Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Run Dont Walk 20151114

German officers with various collaborators had planned and decided how exactly did this begin, actual event . The germans came and first when the soviets escaped the auxiliary police was formed and they took care of the town. They had some relations with germans. They came and talked to them and they encouraged them. They talk to you have three days to kill the jews, the germans, the germans, the germans told the poles. You have three days to kill the jews. So, it was encouraged by germans , but the germans didnt take an active path of the killing. It was orchestrated by poles. By the polish police . By the police. Yes by kind of police police. Some people in the town. Was there a general call . Did they get ringleaders or go knocking on doors . And they knocked on the doors and they told people to come to kill jews. There were some people who didnt do it and thats what happened to them. But, guess, it was quite organized because its not so easy to kill somebody people, but what is horrible is that it was like a whole pound picnic, but all the people came to see. A 15year old boy came to the field and catch the 12year old boy in the 10year old boy cut the five years old boy. So, it was really, it was really the town who did it. Thank you. [applause]. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] but tv is on facebook. Like us to get publishing news, scheduling updates, behindthescenes pictures and videos, author information and to talk directly with others during our live programs. Facebook. Com. book tv. You are watching book tv on cspan 2, television for serious readers. Heres a look at whats on prime time to die. At 7 30 p. M. Eastern, antony lowensteins take cyclical look at companies that make money off of natural and manmade disasters around the world. Than a 9 00 p. M. , rita davis talks about the recent discovery of her maternal grandfathers involvement in the the stop out in lithuania, from 1941 to 9043. Tonight at 10 00 p. M. Eastern on book tv Author Interview program , afterwards, former congressman Patrick Kennedy Discusses Mental Health and addiction with congressman jim mcdermotts. Then, at 11 00 p. M. A conversation with president george w. Bush and pulitzer prizewinning biographer john meacham about the life and political career of americas 41st president , george h toby bush. That all happens tonight on cspan 2 book tv. Now book tvs coverage of the 12th annual louisiana book festival. All day we will bring programs on africanamerican history, the media, politics and culture in new orleans and more. Keep an eye on the screen to route the day for a schedule of events. You can check online at book tv. Org. So, we kick off the louisiana book festival with a look inside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Good morning. I am one of the book festival volunteers and on behalf of the state library of louisiana in the Louisiana Center for the book, welcome to this program. A couple of requests, please. Please a silencer cell phones and please respect our host rule, no food or beverages are permitted in the spectator area. Also, there will be a book signing at the book intent beginning 15 minutes after this program and all book sales benefit the Louisiana Library foundation. Today we have a presentation by ms. Adele levin and i would like to take a moment to read her bio. Adele levine, her work is entitled run, dont walk, the curious and courageous life inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Adele levin is a practicing physical therapists and worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center from 2005 till its closure in 2011. Issues then transferred to the National Naval Medical Center renamed the Walter Reed National military Medical Center where she continued rehabilitating war amputees. Levine edited that apartment newsletter, known for its reviews of the local [inaudible] suggestions that the hospital uniform policy should include superhero costumes. Levines writing has appeared in the new york times, the Washington Post, psychology today, narratively the washingtonian and now i present to you ms. Adele levin. [applause]. Thank you. Its an honor to be here in louisiana, a beautiful state and beautiful festival. So, just a little background. I worked as a physical therapist at walter reed for nine years. Seven of those years in amputee section. Walter reed was americas oldest Military Hospital and in the end, the largest amputee clinic the world has ever seen. We were shut down in 2011, as part of a much earlier congressional budget decision and we emerged with the naval hospital. My book run, dont walk focuses on what it was like to be at walter reed during those last couple of years. I will talk a little bit about just how i ended up writing a book in the first place. Mostly i will talk about what it was like to be at walter reed. So, in 2007, i had a 17year old car that my friends called the rest paying because the doors had rusted shut and the only way you could get in or out of my car was to climb through the windows, which my friends thought was a very unsafe car for me to be driving and when they found out that i was also using a screwdriver to unlock my seatbelt they had this intervention where they got everyone together and they all try to talk me into getting rid of my car. Which, of course, i was never going to do because i loved my car. Anyway, a couple of weeks after the intervention i was driving home and i was in a traffic jam, which is very common in washington dc. I was about a mile from my apartment when completely out of the blue my car just caught on fire. Which, was exactly what my friends were worried was going to happen. So come i didnt know what to do , so i did the only thing i knew how to do, which was i just driving my car. I had about a mile to go and i was determined to get my car back to my apartment building. Somehow, i get my car back, i fly into the parking lot and jump out the window, run up the stairs to my apartment and then i just lie down on the couch and thats kind of how i handle all major calamities in my life. Anyway, after that day my car never drove again and i just didnt have the heart to have someone come and told it away, so i just left it out back in the parking lot where it was just sort of rusting away and no spending a lot more time at home. I was at home one night and i was reading the Washington Post and they had an article about local eyesores and at the end of the article was a query, do you know of a local eyesores. If you do, let us know and we will send a reporter out and i thought, well, yeah, i know a local eyesore and its parked out back. So, i figured i will just write it up myself and i wrote up this story about my car and i sent it into the post and