Free Online Event ~ The Livestream link will be sent to your e-mail upon registration.
Sponsored by: Word Vancouver and Banyen Books & Sound
Join award-winning author and broadcast journalist Carol Off—longtime co-host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens—for a compelling discussion of her #1 national bestselling book At a Loss for Words: Conversations in an Age of Rage.
In this urgent and incisive work, Off digs deep into six words whose meanings have been distorted and weaponized in recent years—including democracy, freedom, and truth—and asks whether we can reclaim their value. Drawing on decades of stellar reporting and 25,000 interviews, she explores how language once central to civil society and social justice has been twisted to serve opposing political agendas or stripped of meaning altogether, eroding our shared political vocabulary. As Off warns, “If our language doesn’t have a means to express an idea, then the idea itself is gone—even the range of thought is diminished.” Through sharp analysis, she reveals how this loss silences dialogue, blinds us to the complexity of today’s crises, and leaves us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and greed—making her book both an elegy and a call to arms.
Carol Off, award-winning broadcast journalist and author, recently completed a sixteen-year run as co-host of the multi-award-winning CBC Radio program As It Happens, following an extraordinary career reporting from across Canada and around the globe. As a radio correspondent, she covered politics in Ottawa and Quebec, and as a television journalist she reported from the Balkan wars, the aftermath of 9/11, the elections of Vladimir Putin, and uprisings across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The bestselling author of The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle, Bitter Chocolate, The Ghosts of Medak Pocket, and All We Leave Behind—winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction—Off has been recognized with a Gemini Award, two New York Festival gold medals, a Gabriel Award, a Monte Carlo Festival Award, ACTRA’s John Drainie Award, and the RTNDA Lifetime Achievement Award.
