Truman daniels exploring the american story. What American History tv tonight on cspan3. Good evening everyone and thank you so much for joining us area my name is bennett and im a bookseller and Event Coordinator and im going to be your host tonight for athome literati field featuring miles party. Before we get underway i want to explain a big thank you to everyone for your support of our virtual programming in particular. We feel incredibly lucky were able to continue to offer Virtual Events release through the difficult times and we wouldnt be able to do that and gather and hear about the intricacies it wasnt for you all showing and stopping by and continuing to be supported so that for doing that. I like to go over our zoom policies for event. We ask your video feed disabled for the duration of the event and if you do enable us he will disable it for you. If you enable a second time you will have to be removed from theevent. We appreciate your cooperation. I wanted to briefly go over our format for. Miles donovan to start us off. After my from thinking of confidence which is published this past tuesday donovan reads from the interposed which was published early last month in june, were going to hear an extended conversation between the two of them for about 30 to 35 minutes and also have a few slides as needed to add some supplemental images. His book is named a Chicago Tribune best book of the year. He currently teaches at depaul university. The author of mobile duck the true story of 28800 bad boys lost at sea and is out for the john Kenneth Gilbert award. The second book the inter coast was published by [inaudible] last month and i think a lot of us already know this but both of these men graduated from the msa program at university of michigan. Its a few blocks away from the book store so i want to share that for those who are not familiar with that but otherwise i would appreciate it if you wouldnt mind putting your virtual zoom reaction together for tonights first reader, rv. Hello miles. Hello donovan. Good to see you. Yeah, you are fiction and i was poetry and its probably why your book is longer than mine and then then we both teach nonfiction here in chicago and i do in detroit. Its nice seeing you here. I want to be clear to everyone that this is miles event and he kindly is sharing his day with me. I will get ahead of you with your reading and a quote in your book when the antihero of the book whom you will tell us about tonight is getting crowned as king and you write somehow this man established the king and managed to convince 235 lonely souls that his paper crown was a dazzling royal diadem in his wooden scepter homes with energy and that his floor length red robe hitched together by ladies of the church enveloped him in righteousness and splendor. In tonights event we dont have 235 lonely souls gathered in this tabernacle but you are the king with the paper crown my friend and i will be george adams but why dont you start and i want or as i said to you before hand with nonfiction books we end up being experts on the subject but i love your prose. We want you to read something and if you will go with something that can help us understand the title, the king of confidence. And i your prose but we get to that in a minute. If you could just put outside one i thought i would introduce [inaudible] to the title character of my book. All right, there he is. I will read a little bit about this man james chase strang and his time which is the antebellum era which is the decades leading up to the civil war and this is the guy and you wonder how he managed to establish or you can leave it up. You can leave a slide one oh and i will read over it. There we go. [laughter] so, it doesnt look like the most charismatic guy to you and listen to this. Although James Jesse Strang was physically unimposing and a few inches over 5 feet and bald with an oddly bulging for head he did possess one of the distinguishing features, his dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as rather small but very bright and piercing giving an extremely animated expression to his whole confidence. Another claimed that those eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person but more than any tangible attributes strang possessed an invisible, ineffable aura called confidence and in those days before electrical power confidence was what made the antebellum era home then confidence was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, cow towns into cities, empty lots into bustling businesses losers into winners and into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and card sharps alike. Confidence was the sole of the trade in the words of one leading financial publication without it, added herman melville, commerce between man and man as between country and country would, like a watch, rundown and stop. In an age before the federal government started putting paper money, and age when people had to trust in privately issued banknotes glorified ious confidence was the de facto national currency. That is what the sky possessed and confidence in his ability to wield it was what took him from being an obscure farmboy in north new york and a field lawyer, feel newspaper publisher, field postmaster to the midwest which we then called the far west which he became a Mormon Prophet and a real rat to Brigham Young and the church and where he ran a couple of utopian colonies which i will talk about, one in michigan. Donovan, i want to talk to you about your book too. I thought we took a word out of my title so lets take a word out of your title. Coast. What does that all about . Yeah, my book is called the inter coast and i talk a lot about [inaudible] and sent here we are virtually speaking you are in chicago and im over here on the other side of