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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. [via]