Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book 20240706

Current nonfiction authors and books, the latest book reviews, and well talk about the current nonfiction books featured on cspans booktv. To about books. In a few minutes, well talk with an author and professor who found a new outlook on education through her work teaching the humanities to inmates at a maximum security prison in new york. But first, heres some of the latest stories from the publishing world. A recent focus on gifts given to Supreme Court Justice Clarence thomas has led to fresh scrutiny of the Financial Arrangements of other Supreme Court justices and the judicial reform group fix. The court recently highlighted the book deals of justices Sonia Sotomayor and neil gorsuch. Fix the court notes that both justices sotomayor and gorsuch failed to recuse themselves on Copyright Infringement cases involving Penguin Random house fix. The court reported that Justice Sotomayor has earned more than 3 million from books published through penguin, and the group said justice gorsuch, whos a republic, if you can keep it memoir was published by Penguins Forum books in 2019. Earned over 500,000. In other book news, the 2023 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. Heres some of the winners. Freedoms dominion a saga of white resistance to federal power. Jefferson cowie. He won the prize for history. Gman j. Edgar hoover. And the making of the American Century by beverly gage won the biography category and stayed true, a memoir by hua hsu won the prize for memoir or autobiography. And his name is george floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa won the general nonfiction category. Both beverly gage and tolu olo juniper were recent guests on booktv. You can find them in our video library. And finally, in publishing news, the Us Postal Service announced recently that it would honor Childrens Book author and illustrator writer tommy depalma on a new forever stamp. Now, mr. Depalma, who died in 2020, is best known for his 1975 strike. Unknown a folk tale and picture book about a grandma witch and her magical always full pasta pot. Mr. Depalma received a childrens literature legacy award from the American Library association in 2011 and the new postage stamp art features the cover of stranger. No doubt. And now a conversation with author and professor brooke allen, who teaches the humanities to inmates at a maximum security prison in upstate new york. She recently wrote a piece in the wall street journal about her experience and titled college should be more like prison. So brooke allen, what is the Bennington College Prison Education initiative and how did you get involved in this . Well, bard college started a Prison Education program. It must be close to 20 years ago now. I think quite a long time. It was very success. And my colleague at bennington, anabel davis, whos a writer and and teacher at bennington, decided that she thought this is quite fabulous and she would try to start a similar one at bennington. And so she contacted a prison, which is its not that close. Its about an hour from bennington in comstock, new york. And after mens maximum security prison and after a lot of jumping through hoops and filling out forms and a lot of security issues, she was able to start the program. And im thinking that must be, i dont know, maybe close to ten years ago, seven or eight years ago at least. And i got involved in it through her. Shes somebody i admire and take her advice. And she said, i would love to teaching there, which in fact is true, which is great. Well, what were you teaching at bennington and what were you teaching at the prison . At bennington, i taught literature and its a small department, so weve sat had a very wide sort of range of things that we all tried to do. And i found myself sort of specializing in 18th century stuff because that seemed to be lacking at the college. And i thought it was a gap. And when i moved on to the prison, i took some of that with me and annabels said they already had literature teachers enough, but they needed something more broad. So i developed a series of classes called history of thought. And the first class i taught was on the enlightenment. And the second class was on the renaissance. And i taught a class for advanced student students of romanticism. And then weve done sort of individual classes, like classes on adam smith, on tocqueville and on george orwell. And right now im back to literature teaching a class on indian and pakistani fiction, which is soon coming to an end. And when you taught the enlightenment, what was the the the book that you used . We didnt use a textbook. We did we did readings from the actual authors. And its quite you know, and in that case, its not particularly difficult. But because the enlightenment readers were writers were were reading to be understood. So theyre not trying to couch things in too many hidden metaphors. We started with john locke and hobbes in the obvious places. We went on to montesquieu. We read the spirit of laws. We read persian letters, we read a lot of voltaire. We read rousseau, we read david hume, we read thomas paine and the american Founding Fathers and just a whole variety of people and it was a huge hit in a couple of the students actually said, why dont we read these things in high school . Theyre