Even in a book as comprehensive as this, based on his access to Brand’s archives and to Brand himself, Markoff has trouble tracking this revolutionary thinker’s many changes of mind as he moved from a career in the military to photography to various startups, seeking to cope with the velocity of change by employing a slowed-down, organic way of thinking about the world ... Missing from this biography is a chronology, a sort of chart, that might help the rest of us navigate through the teeming adventures of the Brandian world.
... an illuminating biography that captures Mr. Brand’s rich and varied life ... It is a challenge to capture the essence of a protean life while the subject is still writing the script, but Mr. Markoff, a longtime tech journalist for the New York Times, has done it beautifully.
At times, reading Whole Earth feels like being the sober person at a psychedelic party ... The book offers less, however, of a critical perspective on Brand’s life and work. Markoff aims to illuminate tensions in how environmentalism related to science and technology, but he struggles to place Brand’s contributions effectively in the context of the complex broader movement. Maybe that’s because, in the end, Brand rode a series of waves, but did not create them.
Markoff’s biography will likely be the last word on Brand for some time. His approach to his sources is vexing, however. He made heavy use of the thousands of pages of Brand’s papers archived at Stanford University for quotes like the ones above. However, because Whole Earth 'is not intended as a scholarly volume,' Markoff provides no footnotes. This is disappointing given the richness of the material he uncovered. Scholars hoping to understand the source or context of the scores of lively and intriguing quotes are condemned to tracking down the originals. The only positive outcome I can see is that a new cohort of scholars will be forced to rediscover Brand, and to fashion new narratives that complement or challenge Markoff’s ... Since more than half of Markoff’s time is devoted to Brand’s life and activities through the early 1970s, when he was still just in his early 30s, the next half-century gets brisk treatment. Nonetheless, Markoff is able to survey a remarkable number of fascinating and thematically coherent episodes.
Drawing on several dozen interviews with its subject over four years, Whole Earth comes across as something like a third-person memoir ... Stewart Brand is an earnest and serious-minded person. Nevertheless, one of his moments of illumination, as related by Markoff, caused me to laugh out loud.
Markoff gives readers a well-researched account of Brand’s life ... Brand’s detractors will not find much to grab on to in Markoff’s mostly laudatory biography, and readers might wish it was a more critical take ... The biography makes no apology for its approach, as there is plenty of good to find in Brand’s long life; it’s an insightful account of the Zelig-like figure ... A laudatory biography of Brand that admirers, the unfamiliar, and even some detractors will find insightful.
Though at times repetitive...and stuffed with minutiae...Markoff’s telling of Brand’s strange and busy life is compelling—the book version of opening a time capsule filled with unexpected and one-of-a-kind items.
