Revisiting Radisson: Mark Bourrie and Bush Runner

This podcast is one of a series recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019. In this episode, we talk with Mark Bourrie, an award-winning writer and a respected military historian with a PhD in history. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, he has been a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery since 1994. Bourrie lectures on propaganda and censorship at the Department of National Defence Public Affairs Learning Centre and periodically teaches courses on media history, censorship and propaganda at Carleton University and in Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. His latest book, Bush Runner, is the first English-language biography in nearly a century of Pierre-Esprit Radisson—pirate, cannibal, and co-founder of the Hudson’s Bay Company.So how does a co-founder of the longest-lived corporation in North America, a “free man in a time when they were rare,” die penniless in London? Drawing directly from Radisson’s journals, Mark Bourrie paints a vivid picture of the class and national tensions that gripped the globe tightly even as colonial ownership of specific territories shifted with the seasons. Bush Runner brings Radisson to life: a man adopted as a teenager into a Mohawk family before his ocean-crossing adulthood, a peddler of goods and not of worldview, more trading partner than colonizer, “a brave man who must have been a tremendous dinner companion—as long as you weren’t on the menu.”http://biblioasis.com/mark-bourrie-challenges-us-to-retire-the-word-explorer-from-the-lexicon/https://twitter.com/MarkBourrie?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor