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 Thinkers 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: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds touches upon societal values, how we govern ourselves, and navigating in the international community. In this remarkable book, Bernie Lucht, winner of the John Drainie Award for broadcast journalism, introduces readers to the origins of the ground-breaking program and to "the best ideas you'll hear tonight."

Since the beginning, geopolitics has been one of the significant concerns of the program, and issues such as democracy, dictatorships, the nature of the nation-state, the public good, ideology, religion, peace and violence keep returning to the fore. Although many of the topics have been around for decades, the questions remain startlingly topical today, even in a radically changed world. Exploring geopolitics writ large, Ideas features interviews, lectures and radio documentaries with such influential contemporary thinkers as Tariq Ali, Michael Bliss, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Northrop Frye, Bernard Lewis, Margaret MacMillan, James Orbinski, and many, many others. While each thinker speaks from his or her specific experience in time, the themes and concerns resonate as much today as they did last week or forty years ago.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a Canadian-born American economist, public servant, and writer. Born in Iona Station, Ontario, he earned a B.Sc. degree (1931) from the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph and M.Sc (1933) and a Ph.D. degree (1934) from the University of California, Berkeley, and later studied in England at Cambridge University. He became a U.S. citizen in 1937 and would serve in Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. He was also Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he taught for many years, a U.S. ambassador to India (1963-63), and the author of many books of economics, including American Capitalism, The Great Crash, 1929, The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Economics and the Public Purpose, as well as hundreds of essays, a memoir, and a number of novels. He was awarded numerous honorary degrees, twice received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1946 and 2000, and was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1997.

Bernie Lucht's profile page

"This book is an excellent introduction to current ideas, reflecting the breadth and depth of contemporary thought."

<i>Winnipeg Free Press</i>

"The Ideas series has become essential to Canadian intellecutal life. And here in print are gathered some of the best of the best. This is a volume to read and to cherish."

David Frum

"Ideas has regularly taken the intellectual temperature of the world."

<i>Globe and Mail</i>

"Food for many moons of thought."

<i>Globe and Mail</i>

"The ultimate brain-trust reader . . . a collection you'll return to whenever your brain needs a workout."

<i>Monday Magazine</i>