Marconi: The Man Who Networked the world is shortlisted for the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. Winners will be announced on October 25th.
For more details, please visit GGBooks.
Marc Raboy reads from Marconi at Montreal book launch
There was a full house at Montreal’s Robin des Bois restaurant tonight to celebrate the publication of Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World and hear the author read from the book.
Watch the video
Marconi reviewed in Wall Street Journal
“Mr. Raboy’s book is a rock-solid, archivally based, professional work of history and surely one of the year’s better biographies.”
Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World was reviewed today in the WSJ by Paul Kennedy. To read the full review, please visit “The World’s First Communications Giant”.
Marc Raboy begins term as Chair of McGill’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies
This Fall, Marc Raboy begins his term as the Chair of McGill University’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies.
For more information, visit: www.mcgill.ca/ahcs
Marconi reviewed in New York Times. Major reviews have also appeared so far in Nature and New Scientist
Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World was reviewed in the New York Times, Nature, and New Scientist.
“[Raboy] is especially adroit at portraying how Marconi was swept up in the modern world he helped create… Marconi really hums when Raboy details how his subject was implicated in the social and political effects of wireless…Marconi, which functions as a cultural history as much as a biography, reminds us that in its earliest incarnations, wireless had a romance and mystique.”
“In a New Biography, How Marconi’s Start-Up Changed the World”, Greg Milner, New York Times
“Raboy superbly traces every twist and turn of Marconi’s life, showing us his influences, business strategies and shrewd management of his own public persona. Raboy skilfully locates his activities in the context of communications policy, the arms race between Britain and Germany, and popular culture.”
“Technology: Revolutionary of radio”, WB Carlson, Nature
“…at long last, we are offered a clearer picture in Marconi: The man who networked the world, a deeply researched and almost all-encompassing biography by Canadian media studies academic, Marc Raboy.”
“Marconi forged today’s interconnected world of communication”, Andrew Robinson, New Scientist
Excerpt from Marconi published in The Daily Beast
How Marconi Gave Us the Wireless World
In giving us the wireless world, the Irish-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi was arguably the first truly global figure in modern communication
Contact: A hundred years before iconic figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs permeated our lives, 60 years before Marshall McLuhan proclaimed media to be “the extensions of man,” an Irish-Italian inventor laid the foundation of the communication explosion of the 21st century. Guglielmo Marconi was arguably the first truly global figure in modern communication. Not only was he the first to communicate globally, he was the first to think globally about communication. Marconi may not have been the greatest inventor of his time, but more than anyone else, he brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
Op-ed by Marc Raboy published in Los Angeles Times
“The first company that wanted to ‘connect the world’ wasn’t Google or Facebook”
Marc Raboy interviewed by Phillip Adams on Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Late Night Live
Marc Raboy was interviewed by host Phillip Adams on the ABC’s Radio National program Late Night Live.
Listen to the episode here.
Marc Raboy chairs plenary session on Communication Rights at IAMCR conference in Leicester, UK
Marc Raboy chairs a plenary session on Communication Rights at the 2016 International Association for Media and Communication Research conference in Leicester, UK on July 29th. More details on the conference’s plenaries are available here. The theme of IAMCR 2016 is “Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward”.
Book Announcement | Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World
“An obvious labor of love, this is the definitive biography of Marconi.”
—Susan J. Douglas, author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination
“MARCONI is a tour de force, revealing the fascinating history of one of the most influential figures in the history of modern technology and the communications revolution.”
—David Kertzer, author of The Pope and Mussolini, Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Guglielmo Marconi is arguably the central founding figure of the age of digital media. The pioneer of long-distance radio transmission, his genius innovation in communications irrevocably changed the world; ships could communicate with other ships, financial markets across the world could coordinate, and news could be disseminated—everywhere and instantaneously. Before the age of 40, Marconi was decorated by the Czar of Russia, became an Italian Senator, was knighted by King George V of England, and awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Despite his overwhelming influence on media and technology today, Marconi remains a somewhat enigmatic figure. His life and career have never been thoroughly examined and, in MARCONI: The Man Who Networked the World, Marc Raboy remedies the situation. He chronicles the man’s brilliant work as a physicist as well his personal life, from his relationship to fascism as a leading pillar in Mussolini’s regime to his relationships with his wives, lovers, mistresses, and children. Guglielmo Marconi was a fascinating man whose influence helped shape the early 20th century.
MARCONI: The Man Who Networked the World
by Marc Raboy, published in hardcover by Oxford University Press on July 27, 2016
($39.95 | 832p | ISBN: 9780199313587).