Tonight’s guest is Man Booker prize-winning author Yann Martel. Martel is a Canadian who has lived the world over , but now resides in Saskatoon. He has often credited government arts subsidies such as the Canada Council grant for allowing him to write his first novel.  It was at a 50th anniversary celebration of the Canada Council program in the House of Commons,  where Prime Minister Stephen Harper came under Martel’s radar. The author got the impression the Prime Minister was uninterested in the event and perhaps, not committed to supporting the arts in Canada – especially after a round of funding cuts to various cultural institutions.

And thus a book was born. What Stephen Harper is Reading: Yann Martel's Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister and Book Lovers of All Stripes is a compilation of letters with book recommendations sent to the current prime minister. The project also spawned a website, in both our official languages, where the project continues to this day.

In light of the attention The Agenda has paid to a) literacy and b) political leadership, we invited Yann Martel to join us to continue that discussion.

I would like to conclude by including The Agenda’s Recommended Reading List. To mark Family Literacy Day last season, we compiled our own list we informally refer to as the "Agenda Canon"  --  a list of non-fiction works that have influenced our producers and that we believe should read to help understand the changing world around us.
 

The Agenda's Recommended Reading List

 

 

 

1.    Leaving My Father's House by Marion Woodman

 

2.    Money and Class in America : Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion  by Lewis H. Lapham

 

3.    The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

 

4.    Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary by Richard Gwyn

 

5.    Trudeau and Our Times, Volume 1: The Heroic Delusion by Stephen Clarkson and Christine McCall

 

6.    With Fidel: A Portrait of Castro and Cuba by Frank Mankiewicz, Kirby Jones (Editor)

 

7.    Unholy Orders by Michael Harris

 

8.    Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

 

9.   Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer

 

Judy Brake

 

10.   Truman by David McCullough

 

11.   John Adams by David McCullough

 

12.   John A.: The Man Who Made Us by Richard Gwyn

 

13.   Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan

 

Daniel Kitts

 

14.   Night by Elie Wiesel

 

15.   The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor

 

16.   The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

 

17.   Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler

 

Steve Paikin

 

18.   Lament for a Nation by George Grant

 

19.   Finding our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada by Will Kymlicka

 

20.   Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

 

21.   The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernado De Soto

 

22.   Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom by Ronald Dworkin

 

Mark Brosens

 

23.   Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party by Christina McCall

 

24.   The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier

25.   The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

 

26.   Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll

 

27.   The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

 

28.   A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

 

29.   King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

 

Mike Miner

 

30.   Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

31.   The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

 

32.   The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

 

33.   Collected Essays by George Orwell

 

34.   Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills

 

Dan Dunsky

 

35.  The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

 

Navin Vaswani

 

36.   The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

 

37.   Krakatoa by Simon Winchester

 

38.   Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

 

39.   The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery

 

Stacey Dunseath

 

40.   The Canon by Natalie Angier

 

41.   Pandemonium by Andrew Nikoforuk

 

42.   Freakanomics by Steven Levitt

 

43.   Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

 

44.   The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

 

45.   A History of God by Karen Armstrong

 

46.   The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

 

47. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

 

Sandra Gionas

 

48.   The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe

 

49.   Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson

 

50.   Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

51.   Home Sweet Home by Mordecai Richler

 

52.   The Yellow Wind by David Grossman

 

53.   Good to Great by Jim Collins

 

54.   Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco

 

55.   Louis Riel by Chester Brown

 

56.   Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

 

Alan Echenberg

 

57.   The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

 

58.   The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil

 

59.   Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

 

60.   Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington

 

61.   Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey

 

62.   The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

 

63.   Endless Universe by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok

 

64.   Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple

 

Wodek Szemberg

 

65.   Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec by Taras Grescoe

 

Stavros Rougas