Country doesnt work in another. They have to really invest themselves in it. Do you speak any french . I speak just enough to get myself in trouble. I can ask a question that can be under stood but i can understand the answer because they speak much too fast for me. When you have a staff meeting here in the United States, whose around the table . There are monthly board meetings and the board is composed of all publishers of all seven divisions in the heads of each of the major functions, chief operating officer, chief counsel, marketing director, Communications Director hr director. Im probably leaving somebody out and i apologize in advance but people around all the major functions are there. We talk about how we are doing against our budget and strategic initiatives. Thank you. s Book Publishing a modern business . It is a 19thcentury business. It has changed more in the past ten years than it did the past hundred years before. It is not a leadingedge business because its really an ancient unchanged experience. Reading a book is a 12 or 15 hour experience. It takes time and books were portable the day they were invented. I could say they are incredibly modern because the rest of medias just catching up with books. Digitization, movies, tv, all these other forms you had to be in one place to hear them before those businesses were radically transformed because they became more like books. Books are premodern. Were not the earliest adoption but we make books available in every kind of format. The relationship with the author and publisher and reseller, not much has changed because its a business of hundreds of thousands of products. The number of books published each year is gigantic. They all need individual attention. The focus of acquiring a lot of books and developing them and getting them out to all the millions of readers around the country, that really hasnt changed much. Digitization changed wonderfully in that anybody can buy a book the second they think of it. They dont have to go to a bookstore if you dont want to. If someone says they love a book you can have it on your ipad the next minute. It is modern and instantaneous in that way. But that subversive experience is still unchanged. Thats why books havent changed as much in the past decade as these other Media Industries that i talked about because the experience of reading a book, people people like the physical incarnation of a book. The journey thats in your head is the book. It has taken about 20 of the business but 80 is still print. Ebooks grew really rapidly over the last several years and thats a sign of a really healthy roots of our industry. People who really talk about books, thats the sign of a great success. Has digital revolution been painful or a disruptor . The digital revolution has brought a lot of change but i wouldnt say its been as disruptive as its bedded magazines and movies and television and music. That was much more radically transformed. We have been transformed but digitization is the rise of ebook sales have led to conglomeration. Weve had to get bigger because the market has grown. Thats why you see the bigger publishers. Its not a radical transformation like youve seen it many other businesses. 2016 the health of the publishing industry. The health is very strong. That is a very Stable Foundation because the demand of books is timeless and enormous. The biggest challenge is the quality on that device. It used to be that the book was the only thing you could have in your hand all the time. Now you have a device and your games are on their two and your social media and the number of things that are competing for peoples time in the same channel, thats a big challenge we have to make sure that books stand out. We have to sharpen the messaging and come up with some new formats. Games are narrative base and thats expanding and i think theres a place where games and books could meet and new things would be really exciting. The foundation of publishing, reading, writing is really, really strong. Where you spend the majority of your day doing . I spend the majority of my day, thats a tough question because each day is different. I think i spend the majority of my time working with publishers on publishing their book, on what books were bringing in, maybe half my time goes there and the rest of the time im thinking about strategy and finances and all the things we need to think about to run a healthy company. I spend as much of my time there as i possibly can. I love it and its fun. Give us a sense, and i dont know know how to do this, how many books did you sell last year or whats your revenues or how many employees, give give us a sense of how big. Out to be a sense of scale. There are five publishers that are pretty big the biggest is random and then harpercollins and then Simon Schuster followed by us and mcmillan. There are two really, really Big Companies and three that are about the same size. A unique feature of us within the landscape is that among the big five we are the smallest title count. We are still small in numbers and the next biggest would be Simon Schuster. They publish many more books than we do and the reason i like that is attention to the writer. We are being selective in making sure we have time to partner with the writer on the editing and the marketing and communicating about the whole experience of the partnership. Its just something that is a unique strength of ours that we want to keep that way. What are your revenues for year . Our revenues were 600 million in 2015. We just acquired perseus which was a 90 milliondollar company. That sounds like a lot of money but when you compare it to a car company or a google or facebook, its pretty small. We are much smaller than most major media and Industrial Companies that you are thinking of. Its an industry that is built up out of all these different products. Every book is something that one person created