michigan but part of what i was thinking about was i grew up on the coast of california but as a son of misplaced midwesterners and i spent much of my life here by the great lakes and i kind of wanted to make the case for the great lakes. Coasts have always been contact zones between here and elsewhere and analogically it derives from latin and in middle english they can still offer you coast of lamb meaning a rack of ribs. The seacoast was the cage of the lambs and its primary sense coast referred to the place where land and sea begins and coasts who are by definition outer and oceanic ones. Its a term for the edge of the lake or stream as bank or shore but the mayor tone geography of the midwest is a paradox in michigan is midwestern and it is also coastal and pendant sealer and. Its shoreline is speckled with lighthouses as new england is longer than californians, florida and the other states besides alaska and standing on a midwestern region watch freighters slide across the horizon and nautical terms to coast is to travel by water while keeping the land nearby and in that sense you can coast to the heart of north america. Circumnavigating all the states east of the mississippi without ever laying eyes on the pacific. These days the word coastal is a sociological as it is geographic and in phrases like coastal living or coastal elites word collapse is the west coast and east into a conjoined seaboard supposedly inhabited by decadence system for seconds and is were next berkeley or boston in commuting to seattle. In seattle the holiday goers michigans on gold coast might qualify as coastal in this sense but not the residents of sandusky or milwaukee or dearborn home to the largest Muslim Community for the afternoons paddle down the rouge river from lake erie and a neighborhood on the northeast side of detroit have become popular with immigrants from vietnam and i will stop there with a little taste of what of trying to make and talk about that word coast. Lets go back to confidence. You touch on and you brought in melville who wrote the confidence man and he talked about how this idea of confidence most required economically but also a secret power for the charismatic and you talk later so could you tell the story of the origins of that word where you quote the newspaper story that introduced it to the lexicon so what about [inaudible] among all the materials were drawn into the story youre doing a sort of amount of in that passage etymological excavation like you are reminding us what parts of the american vernacular originated in this antebellum. And some of it is strange now that you do this whole thing on the idea of thinking which i love but what is the origin of that in the confidence man at the time. It is interesting you say that because one of the fun things i did with this book is i kept finding words that were not early enough in Oxford English dictionary as a lot of the people in her audience know if the Gold Standard for etymology and i look up a word that i found in a newspaper straight from 1820 and would be like 1890 and i dont know if they changed it because they never wrote back but the confidence man came in 1849 and this is the time when there has been an economic crash that the country is still to recover from the massive technological revolution you got the telegraph in the photograph and the railroad and there is the Communications Revolution that might be the internet superhighway and people are displaced and the confidence become such an important thing. In 1849 guy was arrested in new york and the new york paper called him the confidence man. His game was to go up to people and say on the street hey, donovan, donovan, you dont remember me and come on man, you dont remember me and then of course youd be embarrassed and you would say its mild, mild harvey and theres a miles ive got you and i was a donovan, im hurt by it but could you just show your confidence and he would give me a watch and people would do that in this word spread like wildfire. Its fun to watch it spread through the american lexicon at this time because it describes so many people in so many walks of life and i think strain epitomize this and he was a guy who was able in this time where truth was malleable and facts werent facts and its a lot like our own time in some ways. People like string five on those and he was able to invent his own truths and pull it off with the bluster that people wanted to believe in. Thank you. I will do something a little weird, miles, because string as a historical figure and from the writers point of view is this treasure for you, as you know and you discover and write about it a bit. I want to make you speak about the index of your book and your acknowledgment that it is amazing and the way i think about the way this book works is you got this central figure in strand but hes almost like a planetary object that who is like force of personality exerts like Gravitational Force on the antebellum 19th century of the upper midwest in the whole nation and your book draws into it all these marvels and wonders and obscurities from that time so from in your index are pulled these items abolitionism, American Revolution and Hans Christian and angels so part of it seems what wonders about the book but its collecting all the historical figures that you end up guiding into your narrative and the honorary and pt barnum and emily bronte and Charlotte Bronte and John Wilkes Booth and henry clay and darwin in the sky who invented the keyboard and somehow you managed to, its this magnetic power to gather all that up and in your acknowledgment you talk about that and say at the beginning talk about this post story, a man of the crowd and how there is the central figure and he spots a manhood once arrested and absorbed my whole attention and so