Author Description

Decades after he began his intellectual adventure, and even decades after his cameo in Annie Hall, McLuhan remains a series of open questions, one of the simplest being "Was he right?" In 14 essays, contributors examine facets of McLuhan's theories and their applications by various enthusiasts and detractors. The authors make no effort to review McLuhan as whole cloth any more than did McLuhan himself, and the result is remarkably free of simple answers to the simplest question. However, they do examine such diverse issues as McLuhan's continued influence, Canadian communication thought, the rise of the legacy of modernist writers, postcolonial contexts in hybrid media, a review of spatial information, including McLuhan in space, what McLuhan got wrong, poetry about the space in which McLuhan spent his last dozen years, and a panel discussion about trouble brewing in the global village. Distributed by the U. of Toronto Press. Annotation: 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).