Wow, it'd be one thing to point out Brand's shortcomings, but to review a biography that does some of that in order to produce a non-stop stream of snark and putdowns seems excessive. It could well be that Brand is a jerk (I haven't met him), but I think it's flippant to dismiss his accomplishments - WEC, The Well, even books like _How Buildings Learn_ are all real contributions.
It isn’t really that bad until the end, FWIW. Mostly. The D.C.-based author is apparently writing a book titled Palo Alto; I bet we’re gonna love that one...
I like the review; it’s just that it’s unbalanced and extremely biased towards the present, with almost no attention to the time and place that Brand came out of as a person. Harris is evaluating Brand from the perspective of 2022, which is anachronistic and out of place.
This is something I have wondered about having listened to a lot of the Long Now Talks. If you listen to Brand in these talks, he has the aura of an elder statesman. This book review raises far more questions than it answers, and doesn’t really show an understanding of the history that has occurred.
Tom Wolfe and John Markoff both portrayed Brand as a likable figure in their earlier works. Both Wolfe and Brand are contemporaries from the Silent Generation. Markoff was the boomer. There wasn’t much distance between the three. Now enter Malcolm Harris.
Harris gives us a new review with an altogether different viewpoint than his predecessors. Harris, a Millennial who was born in 1988 and who came into his own during the turbulent 2000s, sees the world that the boomers built and perceives its failures upon class lines—and he’s not wrong.
The problem with this well-written book review is that it fails to take into account the world Brand came from in 1938. Harris glosses over this historical dichotomy in favor of his own much more recent account. It’s something every generation tends to do to the ones before them, not realizing that someone will eventually do it to them in their later years. And so, the tradition continues.
Have met Brand on a half dozen occasions or so and I even did a 1 hour interview with him as part of a never released documentary on the origins of scenario planning and foresight.
Can confirm, he is the opposite of a jerk. He was lovely, insightful, generous and kind every single time I met him.
I think your analysis of Harris' article is spot on, thank you.
