Marshall Mcluhan: Escape into Understanding: the Authorized Biography - Hardcover

Reseña del editor

The originator of such widely used phrases as "the global village" and "the medium is the message, " Marshall McLuhan - the prescient media guru - is finally attracting the critical attention he deserves. In the 1960s, McLuhan blazed the intellectual territory which we are only coming to grips with today. W. Terrence Gordon traces McLuhan's beginnings in the prairie city of Edmonton, Alberta, through his education at Cambridge and teaching in America to his startling breakthroughs in communication while at the University of Toronto. McLuhan's central place in the ferment of the 1960s is evocatively drawn and the formation of his most brilliant insights into the media are clearly explained. This is the first book to mine McLuhan's extensive personal and public writings - journal entries; correspondence with family and luminaries such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Peter Drucker, and Clare Boothe Luce; manuscript notes and files; and all of his publications - to bring us an authoritative, well-rounded, and passionate portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

Reseña del editor

With more media coverage of this media critic in the past year than at any time since his death in 1980, Marshall McLuhan remains the subject of heated debate. In the first book to mine his extensive personal and public writings, including journal entries; correspondence with family and the likes of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Clare Booth Luce; manuscript notes and files; and all of his publications, author W. Terrence Gordon has written what will become the standard reference on McLuhan's thought: a compelling, intellectual biography that infects readers with the vitality of McLuhan's ideas and of the man himself.

Gaining fame and stirring controversy in the 1960s with his proposal that television was creating a "global village" and that the medium itself, not the messages it carried, was influencing the public, McLuhan was idolized by some and vilified by others. Those who truly knew and understood his work predicted that it would take ten to twenty years to be fully appreciated, and today's debate bears that out, as his predictions and prescriptions continue to be vindicated as history unfolds.