The combination, for example, one line in your book that i think i slightly disagree with, when you said that jesus was the colossal failure, or Something Like that. Yes. Its a true. In a way he was the biggest loser. People witnessed all these miracles and always have, and yet they still cried out crucify him. But yet in a way i see them as the greatest winner, because he didnt allow all the forces against him, you know, to stop loving us. And thats what i see the transformation of the cross as a symbol of really a curse to humanity to a symbol of glory. I think you have to acknowledge the paradox. Within these religions, particularly christian, that the humiliation of god, of christ comes within also the most glorious moment of its existence. Im interested in the word of desert because when we say a place is deserted, we mean that something has left it. Something, and the expense of the desert is so terrifying to us. When i refer to las vegas earlier, i think its an extraordinary fantasy land that americans have created in the desert with golf courses and swimming pools, and they have taken the melancholy of the desert which is that nothing lasts. Theyve decided that that means everything is movable. So you can put the eiffel tower next to the pyramids across the street, and you can put that influence is now spreading into the emirates. The desert kingdom of the emirates. Dubai, for example, which is i can take you to the ice temple into by and we can have a snow fight in dubai. And now its even moved into mecca. In mecca, the Architectural Firm of osama bin ladens father which has had the favor of the saudi royals for many years. They have built in mecca, they have built overlooking the most sacred place in islam a Fairmont Hotel that is built in the shape of big ben. Not even las vegas has come up with a hotel initiate a big ben, and you can look from the penthouse down underneath the hotel is a Shopping Center with 40 4000 jobs. Let me as it went to prepare questions. I want to ask one question. Im curious to talk about where this book sits in your body of work. You talked about some of the difficulties of posing to editor on writing book about religion and some of the ideas in this book are implicit in your earlier work but that is something unique about the inception of the work in 9 11 and the way you set out in a journey to discover some source of yourself. How do you see this book in terms of your larger literary project and where does it take you . I dont know the next. I do feel theres a much a lot writing requires. As i get older a number of critics have said im not sure he will be able, capable of another book like this. It takes a great deal of energy to write a book of this density. Even though its a relatively short book. I dont know whether i in some way i was fighting ghosts for many years. I was fighting mexico about whether i was whether i was hispanic. Whether im gay. Charlie was asked whether i was gay. I said no, im a roast. Ive never and happy with the designation of people have given me. All i knew begin with my first book was i was a scholarship boy, and education separate me from the people of those. No one was talking education in those terms. Education was opening the World Everybody said, but it separates you. It costs to become educated. To go back from Public University to your house and no longer at ease come as cheap as the nigerian novelist, great novel about going back to his village from college. In some way books right you coming this book wrote me at a point in which my life, im not obsessed with the homosexual but i am obsessed with this fact there is violence in the world and the pope in this brilliant moment that i think cavalier generosity says, you know, who am i to criticize gay marriage or abortion . And i think to myself, well, thats interesting that you say that because there are those two links between the woman who control your body and men getting married. And in some way i more and more preoccupied by women, where women arent my life. Not the atheists i know but increasingly the women who are insisting, quietly, even confidence i know of to insisting that the guy is imminent as much as masculine. If you say off a, that which gives life, you have to acknowledge. Defendant impulse within the life process it and all the great religions seem to me to account for that complexity of god and this human era which i think in some ways is china make him an american. Questions . Just went into the microphone gets to use the you can be on the video. Hello. In hunger of memory you talk about being a young boy attempting to clean your face and change her skin color. Can you please describe that . Cant i what . Can you please describe that experiencing . It was an extremely. I wanted to know what this was, so i took a razor blade and ran it against this is a boy. This is a point about six. Took a razor blade, my parents were about to start this, one sister start into siblings is darker. I want to know what this was a how deep i would have to go to get a. I found i couldnt get it out to it was shocking to many people, but it is true. I dont want to be a role model. I never wanted to be a role model. I dont know what that is. If Virginia Woolf was my role model i would put a rock and a sweater and go to the river and to myself. That isnt what writers do. They are not role models. Its people who live life intensely and are prepared to do other people about that. Do you understand . Its about honesty of the portrayal . He really didn did it to himse. And writing about it i was separating myself from that