tell me about how you think of the way, i dont know if you want to explain that analogy but how, its not a traditional biography book. How does strength work with all the rest . String at least three good books about string and they are very good but im not being the least bit dismissive here. They tend to treat him as either a footnote to mormon history or a michigan story, midwestern story in one of the books called assassination of a michigan king. From the start i saw string as this lightning rod for all the enthusiasm and social movements and apocalyptic fears of the age and so i just saw him as this embodiment of this crazy time and as far as my writing style goes, its funny because i so admire you we dont do the same thing but you do something similar in the new york review or the New York Times book review and i just got a very nice review and we like truth reviews and what he called my style wonderfully digressive which was the biggest compliment ive ever had and talked about and i had not thought about this but where you get the big picture and these little maps but donovan, ive got to go back to you on this, i thank you are one of the really most wonderful nonfiction writers today doing exactly what you just praised me for. Donovan ive heard the story a million times but isnt there an essay here for the second essay, right donovan in the inner coast called the romance of rust and this essay i always tell donovan this was before i knew him was a real source of inspiration for me. I read it one day and i did not know what it was, 20 years ago, 15 years ago . A long time ago and was just a time i needed to be inspired by another writer. I picked up harpers and started writing about this antique tool collection or in michigan and im into collectors and written about it before and i was interested but the way in which you brought American History and american commerce and our desire and our commercial desires into that piece was just incredible. Do you want to talk about that . Yeah, sure. That one to me was an important one because i had been writing nonfiction but i came to nonfiction by way of fiction and poetry which is i think not all that uncommon the people come to it from one of those more pseudo genres that historically was the standard genre writing programs but my initial or my first early was search of the personal essay or memoir or to a confessional essay and this was the first one where he wanted to do what youve done in this book which is due that and think of it as the act of finding where something known what the analogy i use when i teach is comes from entomology not etymology and its like an and detecting pheromones so you follow it but once you have that like this is fascinating and then your mind starts generating questions and its that kind of where i have some ideas about what questions may be behind the king of confidence so to that essay months i have that uncle and i have great affection for who lives on the outskirts of ann arbor who is a botanist by trade and has begun collecting kind of by chance in ann arbor happen to pick up two wrenches that were identical and had this vision of symmetry like he found two specimens of the same plant but it was wrenches and, you know, obsessively began collecting from all over the upper midwest factories, state estate sales, foreclosed farms and all these artifacts of history and he turned this barn on the outskirts out near dexter but initially he started with one and turned to this museum but it was not open to the public where he makes these arrays of like the artifact look like specimens and they look like fossils or dinosaurs or frankly he had hundred spigot handles and he would make one array of them so hes got this kind of cabinet of wonders but not of the natural artifacts and that for me became fascinating and then accompanying him was the narrative and you get to try to tweak your own museum of an essay actually, i think. I think youre doing something similar here and [inaudible] but then he allows you to just follow your own curiosity and questions and make things so that somehow the inventor of the keyboard is adjacent to the guy who invented or introduced the potato to the midwest as a medicinal plant. Its a wonderful, at or accidental juxtaposition. Yeah, i think we may be working from a similar message and why i have so much admiration for you as a writer but i always tell my students that i dont think many predictions about the future writing but one is that i feel in my own work it would be interesting to see from you guys and i can talk about an example of it but is that i feel like writers and curators are in the digital age becoming more and more similar like writing is increasingly an active storytelling and for me that is all really cool and i love that and i think increasingly i find myself this book had a turn 50 singlespaced timeline where i just list what was happening in strings life and in the world and i just the juxtapositions are there and its a narrative making machine but i mean, let me give you an example. I do another quick reading if you dont mind. Bennett if you could just put up the picture, slide number six. There is. Here it comes. Love this. I will read to really and then i will just, i just, in between them i will give you explanation but the island was important to this and so i want to read this little bit about island. Island Edgar Allan Poe wrote in the stormy seas of the psyche of places of perfect security where freedom from all restraint can be enjoyed. Tiny cosmos where normal laws, normal rules of conduct and normal systems of logic do not apply. Their frequent locales for experimental communities, including the original utopia which thomas moore in his famous 16th century book. I would just say that there are many things we can