In Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan (Viking $26),novelist-turned-psychopathologist Douglas Coupland gives us two great thinkers at once-a father-son act of Canadian minding-bending-with his original appreciation of Canada's most enigmatic intellectual, Marshall McLuhan, citing McLuhan's autistic leanings as a possible source for his creativity. Coupland, author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, also traces the evolution of McLuhan's growth as a "cantankerous conservative,"; including his conversion to Catholicism, his indebtedness to University of Toronto academic Harold Innis, his dislike for the Biblical scholar Northrop Frye and his fascinations with Ezra Pound and Dagwood Bumstead cartoons.

Still best-known for "the medium is the message,"; McLuhan is given his due as an artist, rather than as a philosopher or futurist. In doing so, Coupland speculates that future biographers might examine brain chemistry as much as environment and history.
Back in the early 1960s, McLuhan also predicted that that visual, individualistic print culture would be replaced by what he called "electronic interdependence,"; creating a new "global village"; characterized by a collective identity with a tribal base. Jeez, the guy even predicted the Internet. 9780670069224

[BCBW 2010]