Desegregation. And now ceo rosen, in turn, is enforcing the time limit. [laughter] ladies and gentlemen, like the sixth amendment right to speedy trials, the National Constitution center book fairs have to end on time. But i just have to thank, first of all, our two superb participants, harlow unger and judge wecth, for a spectacular conversation. [applause]. A tribute to the cspan audience and a vindication of my faith that when the citizens of the United States are presented with the best arguments on all sides of complicated constitutional questions, they can Pay Attention and grasp them and make up their own minds. Its a privilege to share bill of rights day with you. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] every weekend, booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more here on cspan2 and watch any of our past proms online at booktv. Org. Jonathan yardley, how did you get into the become review business . Guest i stumbled into it. I thought when i was young, long time ago, that i would like to be the editor of a medium sized newspaper. I spent much of my youth in North Carolina, and had been a reader of the paperer in greensboro, thought that would be a nice place. I goth to greens proper at the paper for the editorial writer, and the department was three people, controlled the weekly book page, and there was a change in the administration, i moved one step up and the person who had been running the book page moved one step up, and asked me if id take over the book page. And i said, sure, it meant free books. It was purely accidenta. I started with reviews by other people. And North Carolina a very good novelist wrote me a note and said writing soming for the page yourself, not just a book news thing, but a review. I thought, thats a good idea. So i started writing down the lefthand corner of the page, book review every sunday, and it was just a case of one thing leading to another. I was lucky enough to get a fellowship at hard record 196869 for the academic year, and i thought it would be studyingth that issues but ended up studying american literature. You cant take nick for credit on the fellowship. Youre supposed to expand your mind not earn brownie points for the dean. So i discovered while i was at harvard. What i really wanted to do was something involving books, and turn out to be book reviewing. I went back to greensboro, and i wrote a letter to thed the it of the new public because i was upset about a review that had run of the collected short stovers peter taylor, and i was that magazine is going right now but was a very good magazine back in the early 70s, and reed hoodmoore said he liked me letter and wondered if i would write reviews for them. I was floored. I thought, this is the best magazine in the country and i was deeply honored to be asked to write for them. I did that for five years. Probably wrote a few 60 pieces for them during that period. And as you know from interviewing authors and book people and recovering book related events, the world of books is a small place, and word gets around, and word got around i was reasonably competent in places like the New York Times book review started calling me up and inviting me to do things, and eventually, in the summer of 1972, the editor of book world at the Washington Post invited me to start contributing, and i did that intermittently until 1978, when i joined the war star and was there until i folded in august of 81. I have been a pretty lucky boy. I folded two months after i won my pulitzer prize, so it was a ticket to walk across town to othe post p. O. W. And i was there for 33 years and four months, exactly third of a century. Host how many books . Guest i calculated i reviewed 3,000 books for the post, and if you add the monthly and weekly column i used to write for the first 25 years i was there, probably close to 4,000 pieces. How many nonfiction, fiction . Well, thats an interesting question. When i was young, i built my reputation as a reviewer of fiction, particularly southern fiction, which interested me a great deal, and ive gotten very tired of American Fiction in the last ten years. I have no tolerance for the schools of creative writing which have taken over the American Fiction writing establishment, and there are very few writers of fiction now who American Writers who dont go through the writing school mill, which teaches people to write about what you know, and what they know because theyre young is themselves. So all of the too much fiction coming out that is thinly autobiographical. Im not interested. In the last ten years its been 95 nonfiction. Before that it was 5050. Host what some or of the schools in one comes to mind is the iowa guest we have them in the d. C. Area, university of virginia, george mason, Johns Hopkins one of the most notorious, and my old alma mater, unc chapel hill. A big one. All happens. Something that students expect. That you can go and take a course in writing, which seems to me projecting yourself on to paper or into a computer now. Host if you were going to teach a course on writing what would be a goal. Guest i did that four four semesters, two the university of North Carolina and then two semesters at the Johns Hopkins in what they called the writing seminars. In both case is taught opinion writing. I taught writing editorialswriting book reviews, writing