i went out for a walk and when i came back, there was a message on my machine from the editor of that section and he said that he loved my article and he said if i ever had anything else i would like to send him to go ahead and send it in. Then, he added especially if its about public transportation. I guess he figured, here someone is taking the bus, so after that day for the next three or four years whenever something funny what happened to me i would write it up and i would send it to the Washington Post and a lot of times they would run its, so i was really lucky. I was lucky for two reasons. One is i found out that i could write. Believe me, this book never would have happened if my car had not caught on fire. But, the real reason i was lucky is that during those years that i was writing those articles for the post, things at walter reed were starting to get really hot. I worked as a physical therapist in amputee section and in the beginning we were mostly seen single leg amputees, patients who had lost their legs below the knee, but as the wars went on the entries began to get worse and worse. Began to see more and more double and triple amputees. Those are soldiers who have lost two or three limbs and we watch as amputations began to move up the body. They went from being below the knee and below the elbow to above the knee and the five above the elbow at the arm in the armpits. We began to get soldiers back who are losing their legs at the growing and we even began to see partial pelvic invitation. By the time walter reed closed in 2011, we had almost all their patients coming in on the medevac at that time were either double or triple entities and we had rehabilitated by that point three men who had lost all four of their limbs, but i was lucky because i had stumbled into this hobby that kind of forced me to look for the funny lining in life and all of my coworkers who made it through those years at walter reed had something that we did in the evenings whether it was obsessively baking pound cakes or training for 100mile running races or even just keeping up with a very complicated world of celebrity news. We all had something that we did. So, you could go to the biggest Trauma Center in the country and you might see one amputee, but at walter reed we regularly rehabilitated between 100 and 150 entities a day and we did it all inside a glassed in rehab clinic, which was glassed in because they used to lead to a groups around the perimeter and it wasnt just one to her group, but there were two workgroups running of a long. So, you are always looking out at people looking at you. So, our patients and my coworkers always used to joe, this must be how it feels to be an animal at the zoo. But, to me it began to feel like a really dark comedy, which was kind of how i wrote the book. Because the tumor groups always looked horrified, but on our side of the glass everyone was always joking and laughing. The patient, especially. They used to tease each other in college other names like of the stump and princess if someone is having a really bad day and they would wear tshirts that said things like i had a blast in afghanistan. Marine, 50 off. My coworkers and i, we werent much better. We were always kind of upsetting loudly about whatever infomercial we had watch a latenight tv, but overall the feeling in their was that this is life, this is normal and we are going to get through this together, but you could tell that on the other side of the class that the two are groups didnt share that feeling. This is the longest war our country has ever been in. It affects so few people on a personal level i remember how astounded i was the day i got a new patient who had lost both of his legs on his sixth deployment. One of the reasons i came down to louisiana, because i wanted to visit a friend of mine who was recently pts out to port poke and shes there because her husband is in afghanistan on his eighth deployment. So, in 2010, walter reed began to shut down. Unfortunately, that also coincided with the surge in afghanistan, and that year our caseload at walter reed triple. Unfortunately, walter reed was in the process of moving to bethesda bethesda and the first thing was that they started to get at the employee parking lots, so in order to find parking at work, you had to get to work no later than 6 00 a. M. Which, we all did. We got to work at 6 00 a. M. , we worked through lunch and we stayed late. We were just so busy. We were so busy that at night in my dreams everyone was in amputee. Even me. My friends come over the years got really sick of hearing me say that i was going to leave walter reed. I was always going to leave walter reed. I was going to quit, find a new job with parking and better hours. Then, the next time they saw me i was still at walter reed and they would get kind of annoyed, but i never could quite explain it to them why i stayed. I stayed for nine years, but i realized that i was part of something that was much larger than myself. I couldnt just walk away, just because it was hard. I was lucky. Because at night i was busy writing humor articles about life in dc. That really kind of took my mind up for what i was seen it work. Anyway, one night i was at home and i was writing and working on an article and my girlfriend, ashley, said something to me that really surprised me. She said, you know, you are wasting your time writing those articles for the post. I thought, what, and she said your articles are funny and their cute, but you should be writing about what you are seeing at work. I thought, thats a terrible idea. The last thing the whole reason i am writing in the first place is to get my mind off of what i am seeing at work in the last thing im ever going to do when i come home from work is right about work. Anyway, a couple days later almost as if they had planned it that editor that i had been in touch with at the post called me and his name also happened to be ashley and he said kind of a similar thing to me. He said with walter reed shutting down he thought it would be interesting if i were to send in an article about my job and i said that i really did not feel comfortable doing that. So, i was surprised to get a phone call the next day by a reporter from the Washington Post and he told me that he had been assigned that article and that he was going to be writing an article about her clinic and i was so mad when i heard that. I was just fuming at the end of the line and he was asking me questions and i could tell by his questions that the article he was going to write was going to misrepresent us. He seemed to be hunting for a really grotesque shocking story involving the most badly injured patients. And i knew he didnt get it. Because our clinic, you know, we saw really devastating injuries at walter reed, but we were neve