This year's CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.
Recorded live at Gopnik's sold-out Lectures in Charlottetown, Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto, he takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopnik's kaleidoscopic work ends in the present day, when he traverses the underground city in Montreal, pondering the future of Northern culture.
A stunningly beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik's trademark gentle wit, Winter is at once an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination.
- 5-CD Set.
- Running time approx. 400 minutes.