boy. You go to hotels, many years later i went to hotels and i was at the Carlyle Hotel in new york. I have an affection for five star hotels, dangerous, but i remember i set the carlyle and then into something with my luggage set have you been on safari, he said . Because this skin is suddenly leisured. In my mothers eyes if i stayed in the senate too much, it was the labor that she saw. Wear a hat, dont stay in the sun. This preoccupation of mexico, that this becomes, you know, people like this do not go on. They dont look like this. They dont look like indians either unless they are clowns. But thats another sure to you ask about mexico someday. I will tell you about mexico and why i hate her as much as she is my mother. Hello, mr. Rodriguez. When you were speaking about hunger and there is a second ago i was reminded a bit of your commencement address at the college a few years but in that address you celebrate in a way that risk that writers take in their younger years, how they exuded forms of brilliance that supersede whatever they come up with later in life. And i was curious about how you might see that concept within your own career, what did you may be in the end the younger mr. Rodriguez and what are you kind of happy that you left behind . I do envy the. I think the a certain kind of bravery or carelessness. But curiously as you get older, as you get ready older like me, you get careless, to the i can say anything to anyone and i just dont care. You know, coming here and i was thinking, texas is all catholic and baptist. But can even talk about . Will the fire come down . And i thought, you are too old to worry about that. You are just too old. So im able to go to places, do things with people now that even made when i was your age i wouldnt have done. The sisters of mercy, the order, the irish order to educate me just have a slogan which ended up in a Richard Burton movie tersely enough, ava gardner said it. Be embarrassed by nothing. Actually and embarrassed by nothing but ive seen so much in my life. Theres nothing you can tell me that will shock me, nothing. Of course, the priest knows this, too. Having had many confessions over the years. Its true, this book is more daring in literary terms and its order, in formal terms, the way you combine element of imagination and dream. I mean, so it speaks exactly to this. One of the things that is charming and maddening about the old man is you cant follow what hes saying. Hes talking about kansas in 1922, and then he sort of forgets. Hes in the wars on the enemy somewhere else talking about his exwife that he divorced in 1952. Youre sitting there bewildered. I found that the essay is the old man john Trump Country and now is active and you and your age. Everything is able to be part of the essay because the connections of people are making in the thinking process no longer is logical but is almost biological. Did i tell you the one about las vegas and about this hotel in dubai or this hotel in mecca . Yeah, theres a hotel in mecca built in the shape of big ben, and all the grandchildren say not that again, you know . If thats the basis of essays is to make all that postel. Theres a wonderful writer, a great, great, great essayist, a german writer who lived in england who wrote a book called rings of saturn which i think is one of the great books of the last century. But it is madness. You let it go and you go within or you say, im not going there. I cant go with you. I cant swim with the current. If you trust your brain, what your brain is doing now, thats an essay already thats forming the way your brain jumps in those and the way Elvis Presley wanders into a chapter with Mother Teresa and theres cesar chavez in Saint Augustine is and theres the Prophet Muhammad in a cave and theres Martin Luther king, jr. Giving a speech at the Lincoln Memorial and Jackson Singh told them about the dream. Martin, tell them about the dream. Everything pertains because it relies its all part of the life the creature. Trust in it. Trust in it. I dont think we can followup on that but i think that may be a perfect way to end the afternoon. Thank you. No, no, no. Thank you for your patience. Im aware of the fact that we live in an age with fewer and fewer readers, fewer and fewer people who are willing to take on it difficult task. Two of you are, that youre more my age of any age of the young, and that you dont exactly belong to that civilization. I to young people that steve judged as more my age than his your age. Whatever it is in this room that still holds reference to the text, remember that those of us who are christians, jews, muslims, we are people of the book. If i ever go to a bar mitzvah when the kid comes in with a kindle, im leaving. [laughter] spin things are much, richard rodriguez. [applause] he will be signing books upstairs. