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Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.
In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ.
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"In this year's highly anticipated Massey Lectures, internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of the great figures of the past, women and men, who have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times--and sometimes with huge consequences, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Thatcher. She also acknowledges people such as Richard Nixon and George W. Bush who stubbornly went...
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"Once, it was conventional wisdom to assume that digital technologies would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society. Rather than facilitating unity and the emergence of a common ideology based on science, the internet and social media have proven to be vehicles used to spread falsehoods, pollute the public sphere, and subject populations to wholesale surveillance. People are also spending an...
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Turok explores the transformative scientific discovers of the past three centuries, from classical mechanics to the nature of light and the evolution of the cosmos, and shows how they created shifts in the organization of society. He argues that we are on the cusp of another major transformation: the coming quantum revolution that will supplant our current digital age.
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Massey lectures volume 1967
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From the Dust Jacket: In November and December 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered five lectures for the renowned Massey Lecture Series of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The collection was immediately released as a book under the title Conscience for Change, but after King's assassination in 1968, it was republished as The Trumpet of Conscience. The collection sums up his lasting creed and is his final testament on racism, poverty,...
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Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopniks kaleidoscopic work ends in...
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Offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today. Blood runs red through every person's arteries, and fulfills the same functions in every human being. However, as much as the study and use of blood has helped advance our understanding of human biology, its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses through religions, literature, and...
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In February of 2017, Amnesty International released their Annual Report for 2016 to 2017, concluding that the "us versus them" rhetoric increasingly employed by politicians is endangering human rights the world over. 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...
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"Brilliant, jubilant insights into the glory and anguish of life from one of the world's most treasured Indigenous creators. Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap lunatic. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have one blast of a time, to laugh ourselves to death. Ever the trickster, Tomson Highway brings his signature irreverence to an exploration of five themes central to the human condition: language,...
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"Two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan delivers an incisive analysis of the relationship between race and art. History is a construction. 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...
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Every single year in Canada, one-third of all deaths among Indigenous youth are due to suicide. Studies indicate youth between the ages of ten and nineteen, living on reserve, are five to six times more likely to commit suicide than their peers in the rest of the population. Suicide is a new behaviour for First Nations people. There is no record of any suicide epidemics prior to the establishment of the 130 residential schools across Canada. Bestselling...
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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...
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Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water -- the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing...
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In his national bestselling 1988 CBC Massey Lectures, Noam Chomsky inquires into the nature of the media in a political system where the population cannot be disciplined by force and thus must be subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control. Specific cases are illustrated in detail, using the U.S. media primarily but also media in other societies. Chomsky considers how the media might be democratized (as part of the general problem of developing...
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The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form. This is the second volume of recovered lectures, a follow-on to The Lost Massey Lectures, and features: Nobel Peace Prize recipient Willy Brandt on the dangerous inequities...
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A passionate argument for the geopolitical autonomy of Latin America, Carlos Fuentes's 1984 CBC Massey lectures trace the region's unique historical and cultural tensions and call upon foreign powers to cease interference in a sphere of influence they rarely fully understand. Fuentes sees the turbulence in Latin America ending not with political solutions, but economic ones. Foreshadowing the end of the Cold War, the signing and expansion of NAFTA,...
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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." Fukuyama 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, the waning of traditional power politics, and the path toward a more peaceful...
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Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear, The Discarded Tools of Modern Man, A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Science in the Service of Man, The Future That Can Be Demanded Now, The Free Man in a Cybernetic World. Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world.
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Narrative has been central to human life for millennia, and the twentieth century has been preeminently the age of the story. Mass culture and mass leisure have enabled us to spend far more time absorbing stories, real and imaginary, than any of our ancestors. Whether or not this has been to our benefit is one of the questions raised by journalist and 1999 CBC Massey lecturer Robert Fulford. Narrative, Fulford points out, is how we explain, how we...
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