We are so excited to be hosting pamela for her book. She will be speaking before i turn it over to them i have a couple of housekeeping things. Please take this moment to turn off or silence your cell phones and also note we are grateful to have cspan here for booktv. Please be aware you may be on camera and passing around a microphone during the qanda. We have flyers available at the register as well. The other people we marry and most recently the novel modern lovers which has been named the best book of the year by npr Entertainment Weekly among othet authors. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the news york times. Most recently she along with her husband Michael Stroud opened the bookstore which is open for business. S she will be speaking with pamela paul the editor of the news york times book review anddyort overseas books at the news york times and choose a host newo york times and host of valaika podcast inside the news york times book review pages the author of the book parenting incorporated, to start a namemae marriage and the future of matrimony which was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post. She has appeared on uber and npr. Publis she has also testified about her work and presented her research to issue currently lives in new york printer new book my lifer with bob is a singer account of the readers life. Its a journal that reports every book she has ever read from Anna Karenina to catch22. Her fantasy is mistakes and missteps of dreams and ideas both halfbaked and wholeheartei her life in turn influences the book she chooses whether for solace escape information or sheer entertainment. Anders solomon writes in this hilarious wise account of a life led half in the world and have them books pamela paul writes with exuberance about the bumpy road of maturity. Her voice tender moral madcap nostalgic generous for captivate all readers. my life with bob is full of life and full of love in a poignant reflection on a wellwritten life. Pamela will be reading from the book and then emma will join her for conversation and then you will have your chance to ask her questions after that so please join me in welcoming to theming stage pamela paul and emma straub. E] [applause] thanks so much. Im not going to read for very long but rather have a a conversation with emma and hear from all of you but im going to read from a chapter that is largely about working in a bookstore since we are in a bookstore. I grew up relatively with the background feeling deprived. I didnt grow up in a house full of books. They were precious commodities. I usually have handmedowns for my older brothers usually about trucks and whenever i asked my mother for a book or standard response was get it from thendae library. Im going to read you a little bit from a chapter calledy. Catch22 which is about my insatiable desire for more books. Her standard response was get from the library. There wasnt much you could save to back it up. U our house built in 1673 had actually been our towns first library. It has long ceased to serve in that capacity but we were just around the corner from the existing library which is directly across from the main street pool. After crossing the street id install myself for an hour or two. While the library was a Public Institution itself private to me the Childrens Library i knew where my friends jenne and geneva awaited and the slightly livelier gang hung out at the end of the front row. The mean kids look down from a high shelf. These characters provided my social life and i never had to be told to be quiet in their presence. I wanted to call and absorb them musty smell of decadesold paper. I ruffled my fingers are the card catalog drawer. I could be the first girl to master the dewey decimal system. I might one day know where every book stood. All i needed was some authority or at least some kind of officially sanctioned status. A few years after he moved to town i mustered the courage to ask for a job. Im sorry, there are no Jobs Available for children the librarian told me. I was 10. You wouldnt have to see me i insisted my eyes gleaming with what surely came across as unhealthy fervor. Thats okay but thank you. Th the rejection was terrible. What was it that put the childrens librarian off my candidacy . Was that the internet to see to see me part . Did she question my intention . Could she not see that i was a m book person different from casual libraries that i cared that i never left the book face down with her spine flayed open like other kids my age. I couldnt think they were kicking me down a notch. Ch. This library isnt yours is how i heard up every once in a while i would inquire again because maybe they would remember me from the last time. W sometimes asking at the Childrens Library and other times going check out in theca enviable task of the ghostly red glow of the primitive computer system. These requests were slowlyly rebuffed and each time i felt sorry for having the temerity to ask. So im going to skip a little bit but i go on to talk about again various deprivations booki wise and my finally getting offered the job of my dreams when i was a senior in high school. Finally armed with a drivers license i was able to find the kind of work i sought. 