With this book it's evident that Taylor has been thinking about certain heady concepts for at least all of his adult life. Indeed, I've also read an earlier work of his, "Hiding," that touches on some of the same ideas. But with Complexity he has honed his thinking and added even more contributing topics, all zeroing in to our current turbulent moment of history.

It's difficult to describe briefly what this theory of everything entails, as you might expect with most theories of everything. Taylor's is personal and professional, and it's been developing since the 1960s. It includes a sometimes dizzying array of topics and references to other thinkers, including artificial life, chaos theory, information theory, evolution, semiotics, cultural studies, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lamarck, the history of the modern university, cybernetics, emergent phenomena, fashion, intellectual property... and more!

Taylor somehow manages to weave a coherent and compelling tapestry out of all these threads, with results I can only describe as profound and inspirational. By looking at recent history and its social upheavals through a lens informed by the latest ideas in these fields, he arrives at a very convincing and intriguing picture of the fundamentally different sort of world we are seeing develop around us right now.

Beside the wise observation and intelligent synthesis, though, he also does something else that's very rare with these sorts of projects: he attempts to explain his theory in practice. The last chapter of the book tells of his experiences over the past few years creating a new kind of company engaged in shifting some paradigms in higher education. It's great to see how Taylor has tried to put his ideas to work in the field that he knows best; as a professor, his personal and professional experience with colleges and universities are where his "theory of everything" touches the ground. Still, though it's a tall order, I would have loved to see perhaps one more real-world example. Perhaps this would have required partnering with someone from another field to co-author one more chapter, but the connections between the heady wisdom and the real world would have then been that much more clear.

However, that's a minor criticism. All in all, "The Moment of Complexity" is a book I would recommend highly. Anyone with a bit of patience, an ability to grasp some extended analogies, and a hunger to connect our present time with past developments in multiple streams of thought, should read this book.

There was a review in BookForum about Hiding that couldn't let go of the central tenet of this cunning book: surface is not to be underestimated. Surface (as opposed to depth) is not simply a dead-end but the beginnings of a new worldview. While older worryworts and curmudgeonly librarian types may protest this premise, sorry, I've got five words for all of you: Sean "Puffy" Combs, Grammy Winner.

The layout of the book is as provocative as its content: our current state of affairs. Supermodels are celebrities, COPS is reality television, Las Vegas is a family getaway, tattooing is our youth's version of long hair. All of these topics get brought up and explored in studied and thoughtful detail. Yet, Taylor doesn't dissect these cultural changes from a sterile laboratory atop an ivory tower -- he digs right into it. His section on fashion reads like it's a special pullout to W magazine (let's see that happen!) and you don't need a dictionary to make sense of the fundamental mysteries being wrestled with throughout this fast-paced tome.

It can be difficult, at times, to make sense of some of the more poetic or lyrical moments but then I also don't care much for rap or French cinema. All in all, I'd put this (quite beautiful to look at) book right up there with anything Barthes has written -- with the added bonus that this is an enthusiastically eclectic and sincerely postmodern collage.

IMAGOLOGIES is an antibook concerned with what it considers to be a necessary shift in the academic approach to media philosophy. According to the authors this shift is cultural, intellectual and philosophical. It calls for a restructuring of media function and capability within cyberspace, within the realm of the simulacrum and within the mediatrix.

IMAGOLOGIES looks at virtually every facet of the radical changes taking place within communications, from cyborgs and electronomics to hypertext and cyberwar. Its intellectual approach is both unorthodox and unsettling, yet within its pages are valuable perceptions which sometimes illustrate the current and future direction of electronic media.

Much of this production is innovative, timely and trendy. Still, there are journal correspondences here between the authors that I found much too tedious. And, at its worst, IMAGOLOGIES turns outdated techological terms into tired e-mail banters, capsulizes philosophical content into rampant sound bites, and visually distracts with graphical text and eye-catching geometries.

Everything about this work is designed to catch the eye. But it tries too hard to dazzle. Philosophical scholars and intellectuals may feel the need to look deeper, and may eventually interpret these markers as red flags when determining the overall validity of this antibook's rhetoric, and its final destiny within the narrow halls of academia.