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.

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. Compiled and edited by Bernie Lucht, this volume explores the ideas of nineteen inspiring international and Canadian thinkers, including Louise Arbour, David Schindler, Jerome Kagan, John Gray, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Leonore Tieffer, Nat Hentoff, Theodore Dalrymple, Mark Lilla, and many others.