and there are hundreds of thousands of them. Thats different than anything else out there. Thank you very much. Youre watching tv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Book tv, television for seous readers. Good evening, thanks for attending tonights bookmark with Mark Zwonitzer, author of the statesman and the storyteller. Facilitating tonights discussion is a friend and former education director, you will notice a camera in the back of the room. Tonights program is being filmed by cspan. We will be offering a q a at the end. Please, if you want to ask a question wait for the microphone to come to you. You want to be heard as well as scene. Finally on the way out, if you could please pick up a listing of our Upcoming Events and information on the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Program we encourage you to take a look at those opportunities. Thank you for coming tonight. Double thank you if you are a twain house member. With that i turn it over to begin the program. Thank you. Thank you. Its my pleasure to introduce our author, Mark Zwonitzer who wrote the statesman and the storyteller, john hay, mark twain and the rise of american imperialism. Its on sale in the books or which will be open at the end of the program and he will be happy to sign them for you at the conclusion of the remarks this evening. Let me say little bit about him, from 1986 until 1992 he reported the book what it takes, the way to the white house which was named one of the 100 best works of nonfiction and the 20th century. He also worked with ben cramer on joe dimaggio. The wife published in 2000. Since 2000 he has produced, directed and or written many programs for pbs. Theres a rich variety of subjects, mount rushmore, Transcontinental Railroad robert e lee and jesse james. He has received the dupont columbia award the riders guild award and many others. In 2007 he was a writer for the four hour pbs history of the United States Supreme Court which was awarded the International Documentary associations award for Outstanding Limited series. In 2008 he was nominated for a prime time emmy in the category of Outstanding Achievement in outstanding filmmaking and achievement in writing for his pbs program on walt whitman. Hes also the author of will you miss me when im gone, the Carter Carter family and their legacy in American Music which came out in 2002. It was one of New York Times notable books of the year. It was an American Library Association Editors choice and a finalist for the National Book critic award. This evening, we will delve into his second book the statesman and the storyteller and thats what brings us here tonight and id like to thank you very much for being with us and sharing this book on the day of its release to the public. Thank you very much thank you for having me. [applause] i would like to start by asking you to give the audience how you came to pair these two individuals, john hay and mark twain together, particularly since your work is so wide ranging. How did you strike on these two individuals and the thought of pairing them together in a book. I will you a long threepart answer on this. The idea for this book happened in stages. The first stage was i was working with joe biden on a separate editorial project in senator biden was the Ranking Member and later the chairman of the foreign relations. In the three years i was working with him he was trying to make a better outcome in iraq. This was 2004 2007 he was handed in by history. I was talking to him a little bit about when the country got this idea they could have good outcomes anywhere in the world. It led me back to the period around the spanish american war. I wanted a character just tell that story and the first one i struck on was john hayes. John hay had been lincolns to private secretaries when he was a young man. He was the ambassador at the court of st. James in london and later secretary of state to both mckinley and roosevelt. He was at the center of events leading up to and just after the spanish morning american war. The research i did on him, sam clemens as he does keeps popping up. He was always on the other side of the issue, not always but often and it may be realized i could tell the events from a couple different perspectives. I thought the whole had become bigger than the sum of the part. When i really decided to pair them was actually when i read about a Birthday Party that mark twain had in 1902. Pay was secretary of state and if you know anything about what sam clemens was talking about in those days, he was very much opposed to what they were doing. I think there are many people in the audience that thought sam clemens might take the hide off john hay that night. He did not. I was curious about why he didnt do that. Why he held back and why he tempered himself. I think his story has a lot to do with the difficulty. Thats a long answer to how i ended up with those two guys. Together. Theyre not intimate Close Friends but they were good friends that had respect and admiration for each other. You point out in your book, theres an Important Foundation between them, they come from the same region of the country, central and Mississippi River valley. I was wondering if you could take a minute or two to comment on those influence that may have forged that friendship from that common experience, that cultural heritage. They grew up about 50 miles apart on that river so of course they would have never seen or known each other but they had common experiences. By the time they met in the late 60s they were both already Fairly Famous young men. Clemens actually, when clemens moved to buffalo after he got married, he asked hay to be his partner in that paper. A few years later when clemens was doing his research for the trip down the mississippi, life on the mississippi, he asked hayes to come along. So he was unable to do that at that time. So while they werent together, they had very common experiences and when hay wrote his early poems, clemens was the first out to congratulate him on those poems. He was the first to recognize that hey was in the front, these people had written in the in that way before. He was always quick to credit hay ahead of him as the man who popularized the western. He was happy to give him a little nudge anytime he could. So while clemens, we have the civil war and thats going to change everything for both men, he has out west seeking his fortune in mining but he cultivates a writing career there. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what takes him out of his home town and eventually they both converge and meet each other in new york city, post civil war new york city, the Media Capital of the print revolution in america. If you could just flush out a little bit about those young bachelor journalists enjoying their days together in new york and how that wouldve contributed to their friendship. John hay had the good fortune of reading law and his uncles law office just down the hall from an attorney named Abraham Lincoln and hay ended up in lincolns white house. He was then briefly in europe as a young diplomat. He came back to the states and landed at the new york tribune about the time clemens came to new york. He was very much on the make. He was really out to make a name for himself and out to make some money. The new york city media was full of young men like john hay and sam clemens. They were all around the city together having as much fun as they had worked. When booth used to hang out with them, it was almost a nightly round of fun and good cheer and it was like early networking you would say and they became pretty fast friends. That was probably the most time they ever spent together in the early 60s and 70s when he would come into new york and try to dustup a little interest in his own self. So clemens has out and takes his tour of europe and hay does some interesting things as well but that leads us to marriage for both men and from your book its clear they both married well in a number of ways but also those marriages were pretty influential in both of their lives and the relationship between the two of them. Could you talk a little bit about that. They both married up as we all know. Libby clemens came from a welloff family but john hay married a woman, clara stone whose father was spectacularly wealthy. Hes one of the big cleveland industrialist so by the time, hay made his money and the good oldfashioned american way. He married it. He never had to worry about working for money again. Clemens did well for himself but he was always worried about making more money and he was always working very hard. After hay married and clemens married they grew apart a little bit part of the reason was to mrs. Hay was a little apprehensive of having sam clemens in the house. He was not the easiest guy to have around the house and mrs. Hay didnt altogether trust him. I think it could be saved at he possibly viewed her as being out for himself but through the 1870s and 1880s they wrote to one another and cap contact through mutual friends but they were never much in one anothers company. I think it door gets closed when she catches the two of them in their parlor on a sunday cutting up, yukking it up on the sabbath and that marked the end game for mrs. Hay. She made it clear. Clemens described the scene and it shut it both up. Talk a little bit more about the two personalities of the men. You talk about how clem was always on the make, one of the great lines in your book was unlike sam clemens, he never appeared to be selling and if you talk a little bit about their personas, perhaps privately versus publicly, maybe give the audience a sense for the two mens compatibility but as you say also, a friendship that is going to be conducted at arms length. So in some ways the two men were opposites and personality. John hay, as a young boy was plucked out as the special kid in the family. He had an older brother but it was john hay that was sent to a special school. He was set to Brown University by his uncle melton. He never really had to do anything but be himself and show himself and there were people willing to help push him down stream. Hes an incredibly talented and gifted man. He was great with languages and very funny, he was easy to be around and he never seemed to be making any effort. It came effortlessly to john hay kleiman always seem to be thrashing for the next thing. He had to paddle his own canoe and he paddled very hard. They were in that way very different. There were also different in terms of their politics. Hay was a very old line republican in the sense that he believed the best government was well bred, wellrespected, intelligent, and clemens was a little bit more of a democrat with a little bit more, a good bit more confidence in the general decency of the wider American People. So the other thing that i found really fascinating is how different they were in terms of how they treated the people who worked for them. I didnt write a lot about this in the book, but in reading almost every letter and diary that both those men wrote in this ten year period, i know john hay never once mentioned to the servant staff that worked for them. Nobody by name. Occasionally it would pop up in a note to his wife. The best we can expect for a butler is another drunk. Whereas kleiman, the people who served him they were basically family. Katie leary, they would be in europe and they would say you have to take katie to switzerland, shes never been there. Katie was libbys mate. George griffin who worked in the house was obviously a great, great friend of sam clemens and he wrote good bit about him and after he died, especially the loss of george was very difficult for him. An africanamerican butler. That was one of the biggest differences i noticed in them and sort of surprising and interesting. As you develop the characters through the book and the maturation process, they seem to share and maybe in their own personal ways they seem to share the core value of duty and honor toward everything, their sense of duty, selfless duty and honor come through repeatedly in the book. Could you talk a little bit about that. One of the things that fascinated me as a read more about these two people is that they did talk a lot about, and not not just in their personal lives, but in the live, in the life of the nation, they spoke about duty and honor and patriotism and they approached it from different perspectives, but they took it very seriously. I think hay operated his entire public career, when he saw as his chief duty from the time he was serving Abraham Lincoln through ambassadorship and years of secretary of state, his goal was to make the burden on the president a little bit easier. He had seen a president operate at the moment of greatest burden in the country during the civil war, so he understood the enormity of the office and he worked very hard to serve that president. Whatever president he was serving, take a little bit off his plate but to do it at the same time in a way that was honorable, not only to the administration that he was serving but to him personally. Thats a pretty tough line to work. Clemens talked a lot about duty and honor and selflessness but he was always pretty skeptical that the human being could operate with true selflessness. He always thought theyre working an angle here. I think he used himself as an exhibit a. I recall after his great Financial Difficulties that he felt a sense of honor and duty to pay back the debts that he owed although libby had something to do with that i think, not to accept creditors to discount his debt burden. I think had she not been around maybe he wouldve accepted that but thats a theme that as they explore the later years of each mans life, thats something that weighs on clemens as he is going to want to comment on the issues of the day, the fact that hes trying to dig himself out of a financial hole. That he dug himself. And was determined to do so and i will allude to it and will talk about in a minute about the number of issues of the day. Yes he was in a terrible financial pickle when the stories began. They had worked out as they do in Bankruptcy Court with about 50 cents on the dollar and libby really thought he was going to pay back every cent. She pushed him to do that. He sort of made a crusade out of it. He made a public crusade. He said watch me, im going to do it and it turned out to be much more difficult and much more personally costly than he couldve ever expected but he pushed right through to the end. In a sense, he did end up paying off that debt to the dollar, pretty much. He didnt do it as he wouldve thought, paddling his own canoe and by himself. He had a lot of help from his friend so his idea of being a one bold individual, taking care of himself, that was a hard idea for him to hold onto when he had help clearing those debts. There were many times in the years it took him to clear the debts when he was looking for an easier way out and really wanted an easier way out. He mightve had had he not been in the direct gaze of his wife libby who throughout their marriage she called him youth, which i found interesting. That was her name for him. He was ungovernable. The subtitle of the book is rise of american imperialism. Its a period in which the United States transitioning from a former colony that establishes its National Identity in a revolution to throw off the control of a colonial overlord and very rapidly after the civil war becomes the very thing it had revolted against in several instances around the globe and id like to talk a little bit about that issue because he is on the inside and tween is on the outside in both their sense of duty and honor compelling them to react to this major transformation in the american character, could you talk a little bit first about hawaii being central to both men for a lot of reasons, but a place that had its own clean, its own government, a strong american presence there for a long time and this establishes a bit of his fame with his lecture, so the annexation of hawaii becomes an early issue of imperialism. Can you talk a little bit about the two men and their thoughts about hawaii and its relationship to the United States. I will actually skip ahead, basically, the u. S. Marines help run a two coup and there was a treaty of annexation which they did not get through the senate. It was not until 1898 until the United States was able to grab hawaii. It was only done as a worn measure. They never could get the treaty through for the annexation of hawaii. It ended up being a joint resolution, a war measure that because of the philippines that hawaii was so important to hold the philippines and get to the markets in china, thats really the only reason we ended up with hawaii. Saul jump ahead a little bit to the spanishamerican war, the idea was that we were going to free the cubans and then we were going to free the philippines. John hay was all for it but so was sam clements. Sam clements, when the spanishamerican war first happened, he was very excited about this war. It was the war unlike any other. It was a war we were fighting and spending blood and treasure to free another people. At one point he was so excited about this, he would join up the fight himself if it werent for the danger. That changed over time as it became clear that it wasnt about free in the cubans and freeing the philippines but we were about controlling those places. Hay was the guy who had to basically execute the plan, the annexation of hawaii and we dont annex cuba but we establish control, we will annex the philippine and quam as well. That was the island to be named later. There were proponents in the senate, although the treaty of annexation