SPEAKER SERIES
What: Andrew Coyne
Where: Charlie White Theatre, Mary Winspear Centre, Sidney
When: Thursday, May 31, at 7 p.m.
Tickets: Thursday's event $90. Tickets for the series of four cost $325. Information at marywinspear.ca
Journalists Andrew Coyne and Peter Mansbridge, anthropologist Wade Davis and singer Jann Arden form the lineup for the speaker series at Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney that starts tonight and runs through the fall.
First up at the Charlie White Theatre is Coyne, a political columnist for the National Post and former national editor of Maclean’s.
The Centre is promising a dynamic talk on the social, political, media and economic issues shaping Canada.
Next Thursday, June 7, the speaker is Davis, whose writing and filmmaking has taken him around the world from Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, and Polynesia to the Arctic.
Davis, a professor at the University of British Columbia, will speak about his 2011 book, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest.
In it, Davis chronicles the ill-fated attempt by climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine to reach the summit of Everest in 1924, and asks why they kept going in the face of such difficulties that would cost them their lives.
Davis, who has 11 honorary degrees, points to a single phrase uttered by one of the expedition’s survivors as they retreated from the mountain: “The price of life is death.” Like his generation, the First World War had taught them death was an accepted degree of risk. Davis suggests that what mattered was how one lived and that Everest had become a symbol of hope.
On Sept. 27, Mansbridge, former anchor of CBC-TV’s The National, who has, for decades, guided viewers through Canada’s definitive political, economic and cultural events, will speak about his desire for Canadians to celebrate their heritage, the Centre says.
Mansbridge will address the shared national story that has shaped Canadians at both individual and collective levels.
Drawing on the world leaders he has interviewed, Mansbridge will also talk about leadership and how it can be achieved, whether in politics, academia or business.
The series finishes on Nov. 25 with Arden, winner of eight Juno awards, speaking about her recently released book, Feeding My Mother, based on her popular social media posts about helping her mother cope with Alzheimer’s disease.
The stories of Arden’s mother have regularly turned up in the performer’s asides during concerts, so it wasn’t a stretch that the singer-songwriter would be as candid when her mother became ill. In her book, Arden writes about becoming the primary “parent” to her mother.
Tickets for each speaker are priced individually, but there are also tickets that cover the whole series available for $325.