20 minutes from my house in upscale Shopping Center there was a branch of the bookstore chain and they hired me. Now this was a job. I was the only high school or her work there been a monumental achievement and a source ofho fierce pride even if you consider there wasnt much competition. All the other employees were ico actual grownups some of whomctl thought it was a calling and others who could just as been easily been working in the produce section of the amt. E dan the manager was a short sweaty man in his mid30s with black hair clinging hopefully and a mine rooming with knowledge acquired the hard way. He greeted my enthusiasm and ignorance with tolerance. He had informed opinion but i was determined to learn. Te i would know exactly what to read and what i would read next. My book reflected its clear path forward. Here at b. Dalton i could keep my hopes on the passion of the nation. His had to Pay Attention pretty quickly noticed whenever a book broke out in a big way someone from management came to the floor. Only senior employees maintaine the symmetrical assemblages. Regular sales clerks like me were not allowed to even touch them. Massive cardboard displays demonstrated stumps moaned over the aisles where they signify the cultural event of the day over here powers of on fire vanity over there a tower of Steven Hawkings orchestrated times which everyone in the suburbs just had to have. I would caress the slender volumes longingly. I envy the people who could stroll in and purchase a few a hardcovers off the important powers with this wipe of a credit card. Somewhere along the main aisle the commanding signs these most importantly pinker copy during an idle moment. What do you think you are doing sam barked. Im just curious i said guardedly. What is this . You want to know he muttered with a quick waive of his hand. I put down and unclenched to unclench curiosity. There were so many mysteries that eluded my beginning in the world of letters. Whats this i inquired holding up one of Joseph Campbells books. It was Joseph Campbell and why is he is so important . Whats this pointing to a mermaid explicable he covering. Some books author authors seem to have recitations i couldnt quite place. Stewart woods dominated the q entire shelf a monolith of contemporary letters and rules master of criminal justice and then the threat of crime itself came to be dalton. In 1989 when the Ayatollah Khamenei and i ran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel the satanic verses why colleagues and i were swept up what fela commission of local importance. The only time i had given thought to i ran prior to this was during the hostage crisis when some graffiti put thee ayatollah on the building near main street school. Every time i look at it i thought the world is full of mysterious dangers. This current danger was exciting. Ge i became nearly delirious in my desire to see the satanic verses. The topping of Cash Register buttons was swiftly upgraded into a campaign to save literature from the forces of darkness. I blaze with excitement. Prisoner reported for duty to get the latest instructions from Corporate Headquarters copies of rushdies book kept near the Cash Register, no behind the Cash Register now and the back of the store the stock room or management. Employees who do not feel safe selling the book were allowed ty be taken off the schedule with no repercussions. People were bombing bookstores. Suburban customers who couldnt in their lives tell a difference between iran and iraq counting myself among them came into the stores without curiosity or of curiosity or political purposes or simply to feel part of something. They say in the hushed tones they wanted to buy the book. Somebody asks whether we stock it or not think carefully before you reply we were told answer on a casebycase basis. Whats the book about i asked. Nobody knows he replied. [applause] i love that. I can tell you those cardboard things. Emma should know the owner of a bookstore. M i should have started then. I want to talk first about the very first chapter in the book which is about your childhood ie libraries. Sort of coming to your life as a reader and i was thinking about how youd describe at the very end of that chapter what i think of as the privacy of reading and how it is totally separate from anybody else from anything else, your family, your school, your friends and the rest of the world. I was wondering if that was how you thought of reading and is it still how you think of reading . It could clearly be open to ease. Its still something you are actively keeping track of in your life. I was wondering if that is what juror you to reading, the experience, the closedend somewhat behind the curtainlo feeling of it. E i mean i didnt have a wretched childhood or i wasnt exceptionally dreary or challenging. Economically i was relatively privileged and in most senses but i felt like a loner and i felt like it didnt fit in. I had Seven Brothers growing up and i felt like being a girl with a distinctive disadvantage not for the traditional reasons. I didnt feel discriminated against as a woman or girl or anything like that but i felt left out. So for me it was a way to seek out company. Y. I also felt that i felt like as a child i was in independent agent just to be slightly associated with the people around me including my own Family Member so i felt if you went into a book you could adopt your own world and you could find your people and you could go somewhere and sort of figure out who you were. And so at that stage in my life. Especially i sought out two different kinds of stories. One was a traditional schoolchol story and just to sort of get a sense of the social order and to have company among my peers. I was also incredibly shy. I would talk to people through characters and the other book i sought out for biographies at that time because i felt like for me biographies were like a roadmap. I felt like if i sort of looked at Abigail Adams or dolley madison, wasnt like i wanted to be a first lady by any stretch of the imagination but i felt like these people did certain things that got him got them to a place of achievement, which to me was being in a book. I kind of explored their lives and i think those two threads in a way continued throughout my reading life. Reading