for hawaii doesnt pass, there were proponents, the rhetoric to justify doing what had been done to us in the revolution might today be recognized in the phrase of american exceptionalism. The notion that there god has bestowed on the United States a duty to christianize and bring civilization to backwards people of the world, did you talk a little bit about john hayes thoughts about imperialism as the act of imposing authority on a native people and likewise sam clemens and in particular that its a charge from god to do it . That rhetoric got hotter and hotter in the aftermath of the spanishamerican war. The idea that this was gods plan, mckinley actually, first he went on a public tour and said he wanted to tap into the wisdom of the American People and after that he started talking about how this is what god wants. In my observation over the years when politicians and leaders Start Talking about doing things because of Public Opinion and because of god, the rest of the world should hold their wallet and dock. Now hey didnt think of this as imposing authority but imposing civilization, making these places better. He didnt have a lot of doubts about what was happening. Clemens did. Clemens was not a big fan of white civilization. I think clemens thought of american exceptionalism it was the breath of people here in the breath of thoughts and ideas and one idea of basically white man exceptionalism was not his cup of tea. Hay was very comfortable with that. Hay was not comfortable with the idea of god. One reason i really liked writing about these two men is that they seemed very modern to me. They were talking about gods plan of of what god wanted for the American People. They were, god didnt really enter the equation much for them. The most john hay would ever talk about was the tendency so thats as close as he got to god talk. Clemens was more than skeptical, quite angry about the use of religion and race in our foreign policy. President mckinley was sort of a reluctant imperialist at first although he comes around to the inspiration of god as well but hes assassinated. Teddy roosevelt by some interesting circumstances, some of them selfmade and some of them accidental, he succeeds and becomes president of the United States and again both twain and hey have interesting relationships with Teddy Roosevelt and what he was doing, particularly with with reference to imperialism. Teddy roosevelt has to crush once the philippines figure out that america is not there to help them liberate themselves from spain but to take over. Then they have to fight sort of a vietnam type of war for several years, guerrilla war against the dogged determined insurgency and committing a lot of things that are also said associated with vietnam in terms of the brutality of war and the moral massacre of muslim filipinos at the hands of the United States marines. Teddy roosevelt, was very enthusiastic about the success of the american military, if you could talk a little bit about mark twain and hey working together about the consequences of the United States now having an empire. So actually, they ended up fighting the filipinos war for independence and when mckinley died, i think hay was somewhat terrified of the idea of Theodore Roosevelt coming into office. They had been friends a long time. He had known theodore since he was a child, 55 years old. He actually stayed with the family for a while so he knew roosevelt well. I think what he hoped was that he could sort of keep roosevelt within the bounds of reasonable diplomacy and reasonable behavior and he ended up doing some things on behalf of roosevelt as a duty to the president but i dont think he was altogether comfortable, i think it was maybe the only time in his life or career that he recognized he might have done some things that brought a little dishonor to himself. Boy, clemens was so hot in his rhetoric about roosevelt. He really does disliked his public stand, but at the same time when he wrote about the moral massacre he didnt publish it at that point. He was past the point of speaking out. He was past the point of beating his chest about this because i think he realized there was not much he was going to change this tendency, the trajectory of this country. So he roosevelt personally. He liked being in the same room and they got along when they were together but in almost every instance he felt that roosevelt was a disaster, publicly. He calls him the tom sawyer of the political world and he doesnt mean that as a compliment. If you remember tom sawyers character, he was a show off and he said he would go to halifax for half a chance to show off and held for a whole one. I remember also you pointed out that twain was somewhat disappointed or at least philosophical about hayes role in all of that. I actually wrote down that he writes good friend from the church and says im sorry for john hay and ashamed. He wears a collar and he has to pay the penalty. He meant it in terms of moral conscience which i think also leads us to the acquisition and the building of the panama canal that letter i had read years ago and read at different times. It sort of, when they lay their lives together, you learn when he wrote that letter, it, it was in the election of 1904 and roosevelt was begging john hay to go out and politic and make speeches and attack the democrats and hey was saying i cant do that because thats going to really make it much more difficult for me to work with the senate, especially the senate democrats. You shouldnt should have a secretary of state wallowing around in politics. Roosevelt basically said look, im going to lose and you need to go to new york and make a speech for me which he did. Now it just happened to be at the very moment when sam clemens had come back from italy where his wife had died and he brought her back home to bury her. This was a few months after and he was quite despondent and he wakes up one