columns, expressing opinion in an instill gibel and coherent way intelligible and coherent pay. My plans for retirement did not include teaching, and i didnt like it very much. If youre teaching a class where students are handing in papers, its really important you have good students, and the truth of the matter is that if youre teaching a seminar of 15 kids, you have two good studentsor, youre very lucky. The rest of them may by bright but not very interested, theyre more preoccupied in a place like Johns Hopkins where the writing seminar is not a major its wellknown but not a major part of a curriculum. Those students are majoring in something else. And so the writing my writing course was something they took because they were sort of interested in and it may have thought it was an easy a, which it was, and they were all nice kids, but only in the four semesters i did at two universities i had a total of eight good students, only one of whom actually went into journalism, and the had a pretty good career at the New York Times. Host in your last column for the Washington Post you write that you approached book reviewing as a journalist, nat literature and i have remained one to this day. Guest that means im a newspaper boy, and i majored in english, at unc fourth be perfectly honest i majored in the daily tarheel, the newspaper. I was its editor. A wonderful, happy experience, i learned a lot. As far as literature and books, the rest of my life has been a catchup period on my own. I think im a pretty good reader. I think that i have learned what to look for in a book. As ive said in the paragraph that you referred to, approaching the book as if a book as if i were a reporter. What is this book about . What that story . What in it is notable and what is not . What are the singular thing is node to tell the reader about, the thing is dont need to get into. What do i think of the book . Thats important. People expect an opinion. And what does the book feel like . I always give quotations from the text so they can see how the person writes, the style in some cases its because the person writes very badly. That is always a lot of fun. But when youre dealing with someone like ian mccune or peter taylor or anne taylor, youre teaming with somebody who can write and you want to get that across to the reader. Host here, the really stupid question here Million Dollar question, whats the importance of books . Guest of books generally . Host yes. Guest well, that is a big question. Not a stupid one. Books are the repositories of centuries, millenia, of human culture. Thats where we put it. Everything goes into the pains of books venally. Even science eventually, even science goes into books. People this is not a reading nation in the sense of a bookreading nation. Im sorry to say were not a bookreading nation in the way england is or france. We do have many readers, as ive known from the wonderful response i had to my farewell column, but books are not a big part of American Culture they way they are in the british culture, but their still there, and if youre in the business, reading books or writing them, if youre in show business, you write your own autobiography. Whose the guitarist for the Rolling Stones . He wrote a fantastic memoir called life. Wonderful, wonderful book. Books serve a lot more than book people. They serve the general culture in all sorts of ways. My wife works at the library of congress. Just started doing that in the last couple of years. There is no greater repository of Human Knowledge in this country than the library of congress. Host did you get too toe choose get to choose which books guest eventually. When i first start, when i was the book editor issue chose what i did. When i was a freelancer, writing for various publications, i i would look at the regular issues of Publishers Weekly and send them lists of books that might interesting but they made the choices. I found my way to a lot of really good books at other peoples suggestions. When i first joined othe post oas the book critic in august of 81, bridget weeks was running book world. And we got along very well. So the first sort of a co will be brative process. People would go into a book room where advance proofs ares, and we look through them, does this look interesting . No. And gradually she went on to wishing with the book of the month club and other people succeeded her, including eventually my wife. I say by 1995 i would always clear it with whoever was running the book session at the time but it was basically my choice. Host i think thats the d keith moon. Guest no yes, its mick jaggers sidekick. I feel very stupid because i dont remember his name. Its a terrific book. Host did you ever pick up a book reluctantly that surprised you, or conversely, a book you were looking forward and that disappointed you . Guest that happens more often, i would say. Books are like everything else. Theyre not black or white. Theyre shades of gray. Midnight books have things that i can recommend and things you wish were better. I have been accused of being a too positive reviewer itch dont think thats true. But feeding my readers a steady diet of negative reviews would not keep a readership interested very long. People are looking for books they might want to read. And if a always felt this will sound, to borrow your word, stupid