say about the community and that string had to be and its some of it is controversial but i wanted to talk about the draw and i think sometimes people think this guy what was he or what was the job but one of the things we need to understand is what apocalyptic times these were. In 1848 right when the string was starting to start the colony and really push it that this was the year of just apocalyptic fevers in the United States and in the world and i thought i would read about those and then you will see why. String spent the summer of 1848 pointing to what he describes as ominous signs, including a series of revolutions in europe, u. S. War in mexico and rising tensions between north and south. For months he been urging his followers to prepare for the end and now let me warn you the time draws near he looked wrote that prophetic events are crowning close upon one another and strings newspaper even reported that local fishermen had spotted a huge sea serpent off the coast of the islands and one of many such sightings around the world during the pretentious years between 47 and 48. From the 21st century perspective of course it is hard to know what to make such an outlandish claim in the one possibility is it spring its late michigan monster with the beast from the sea whose appearance heralded the apocalypse in the revelation. Knowing that joseph smith claimed the symbolized quote the degenerate kingdoms of the wicked world and string may have hoped to underscore the idea of the island as the renewed scion of prophecy and that Promised Land where according to mormon teachings for latter day saints would help gather to usher in the Second Coming of christ and the advent of his 1000 year reign on earth. I should point out that this picture in front of you is not an illustration of the sea monster that string said was off the island but it was one off the many sea monsters that the judgment people thought they saw in 1847 and 1848 and this was a Royal Navy Ship that spotted the sea monsters somewhere and so that gives you a sense of relief the intense time we are talking about and strain was not his only reason for going to that island. He also started a criminal enterprise and you can take it down now of bennett. He basically had a pirate colony running out of that island where he would send his people out all over the lake to raise various towns and throughout the midwest and he would steal horses and other items. There has been a lot of controversy about this. Early writers have said there is no proof that string pulled off any of these crimes and that it was all anti mormon so there was penny of anti mormon bias but string pulled up and most of the things the king of confidence does is move that along a little bit. There are some pretty solid undeniable realtime reporting of strings kind in this book. Yet you discovered there is a whole chapter in ohio and if i caught it right you said this is new research. Yeah, thats all new. It is important or first of all, there are a lot of Great Century journalists and this was a guy editor in harrisburg, ohio and was a wonderful, sarcastic writer and he this is important because in real time there is a series of stories one after the other and first comes to this town and theres up posses sent out after him and he is caught and brought back and he is one of top lieutenants, enforcers and the paper reports on that. It reports on string coming to town and they predict that string will help get this guy out of jail and there is this trial and hes found guilty but overturned on a technicality that the sheriff did not fill out some form or something and the papers in the area write about how that technicality was in them probably hinted that it was going after and sure enough the string a doesnt go to the penitentiary but stays in the local jail and there is a jailbreak and hes gone and returns to the island. So yeah there is just a lot more of that. I was wondering, one of the things we both are interested in my ranger showed is the landscapes of the midwest. I was wondering if there was some stuff that yeah, the introduction which i read and this came out in june and have done a few of these but ill do a couple paragraphs from the introduction. You are right, theres a similar that all these essays formally preoccupation with the idea of excavating and i think for me somebody whos been an adoptive midwesterner bided send i grew up on as my family was very nostalgic for this illinois prairie i grew up on the mythic midwest and lots of little house on the prairie and not just that but the whole project has been to do excavation and your book this is the midwest like we never imagined it. Its one thing and just before i jump into my own, one thing write about is that idea of islands in a tiny cosmos. It feels like your whole book is doing the logic of the microcosm and here we can look closely at Beaver Island and string becomes the representative man of this time in so many ways. You do not mention the rest of his career in the state legislator and amateur meteorologist at the dawn of meteorology as a scientific discipline and to his credit abolitionists were not as were approached so a representative figure but on the island becomes this concentrate of america out there in the middle of michigan and for me my First Experience in this part of the country was they came down, i got to paragraphs i will read. It was passed down to generations near the edge of Lake Michigan and by the 1970s the farm was no longer operational and the family held onto it as a kind of heritage site to which the increasingly scattered tribes would make the primitive and the potato salad while commuting nostalgically with an agrarian past vestiges of what survived in the place was like a museum of an acronym and exhibits included an empty