Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!

A crackling look at the philosopher whose founding ideas were at once obscure and eerily prophetic.

Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is remembered now primarily for the aphoristic slogan he coined to explain the emerging new world of global communication: The medium is the message. Half a century later, McLuhans predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of electronic inter-dependence have become a realityin a sense, the realityof our time.

Douglas Coupland, whose iconic novel Generation X was a McLuhanesque account of our culture in fictional form, has written a compact biography of the cultural critic that interprets the life and work of his subject from inside. A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global villagenow known as the Internethas come to pass in the 21st century.