Common Ground: Exclusive Edition

Canadians fell in love with Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s beautiful and high-spirited bride when he brought her to the world stage as the youngest First Lady in the history of the country. But the situation wasn’t as rosy as it seemed. Plagued by mood swings and unprepared for public life, Margaret became increasingly isolated at 24 Sussex, as her depression alternated with bouts of mania. As her behavior became more puzzling - even to Margaret herself - she did her best to mother her three young sons.

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school. These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

How you feel about yourself crucially affects virtually every aspect of your life, especially how high in life you are likely to rise. Who and what you think you are shape all your responses. Self-esteem, therefore, becomes the key to success or failure. It is also the key to understanding yourself and others.

Our modern diet, high in low-quality carbohydrates, is damaging our bodies - producing a constant overload of sugar in our bloodstream that clogs up our arteries and piles hidden fat into our internal organs. The result has been a doubling in the number of type 2 diabetics,as well as a surge in those with a potentially hazardous condition - prediabetes. It is now known that even moderately elevated blood sugar levels can trigger heart disease, stroke, dementia, and cancer.

Catherine Gildiner is a best-selling memoirist, a novelist, and a psychologist in private practice for 25 years. In Good Morning, Monster, she focuses on five patients who overcame enormous trauma - people she considers heroes. With a novelist's storytelling gift, Gildiner recounts the details of their struggles, their paths to recovery, and her own tale of growth as a therapist. 

In the spring of 1944 gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor “Max” Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard, and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At 15 years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and he was inducted into the camp as a slave laborer. More than 70 years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, By Chance Alone details Eisen’s story of survival.

Jann Arden moved in to a house just across the way from her parents in rural Alberta to be close to them but also so they could be her refuge from the demands of the music business and a performing career. Funny how time works. Since her dad died in 2015, Jann cooks for her mom five or six times a week. Her mom finds comfort in her daughter's kitchen, not just in the delicious food but also just sitting with her as she cooks. And Jann finds some peace in caring for her mom, even as her mom slowly becomes a stranger.

In October 2017, Jagmeet Singh was elected as the first visible minority to lead a major federal political party in Canada. The historic milestone was celebrated across the nation. About a month earlier, in the lead-up to his election, Jagmeet held community meet and greets across Canada. At one such event, a disruptive heckler in the crowd hurled accusations at him. Jagmeet responded by calmly calling for all Canadians to act with “love and courage” in the face of hate. That response immediately went viral.

What could be better than growing up in the 1980s? How about growing up in 1980s Newfoundland, which - as Mark Critch will tell you - was more like the 1960s. Take a trip to where it all began in this funny and warm look back on his formative years. Here we find a young Mark trick-or-treating at a used car lot, getting locked out of school on a fourth-floor window ledge, faking an asthma attack to avoid being arrested by military police, trying to buy beer from an untrustworthy cab driver, shocking his parents by appearing naked onstage - and much more.

The final work from Leonard Cohen, Canada's most celebrated poet and an artist whose audience spans generations and whose work is known and loved throughout the world.

While building the Virgin Group over 40 years, Richard Branson has never shied away from seemingly outlandish challenges that others (including his own colleagues on several occasions) considered sheer lunacy. He has taken on giants like British Airways and won, and monsters like Coca-Cola and lost. Now Branson gives an inside look at his strikingly different swashbuckling style of leadership.

Canadian botanist, biochemist, and visionary Diana Beresford-Kroeger's startling insights into the hidden life of trees have already sparked a quiet revolution in how we understand our relationship to forests. Now, in a captivating account of how her life led her to these illuminating and crucial ideas, she shows us how forests can not only heal us but save the planet.

As President Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is one of the few White House memoirs to date by a top-level official. With almost daily access to the president, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a president for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation.

The final novel from Richard Wagamese, the best-selling and beloved author of Indian Horse and Medicine Walk, centres on an abused woman on the run who finds refuge on a farm owned by an Indigenous man with wounds of his own. A profoundly moving novel about the redemptive power of love, mercy, and compassion - and the land's ability to heal us. 

Margaret Trudeau, former wife of Pierre Trudeau, 15th Prime Minister of Canada, mother of Justin Trudeau, Canada's current Prime Minister, and international mental health advocate, brought her intimate staged performance, Certain Woman of an Age, to the Minetta Lane Theatre, where it was recorded live for Audible Theater. In this "fearless and vulnerable" (Chicago Tribune) one-woman show, Trudeau opens up - with refreshing candor - about her extraordinary life and her encounters with some of the most important icons of our time.