as a way to try on a different life for a while. You say that like, its like the inverse of the impostor syndrome you know like where you never feel like you are good enough to do whatever it is you are trying to do and others might find out you are a fake. You read and you were like oh im completely here. Im inside this book and im inside these characters as the seamless acceptance. The book has no choice but to fully let you in. Its an emerging experience and for me again it was like trying on different kinds of lives to help figure out over the kind of life that i wanted to live. Hes said the ultimate goal was to be in a book so where there other slightly, slightly more concrete goals . You know i go through my life with two operating solutions, fully aware that there is delusional thinking. One is nonbook related and to me it stems from a profoundd laziness although on the surface it makes me incredibly productive. Basically mis keeping a list ofa things to do and every day i wake up and its like groundhog day. Y. Im not aware of anything. Im just acting out the same thing over again. If i can check everything off my list than i will be done and once im done i can do whatever i want for the rest of my life not realizing of course that there will be a list of things to do the very next day. Every day wake up and im right and then the under the same delusional thinking. If i could just finish early enough than i can lie around and watch movies or whatever else for the rest of the day and be free. So it stems from a profound laziness. With books my motivation is like , i will at least have covered the 18th century. I will finally be on top of it. For a long time i didnt read a lot of 20th century fiction. Im not done with the 19th century yet nevermind the 21st century but i felt like if i could just get up to the thomas man and be done through that than i could start reading ross and midcentury sections. So i felt like my reading was also motivated by this desire to find this body of knowledge. I write about that one of the chapters called the mythology of english literature. You need to know, there were certain kinds of information that you could only leave for books than you needed to know in order to sort of be a person in this world instead of being suspiciously ignorant. Do you have still a list of books, a list of unread books that you feel that you must inject in order to. No, i dont do that. Its not like i have a palette of bookshelves like this, several of this size in my house that are not red. They are not organized at all. I go to other peoples apartments and advocate their books and i think how do you do that . How do you follow those rules . I was talking with someone today about bookshelves and whatever and they seemed surprised by my suggestion that its actually really important to be surrounded by books in addition to books that you have read and loved but also books that you have not yet read. I said in my house i have probably read, i mean there is one main bookshelf with maybe 75 of the books that i brought to the shelves plus my husbands books that i may or may not have read. In my bedroom i have to bookshelves that are completely unread. Thats how theyll come in to this house. At this point at least my reading has slowed but the rate at which i buy books and think about reading books has not slowed. I like teen surrounded by unread books because youre constantly surrounded by possibilities. My own decisions around what to read are almost, its a sort of long process. I dont keep a list but what i do what ive got a current vote, and im a slow reader. Its like my greatest feeling in life so i will start to accumulate a list of things i think i might want to read next. But i dont take that final decision. I totally close the book and then i take my temperature and think what is it that i need right now and that i will narrow it down a short list of picks for the books. This is all just reading for your own pleasure. Obviously at the news york times you have to look at you cant read hundreds of books for days. I cant even imagine how many books. I feel terrible about thisamy but i have an amazing staff at the news york times book review on the book stuff and they do the reading before me. Im very selfish. I like to do my own reading. Theres a certain amount of reading that i have to do forr k work especially when we have to make decisions around the year and a 100 notable and a couple of others every week so i have to have something about the book. Im very good about the reader rounds but i guard my reading time very selfishly because it really is that time, its just personal and thats the way i spend my leisure time. I could never i always felt terrible for people who had chunks of manuscripts and hadnt even read or where they just had to read. For me reading even though it is my job its also my pleasure and i dont want to lose that pleasure. I want to talk about the reading versus paper rate paper reading. O one of the chapters in your book i was so jealous of the kids you talk about and reading and i never figured out how to do that properly. I had 14 different nursing i dont know, couldnt figure it out and its really because i refuse to read anything anatomically. Lectroni anyway. I would put it in the book on the pillow and i would open it up and have it there and pulled the baby around and annoy them. I was determined. Can you talk a little bit about the notation system in th book . In my book of books . In my book of books. That evolved over time there when i first started writing the book i was 17 years old. I was living really in the armpit of france, part of france that is in no way french or interesting and its really a terrible bit of nowhere in france. They had something that was decades