i thought it was important in restaurant reviewing or movie reviewing, people look at you to see what they might be interested in reading. I realize thats not viewing my old job in a very elevated way but its one of the functions it serves. And so books i remember years and years ago, bridget i used to the first 25 years i was at the post oi wrote three pieces a week, a weekday book rexray style and my monday Opinion Column and the style section. And sometimes filling that wednesday or thursday or whatever day it was back review, was a problem. I remember one day bridget and i going into the bookroom and she pulled out a book called the good man in africa. By a first first novel by a young british writer named william boyd. I said, sure. And i took it back to baltimore, where i lived, and went upstairs and read it in bed, which i did in those days, and almost literally fell off the bed i was laughing so hard. Boyd has become one of my absolute favorite writers. Everything he writes is different. Everything is a surprise. He wrote the most recent james bond novel. Yes. And i havent read it yet but told its very good, very witty. So, a surprise like that doesnt happen very often. Its always very gratifying. Because you can tell people about a good book and its i think that i dont usually go into a book review with any particular expectations. I go into hoping that when i picked up inferno 650 pains, a couple years ago, about the entire sweep of world war ii, thought, this will be a lot of work. Really it wasnt. A fantastic, wonderful book, i i couldnt put down, as the sagos. But sometimes you get into a book and you think, oh, lord, ive got 475 pages ahead of me. And ive only two or three times in a long career tossed a book aside, and in both cases it was because the book was so bad i didnt think i wanted to inflict what i would write on that particular writer, who was probably a perfectly nice person. So, i think more positive surprises than negative. When i was writing the series we mentioned, called second reading. Which i wrote for eight years from 2003 to the end of the decade, wrote all told 100 pieces, and there were a few books that surprised me and disappointed me. Pie lie down in darkness, a mon independent any growth as reader, on the fourth reading disappointed me. I thought it was programattic. Host on the fourth reading. Guest yes. One thing when i was going down to peru for the summer, and we have a apartment in him ma, and ill be reading the count of monte cristo for the fourth time, and ive read great gatsby god only knows how many times. Ill read portrait of a lady for the second time. I just read it for the first time two years ago. There are always books you havent read and there are also books you want to go back. Host well get to that and the reviewers out there are screaming, Keith Richards. Guest Keith Richards. Host well leave that go now. What is it about the count of monte cristo that brings you back . I dont know who the translator is. Its in the penguin classic addition, about this big. Its an absolutely amazing story. Its a book its not a literary novel in the sense that who is a literary ian mccune is a literary writer, very good writer, but its not you dont hold it to high literary standards but as a piece of entertain. Its out of the world. Somebody wholes is good serious entertainment and thats john gresham. Itseesy to turn up your nose at somebody who sold 250 million books but the fact is he is a very good writer version smart. The most recent novel, something mountain, is about the coal business in kentucky or west virginia. Gresham has really powerful feelings about it. Mostly about the law and people who abuse it. Lawyers i mean. But he is a i was reluctant to read him, and finally thought, ive got to do it. And i sat down first of all with the firm. I daytona believe how good it was. I read it twice. Michael connellly, fantastic. Carl in florida. Dennis la hain. Have your ever heard of money mystic river . Host no. Guest incredible book. It will break your heart. Clint eastwood made a beautiful movie out of it. I think sean penn and kevin bacon. Its a wonderful, wonderful movie. Host mr. Yardley you maybed a couple of british authors. There is a difference between british writers and American Writers . Guest well, its their language and they did coin it, i and i think in all candor, they write it better than we do. On the other hand our english has more energy then theres. Were more willing to coin phrases, to coin words, an awful lot of the slapping that has crept into the British English is american slang, and the british writers who are not snobby about americans and max hastings comes to mind, and william boyd comes to mind, and even mccuean comes to mind, they understand we have made contributions to the lange as well as they have. British writing tens to be a little more formal. Sometimes a little bit stuffy. I think the present generation of british i say my generation people in their 70s ore older people like Penelope Lively the closest we come to those are people like aint taylor and gayle goodwin, very good writers. But american novelists i have a hard time naming any i would want to go back and read. That probably has something to do with being how old i am. Host well, you do write in your final column, again, im an Old Fashioned guy in a new fashioned world. Guest yep. I think ive been pretty good at adapting to change. I wasnt very back at the miami herald, i was a very early computer user, and when i was working for the post people would laugh at the computer, it was in a suitcase and had a tiny little printer that looked like a ticker tape. The printer was this wide. But i wrote on that and printed on that and i filed copies electronically, and i can do all that. Stepping out into your greenroom is my iphone 6 plus, and i am always interested in new things but i also very, very strongly believe in the permanence of old good things. Host speaking of old things, book reviews are going away across the country. Guest certainly book review sections are going away. I mean, i remember when my first book came out, biography of a writer and i got a full page in Time Magazine with a big picture. Ive then never been much of a fan of Time Magazine but i thought it was a kick, four million people. The rerue section is now a joke review section is now a joke. The problem is reviewing the Washington Post is reviewing about as many a week as it used to. If the theyre scattered throughout the paper, the outlook section on sundays, the style section on wednesdays and the art section on sunday and the business section. Theyre there but not there in an organized coherent way, and its i was very sad when book world was killed, income 2010. And my wife was the last editor of book world as a freestanding section. It was the best in the country no doubt. Didnt have the advertising support of the New York Times but was a better section. Reviews were livelier and more readable and less of an in crowd sort of thing. But, yes, a number of readers who wrote to me after my farewell piece, now reader comments at amazon. Com, and, well, some of those are pretty smart. I dont pay an awful lot of attention to them. But my wife and my one of my sons and i have all published books so i keep an eye on how theyre dog on amazon. Look at the comments, and some of them are pretty intelligent. The most recent book is a biography of simone bolivar, has gotten comments at amazon and elsewhere as well. May be that book reviewing is democratized. , didnt go to school and today to be a book reviewer. I occasionally over the years have gotten letters from bright young people, how die get to where you are . And theres no real answer. Try to offer your services to the local paper, or to try to get some book reviews published, get some experience, doesnt all happen at once. But its a very different world now, and i the National Book critic circle, havent been a member for years, but still exists and ive looked at the list of their membership and i dont recognize a single name. Theyre all out there writing somewhere but i dont know where. Host we have a couple of different awards, the nbct, the National Book awards. Are they important . Guest to the people who publish and write books, theyre very important. To the people who read them, not particularly. We talked before we were on the air about awards and agreeing, when people see a little seal on the dust jacket of a book, x prize, they say, oh, won a prize. But its not the same here as the book of prizes in the book of prize really sells books, and which is why theres so much rivalry over and why the Selection Process is so fraught with politics and other things. I think the pull litter in fiction and history and biography probably has more influence on book buying habits than the other prizes simply because its better known the pulitzer is a wellknown prize. But if you ever get a publisher on this program, ask him or her about it. Id be interested what they would say. I dont think it goes like that. Host jonathan yardley, every a review you wrote that you regret or were like you eviscerated somebodys book and just didnt want to publish it . Guest no. There are review i wished i had done a better job on it. Anybody in any line of work will feel that. I didnt really understand that book and i dont think i got it across fully in the review. Ive written some pretty tough book reviews, though. I wont mention the authors. But ive written some book reviews i know hurt the people who wrote them, and did nothing to help the sales of the books. But the reviews were honest. They came out of an honest opinion, carefully arrived at, just as the praise i i know, for example, that i can think of two books i reviewed and i should interject here, book reviewing is not a very social part of the bookselling process. The most important ingredient is word of mouth, what your friends say and your Friendly Book seller says, and your Friendly Book seller is now a big computer outfit in seattle or whenever amazon is. But the recommendations of friends and family are the most important things, and word of mouth trickles around as the book goes on the best seller list, that becomes a kind of word of mouth because other people are saying we like this book enough to have put it on that list. I can think of very, very few books over my career i know i helped. One was a mother and two two daughters, which i really loved. I have not reread it but i want to. She told me herself hat review made the book. It bake a National Best seller, and im glad because its a wonderful book. And then back about 20 years, Peter Taylors short story collection the old for rest forrest. Taylor