Monday, May 15, 2006
Hart House Library (7 Hart House Circle), 7:30pm

In a night that is certain to be an incredible voyage through history, widely published journalist, translator, and author of the highly acclaimed Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I, and best-selling Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of Cathars, Stephen O’Shea brings us his magnificent work of the 1,000-year struggle which stretches from Syria and Israel to France and Morocco, a popular history and timely reminder of our shared past, Sea of Faith: Christianity and Islam in the Medieval World.

Also joining us is the author of several books, including The Return of Martin Guerre and Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Natalie Zemon Davis is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of History and Senior Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Natalie brings us an engrossing study of Leo Africanus and his famous book, which introduced Africa to European readers, in her new book Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Hart House East Common Room, 7:30pm

Lorraine Johnson, author Tending the Earth, and contributor to Canadian
Gardening , Gardening Life, and This Magazine, and member of the board of
directors of the North American Native Plant Society, moderates a discussion
that is sure to spark debate!

Mark Jaccard, author of Sustainable Fossil
Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy,
shortlisted for the 2005 Donner Prize, believes that we have the
technological capability to use fossil fuels without emitting pollutants.

Terry Glavin, author of Waiting for the Macaws, believes that all
extinctions are related and that the language of environmentalism is
inadequate to describing this great unravelling.

Wayne Grady, author of Bringing Back the Dodo and co-author of the bestselling Tree: A Life Story, was written in collaboration with David Suzuki, searches our history and prehistory to explain why humans love nature and fear it at the same time.

Monday, April 10, 2006
Hart House Library (7 Hart House Circle), 7:30pm

Rudy Wiebe, an international lecturer, college and university teacher, writer of numerous film and television scripts, author of Peace Shall Destroy Many, First and Vital Candle, Governor General’s Award winner The Temptations of Big Bear, brings us Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. It is a beautiful, moving memoir of a boy’s coming of age, in the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community – and Rudy’s first home.

Jonathan Vance, historian and storyteller, author of High Flight, brings us Building Canada, an imaginative look at the architecture, transportation, and icons that made Canada what it is today. It brings to life overlooked episodes in this country’s growth and shows how twelve far-reaching building projects shaped the nation’s life, culture, and identity.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Hart House Library (7 Hart House Circle), 7:30pm

Random House of Canada and the Reading Series are pleased to present a night of fiction.

Mark Frutkin brings us a brilliant novel Fabrizio’s Return, packed with delights: grand romance, alchemical potions, violins to make you weep, commedia dell’arte theatre, reappearing comets, rambling skeletons and cracks in time.

Dr. Vincent Lam brings us the short story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, an astonishing literary debut, a collection of mature and intricate stories connected through the relationships that develop among a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of med school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evac missions, and terrifying new viruses.