old in terms of french commerce. Anyway i started reading their and i had the blank look and i wrote down the author and the we title and i listed them and i didnt have the right numbers. They didnt keep track. Its funny it was until was criticized by a boyfriend much later that i was just writing these things down in order to kick things off of my list and show off about how much i had read. Then i started putting the numbers and then i went back and i was like oh i never thought of it that way. I perversely took the criticism i guess and instructive way or a destructive way. Tr the thing about when you do puto numbers in you come up with all kinds of mathematical calculations and back to your point about getting done when you have kids and a job in and that kind of thing. You can see your annual average declines. I remember when i was unemployed or marginally employed living in northern thailand after college and i basically had no friends. There was no internet and i didnt have a telephone. I read 76 books that year which for me was a lot was a lot that also included things like annad karenina so they were just short books and then i think after mye third child was born it was working. Born and fulltime. The numbering is a mixed blessing. And then i have other adaptations. I started writing off in parentheses when i didnt finish something. If first book i didnt finish was interview with the vampire which i really wanted to like that look. I really really didnt like it. I found it in the bathroom of one of my stepbrothers. I was in his bathroom and he had a bunch of paper books in there. That eventually evolved to signify when i dont finish reading something that i try to finish everything. Is there a certain threshold . Like if you start reading. Something and read 75 pages or something . It counts. He gets in there. 30 pages . 30 pages doesnt go in. I pick up a book and talk about veaux being very moving, i recently, actually i did this for the first time. I asked my friend what book i should read next because i just finished reading a number of ne. Contemporary novels. They were humorous and i needed something right felt like i wanted to have some kind of real emotional engagement in what i was reading. I picked out three books. One was spooked and i picked up recently in Portland Oregon and that was not engaging so that ultimately did make the cut and the others were a constitution phenomenon by anthony mara and neil zola and elliott turret. I read the back cover and i asked my kids and of course they like being contrary. I thought okay ive got to be fair to the other child then i picked up tomorrow but i wasnt going at my own needed that moment. When i started to read it i realized it wasnt what i needed at the moment. I i really like it and they read like 15 pages and i thought this is really good but its not filling that gut level need. I put it down i realized there was a reason i hadnt picked up spoofs. I wanted to engage the something also a little bit relevant. It was a bit of the escape but also relevant and i ended up reading ben bradlees 1995 memoir a good life and other adventures so relevant to me working at the news york times but also working like a million years ago back when newspaper was the word. So thats what i ended up reading. What do your kids think about ebooks . E do they care enough to want to vote and to help you make an entry or are they like what are you talking about . They said it was extremely creative that i was involving them in this process. They know how selfish i am about my reading. A certain point once they were able to read on their own after they are independent readers but i also was like awesome. Now they can read and i can read. We can parallel read like kids pair low play. We are kind of evil parents who dont allow more exciting options so they are forced to read. S generally i am selfish about my reading. A works cited to be brought into the process. I also want to talk about kids lists. In the book theres a chapter where you talk about sort of your reading childrensk literature as an adult. Having children going back to at this point for me picture books in Early Childhood books is really so much fun because there are so many books that i remember. For me at this point at least i have a three and a half and a 1yearold, its pretty much in our house but i love that you are a part of the Larger Community that not only reads books with your own kids on their own time but also read together. Can you talk a little bit about that . I never want to be part of the book club because it goes back to that selfishness and my desire to read what i want to read and i didnt want to have to conform to the constraints of a book club. I did belong briefly to a book club and remember we read the third choice which was something i didnt like and i was like forget this. I ditched it so i never wanted to be part of the book club because i didnt want to have to again read what they wanted me to read. This book club though was a great opportunity because what i did enjoy about the clubs is what many of us enjoy which is having that community in that conversation and discussing what you read afterwards. Rd i think we all know that feeling of when you finish a novel. Other people would do that too and do that to an its like has anyone read this . You want to find some other person say can have that connection in that conversation and find out what they think. Bou book clubs obviously are very good for that. Ha the good thing about the Kid Book Club and i joined it before i worked at the news york times and my first job of the news york times was the Childrens Book editor. I joined it before then because Children Books were needed. I thought thats not much of a commitment. The group of people in that