Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Review: Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand , by John Markoff

2023; University of California Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/ch.2023.100.1.105

2327-1485

Peter Richardson,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

countless instances of popular culture, including television ads that have drawn upon the film but twisted it into a representation of triumphant liberation.He also provides an extended comparison to the POW sitcom Hogan's Heroes, which began airing just two years after the film was released.One gets a sense of how impactful this film has been, and yet also of how varied, even contradictory, a text can become as it gets reworked in culture.Polan adds a final, complicating layer to this multidimensional study in an appendix that offers a concise but exacting account of the real historical events that inspired Brickhill's book and, via adaptation, The Great Escape.This is especially thrilling to read if one's only knowledge of the tale is through those sources, though Polan makes it clear that much discussion has already been devoted to the ways in which these texts deviate from the historical record, even as he marks those differences here.Yet, as in the rest of the book, this account is punctuated by specific individuals' accounts of the history and its relation to The Great Escape-once again demonstrating how history is lived and made subjectively, which is not to say falsely.Dreams of Flight shows how The Great Escape has escaped its own apparent, and impressive, textual form.