Download or read book More Lost Massey Lectures written by George Grant and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broadcasting fixture for more than 45 years and Canada’s preeminent public lecture series, the CBC's Massey Lectures feature provocative talks on pressing topics by major contemporary thinkers. Some of the series’ finest lectures have been lost for many years, unavailable to the public in any form — until now. More Lost Massey Lectures presents recently rediscovered talks: Nobel Prize-winner Willy Brandt discusses the dangerous inequities between developing and industrialized nations while Barbara Ward explains the origin and predicament of underdeveloped countries and Frank Underhill speaks on the deficiencies of the Canadian constitution. George Grant's talk on the worsening predicament of the West through an examination of Friedrich Nietzsche is joined by Claude Levi-Strauss on the nature of myth and its role in human history. Not only of considerable historical significance, these lectures remain hugely relevant in the 21st century. Also included is an introduction by veteran CBC producer Bernie Lucht.
Download or read book The Lost Massey Lectures written by and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of five Massey lectures are reprinted in their entirety. The authors include: John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Goodman, Jane Jacobs, Eric W. Kierans, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Download or read book Therefore Choose Life written by George Wald and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2017-09-09 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This recently discovered and very timely 1970 Massey Lectures by Nobel Prize-winning scientist George Wald, now in print for the first time ever. Where did we come from, who are we, and what is to become of us — these questions have never been more urgent. Then, as now, the world is facing major political and social upheaval, from overpopulation to nuclear warfare to environmental degradation and the uses and abuses of technology. Using scientific fact as metaphor, Nobel Prize–winning scientist George Wald meditates on our place, and role, on Earth and in the universe. He urges us to therefore choose life — to invest in our capabilities as human beings, to heed the warnings of our own self-destruction, and above all to honour our humanity.
Download or read book Out of the Sun written by Esi Edugyan and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us. In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.
Download or read book The Truth about Stories written by Thomas King and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.
Download or read book Time as History written by George Parkin Grant and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Time as History, a collection of his 1969 Massey lectures, George Grant reviews the thought of Nietzsche and concludes that the conception of time as history is not one in which it is possible to live a fully human life. Grant was the first Canadian philosopher to pay serious attention to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his analysis of the German philosopher forms the central focus of the lectures. William Christian has restored material from the broadcast version of the lectures. His introduction places Grant's interest in Nietzsche in the perspective of Grant's developing analysis of technology and draws extensively on Grant's unpublished notebooks and lectures.
Download or read book All Our Relations US Edition written by Tanya Talaga and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2024 Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize, for the whole of her work Finalist, 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding Finalist, 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Tanya Talaga, the bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples — youth suicide. “Talaga’s research is meticulous and her journalistic style is crisp and uncompromising. She brings each story to life, skillfully weaving the stories of the youths’ lives, deaths, and families together with sharp analysis... The book is heartbreaking and infuriating, both an important testament to the need for change and a call to action.” — Publishers Weekly *Starred Review* “Talaga has crafted an urgent and unshakable portrait of the horrors faced by Indigenous teens going to school in Thunder Bay, Ontario... Talaga’s incisive research and breathtaking storytelling could bring this community one step closer to the healing it deserves.” — Booklist *Starred Review* In this urgent and incisive work, bestselling and award-winning author Tanya Talaga explores the alarming rise of youth suicide in Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health — income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services — leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism. Based on her Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series, All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.
Download or read book Power Shift written by Sally Armstrong and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong argues that humankind requires the equal status of women and girls. The facts are indisputable. When women get even a bit of education, the whole of society improves. When they get a bit of healthcare, everyone lives longer. In many ways, it has never been a better time to be a woman: a fundamental shift has been occurring. Yet from Toronto to Timbuktu the promise of equality still eludes half the world’s population. In her 2019 CBC Massey Lectures, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong illustrates how the status of the female half of humanity is crucial to our collective surviving and thriving. Drawing on anthropology, social science, literature, politics, and economics, she examines the many beginnings of the role of women in society, and the evolutionary revisions over millennia in the realms of sex, religion, custom, culture, politics, and economics. What ultimately comes to light is that gender inequality comes at too high a cost to us all.
Download or read book The Wayfinders written by Wade Davis and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within our lifetimes. And languages are merely the canaries in the coal mine: what of the knowledge, stories, songs, and ways of seeing encoded in these voices? In The Wayfinders, Wade Davis offers a gripping and enlightening account of this urgent crisis. He leads us on a fascinating tour through a handful of indigenous cultures, describing the worldviews they represent and reminding us of the encroaching danger to humankind's survival should they vanish.