particular book club wereth interesting to me because there were a few authors in the book club and some from the publish publish publishing industry. Interestingly its not all women and we are not all parents. But everyone there really likes Childrens Books and one of the reasons, one of the things i like so much about this particular group is they take Childrens Books seriously and even before he took the job at the times as a Childrens Books editor in my current job i believe very strongly in the power of Childrens Books. I find it incredibly ignorant or how disparaging kids are kids books. Thats when we become readers and thats when you learn to love books. I get goosebumps. The stories are so good. There are a lot of bad Childrens Books we all know that but the Childrens Books have to be so good because they have to hook and a child especially today when there arec so many other things that are more exciting like video games or back in my day you were forced outside to run around. Some kids paradoxically seem to enjoy that. Not me. To me that was like forced labor but they have to be good. They have to be thought driven in one of the things that one of the members of my book club said and i agree with it so strongly, the stakes are so high in Childrens Books. Every emotion itself for the first time and they fall in love and their isolated in the School Cafeteria and the world is ending. The emotions are so powerful and i think as an adult talk about transporting. You can go back and remember feeling those feelings. There was a book that came out recently that was the thing about jellyfish. There is a bullying scene in a that look which is probably a bit controversial for some people but its really harsh. It was one of the few books other than judy blume that depicted bullying in a way that rang true and they didnt like to make it like its not a big deal. It was a big deal. Someone pin somebody down and spat in her face and said something. Theyre like kids cant save that to each other but of course they do. I wasnt bullied as a child butl nonetheless i could immediately find that terrible emotion thatt be feel in junior high when you have that nobody likes me feeling and the world is against me and i felt so strongly reading that. I am a believer in looks for kids. Are you still in charge of what your children read . Oh no. I lost my powers early on and the one thing that am i am able to provide my kids, this too was a little bit of a mixed blessing but they obviously are, when it comes to books i get a lot of books for free. I still spend a ridiculous amount of money books every year and im talking about thousands of dollars. Its a terrible thing but its also a good thing. We have a Great Library which at this point when we start a series they want to read every one of them. They were out of print so i was ordering all of these used copies. I dont choose what they read. They pick their own books and my daughter, they are each very different readers. My daughter is a rereader in a way that i wasnt. I was felt there were so many parts to read. How can you go back but i admire her. Shes a different reader from me and shes also a team reader which i and the enormous leap. My son is an extremely voracious reader. He will complete a different series that he will Read Everything from nonfiction and fantasy to he recently read and earthy. I did get them to read the princess bride. I just got the high sign that we have about two more minutes. I really want to ask you also about dancing. There will be more questions from people. Is that what you want to ask me . C is one of the things i want to ask. There are more. That you shouldnt ask . Know that i should. There are the coolest moments of my high school career. Its funny there were lots of parts of my adolescence that they didnt include in the book and that some people know about. I was having a conversation the other day with another editor and author. I was like thats awesome i cant wait to read about the days in the 80s in your book. Thats not in the book. Why not . Well my mom is still alive. Its so sweet that you are protecting your mother. I said im not protecting her. And protect me. I did include the video and i will leave it at that. The one thing i will say that didnt make it in the book is aurora pullum is part of my application to college. Anyway maybe thats not the end. Its one of the very few works. I will now open it up. If anyone has questions that are not related to nile rodgers, feel free. There is a microphone. This is one of those questions which if youre going away to a Desert Island which books would you take . Its such a hard question because by the probably would take the longest books that i would have the most time without ever read. A lot of long books i want to reread. I was just talking with the Author Jennifer eagan about a book i read in the roosevelt chapter on how to read the books. I read moby dick when i was living in highland and i was on vacation in thailand on the beach. I was the only person there in a tropical resort reading moby dick of myself but it felt like an appropriate venue. The book, she was reading a lot of wailing stories then. She just read it and i said wow you have time to read. And then probably books that i have struggled to finish so i would actually have the time to really think them all out. I hadnt thought about that as the defining characteristic of the book. Very strategic in that way. Yeah. Your comments and issue reading while you use an electronic reader and i dont know if you read it, the article about three years ago the times had an article about a wellknown couple and i forget their identity. Ge they are sitting in bed and one has the apec reader and one has a book and they discussed that whole issue. As someone