The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America’s most influential media moguls.

When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire at the height of the Great Depression to create the prestigious Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. The Crash of 1929 could not stop the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day become Canada’s prime minister. But the self-made McCullagh had a dark side. His glamorous lifestyle, dazzling friends, and ruthless use of political power were dogged by bipolar disorder. It destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him. The man who shook up Canada’s media, owned politicians, and came so very close to national political power was all but written out of our history: you’ve probably never heard of him because there was a successful campaign to erase him from public memory. The company that bought the Globe and Mail tried to hide the shame of McCullagh’s suicide by removing his name from the paper’s masthead and effectively disowning him. His wife burned his papers, making it difficult to write his biography. Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s life story one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history -until now. In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning journalist and historian Mark Bourrie bird-dogs the surviving fragments of McCullagh’s life to tell the remarkable story of McCullagh’s audacious, inspirational rise and his devastating fall.