red barn an outhouse with the splintered door and a hand pump that drew water from a well. Glistening helix is of amber flypaper that spiraled from the farmhouse rafters and there was a few chickens including one whose beheading i would make to witness in this brutal yet valuable knowledge farm life was thought to impart and this headless the chicken man single slap around the chopping blocks with a scene both gruesome and comical. At the edge of this arm was a shallow body of water called lost lake and according to legend allowed one winter attempted to draw an oxen team across it and heavy with harvested timber which comes up in your book green gold heavy with harvested timber his wagon had supposedly broken through the nice dragging the logger and oxen estate i compulsively thought about paddling around with my brother in a dented aluminum canoe. Shallow you could touch bottom with your paddle and bottom was so salty and soft they would sink into it as far as you could sponge it never touching her ground. Who knew what was down there and i imagined if you fell overboard and tried to stand he would get sucked into the muck disappearing with the unlikely prehistoric animals with miniature horses and cloven hooves with sabertooth tigers and the la brea tar pits were mistaken for a waterhole which is perhaps how it had gone and the encyclopedia of the prehistoric mammals of north america was among [inaudible] and though i had never visited the la brea tar pits were a prominent teacher on the landscape of my entire life. Yes, for me one of the things i need to do as a writer is to have the images that work as motifs of the idea of things getting free down there that you cant see below the history is or especially for the collection of essays which is a collection of poems means a different kind of unity then you have because you have a plot. I have to use music and youve got an actual plot here so i want to talk about that because i was thinking a lot and want to make sure we have time in the five minutes to open it up for questions but you are not an historic, miles. Credentialed historian where you are not or you dont have a phd in history and im curious because i have tried to work with you and curious about your method in the book. I know he spent many years and i know he visited archives and all the rest but im also wondering if you did the kind of thing that i know some trade historians do and i imagine the writer must have done because you are trying to bring the story to life with the kind of sensory detail and immediacy that we might encounter in a novel and there was this moment and throw a moment where youve to dramatic climaxes and one of which is that the u. S. Navy sent the gunship to Beaver Island which is amazing. Its really good. Its a tragic story, strange story in the end but this is one little thrilling moment when they talk about this who is saline going out to Beaver Island and the warship closed it in a small town between lake huron and michigan from the deck the companions could see the densely forested shores of Northern Michigan which hundred yearold conifers soared high in the air and rising with their fresh smell and i underline that because that seemed to be exemplary of what distinguishes the kind of narrative history you doing creative nonfiction here. The literary story. You are doing from at least some kind of the scholarly history so it reminded me of this great [inaudible] about the historical imagination. Would you talk about the methods like how did you go about getting the defensive place. First of all, its a little tricky to talk about this because not completely but that was one of the exceptions that in the last i dont know 40 years im guessing and i dont want to get slapped upside the head by some of my colleagues but Academic Experience of pushback on the narrative and i understand when you are telling a story youre not telling another story but my own feeling is that people crave narratives and i love good narrative history. I have a lot of work to make up whenever he writes about history because i have to learn it and sometimes it gives me but you wrote there is a book called natures metropolis and its a classic book about chicagos role in the west and i just remembered for reading a book being fascinated by these michigan pine trees being cut down in settling the prairie like as if it was the historian in the book and so these were precious commodities and then its a matter of just trying whenever you can, i dont think you make stuff up but know that when someone is standing on the deck of a ship and anyone is driven into the upper zones of michigan knows what it is like to get out of the car and smell the pine and so i just wanted to give that moment right and its always startling elise when you go to some friends of mine built a log cabin in the Upper Peninsula and we drive up on a 100degree day in our airconditioned car and suddenly we would get out north of green bay and that smell would hit you. I wanted to get that into the book and so, you know, im a defender of narrative storytelling and history and i love doing it but i have a lot of work to do and im so respectful of the academic historian. I will say this is something i Pay Attention to as well as i have drawn to historical sources. We do credit them but you think is more than a courtesy like you quote these books and honor their titles and i think the book you may quote the most for the title and i know is quoted most often was one on pantaloons fred would you talk briefly before we throw it to questions. I was astonished how much about fashion this book is in it so much about fashion and how people are addressing and baked close and then theres this whole story about an audit on Beaver Islands will talk about that and then we will see. Its