morning in new york for hes staying and in the newspaper is this fairly ugly speech that john hay gave and from that comes that letter. I had the sense that at least mark twain respected him for hanging in there. He wears the collar and has responsibility and he pays the price. Sort of a no mas to his duty in his honor and standing by Teddy Roosevelt in one of his several less than savory acts as president. Hayes said he believed, he didnt want to be secretary of state. He thought the office would kill him in six months. He actually ended up being secretary of state for almost seven years. He suffered great personal loss in that time with family loss, his best friend died, William Mckinley was assassinated which made it the third president he had known in life to be assassinated. He just kept hanging on and doing the job because he felt it was his duty to do it. I think clemens respected that and i think clemens wanted to believe the best and john hay. To sort of put a period at the end of his relationship with roosevelt, roosevelt comments about hey at the end of his life and there truly hard comments where he said the last two years in the state department he has done little or nothing. If anything was done it was because i did it and of course hey was just tireless. I think you also make the point that the state department wasnt up to the new role that it had to take on because of the new status of the United States. It was still a 19th century antique as an organization when it needed a much much larger robust bath and budget because of the states is now engaged around the world. That Something Like 80 people in the state department in washington trying to run the world. Hey had to beg the senate to get an extra secretary at three of the embassies, 33 of the major and the aroundtheclock. He had to do that by bribing them and promising a couple senators he was always fighting against the lack of resources. The resources in the country were actually headed toward the military, headed toward building up the navy and building up a bigger standing army. We went in with regular army troops and generally one in seven was not even around. A few years later in the philippines we had a few thousand men enough for the resources were going. Its not uncommon thing today to see where those resources go. Have you think he assessed his life at the end of his life . Have you think he felt about how he had conducted himself . How do you think he weighed himself . I think he was proud of what he accomplished and what he had done and i think he had a lot to be proud of. We talked a lot about from a clemens point of view about the world, but there was a lot hey accomplished. Among the very important things he did was that he really cemented what we think of today as a special relationship between Great Britain and the United States of america. That was the key thing that he did as ambassador. Intended to do that is secretary of state. I think he would have said, i think the only time he thought he did anything dishonorable in the office within the situation of the panama canal and the way he wrote, he essentially wrote a new treaty with the new broken away state of panama. He wrote it with the guy who is not panamanian but one of the members of the French Company was building the canal earlier and stood to make the company 40 Million Dollars from this. I think hey, he wrote a few letters to senators just after they were getting ready to ratify that treaty. If it do it fast, dont amend it and dont spend a lot of time talking about it because theres a lot in there that maybe we dont want people to think about had like to give the audience a chance to ask some questions so i can ask a few more but we have a microphone we have been filming this evening so if you would just wait for the microphone gets to you and speak into the mic, that would be terrific. We have a question right here. An audible question i picked up on your note about john hayes and the rise of american imperialism. In audible question. They had a one Term Acquisition of the colony. And then we have jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase which is what some think gave rise to the war. They thought he was his character running around south america but in the end he was humble. I think he was very threatened by that and took steps to, i dont know what they were, its sort of an allusion in the biography, but he foresaw the need for americas role beyond channels for the south american organized giant. So i give that background is a bit longwinded the case for me it identifies the foundation or perspective for more might be called an imperialist base and try to get your view of hayes as a figure to narrate or tie together imperialism. The. Im talking about is when imperialism jumps the water. Its no longer in the contiguous United States. All of the sudden its cuba, its puerto rico, its he, its the philippines, is the pacific and so thats the rise of what ill call this modern imperialism that im talking about. Hay is not as much of a narrator as much as he is an observer. He is seeing these events and recording them day by day by day. Hes at the center of some of them but watching all the time as they happen. Yes you can argue the whole sweep of the cherokee nation, sweeping away the jerky, you can pick different point speak of american imperialism but i think this is the moment when we jumped the water and so does it make it possible to say we can take care of a lot that we can take care of vietnam but i dont think thats possible without this jumping off the continent moment in time. Another question . I couldnt help but notice James Mcbride and just out of yesterday, how well do you know when or do you know him . Yes, i do admit, i know him. [laughter] i asked because i thought the good lord bird was a wonderful book. describe what brought you to subject. Field of interest, the country, the history