying "Read this. This makes sense. This makes everything make sense." 22 years later, it's much easier to read and understand, to criticize and quibble with. It's no longer prophecy. Unlike the apocalypses that John Hersey and Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell were warning us about, the one Trow outlined has already happened. We've even gotten used to it.
Rating: 
Summary: Trow offers an eye-opening view into American culture
Review: Trow's prose, terse at times, yet nevertheless powerful, offers an extremely insightful critical review of the insidious nature of the media in contemporary american culture. Trow's main focus centers upon the vast distance which television has created between the individual (the grid of intimacy) and society (the grid of two-hundred million). Trow proposes that television has provided individuals with what appears to be a comfortable context in which to organize their lives yet that context is merely a facsimile of life. Trow's discussion is truly eye-opening. As individuals, we are forced to grapple with the force of the media in our own lives. For example, Have we allowed television to form our thoughts and opinions, leading to automaton conformity? Ultimately, in a society in which the media dominates our lives, Trow's work alerts us to the dangers of becoming lost amidst a collective media-- while it may seem alarming, what we perceive as a comforting context may in actuality be the stark reality of nothingness.
Rating:
Summary: Re: Context of No Context and Cozzens
Review: Within the Context of No Context is a perceptive and melancholy essay (and a better read than its sequel, MY PILGRIM'S PROGRESS) about the effect of mass communication on the national psyche.
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