Download or read book Player One written by Douglas Coupland and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in a new edition with a cover designed by the author, Douglas Coupland’s CBC Massey Lectures is an innovative exploration of the modern crises of our time. Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, a down-on-his-luck bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcockian blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, over the course of the five-hour story, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end. Acclaimed novelist and visual artist Douglas Coupland probes human identity, society, religion, macroeconomics, and the afterlife in the inventive 2010 CBC Massey Lectures. Asking as many questions as it answers, Player One will leave readers with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species — and that there is no turning back.
Download or read book Democracy on Trial written by Jean Bethke Elshtain and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is democracy as we know it in danger? More and more we confront one another as aggrieved groups rather than as free citizens. Deepening cynicism, the growth of corrosive individualism, statism, and the loss of civil society are warning signs that democracy may be incapable of satisfying the yearnings it itself unleashes — yearnings for freedom, fairness, and equality.In her 1993 CBC Massey Lectures, political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain delves into these complex issues to evaluate democracy's chances for survival.
Download or read book Necessary Illusions written by Noam Chomsky and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the media serves the needs of those in power rather than performing a watchdog role, and looks at specific cases and issues
Download or read book The Return of History written by Jennifer Welsh and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 2016 CBC Massey Lectures, former Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General and international relations specialist Jennifer Welsh delivers a timely, intelligent, and fascinating analysis of twenty-first-century geopolitics. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Cold War dissipated, the American political commentator Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous essay, entitled “The End of History,” which argued that the demise of confrontation between Communism and capitalism, and the expansion of Western liberal democracy, signalled the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural and political evolution, and the path toward a more peaceful world. But a quarter of a century after Fukuyama’s bold prediction, history has returned: arbitrary executions, attempts to annihilate ethnic and religious minorities, the starvation of besieged populations, invasion and annexation of territory, and the mass movement of refugees and displaced persons. It has also witnessed cracks and cleavages within Western liberal democracies as a result of deepening economic inequality. The Return of History argues that our own liberal democratic society was not inevitable, but that we must all, as individual citizens, take a more active role in its preservation and growth.
Download or read book History s People written by Margaret MacMillan and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the CBC Massey Lectures Series In History’s People internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of figures of the past, women and men, some famous and some little-known, who stand out for her. Some have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. Others are memorable for being risk-takers, adventurers, or observers. She looks at the concept of leadership through Bismarck and the unification of Germany; William Lyon MacKenzie King and the preservation of the Canadian Federation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the bringing of a unified United States into the Second World War. She also notes how leaders can make huge and often destructive mistakes, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Thatcher. Richard Nixon and Samuel de Champlain are examples of daring risk-takers who stubbornly went their own ways, often in defiance of their own societies. Then there are the dreamers, explorers, and adventurers, individuals like Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe who manage to defy or ignore the constraints of their own societies. Finally, there are the observers, such as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, and Victor Klemperer, a Holocaust survivor, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life. History’s People is about the important and complex relationship between biography and history, individuals and their times.
Download or read book In Search of A Better World written by Payam Akhavan and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2017-09-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of memoir, history, and a call to action, the CBC Massey Lectures by internationally renowned UN prosecutor and scholar Payam Akhavan is a powerful and essential work on the major human rights struggles of our times. Renowned UN prosecutor and human rights scholar Payam Akhavan has encountered the grim realities of contemporary genocide throughout his life and career. He argues that deceptive utopias, political cynicism, and public apathy have given rise to major human rights abuses: from the religious persecution of Iranian Bahá’ís that shaped his personal life, to the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the rise of contemporary phenomena such as the Islamic State. But he also reflects on the inspiring resilience of the human spirit and the reality of our inextricable interdependence to liberate us, whether from hateful ideologies that deny the humanity of others or an empty consumerist culture that worships greed and self-indulgence. A timely, essential, and passionate work of memoir and history, In Search of a Better World is a tour de force by an internationally renowned human rights lawyer.
Download or read book Payback written by Margaret Atwood and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores debt as a central historical component of religion, literature, and societal structure, while examining the idea of humanity's debt to the natural world.
Download or read book What I Mean to Say written by Ian Williams and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enough small talk. Let’s get right to it: Why can’t we talk to each other anymore? What makes good communication? And how do we restore the lost art of conversation? In contemporary society, much of our communication exists in a new dimension, the online space, and it’s changing how we regard each other and how we converse. In the digital realm, we can be anonymous, we can make false and hurtful comments yet evade consequences in a hurried scroll of clicks and swipes. But a good conversation takes time and patience, courage, even. We need to realize that one-half of our conversations is, in fact, listening. And aren't the best conversationalists—like the best musicians—good listeners? With What I Mean to Say, award-winning novelist and poet Ian Williams seeks to ignite a conversation about conversation, to confront the deterioration of civic and civil discourse, and to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings. Alternately serious and playful, Williams nimbly leaps between topics of discussion and, along the way, is discursive, digressive, and endlessly generous—like any great conversationalist.