who has become a writer about arts and literary in brooklyn and a oneperson operation i am curious innocence of here you are in a responsible position at the times. You are a mother and he said you are reading a thousand books a year give or take. I am probably reading, this is my reading and every day i read your books. My home is full of books and i work from my home. The key for me is that i dont watch a lot of tv. I dont own a tv. You are on the right track i guess. I certain other forms of culture that i dedicate myself to the book and i think one of the things, and i dont use an euin reader for ideological reasons but for practical reasons. For me reading is a break from that and also i love the physical object of books. Bj i do think its hard because there are so many instructions. I used to live in a five story brownstone and i would leave it on the floor and go all the way down to read. W that way if you want to text or email you have like five floors to go up so the incentive was te stay put with a book. I still try to keep all distractions far away. Do you do half an hour to an hour a day at a time . We read together sidebyside its our version of tv dinners. [laughter] i enjoyed what you read there. Ive never heard anybody describe a book title. Got my blood pumping. I was wondering how do you find your audience . My novel, parts of the book people are reading and they have a reaction and their other parts of my novel that i think are kind of mundane. People say oh thats great. They dont get me. You know what im saying . When you read to your audience, im not quite sure how to say it. What is your expected feedback from the audience . Well you know honestly my goal with this book was to write a book that was fun to read which i know sounds like are pretty low bar but having written previously, i wrote nonfiction books that were very journalistic in their intention and i had an argument and a point to prove. I had to marshal the evidence and make sure was cogently argued and authoritative and i think as a reading experience i may have persuaded some people or i may have eliminated them to but i dont know if they were necessarily fun to read. D, so wh when anybody told me that they have read one of my previous books my instinct was to say im so sorry. I know wasnt like a fun book to catch a read. It was an argument against culture. I wanted this book to be a part sure departure in the sense that i would just like to have a look that is a pleasure to read and hopefully people get something from it. Ultimately especially i didnt know what was going on in the world when i was writing the book especially now people want to read something that is a little bit of a departure. Thats what i want and thats what i hope readers get from the books. To put a lot of yourself into a . Yeah. The first few books, mostly i put in a lot of hard work to khizr was a lot of reporting and research to do and interviews and with this book it was a very different exercise because it was writing about myself so i didnt have to interview anyone and they didnt have to do any reporting. I thought that would make it easy but of course it isnt because first of all you have to remember not only the moment and frankly thats where the book is so helpful because the book is having these titles and access to what i was feeling at that moment but then to capture that in the writing. A friend of mine once said about memoir that you have to depict yourself at certain points in your life as you were then, as you saw been no matter how pitiful or naive or ridiculous you might come across a neck given moment. In order to recreate that experience and be honest about it you cant criticize it. Thats hard to do. It can be the smallest thing. I wrote at one point, i really did feel as a child very selfconscious. I felt like everyone knew that there was something that i had done wrong that they had told me and everyone else was like a alert, alert, alert. There was this one terrible moment i remember when i was in Elementary School in the schoolyard standing there by myself and someone ran out of the crowd and said the flood is over and then ran away. It was years before i knew that was because i was wearing pants that were too short. I wore mostly hand me downs from my brothers and i didnt know that. So i lived for years with the flood is over i dont know what that means. One else knows what that means in there laughing about it. So there was a reference in the book that i tried to walk down the street looking normal but i was worried there was a Peanut Butter smear on my pants that i just wasnt aware of are the sitting at the wrong table. So i write about those really childish but true situations and it was not easy. Last question what is your one favorite look out of all the books, the one that just stands out. Thats an impossibleu cann question. Not fair. I would have to answer three or five but i usually go back russian classics and 19th Century Russian literature. Im going to Say Something pretentious like Anna Karenina. I think ive a good question to wrap up the evening. Its a question for both of our authors here today. We will have emma go first and then pamela second. What are you reading right now . Oh man. Lets go with one. I just started tom paradas new book and it comes out in august. This is a hard question for me. We have a segment every week called what we are reading and a group of my colleagues and i will talk about what we are reading in that we feel incredible intense pressure. What are you reading and someone will come up with three books. If you are reading the same books for a while i was reading reading and id be like well now im reading your 28 of okafor. I promised him last weeks episode i would be done with the book im talking about it im not so my plan is to finish it tonight. Im reading brent ben bradlees memoirs. If such an interesting book but as i said earlier it to the parh sure from the current moment in time. Just finished talking about the pentagon papers and of course theres a developing movie about the pentagon papers to the plan is to make it about the Washington Post and new yorkt times and they are not happy about it because we won the pulitzer prize. Anyway he goes through a blowbyblow and now i can see why we are not happy at the news york times. He did that have that story first and i was not responsible for it. I have plans to read, im going to australia in a couple offcouo weeks for the city writers festival and interviewing an australian writer so im going to read her book. Wonderful. We can read your book. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. [applause] americans in particular were blessed the Founding Fathers who understood and institutional design that would protect our liberties, our right to say what we think and to worship as we please, to be free from the doctrine of secret police at night to have the dignity that comes with having those who are going to govern you have to ask for your consent. But if we were blessed with that, we believe we were endowed by our creator with those rights. It cant be true for us and not for them. I think that we need to be comfortable saying black people have a slightly different sound because they often spend more time with one another just like white people sound more like one another because they tend to spend more time together and thats true of all human groups. Its not racist. Its just true and harmless. The first guy painted with major chris turner. I was sitting next to turner at a dinner and i said why are you here . He said because i cant get out of my mind seeing a buddy of mine killed. I paint from pictures and photos and as i am painting turner im thinking what that must be like in his mind. So, the things i learned, the main thing that ive learned about del quintin as i was researching this book that i guess i had known but had kind of forgotten is that you know he had this reputation. This is a positive thing that i learned. Yet this reputation and thats all the pundits said about him on cable tv. Hes poll driven, he is poll driven and all he does is study the polls. He does what the polls tell him to do. Well yeah to some extent on some things but actually if you dig a little deeper, no, no. He follows his compass. Sometimes i agree with that personally and sometimes i do not but he followed his own belief system more than he was given credit for at the time. He did some unpopular things that was pretty hard to do and he should be recognized for. I think his intervention in haiti in 1994 which im sure many of you remember, that was a really hard one to do. You remember the circumstances. The the president haiti was a man of the left and he was going to seize all the land of the oligarchs and distributed to the people. Obviously he was a threat and he was deposed by the military. Do you remember that phrase that you probably havent heard in a long time . And the people of haiti were desperate for someone to do something to help them restore their rightful president. There was only one that could do something and that was the United States of america. The cold war had just ended and here was a president using the power of the American Military not to install a dictator as the United States had done for the better part of the previous 40 years in guatemala and iran and wherever else, but to install someone who the United States really had no such interest and who is a person of the left which was not the kind of person we supported during the cold war. You know what didnt necessarily go over well. It was a brave thing to do. The military didnt like it, the public didnt like it but it was the right thing to do. Another thing i will point to on the domestic front is his veto of that partialbirth abortion bill later in his term in 1999 i think it was, which was again to set the stage for you a little bit, congress than in republican hands had passed a bill outlawing what republicans call partialbirth abortion which was intact dilation and extraction. As its a lateterm procedure and it is quite a gruesome procedure but one that is usually only used to save the mothers life. Public opinion was strongly against clinton and republicans were screaming murder and all this kind of thing. A lot of democrats were but he stood firm and he made the veto of the bill that the republicans pass. There were more things like that. He didnt quite get credit for at the time that he served because he had this rep dictation that went all the way back to the governors mansion. If you grow up looking at thousands and thousands of faces until one day you see that one face that you feel was put on earth just for you and you know what instantly that you have fallen in love in a moment, for me trump is like that except the opposite. When i first saw him on the campaign trail i thought this is a person who is unique, horrible and amazing terrible characteristics put on the earth specifically for me to appreciate or not appreciate or whatever the verb is. Because i had really been spending a lot of the last 10 to 12 years without knowing and preparing for donald trump to happen. Good evening a welcome to koala ridge books. We are hosting an event tonight which is being taped for cspan so welcome to cspan. This is booktv. Swindlers hucksters American History is rife with those out to deceive. Where is the line between aggressive businesspeople and out and out conmen . To answer this question and more edgars balleisen is here to share his new book fraud an American History from barnam to madoff. Thso