about michigan so will it be about fashion. Right . Everyone knows that. So i think it is about a lot of the book is about gender roles which are absolutely fascinating so people, women on the island started wearing pantaloons basically pajama pants tight at the ankle and tenuous before emilio blumer the famous profeminist started wearing them as a symbol of the womens rights movement. They were so far ahead of the times and thats one of the interesting things so they look like big skirts that are a little shorter in front and wearing some really non sexy pants but at the time they were really shocking and eventually strang said all women on the island must wear pantaloons and this became sort of the outward point of rebellion that led to his assassination in 1856. My own feeling it was much different than that and i think we have something we can think about right now and the weight masks have become the symbol of loyalty or non loyalty. Right . If you are pantaloons or if your wife or pantaloons on Beaver Island you are with strang and in the same way that when the president announced that masks were okay not Wearing Masks was a symbol of loyalty to the president and to a certain extent aside from health and safety you know, at least trump believes the people on the other side were Wearing Masks just to show their opposition so close are already political and one of the great joys of this book was thinking about gender relations. Im not read Margaret Fuller the feminist writer of his time and shes fascinating and a good writer and when we talk about she was writing about that in 1840 insane no one is completely mad or woman but theres a huge range and this is interesting stuff. This is one of the many interesting aspects of this time that i loved writing about. Is close to strangs household because his second wife of his polyamorous household was doing the gender passage to travel safely which is the freedom of a man so yeah, go ahead. Before we go to questions lets put up slide number five. Could you hit slide number five . This is strangs first wife, elvira, passing is strangs nephew charles j douglas. Strang for many months in the east coast in 1849 as the word confidence man is coming into fashion introducing this young man as his nephew and personal secretary whom he shares a fed with. Charles j douglas. In fact, he was young woman named elvira fields lisa clary married we dont have time to tell the story but a virus is one of the most exciting aspects of this book and a really colorful character and in many ways a very progressive woman for her time. Thanks for that, bennett. I think we should or i hope it piques some curiosity and i think we should throw it open to questions 4 miles. If we have any. Yet, we have too. Thank you for those readings. Thank you for that conversation paid the first question we have coming up is from eileen and she is wondering i love the book and i was hoping if you could tell us what you learned about what people follow an obvious charlatan like strength . Thank you, eileen. Great friend and wonderful writer. Well, i think that people like string thrive in certain times. So, those times when there is a lot of change and when people dont know what to cling to and the truth becomes porous and so strang survived in his time and i dont mention the current president and i dont mention present times in the book and i know theres a bleak reference at the front and at the back but ive got to say my time working on this book totally almost exactly overlapped with trumps candidacy and election and presidency. I woke up and went to sleep every night thinking about trump and woke up thinking about string. Ive got to say trump really helped me understand string in our own era helped me understand string but strang helped me understand trump so that was useful. Strang was beautiful at manipulating media. He totally understood newspapers in this booming newspaper and understood how he could, not only get in the news from Beaver Island to this superhighway that was happening but how he could control those conversations. I was struck by how many people like him are ahead of the times with mass communication. They call this the doctor in the 20s and 30s who implanted goat gonads and men who were worried about their virility and tens of thousands of people did it. You wonder how did he succeed well his name is brinkley and he was a really important early radio pioneer in these when he was kicked out of the United States 150,000 and among other things he helped invent Country Music on the radio and he was like a Brilliant Media guy. I think like i think in 2016 we saw a dude inside a little building in moscow can have an impact on a u. S. Election. Its been one step ahead of us. Thanks for that. We have another one from chris white. Chris is asking a similar question about the parallels between strang and what is going on right now. It goes down to [inaudible] how much of the book did you feel was routinely about unless you want to take it it is interesting. In the last question i did not want to write a book and i do not want to date my book by mentioning trump or our current time but i wanted to like we all have hopes that our book will be read ten, 20 years into the future and it may be a vain hope but there you go. I have them so it is interesting, you know, inc. For the question chris. From the start early readers when i sent out critics alike have seen it as, you know, i dont know, an allegory for our own time even though i dont mention our time. As an english professor with donovan i both are i am a Firm Believer in the humanity even though humanities are getting cut everywhere but i just think this is like what will save us and the humanities is that by studying the past you understand the present and the future and so i hope