so important and we dont know them. So that was a great it was a hit both at the college and at the at the prison. It is indeed material we should all be reading in high school. So brooke allen the obvious question is what was it like teaching john locke to maximum security prisoners and what did you expect and what was he . What was the actual reality . Well, i expected that it might be a difficult im sure, but in fact, they were a lot easier to deal with. And and still are really than college students. They had had to make a big effort to get into the program. They had to apply to Bennington College effectively and be deemed at a good enough level to get in and do their College Level work, not remedial. And so some of the students i had were sort of like ordinary college students, quite young and untested, and some of them were men in their fifties and sixties who had been sitting in the prison reading books for 30 years and were very, very advanced and could do just fine in any graduate program. So the classes tend to run the gamut between the sort of more basic College Freshmen and people who would be in third Year Graduate program. And what was really great for me and it continues to be, is that they help each other. There are some students who are very wellprepared. They go out of their way to help the people who are less wellprepared and theyre all exceedingly motivated. Theyll come into the classroom having done the reading two or three times before class, having taken a lot of notes, having looked things up insofar as theyre able because they dont have access to the computer or the internet. Theyre just a joy to work with. What can i say . I dont know. I recommend anybody who enjoys teaching to do this sort of work now. Brooke allen in a recent wall street journal op ed, you lamented the future of the human outis why . Well, i mean, for many, many reasons. The students of today, the college students, i think, have a radically decreased attention span. And, you know, it is probably 75 comes from internet, social media, constantly being online. But in order to put the attention in that, you need to read, say, a book by like dickens or richardson. They dont seem to have that anymore. The prisoners do have that because theyre not online on there is this feeling of things having to be. You know, applicable to modern life, which is not really what the humanities are about. Theres so many things getting in their way. On the prevalence of tech. I think the new the new Artificial Intelligence we have no idea where thats going to take us. But certainly the traditional way of of learning in college is going to be turned upside down. And again, i havent had to deal with that in the prison. They have no access to these things. They write their essays the Old Fashioned way in longhand on it. Their they have enough access to Research Materials to help them, but not so much that theyre overwhelmed and theyre not being constantly distracted by by sort of flashier things going on in their lives. What do you think these prisoners are getting from the classics, from john locke, from tocqueville, etc. . I think theyre getting exactly what i got in college in the 1970s, which is a expanded view of the world and our relative small place in it. The idea that the Brilliant Ideas we think we have are not reinvent the wheel, that people have been to all these places before and have had very supportive, gated and complex and interesting thoughts that we need to be aware of before we wade into the same waters philosophically, intellectually, historically. You know, i think i think the history of teaching is going teaching history has gone down. The toilet. I dont know any young people who know any history now at all. And, you know how that comes back. Im not sure. Part of the problem, i think, is, is the fact that School Boards are locally influenced and theres no sort of generalized idea in this country. Taking a philosophy of what education is and what an educated, educated person looks like, we dont agree on that. And thats a problem. Whats a typical day teaching at the prison . Oh, well, my classes two and a half hours long. I drive 2 hours to get to the prison, and i have to be there a half hour to advance. So i get there at about six in the class. I mean, 530 class goes from 6 to 830 on. And then well leave again. And during that two and a half hours. Something else surprised me. There is no lapse of attention. They all are fascinated throughout the whole class. Without going to the bathroom, without looking at the watch. Its really fascinating. I think its, you know, by virtue of the fact that theyre not going that many interesting things in their lives and this is a high point for them. Whats the process for you getting into the prison security . Is there a guard in there . Are they allowed pencils, etc. . Theyre there. Do you have to go through a lot of security when you come in . You have to go through a metal detector on your search to make sure youre not bringing in anything. You have to let them know ahead of time what you are planning to bring. And then once you get into the classroom, we close the door and were in the classroom by ourselves. But theres a guard in the hall who is usually theres three or four classes going on at the same time. Theres one guard out there whos on whos there in case anything