Mark Bourrie at Kingston Writers Fest!
2 Princess St
Kingston, ON K7L 1A2
Canada
The Big Idea: War of the Words
Join award-winning author, journalist, and expert on propaganda and censorship Mark Bourrie (Big Men Fear Me) in conversation with cultural critic Tajja Isen (Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service), author Robyn Maynard (Rehearsals for Living), and moderator Carol Off for an investigation into the weaponization of words, and what it means for society. Good words that once meant something—like freedom and free speech—have now been hijacked and used to inject odious ideas into the public space. Dictator and fascist are now used so liberally that they have lost their meaning. And the term woke—first invented to mean being progressive and aware—is now a dirty word, the subject of political campaigns.
The panel will take place on Saturday, October 1 at 7PM ET. More details here.
Register in advance here.
Order your copy of Big Men Fear Me here!
The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America’s most influential media moguls.
When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s biography “one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history”—until now.
In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh’s inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and former journalist. He holds a master’s in Journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in History from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the Bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson.