was one of the best writers in the country but nobody read him. Except the tiny inner world of books and i gave the old forest full marching band review in the, and the book bake a best seller and taylors career after that, the next novel won a pulitzer prize. I think put him in the library of america. So, the book believe me, those moments dont come along often. Mostly a workaday job. I said in my piece i loved the job. Toward the end i got tired of having a little pad of paper and pencil and making notes all the time i was writing. I felt like i was at graduate school. And then i noticed a piece online a couple days ago bay british writer, tim parks, write that reading with a pen and paper is the best way to do it his argument was you get to the of the book if youre not reading that way. If your reading for fun you can sail through. I look forward to doing some sailing through. Host you also listed in your final column your fav i rid some of your favorite books, and some books you didnt review were trilogy on world war ii. Why no review . Guest well, ad atkinson, whom i know only slightly, was a colleague of mine at the Washington Post for a number of years. And book world had a proper policy of not post opeople not reviewing other post people so that ruled him out. So there was a strong post association, and i wasnt really doing much reviewing about world war ii, when the first those of books came out. It was hastings infern know and a book about europe after world war ii. Both books got me thinking about the war, which im just old enough vaguely remember. I remember the day roosevelt died and i remember the day japan surrendered. I was six years old. But theres a lot of really, really good scholarship about world war ii that is coming out now, and the flag waving aspect of the history is pretty much over. People are beginning to understand, of course, it was a war that had to be fought and had to be one but it wasnt fun, and a lot of really, really terrible thinks happened, a lot of bad things were done, and savage continent is a superb example of for example, getting behind the mythology of the french resistance, which was nowhere nearly as heroic as the french like to think it was. I didnt review those books bass they worked post and i just read them in 2014, all in a big gulp. Im in ah of them. His research is stunning, writes beautifully. You really feel the battle you feel youre there and slogging across europe after dday, wonderful stuff. Host another nonfiction historian you list in your favorites is jean edward smith. Guest he has written three really good president ial biographies, eisenhower most recently. The one listed are fdr and ulises grant. The one that matters is grant because grants reputation has taken a real slide after his death, and he was thought of as a drunk and a cheap politician and so forth. He was actually a very distinguished and accomplished man, and directly across the circle from the house built by Ulysses Grant, jr. , and paper on the first floor of building built bay friend of his. He have the only original flooring in the building and we like to think that Ulysses Grant trod those floors. Gene edward something i has the remarkable capacity to disstill large, complicate lives into 500 page narratives and make them readable. He tells me that we have since corresponded. He says he is about to come out with a biography of george w. Bush and i will be perfectly honest and say im glad im not around to review it. I would go into that review with some biases that would keep me from reviewingite you two to the sunday post, look at the best seller lest, and up there at the top of the nonfiction is unbroken. Fiction gone girl. When you see that, would you pick those books up automatically to review, thinking, why are these best severals . Guest thats what led me to john gresham. I have not read laura hillen brand and is a good person. I will read those. One of the things retirement is for. But the bestseller list as a general rule, bear very little relationship to my own tastes. I dont think definitely do not think im a literary snob, but selfhelp books, movie star autobiographies, sometimes as in keying Keith Richards it can be a good book. But they tend to be celebration of most of the books on bestseller lists are going to get on whether or not i review them. Theres kind of selffulfilling prophecies, and im more than inclined to think the book review is serves a more useful function of bringing peoples attention to books they dont know about or know vaguely about and would like to know more about. Biographies, history, serious fiction. Not much but host 45 million copies of catcher in the rye. Deserved . Guest no. In the course of the second reading series of my i thought the catcher in the roy and old man in the sea are probably the two worst famous american novel skis stand passionately behind that statement. I think, as i said at the end of my second reading of the the catcher in the rye i think the reason one one of the reasons it has lasted so long is although its a book of very little literary merit, its a book of transparent sincerity, and people dig that. They know when i could never write a john gresham whats his name patterson host james patterson. Guest i dont have that particular gift. If i did it everybody would know i was faking it. Salinger wasnt faking