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you are watching tv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on cspan2. Booktv asks what are you reading this summer . So much of my daily life here is policy orbit, serious things and so i like to do with reading, which is a passion of mine is unwind. Nothing like good murder mysteries. Ive heard a lot of great things about this author, have never read the book, but this gone girl, i love it but its talking about the town golden boy, series of lies, deceit, inappropriate behavior. Whats not to like . He is bitter that is a really a killer . We will find it. And then my spanish to my native language but im just not practicing it as well as i should, as often as i should so heaven is for real i heard is a very good book but this one is in spanish, el cielo es real. And then this guy, ive heard a lot about him, havent had a chance to read any of his previous work. Its a great title, not cool. I think im going to enjoy that but its beach reading along with david berry, good advice for my two granddaughters, you can date boys when youre forty. I think thats a good age. So david berry is a constituent. Love the guy. And now these two books, they are little bit old but i hadnt gotten a chance to read and. I purchased them. The book was made into a movie i do not want to see the movie because i heard that the book is superior. Socket wait to dig into that one. Then this one is a little bit older, the devil in the white city, murder, magic and madness of the feather changed america. Im all for it. A couple of old ones and a couple of new ones, some light reading, beach weather, surfs up in miami always spent what are you reading this summer . Tell us whats on your Summer Reading list, tweet us at booktv. Posted for facebook page, or send us an email, booktv at cspan. Org. Walter isaacson, a new book coming out this fall. Whats it about . Its about the innovators. We talk a lot about innovation these days. The word has almost become a so devoid of meeting that it gets overused. I wanted to look at how real people invented the computer and the internet and how innovation really happened in the digital age. It was some that came out of working with steve jobs and before that bill gates to say, who made the type of person, how did en it end up being successf . So the book is not just about Singular People but about teens, about collaboration. One of the things i discovered in doing this book is that real innovation comes from great teams, not just from great leaders. What surprised you . The importance of connecting the arts to technology. The importance of what steve jobs always talked about, the liberal arts and the engineering intersecting. It begins with she loves poetry but her mother wanted to be a mathematician so she became a great mathematician by the end she is able to combine the notion of poetry and the notion of math and she comes up with the idea of a computer program. Shes the first person to understand that the calculating machines that do numbers will also be able to weave patterns, be able to do words or music. So the notion of the modern computer comes from this idea which really begins with connecting sort of the arts to the technology. When we think of Early Computers in the u. S. We think of any act. Spent it was a great computer and was the first programmable all digital computer. One interesting things at the same time in iowa there was this lone professor doing a computer in the basement of the physics building. In some ways he is the first but it doesnt have the team around him. Unlike the other folks on this ultimate university of pennsylvania. So they could never get his computer really fully working, never get it developed and ends up being abandoned. So yet another example of the importance of teamwork, and thats where the eniac is so successful spare walter isaacson, when this book comes out in the fall and you are asked who invented the computer . You would have to say the people who created eniac were probably the first to do a programmable electronic computer. They did it working in teams but john markley one of the leaders of the team even goes to iowa and takes ideas from the. He goes up to harvard and seize the computing machines that a guy named howard aiken made it there. So what he does is he collects ideas like a bumblebee collects pollen and fertilizes it integrates places and then brings it all together. That as i was saying earlier is how innovation really works. Its not some guy sitting in a garage all alone for a dared or a lightbulb goes off in his head. You can ideas from many places, you pulled together a team and they said were going to execute on it now. So if i were to give credit to invention of the computer it would be the people who did eniac and even though they took the idea from a lot of other people, or i should say especially because they took their ideas from a lot of other people. Who is Steve Wozniak . He was steve jobs partner, you know, and the founder of apple. Once again it shows how partnerships in teamwork can work. Because Steve Wozniak creates the Circuit Board will becomes the apple one and the apple ii. Hes a genius at knowing how to create circuit, with very few components in order to turn it in to a hobbyist computer, but ive a computer you can use at home. He loves giving it away. Is part of the old ethos. He takes the sheet about works out and gives it away to all the members of the Homebrew Computer Club so they can build one. What happens is his friend just down the street, steve jobs, said no, we should build these and we should sell them. So they create a Little Company which they call apple. So what it takes to innovate is not just the person who has the idea which is wozniak but it takes the person this is how we going to execute, how are we going to turn this into a commercial machine, which is what steve jobs did. How we put a beautiful face around the . How can we get a power supply . How are we going to gather it all together . So the greatest teams, whether its the people inventing the transistor, the microchip, the personal computer like steve jobs and wozniak usually have sort of a visionary engineering type but also a hardnosed business type, and that team pulled together a great things like apple or
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