Thursday, November 20, 2008
Robert Gill Theatre, 214 College St. (3rd floor, St. George entrance)
7:30pm
Free. Limited seating.

An evening of lecture and Q & A.

David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream is the enthralling story of an adventurer who was also an able leader with a rare vision for a new world founded on harmony and respect – where Europeans and Aboriginals would cooperate for mutual benefit. A complex, elusive man among many colourful characters, Samuel de Champlain participated in palace intrigues, endured raging storms at sea and fought with his Indian allies in ferocious wars. Champlain’s Dream brings to life a remarkable man.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham is one of the pivotal events in North American and global history. This clash between British general James Wolfe and French general Louis-Joseph de Montcalm on September 13, 1759, led to the British victory in the Seven Years’ War in North America, which in turn led to the creation of Canada and the United States as we know them today.

Rooted in original research, featuring quotations and images that have never appeared before, Northern Armageddon immerses the reader in the campaign, battle and siege through the eyes of dozens of participants, such as British sailor William Hunter, four Quebec residents enduring the bombing of their city and a teenage Huron warrior. Shifting from perspective to perspective, we move from the bombardment of Quebec to the field of combat, where Montcalm and Wolfe gave their orders but thousands of individual soldiers determined the outcome of the battle. In the final chapters, MacLeod traces the battle’s impact on Canada, the United States, both countries’ Aboriginals and the world, from 1759 into the twenty-first century.

David Hackett Fischer, University Professor at Brandeis University, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for Washington’s Crossing, which was also a New York Times bestseller. His other acclaimed books include Albion’s Seed and Paul Revere’s Ride.

D. Peter MacLeod is the pre-Confederation historian at the Canadian War Museum, where he curated the permanent exhibits on the Seven Years’ War and The Battle of the Plains of Abraham. He is the author of The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War.

Presented in partnership with

Monday, November 3 2008
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.
7:30pm
Tickets $5. Limited seating.
For tickets call: (416) 640-5836 or visit the Refunds desk at 214 College St.

A humourous lecture.

In this topsy turvy world, look to Old Father William to reveal to you the extraordinary order of the universe. Old Father William has retreated to the smallest room in the house. There, in the full flush of solitude, he gathers the worldly strands and snippets that filter into his hermitage and does his addled best to weave them into something, anything, that will help him make sense of the dreadful universe that heaves and churns on the other side of the walls.

Keith Richards and George Bernard Shaw were both damaged when they fell from trees. Prince Philip, husband of the Queen of England, and John Holmes, the star of over 2,000 pornographic movies, were both born on the kitchen table: different tables in different kitchens, it’s true. But nonetheless: what does it mean? What famous composer was autopsied in a tool shed? What was the name of the woman who invented the dishwasher in a tool shed? When did Mr. Harley and Mr. Davidson invent their motorcycle in a tool shed and what do they have to do with Pamela Anderson, anyway? And what, what, what does it mean when you put it all together?

Whether you labour over these pages or whether you read them in quick and easy spurts, this is a book that will make you want to skip to the loo, my darling. Let the private sanctum of the bathroom become for you, as it has become for Old Father William, a place as much about making sense as making scents.

Bill Richardson is a well-known columnist, writer, humourist and former radio host for the CBC. His dozen books include The Bachelor Brothers Bed and Breakfast, which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1994. He has also written successfully for young adults: his novel After Hamelin won the prestigious Silver Birch Award. He lives in Vancouver.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Hart House Library, 7 Hart House Circle
7:30pm
Free. Limited seating. Call 416-640-5836 for details.

An evening of lecture and Q & A.

Presented in partnership with

Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane tells the story of a daring nineteenth-century explorer who went in search of an Open Polar Sea at the top of the world, hoping to rescue survivors from a lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin.

Race to the Polar Sea is the fourth and final volume in Ken’s Fatal Passage Quartet. You can read all about it in the April-May issue of The Beaver magazine. At this point, you should know three things.

1. The book is timely. Everybody has seen the headlines. The retreat of the polar ice cap has put the Arctic on front pages around the world. Certainly, Race to the Polar Sea arises out of the nineteenth century. But Elisha Kane was the most literate of all explorers. And he left such a vivid word-picture of the Arctic that it constitutes a singular touchstone. In September 2007, while sailing in the Northwest Passage, where once Kane struggled through upraised tables of ice fourteen feet thick, Ken encountered nothing but open water. That contrast makes this book relevant: it speaks to global warming.

2. Race to the Polar Sea draws on a long-lost journal. Almost by chance, after doing research in Kane’s hometown Philadelphia, Ken learned that a Calgary antiquarian had acquired material from the Kane family. While investigating that material, he made an stunning discovery: a handwritten, 376-page logbook from Kane’s second expedition. This private journal, missing for 150 years, sheds new light on Kane’s entire life.

3. Elisha Kane has been mistreated by history. After surviving two horrific winters in the Arctic, making notable discoveries, and forging a unique alliance with the Inuit, Kane led his men in the most dramatic escape in Arctic history, man-hauling sledges and sailing hundreds of kilometres in small open boats. Question: Why has this man been so completely forgotten? Answer: Kane secretly married a young woman named Maggie Fox – a spiritualist born and raised in what is now Prince Edward County, Ontario. Maggie died tragically – and for this, Elisha Kane has been wrongly blamed. Race to the Polar Sea sets the record straight.

When Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in 1945, its records revealed that two young Canadians, Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill, were among its countless victims. At 30 and 31 years of age, they had been agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE ), an undercover unit established by Winston Churchill that used sabotage and subversion to bring down the Nazi regime from within.

Jonathan F. Vance brings us the dramatic, untold story of two men who were the most unlikely of soldiers. Pickersgill, an up-and coming journalist, and Macalister, one of the finest law students ever to attend the University of Toronto, were both living in France when the Nazis seized power. Pickersgill, arrested as an enemy alien, spent two years in prison before escaping to England.

The men’s intelligence, resourcefulness and familiarity with French customs and language caught the attention of the SOE. Trained in special-operations techniques, from radio control to killing, they were paired together and parachuted into France—just as the underground network they were to join was cracked open by the Germans.

Unlikely Soldiers is an extraordinary tale of unsung heroes, intrigue and tragic error. With access to the recently opened SOE archives, Vance draws new material into a fascinating narrative that will appeal to anyone interested in military history, the evolution of espionage, or simply the remarkable story of two heroic Canadians.

Above the village of Châtillon-sur-Cher on the night of June 15/16, 1943, Frank and Ken sat in the fuselage of the Halifax and watched as the dispatcher hooked their parachutes to the static line. Seconds later, the red light blinked on, the dispatcher pulled the cover off the chute in the floor, and the two Canadians sat down. . . . Then the green light flashed . . . and Ken and Frank were gone.
—From Unlikely Soldiers

Ken McGoogan is the author of the national bestsellers Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner and Lady Franklin’s Revenge. One of Canada’s leading historical biographers, he has won the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the CAA History Award, the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award and a Christopher Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Pierre Berton Award for his body of work. A film adaptation of Fatal Passage will be released in 2008. Visit his website at www.kenmcgoogan.ca.

Jonathan F. Vance is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture. His books include High Flight, Building Canada and Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, which won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the C. P. Stacey Award and the Dafoe Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail and a reviewer for The Beaver, Vance is on the advisory committee of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Thursday, November 6, 2008 @ 7:30pm
Hart House Library, 7 Hart House Circle
Free. Limited seating.
Interviewer CBC’s Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.

A bold revision of one of the most successful theories of all time: Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Physicists have long known that something is wrong with gravity. Einstein’s relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, which has prompted the last 30 years of work in string theory and quantum gravity. However, John Moffat has identified a bigger problem: not only does Einstein’s theory not work in the world of the very small; it does not seem to work in the world of the very large either.

Moffat has developed a modified theory of gravity, or MOG, that can explain the behaviour of our universe as well as Einstein’s, without resorting to dubious, yet long-claimed excuse for the existence of invisible “dark matter.” As John Barrow of the University of Cambridge asserts, the simplicity of Moffat’s model demands that physicists take this daring new theory seriously.

Now, for the first time, “Reinventing Gravity” introduces general readers to Moffat’s groundbreaking new ideas about the universe.

An enjoyable and compelling ride through one of life’s most fascinating enigmas.

“What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know,” St. Augustine of Hippo lamented. “But if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

Who wouldn’t sympathize with Augustine’s dilemma? Time is at once intimately familiar and yet deeply mysterious. It is thoroughly intangible: We say it flows like a river — yet when we try to examine that flow, the river seems reduced to a mirage. No wonder philosophers, poets, and scientists have grappled with the idea of time for centuries.

The enigma of time has also captivated science journalist Dan Falk, who sets off on an intellectual journey In Search of Time. The quest takes him from the ancient observatories of stone-age Ireland and England to the atomic clocks of the U.S. Naval Observatory; from the layers of geological “deep time” in an Arizona canyon to Albert Einstein’s apartment in Switzerland. Along the way he talks to scientists and scholars from California to New York, from Toronto to Oxford. He speaks with anthropologists and historians about our deep desire to track time’s cycles; he talks to psychologists and neuroscientists about the mysteries of memory; he quizzes astronomers about the beginning and end of time. Not to mention our latest theories about time travel — and the paradoxes it seems to entail. We meet great minds from Aristotle to Kant, from Newton to Einstein — and we hear from today’s most profound thinkers: Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Julian Barbour, David Deutsch, Lee Smolin, and many more.

As usual, Dan Falk’s style combines exhaustive research with a lively, accessible, and often humorous style, making In Search of Time a delightful tour through a most curious dimension.

John W. Moffat is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. He is also a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Moffat earned a doctorate in Physics at the University of Cambridge.

Dan Falk has written about science for the Globe and Mail, National Post, Walrus, and New Scientist, and has been a regular contributor to the CBC Radio programs Ideas and Quirks and Quarks. He is the winner of the 2002 Canadian Science Writers’ Association Science in Society Journalism Award, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, for Universe on a T-shirt, and the 1999 American Institute of Physics’ Science Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy.

Bob McDonald is the host of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks. One of Canada’s best known science journalists, Bob has been presenting the program since 1992. Bob is also a weekly science commentator on CBC Newsworld Morning, and science correspondent for CBC TV’s The National. Before joining Quirks & Quarks, Bob was the host of CBC Televison’s children’s science program Wonderstruck. He is also the author of two books based on the program, Wonderstruck I and Wonderstruck II.