During the 1960s, Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan became world famous for his studies of the effects of mass media and technology on modern culture. An academic rebel and a brilliant linguist who loved puns and wordplay, McLuhan published several breakthrough books, including "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962) and "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (1964). McLuhanisms like "the global village" and "the medium is the message" have become part of our everyday vocabulary. A number of McLuhan's revolutionary ideas baffled and astonished audiences during his lifetime. Now, in the first decade of the new millennium, he seems to have been an explorer who peered into the future and mapped its contours in living colour. He described the nature and dynamics of the Internet many years before it even existed. A giant on the cultural landscape, McLuhan equipped the planet's current population with the mental charts and maps to learn its way through the maze of what he termed the Age of Information. In this book, award-winning poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald presents a fascinating portrait of one of the twentieth century's great thinkers and the guru of media culture.

Fitzgerald's own humorous wordplay captures the wise-cracking spirit of McLuhan as she traces the trajectory of his life from his prairie childhood, Cambridge education, happy marriage and conversion to Roman Catholicism, to his teaching years in the United States prior to taking up the position of director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.