my book can help do that and i know donovans will and shirley miles you must have been cognizant that these two sentences of how they would be shadowed by the present and when he lived in an era of conservation and when one day you can be broke and then anonymous in one day and famous the next and how they can quickly metamorphose into hard facts at such a precarious time when nothing felt stable or certain anymore and say for millions like the man who was no longer there. So, maybe a little bit but it wasnt just all no, no, it was conscious but i mean like i think in answer to your question i think i wouldve written a different book in a different time. I guess if i feel lucky about writing this book it is only because theres a massive padlock where we are all feeling or maybe not all but a lot of us feel about having a time when, has two great his owns truth like string is not just take over Beaver Island or get elected to the Michigan State legislator but have much more power than that so yeah, obviously trump and our world influences book but i think it is true for writers. Any other questions, bennett . Your mike is off. Thanks for that. We got one from evanston and another from kaitlyn and they both talk about Beaver Island and the evanston is wondering what it is like now and you went you mentioned how did that trip influence writing or your thinking or editing . I went after visiting one of the questions at a Vacation Home of her families so it was, in one way Beaver Island, those of you who know it and im sure a lot of people out there in zoom land know it but it is very beautiful, beautiful place. One of the things that struck me is how remote that when we were on the south end of the island i dont think we had and we cannot get cell signal sows like for my teenage kids this is life trauma in the worst possible moment of their lives but for my wife and i it was great. We sat out and laid out on the deck and had this incredible meteor shower and he thought these would come down into your house. Strang has not left much in terms of architecture and after he was murdered in 1856 the mob i was trying not to give away your ending. [inaudible conversations] but so the mormons got wiped off the island and like literally wiped off the island. There was maybe 1 billion or maybe two but strang is in the place and st. James was the only real town on the island and that was saint james strang and kings highway was the really only big black coat on the island and that was the kings highway that he ordered his people so you really feel it in more than that exists in you can see this in his book because donovan will go there and experience that kind of writer in the best way possible. I just dont, like i wanted to see it and it didnt, it didnt affect the book any profound way but i wanted to be. Surely you have a video or youre putting yourself in your historical imagination into the place in subtle ways and you have a sense of the distance between the north end of the island where st. James and the south end of the island where fishermen who are in revolt sai it is like what you did with moby doc. The bestseller highly acclaimed book which is amazing but it is about, i dont know how many rubber ducks they get released into the ocean and where they all wind up but it is about many of the things in that way that donovan was talking about and i would hope wonderfully digressive and if you dont like it its awful and just get to the point but donovan goes so many places in that book and sees so many things just to bear witness and i just think bearing witness is such a powerful thing in our culture and something we dont do enough of. There may be other questions but if you could make a movie of this because it does feel cinematic i know you have ideas about who should play strang. Yeah, my 18 yearold son, go ahead. But i also want to know if you have any ideas who should direct it . Unlike a lot of narrative history there is this mark twain humor to the storytelling so youll mostly like a Charlie Kaufman or spike jones to adapted if you get to it because you got to get the town right because it is serious but we are trying to play with the strain or the genre of the whole tale almost. Well, you know, i think voice is important and youre such a wonderful voice writer donovan and for this book i just thought of it in the back of my mind is the barnum voice and it wasnt like they would write a pt barnum sentence where i thought about this filtering and that phrase is always there. Who would play strang . Bennett, if you could call out or pull up slide eight and i have no idea who would play strang but here is what my son julian the 18 yearold suggested. Its jared leto and if you look at the nos of these two guys i find it uncanny and jared leto has a kind of chaotic charisma that i think strain might have had but im struck. I feel like theres a genetic tie here that only needs to be traced but you know, are there any other questions because donovan and i want to get to some before we close out. Weve got a few more here in ohio. That [inaudible] paul giamatt giamatti yeah, the cohen brothers. A lot of questions are coming on the connections between right now and democracy, specifically that time and what confidence was originating but there was one question that came up that i would really like you to talk about which regarding his abolitionist belief and i was hoping you could talk about [inaudible] but there seemed to be other things that he held steadfast too and i think coming from your wife. So could we just say about my wife she did, she is a wonderful, wonderful chicago [inaudible] but she did the audiobook and it was fun or mostly just give her suggestions that im a professional and i got this but ive been listening to this and its just so much and im