goes wrong. Nothing ever has, so far as i know, in our classes. Do you get a sense that these prisoners or these students have political opinions . Oh, yes. And i would say that 80 of them are political liberals. And then you get the odd conservative and they all sort of give that guy a hard time. But in a in a good natured way, there are no there are no ugly political fights in the classroom, which is another refreshing thing. And i feel that one thing that could be applied from the prison to the College Classroom is that we could forego political discussion, except insofar as they were in the context of whatever it is were reading. I mean, if youre reading voltaire and you understand the political context of his time and what it meant to be a liberal, which he was, that is fair game. But then to start, you know, have a look at each other or at the teacher is just not very productive. And we dont get that in the prison. In your op ed in the wall street journal, you referred to reading some of these authors, some of these classics as time travel. What did you mean by that . Well, that, too, is something i think we could apply to the College Classroom, because right now, colleges, if you read a i mean, lets just take the most obvious example. Huck finn, everybodys talking about this ad nauseum. And People Choose to become offended at the content of it in reading it in the 21st century. Context. If you try and travel to the 19th century and look at it again, youre going to have very different ideas. But it takes a certain sensitivity and tack on the part of the teacher and a certain willingness on the part of the students to be humble and realize that they do not. Theyre not there in the classroom to sit on judgment on everybody in the lesson thousand years. Now, is huck finn a book that you would teach at benning . No, i have not taught how. I dont i dont specialize in american literature. Im just im just saying that because its something thats always been in the news. But, for instance, i do teach david hume, and david hume is an indispensable philosopher for his period. You have to read david hume and then, of course, he wrote an essay in which he said that he you know, he thought that there was a hierarchy in intelligence among the races and we dont believe that anymore. Science has proved that thats incorrect. But this is not to say that we shouldnt Read Everything else that david hume wrote, which is of the utmost importance. And i think my students at the prison get that. They understand that there are classes taught the person. You know, we try to we try to do a wide variety of classes. And there have been some, i think, really interesting classes. One on the nat turner rebellion, and there has been one on the haitian revolution. You know, needless to say, we do africanamerica literature and things like this, but we try to give a very, very Broad Spectrum of on historical literature and philosophy and to really make the students understand that each book is a product of its own time, its a creature of its time. And that goes also for the books that people are writing right now. And you just get that, you know, brooke allen is the racial makeup of your class at the present important not particularly. No. We have a little bit of everything. The only time its been problematic is because we have certain people who are not quite there in english as a second language and they struggle a bit. But there has not. I mean, its helpful, of course, to have a very diverse population, which we do by definition. We dont have to try for it. It just happens. But there has been ive not witnessed any acrimony on politico or otherwise. Ive got one guy who takes all of my classes whos a sort of intellectual conservative. He reads he reads things like the new criterion and the wall street journal and the other class members will give him a hard time, but its all in very good spirit and laughing. And we had one discussion monday about gun control, because this sort of issue was something that already came up in the enlightenment. And i was surprised to find that every single one of my students was passionately in favor of gun control. And i said, would you like to go further on that . And they said, well, you know where most of us are here, because we were we had access to guns when we were young and stupid, and we dont want to be. It was that was crazy. So, of course, were in favor of gun control. So these things are interesting. Professor allen, are most of your students there for life . No, to a certain proportion, i would say. Maybe a third of them are. And this has become a particular focus for us, because were trying to figure out, you know, what kind of education you can offer that is ongoing year after year for these students who are passionately interested in that, who want to be doing it all the time. They they a lot of these guys have way more than enough credits to get a b. A. And we as an institution are only allowed to give to the associates degree. But some of these guys have enough credits for two boys. So how do you proceed with it . With education that continues to interest and engage them . Where they dont sort of have to go through the mechanisms of the College Essay and all the things theyve done. Many times before. So this is of interest to us and were working on different ideas to try to make