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Her weakest moment spawned a crusade for change. Julie Devaney takes us on a journey through the health care system as she is diagnosed and treated for ulcerative colitis. In and out of emergency rooms in Vancouver and Toronto, she’s poked, prodded, and abandoned to a closet at one point, bearing the helplessness and indignities of a system that seems hell-bent on victimizing the sick. Raw, harrowing, and darkly funny, Julie Devaney argues convincingly for fixes to the system and better training for all medical personnel.

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard believes his charismatic father is infallible. Wild, unpredictable, even dangerous, André is worshipped by his young son, who believes that his father can do no wrong. When the boy discovers his father’s true identity — and the crime sprees and prison sentences attached to it — his imagination is set on fire. Before long, he is imagining himself as a character in one of his father’s stories.

Knitting is a booming pastime, enjoying a resurgence of interest, spawning books, movies, a brisk online trade in wool and knitted goods — even trade fairs. In Canada, Cottage Craft has long held a strong reputation for its fine wool, dyed to the palette of the local landscape, and the fine craftsmanship of the women who weave and knit its quality materials. Behind Cottage Craft is the story of a woman of vision and remarkable resolve.

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it? Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering, and controlling the world, where everything was subject to science, but science itself has largely escaped scrutiny. In this fascinating collection of interviews, CBC Radio's Ideas producer David Cayley talks to some of the world's most provocative thinkers about how the ideas of science have directed human thought and shaped human society.

In 1943, Northrop Frye wrote a paper, left unfinished, on "the state of the world." His ideas of what to expect after the end of the war and the role that literature might play in a time of peace, are the starting point for a meditation on the roles of writer and reader, and what kind of vision is required of them to explore and depict the world. Homer is the archetype of the writer who can see into the future through his knowledge of the past. But how has Homer been read throughout the centuries by generations caught up in the counterpoint of war and peace?

In this compelling collection of first-person stories, adults who have made outstanding achievements in adult literacy were paired with writers to tell of their transition to reading. These are people who have had the courage to overcome the barrier of words to break into a broader sense of themselves, to feel more empowered in the world. Courageous, too, is the very sharing of these stories, in which private moments are opened wide with the hope that others will take the same steps.

An electrifying collection of thought-provoking interviews from recent broadcasts of CBC Radio’s Ideas. In these remarkable dialogues— most of them in the company of Ideas host Paul Kennedy — some of the great intellectuals of our time reflect, interject, and project on the course of human civilization, addressing topics such as social engineering and human rights, the directions of science and technology, the influence of art, music, and literature, and the quest for truth.

Shortlisted Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical WritingOnce, a single francophone settlement shared both sides of the Saint John River, until a political trade-off between countries split it down the middle. From that inauspicious start, the Maine-New Brunswick border, the first boundary to be drawn between the two nations, has served as a microcosm for Canada-U.S. relations. For centuries, friends, lovers, schemers and smugglers have reached across the line.

Inspired by travel writer Ted Simon, Tony Robinson-Smith quit his job in Japan, returned home to England, and then set out once more with only a a knapsack, a map, and a dream to travel the world with both feel on the ground. Nearly six years later, he returned home having fulfilled his dream and then some. Using his journals and memories as his primary sources, Robinson-Smith tells an exhilarating story that begins and ends in England.

Gripping — the news story that never was. SUMMER, 1974 — Six teenaged boys died and fifty-four were injured in an explosion on a Canadian Forces Base in Valcartier, Quebec. A live grenade inadvertently made its way into a box of dud ammunition, and its pin was pulled during a lecture on explosives safety. One hundred and forty boys survived, each isolated in their trauma, yet expected to carry on with their lives.