so proud to have my name associated with hers anywhere but just the mortgage. What was the question again . About the abolitionism. I would say one thing that strang is slippery on and it is abolitionism. From his days as a young lawyer in new york he expresses an interest with this. I think one of the things i did to push our understanding of this along was i found out what might have influenced and he took a trip to virginia for a corrupt his fatherinlaw was very corrupt canal contractor who taken the money and run from a canal in virginia and sent strang down there to clean up the mess. There is a letter from strang back to his father in law where hes shocked at what he sees and what he sees is slave labor. They are going down to the south where slaves are working on this canal and strings hes on his fatherinlaws bid of the canal the most horrific conditions and is clearly shocked and upset by it and he carries that with him his whole career to when he did the michigan legislator he worked hard against his own party because strang was a democrat working with the new Republican Party which was brandnew with Abraham Lincoln on behalf of African Americans and also ordained a black elder into his church more than one century before the mainstream mormons did. This is one thing that is interesting about strang and just in general whats great about the string for a writer is hes totally contradictory, threedimensional figure who so much fun to dig into. Would you yeah, i would love to. If you could go to slide nine. Donovan and i would like to we could talk about some other books you should read or buy. I want to talk to more about that. If you could go to slide nine we each have some books we want to recommend to you. Bookstores arent fully functioning now we just dont have the browsing capabilities so these are three books with a collection of essays by michelle was a brilliant essayist and the critics have been raving about it. I think its the taboo that she is writing about. Shes writing about on consummated passion, a series of essays in on consummated passion. I find that to be one of the most interesting subjects ive never read several of the essays and it is wonderful. Avalon is the new poetry collection by the great and prolific poet, richard jones, who won poet of the east and his great colleague and friend of mine and cargo falls is a wonderful novel. Bill and i went to the program in ann arbor and this is his latest novel. Hes such a beautiful stylist and this is such a great comingofage story. I wont ruin it but it is about a group of boys who finds a gun with lime ammunition in the forest. Its a quiet book with this intense tension in every second of it. Donovan, what do you got . Could you go to ten . Yeah, let me move this guy over. There you go. Okay. Ive also been thinking a lot about other writers publishing into a pandemic because its strange times. I will recommend scorpion fish. Ive got my copy to. It said in this contemporary grease as well as recent history during the greek economic crisis. Essay about a strange Debutante Ball that takes place on the texas border. Things like in the realm of Leslie Jamison and gideon doing wonderful things with the essay. My last one is avoid the day by a writer named jake kurtz. This book is so hard to describe, im going to read my blurb for it which goes like this, which is avoid the day the marvel, half mad detective story that also a fever dream of the memoir. At heart the book is a hunt for host, lost manuscripts and the truth behind our symbols. Its a new Catholic Childhood in the mountains of vermont to the backwaters of transylvania to the ice fields of high arctic. Coming out any day now, july 2020 publication. Those are my three. Final word . If i could say one more thing before we close and its sort of like the arts are so in trouble right now because of covid and bookstores also in trouble, and authors are some trouble. There are people in worse shape. My wife isnt actors and the theaters set that in chicago and going out of business. I want to urge folks listening to this to support literati and also to buy this book and buy my book im a big browser come like it wouldnt buy a book from event like this but we dont have the ability to browse like we used to. If youre thinking about buying both of our books, and emphasize please buy both of the period please do it now and do it through literati. We are in a time when we are going to see massive cultural fallout from this thing, and buy my book is not proving your fighting that but i just think its really important that was about bookstores come support authors. Ill do in a man by emphasizing literati has been an amazing host throughout this pandemic for many writers and bennet has been the wizard behind the zoom curtain, so thank you in particular to literati. Thanks, literati. Donovan, thanks to you. What an honor to share the computer screen with you and bennet, thank you. Thanks to the huge crowd of people who showed up tonight. Thanks so much. I see see so many friends names. A little intimidating. Im glad i didnt see that before. A big thank you to dot of it and miles. Thanks for stopping by and thank you also for tuning in. We had 60 people tonight. Thats fun. I wouldnt be able to fit all of you in my apartment but i can feature in this zoom meeting so thats really exciting. Hopefully well be seeing you again soon. Otherwise have a good night, stay safe and stay well. Youre watching booktv on cspan2. For complete Television Schedule visit booktv. Org. You can follow along behind the scenes on social media at booktv, on twitter, instagram and facebook. Booktv on cspan2 this Labor Day Weekend watch top nonfiction books and authors. Watch booktv this Labor Day Weekend on cspan2 and be sure to watch the all virtual 2020 national book