that happen in a smooth manner. Have you been able to hold a graduate ceremony at all . Yes, there was a Graduation Ceremony a few months ago for the associate students and i was not able to be there because i had to be at a wedding. But i saw the photographs and ive never seen so many happy faces ever. It was it was obviously terrific. Whats their response to when you grade and critique their papers . Oh, theyre very theyre very humble. They ive never had anybody argue about a grade one of my guys who i have no doubt was a dangerous criminal in a former life is a very much afraid of one of the teachers because he feels that she grades are so so you know it makes me laugh i think they all except that they understand their limitations they theyre very philosophical about the their position and the class. And theres a attitude of mutual respect. You know, they call me professor and i call them mr. Soandso. Now, the the prison has said maybe its not a good idea to say mr. In case somebody doesnt identify as a man. But the people that i have have all said that they enjoy being called mr. And i do think its one of the few moments of respect i get them their day there. So its very precious. Now, brooke allen, i dont want to get you in trouble, but is it . Bennington is rather an elite institution in vermont and youre teaching at a maximum security prison. Whats the difference between the elite students who maybe come from a different background than the men that youre teaching at the prison . I think elite students and im i wouldnt say this about all bennington students because a great number of bennington students are on scholarships and have jobs and have to work. But for those who are, just take it for granted that they will their college will be paid for. I think, you know, theres theres a lot of they dont make the same effort that the prisoners do. And i know that in Community Colleges and certain state institutions, youre going to get, you know, prisoners who i mean, students who are like the prisoners in that they they very much value their what theyre able to get there. And they work hard for it. But its true that and i think itll lead institutions a proportion, a large proportion of students take a lot for granted. And more and more and more, i would say, from my own experiences and those of my friends, they feel like customers rather than people who have to conform with a certain certain strictures. When you read and talk about the Founding Fathers, whats the Knowledge Base of the men in the prison . Its higher than the ordinary undergraduate base. I would say. These people do a lot of recreation reading. But, you know, theres so many things that we as american citizens dont know. And i went to one myself. I went to a fairly elite schools, and i went to the university of virginia and a ph. D. From columbia. But i did not learn a lot of the sort of basic facts about enlightenment. Thought and the fact that our constitution is a enlightenment document. So this is something we all need to Pay Attention to. Ive taken the citizens trip just to sort of curiosity, and that would seem to be a very basic, a baseline that everybody should have when they come out of high school. But for some reason, again, are the u. S. Is a country, doesnt agree on what an education educated person should know. This doesnt happen. And i remember a few years ago, i think the governor of arizona said that he wanted High School Graduates, he or she wanted the High School Graduates to come out being able to pass the citizenship test. And everybody had a fit so that were asking too much of students. I dont understand it. How many students in your class . Ive had everything. From 5 to 16. The class has shrunk after covid because there were social distancing. And and now theres more teachers. And the classes are so much smaller, usually between five and ten. And what are you teaching this semester . Im really class. I taught at the college two or three times before, which is on indian and pakistani fiction. And thats a lot of fun because its a part of the world that on christmas students know nothing about. On and they came in the other day saying thank you, thank you for introducing us to these fabulous authors and this history and culture of this part of the world. We knew nothing about. So so we had a good time in the class. And theres wonderful, wonderful writers coming out of the subcontinent right now. And really, for the last 200 years that everybody ought to be aware of. And what is the platonic method of teaching that you use . Well, youre really this discussion. I mean, i had nothing against lecture classes. And in fact, i they were my favorite classes in college and they provide a framework. But the bennington philosophy is more a small class discussion based where youre not telling your eliciting from the students. And then when you elicit something that seems crazy, you try to get them to refine their thoughts by asking them further questions. And of course, the smaller the class, the better it works. And thats thats kind of the philosophy of the college. And and we continued to follow that in in our class to the present, even though i do teach on survey classes, i knew Something Like the enlightenment would be a survey class strictly from, say, the 1660s to 1790. And on. And they get the context. Its desirable to