“As Albert Camus wrote, the doctor’s role is as a witness–to witness authentically the reality of humanity, and to speak out against the horrors of political inaction. . . . The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.”—James OrbinskiIn 1988, after a year-long research trip investigating pediatric AIDS in Africa, Dr. James Orbinski was inspired to work with others to establish the Canadian chapter...

For four decades, Ideas has presented more than 400,000 CBC Radio listeners in Canada and the United States with the most challenging contemporary thought of the day. Now, to mark the program’s 40th anniversary, executive producer Bernie Lucht has selected the most striking interviews and lectures for Ideas: Brilliant Thinker Speak Their Minds. Featuring some the best thinkers from North America and around the world that have appeared on the program since its beginnings in 1965, Ideas: Bri...

For readers of Christopher Hedges, Robert Fisk, and Christopher Hitchens, an extraordinary humanitarian gives us a bracing and uncompromising account of her work in some of the most devastated corners of the world -- and a new and provocative vision for changing course on our growing militarization.In 1995, twenty-five-year-old Samantha Nutt, a recent medical-school graduate and a field volunteer for UNICEF, touched down in Baidoa, Somalia, "the City of Death." What she saw there -...

"What good is the study of literature? Does it help us think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?" Written in the relaxed and frequently humorous style of his public lectures, this remains, of Northrop Frye's many books, perhaps the easiest introduction to his theories of literature and literary education.

"A book about secrets and surveillance . . . [from] one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing" (Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark).In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fu...

'Breathtakingly entertaining, endlessly instructive, irresistibly enjoyable' THE TIMES'A tour de force ... breathtaking' SPECTATOR'A magnificent achievement' LITERARY REVIEWTERRIBLE BEAUTY presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. Unlike more conventional histories, where the focus is on political events and personalities, on wars, treaties and elections, this book concentrates on the ideas that made the...

"Andrew Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who's in power, which may be why those of both the left and right listen to him."—Bill MoyersAn immediate New York Times bestseller, The Limits of Power offers an unparalleled examination of the profound triple crisis facing America: an economy in disarray that can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad; a government transformed by an imperial presidency into a democracy in name only; an...

As the 100th anniversary of World War I approaches, historian Margaret MacMillan compares current global tensions-rising nationalism, globalization’s economic pressures, sectarian strife, and the United States’ fading role as the world’s pre-eminent superpower-to the period preceding the Great War. In illuminating the years before 1914, MacMillan shows the many parallels between then and now, telling an urgent story for our time. THE BROOKINGS ESSAY: In the spirit of its commitment to high...

The first book of criticism from the acclaimed author of After Babel—a "provocative and probing" look at Russian literature's most influential writers ( The New York Times)."Literary criticism," writes Steiner, "should arise out of a debt of love." Abiding by his own rule, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is an impassioned work, inspired by Steiner's conviction that the legacies of these two Russian masters loom over Western literature. By explaining...

Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Commission "succeeded, within six...

Published with a new afterword from the author—the classic, bestselling account of how the modern Middle East was createdThe Middle East has long been a region of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and ambitions. All of these conflicts—including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis, and the violent challenges posed by Iraq's competing sects—are rooted in the region's political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed by the Allies...