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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. This couldn't be a better time for a readable, full-scale
treatment of his writings, a book that reflects the range and depth of his thought
accurately and accessibly. Marshall McLuhan: Escape Into Understanding
fills this gap. W. Terrence Gordon traces McLuhan's beginnings
in the prairie city of Edmonton, Alberta, through his education at Cambridge and
teaching in Americaa 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. Written in the best tradition of intellectual
biography, Marshall McLuhan: Escape Into Understanding will infect readers
with the vitality of McLuhan's ideas, drawing them with an indelible image of
the warm, whimsical, spiritual man whose playful conceptual explorations revolutionized
the way we see the world. W. Terrence Gordon, Ph.D.,
studied at the University of Toronto, where he received his undergraduate and
graduate degrees. He is the author of twelve books, including McLuhan for Beginners,
and more than one hundred articles in the fields of linguistics, pedagogy, semiotics,
and intellectual history. Since 1972, Gordon has been on the faculty of Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches courses in linguistics, translating,
the role of radio in World War II, and, of course, McLuhan. |