survey class, but at the same time, youre having very close discussions with individual students and small groups. Brooke allen the title of your wall street journal editorial. Our op ed was college should be more like prison was that your title was definitely not my title, and ive got a certain amount of flack for it. But, you know, the editorial writers, editors, they want people to they want eyes on page. And i think they succeeded really well in that. And there certainly are aspects of the college that i wish could be more like the prison. I wish it were more it were more tolerant. I wish it were more peaceful. I wish there were no poems and computers in the classroom. Theres so many things id like to see similar to what the kind of class we have in the prison. Brooke allen former Bennington College professor who works on that institutions Prison Education initiative. We appreciate your time on booktv. Thank you. And i and you watching about books, a program and podcast produced by cspans booktv. Well, each tuesday, dozens of new books are published. Heres a recent sampling. Two new history books focus on high profile congressional hearings of the 20th century. In the last honest man, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author james risen profiles Idaho Democrat Frank Church and the Church Committee hearings of 1975 and 76, officially known as the, quote, select committee to study governmental operation ins with respect to intelligence activities, the Church Committee helped pull the curtain back on an array of intelligence abuses by the cia, fbi and National Security agency and another new book that just came out is called the watchdog. Its by npr Senior Editor steve drummond. And it looks at Harry Trumans work when he was the junior senator from missouri. Mr. Truman led congressional investigations into military waste and war profiteering during world war two. And it was that work that became known as the Truman Committee that would help springboard him to the vice presidency spot on the 1944 ticket with franklin roosevelt. Well, also each week, National Publications review the latest books. Heres a couple. The New York Times recently reviewed hector tobias, our migrant souls a meditation on race and the meanings and myths of latino. According to the reviewer francisco cantu. Mr. Tobar is as likely to quote historians and cultural theorists as he is to cites students, store clerks or an undocumented trump supporter. Randomly encountered on the street. He is also quick to acknowledge the problematic nature of the word latino. Thats from the New York Times. And in another review, this on the Washington Free beacon news site. Andrew styles reviews luke russerts new book, look for me there. Luke russert was a nbc news correspondent, particularly on capitol hill. He was the son of tim russert, former meet the press host. And the book looks at mr. Russerts travels across Six Continents and his efforts to come to terms with his fathers death. Quote, its not the worst memoir ever written. Not even close, probably. Andrew styles writes in the free beacon. But as soon as luke russert embarks on his global quest for purpose and enlightenment, the average reader will find, prohibit tively challenging the task of taking him seriously as a writer, traveler, thinker, bon vivant. At various points through his journey, russert compares himself to buddha, the virgin mary, a rwandan silverback gorilla, and jesus christ. Thats andrew styles, writing in the Washington Free beacon. Well, coming up on book tvs afterwords program is alexandra robbins. She is an investigator of reporter and she provides a behind the scenes look at the issues teachers are facing in the classroom today. Her book is entitled the teachers a year inside americas most vulnerable important profession. Heres a preview. Everything we talk about, everything teachers unions are asking for, everything teachers are asking for. Its not just to better the environment for the teachers. Teachers working conditions, as you say, our childrens learning conditions. If teachers are asking for a better age system, thats as important for the kids to be able to sit comfortably and learn as it is for the teachers to have what should be the proper working environment. If were talking about salary, for example. Its been shown, studies show that students have significantly higher math and english standardized test scores. In districts that pay teachers a higher base salary. And it just it just makes total sense. If a teacher doesnt have to work a second job after school. Shes going to have more time to devote to thinking about, okay, how do i differentiate this lesson so that my gifted students and my struggling students and my students in the middle all get the most they can out of it. Everything we talk about in terms of teachers, working conditions, everything we improve there will improve schools for students to. And a reminder that afterwards airs sunday nights at 10 p. M. Eastern time on book tv. Well, thanks for joining us for about books. This is a program and podcast produced by cspan. Booktv booktv will continue to bring you publishing news and new author programs and a reminder that this podcast is available along with all other cspan podcasts on our cspan now app, and you can also watch online all booktv programs any time at booktv dot org