it. It was from the heart. From a rather unsomething heart in my considered opinion, but people responded to that sincerity. It also came out just at the moment in American Culture when we were discovering teenagers, and i was i was a teenager when it came out. It came out in 51 so i had just become a teenager, and i remember reading it and thinking, what is the word that Holden Caufield used i thought it was bunk. But an awful lot of people read and it theyre not all 15 years old and its staggering. He is one of the fascinating figures in american literature, going silent after second or third book. Leading they reclusive life, holed up in new hampshire, but occasionally willing to let somebody in to talk to him if it seemed to serve his purposes. Then you have hemingway. I think one of the occasionally there is justice in the literary world, and i think the justice is coming ernest hemingway. Not much of his work survives. Its being reveals as very mannered, very selfconscious. Some stories are very good, some passages in farewell to arms that are good and that strength memoir about paris in the 20s, published after his death, has some good stuff and also some nasty stuff. He was a nasty man the stuff about f. Scott fitzgerald is awful. Standing in the mens room and comparing sizes of peniss. I cant read hemmingway anymore. Fitzgerald will last. Maybe only the great gatsby and a couple of short stores. Literary oopinion is very harsh. Books dont last very along. Im not sure that theres a single American Writer still alive who will be read at the end of this century. I would be a little surprised. I think Norman Mailer is fast taking a nosedive. Occasionally youre sorry. I have always felt that theodore drieser was one thereof most important and valuable american detroiters but not read outside overlight classes in college. And anybody any general reader can read that book. Literary reputation is a strange thing, and so many of the books i was reading in the 50s, when i was in college, those writers, nobody reads them anymore. I thing john cheater, who was a wonderful writer is fading. The people who wrote for the the new yorker, a lot of really, really wonderful writing in the 1950s but most of it is disappearing. Host how would publishers approach you . Would they lobby you to review their book . Guest well, sure. Even to this day i suspect that when im put in under the ground that by email it will be clatterring with, hi, john, id like to share with you, et cetera. Back when i was really a fulltime book reviewer, working at home, first in baltimore and then here in washington, i would get catalogues and a lot of unsolicited review copies, which were mainly a problem how you dispose of them. But when i was younger, i knew a lot of people in the Publishing Industry and liked a lot of them. And i would go to new york, which i did in those days, and have lunch with people, about they werent really sub ocraigs these people had become my friends, publishists and editors so generally sitting at somebody would take me to the four seasons and i didnt have to pay so suited me just fine. There were and still are very nice people in that industry. Smart people, most of whom are underpaid, many of whom are in it because they genuinely love books. I would occasionally gate phone call, jonathan, this is so and so at random house. We really think highly of such and such. Would you like to have a look at it . They cant they really cant pressure you beyond giving you a book and hoping you open it. And let me tell you, everybody all my friend used to think it was Christmas Everyday when the mailman and the ups guy came but it wasnt. It was a pain in the keister. I had a guy who bought them from me and turned them over to charity. Oo final question, mr. Yardley, what give is your sense of the state of the Publishing Industry. Flux. But ebooks are there. You are most likely to see them on airplanes and i have one. My wife gave me a kindle when the first came out. I didnt like it. I do have a tablet, not an apple tablet but a tablet that has nice screen for reading books, and i have a few books in it but never actually read more than a chapter or two. Keeps people reading, great. My generation is headed for the last roundup, and beyond us people who are under 50, i dont know how theyre going to be served by the book industry and how the book industry will deal with probably changing reading and buying patterns. I dont think its going away. As you know, big firms are consolidating, and random house is now about ten firms that were all separate when i got started, and ditto for Simon Schuster and penguin. All three of them, published a lot of very good books. Penguin, max hastings. Simon schuster publishes my wife. Good books do get published. Publishers do care about them. One of the great frustrations for many authors i know this because ive had the experience myself, working very hard on a book and the publisher not working very hard to push it. They have to make they publish more books than they should, and they have to make decisions which one to get behind and which ones well toss out there and let them sink or swim. The ones they get behind they do a good job on. I think ive spent my working life as a ancillary of it. Its my business in a way, and i love it. I wish it god speed. Host jonathan yardley, thank you for