In a nonfiction book, this is the place to be. We have four really different books, but theyre all really amazing. We have two finalists for the l. A. Times book prize and i want to point this one out to you now and this one out to you now here. Thats why i like to bring the books, so you can actually see them. We also have two finalists for the penn literary awards one in biography here, jeff hobbs book with, and one in science writing, joshua horowitzs book. And i think its worth noting that this book here is actually on two of those lists, and hes our youngest participant. This is not his first book but its his first book as far as i know of nonfiction, so its quite an achievement. We also have books that are going to take us to places that really, in my mind as i read them can change how we look at the world. Books are going to take us underwater, going to take us hundreds of feet underground, theyre going to take us into the amazon and to pittsburgh and to birmingham, england, which is quite an amazing journey. And then theyre each going to even going to take us to yale which may be the most exotic destination of all from my perspective. [laughter] and then theyre also going to raise some important questions that hopefully, well get to explore a little bit. What are the real costs associated with Climate Change . If i pay 5 for this book and you later get a bill for 25 for the same book, what is the real inherent of that book . And those are the economic costs associated that he, mark shapiro covers in this particular book here. Another question, when you pit the u. S. Military against whales and dolphinnings in the ocean whos going to dolphins in the ocean, whos going to win that war . And in the case of josh horowitzs book whos going to speak out on behalf of those animals when youre pitted up against the u. S. Military . Each as fascinating because even as fascinating because i come from a state montana where we have built our sort of economic base in the turn of the century on underground mining, what happens when 33 miners get stuck underground for 69 days . What happens to them minute by minute by minute . And as fascinating to me is what happens when they come out. And finally, what is the meaning of an untimely death of a very, talented young man and really what does it say about race and class and identity in america . And thats robert b peace. So ive asked each writer to describe very briefly their book i how they came to write it or they came to the topic, and then were going to dig in with some specific questions. Hopefully we can get a little interaction with the panel, and at the end youre welcome to step up with questions. Were going to have microphones at some point, im sure, and if we dont have enough time, well continue those conversations in the signing area. So i thoughting id start with jeb hobbs and see if he could give us jeff honest and see if he could jeff hobbs and see if he could give us a short overview and work down the way. Sure, thank you so much. This is a very special place, i bring my kids every year, and thank you, diana and you guys. Very talented and intimidating group up here. Im very grateful. Rob peace was my roommate, best friend for four years in college. He bailed me out of fistfights such as the time i was unfortunately hired as a bouncer for the yale Symphony Orchestra halloween concert. [laughter] things went south there. You know, he eased me through heartbreak, he was a groomsman in my wedding. A touchstone through young adulthood, and when we lived on different coasts, i had kids, he traveled a lot. We caught up on the phone four or five times a year, you know, those conversations were real and it felt like life was long and there would always be time for a reunion but there wasnt time. Almost exactly four years ago he was shot twice in the sternum by men in ski masks. This happened in a basement surrounded by marijuana hed been selling about a mile from the house hed group up in outside newark, new jersey, a neighborhood nicknamed ill town. And its not as though i went to robs funeral thinking im going to write a book and sit on panels with all these wonderful minds talking about him. You know, the book was just one part of a slow wave, a community that formed. After that funeral people from newark, people from yale, people from all over the world getting together in person talking on the phone sharing stories asking questions and really just not willing to let this guy go. There was i think that speaks to robs great talent at connecting with people, and, you know i there was a lot i knew about rob. We lived together in a small space for four years and there was a lot i didnt know, a lot of friction that he carried with him. You know, his mantra was its all good im all good, its all good, and he projected that and it was easy and safe and comfortable to believe him. Because i and a lot of people took the easy, comfortable way, thats a bug part of why he a big part of why he died, violently, pointlessly, very painfully and awe loan. Alone. That statistic, another dead black man. And it just seemed we knew he was, you know, not a cliche, not a thug, and there seemed some value in telling the story of his life and not his death. So thats what me with an awful lot of help tried to do. Hector . Well, first of all, thank you all for being here and for coming again and again year after year to the festival of books and helping to keep it alive and a very important event for literary culture in los angeles. And you give us authors something every year which is contact with readers. We have usually very solitary lives, and its wonderful to pull us out of our little nooks and bring us out into the sunshine. So thank you for being here and making it possible and thank you to the organizers. I wrote for many years for the Los Angeles Times, as some of you may know and i made a sort of career out of listening and writing about listening to and writing about working people. My family are from guatemala, and i grew up my father and mother both worked in the Service Industry along with most of my relativings. So when i became a reporter i wrote lots of stories about the culture of working class life in Southern California, and the Class Divisions in the city. And i was writing a novel that sort of summarized what i had seen as a reporter and citizen of the city called the barbarian nurseries when i got a call from my agent in new york asking me, hector would you be interested in writing the book about the chilean miners . And i said to my agent, well, do you have their rights . He said, yes, we do, and i said how many of them because i know theres 33. And he said yes, we have them all. What i did not know, and youll learn if you read my book, is these men made a pact underground to share the rights of their story together. They knew it was very valuable they knew that they were global celebrities even while they were trapped. It was a very strange situation. They spent 17 days fighting for their lives, and then they were found and food was lowered down to them, and they came to realize that 2,000 feet above them there was a media circus going on. And so they decided to share you know, the profits of a book together, to write a book to have a book written about them together. And through a series of contacts, they reached out to me. And what was explained to me was because books had been written about the miners already without their cooperation had not been very good and had been done quickly, they wanted a book that was more of a work of art and they wanted a novelist who was a journalist who also speaks spanish and knows south america. So that description is like to the tee me. So i went and i met the miners, and i sort of thought this must be an epic. I teach journalism in oregon, and i tell them enter a story with a hypothesis what you think youre going to find, and it will probably be wrong. But just let that be the beginning of your work and learn to sort of adapt to what the story is. What i quickly found was that these men were carrying a lot of hurt and a lot of pain and that really the story of what happened in the mine was a love story, because these men were crushed for 17 days by the idea that they were in their tomb and their family was going to have to live the rest of their lives without them. Many of us have, you know children grandchildren, brothers mothers all of us have family. And the idea that our families will have to go on without us and to live with that was a kind of emotional psychological torture. And so that became the emotional heart of the story. Its a story about men who want to go home, who want to be with their wiewfs, who want to be wives, who want to be with their sons and daughters and sometimes with their girlfriends too or their mistresses, but who want to go home. And i was very lucky because i thought this is going to be my nonfiction novel. This is going to be my, you know in cold blood, you know . Which is, of course, a classic of the general re, the week that inevented the genre. The book that invented the genre. And i know when you write a novel, you are god. You are in charge of the world. You know everything that happens because it comes from your imagination. And its hard to do that in nonfiction because we cant know everything. But in this case i had 33 witnesses, and each of them knew a little bit about the whole piece of the puzzle. And after a while listening to them interviewing them i came to feel like i was inside that mine. And so thats why my book i hope, has a feel of a novel to it because ive learned everything from the color of the walls, the shape of the cookies that they ate to survive to their own bowel movements. I had people describe their bowel movements to me when they were starving. Senor, what came out of us was like yama pelt ets. Pellets. Its about these 33 trapped chilean miners who spent 69 days and the underground odyssey that they survived. Josh . So its great for me to be back in l. A. Twenty years ago i started in Environmental Press here with my partner Stephen Mills whos with me today, so its a treat to be able to come back here, and its also nice because this is a california story, war of the whales. And like any writer and publisher, im always trolling for a great story and, hopefully, an untold story which is an overused trope. But i first heard about this story in a newspaper headline. Id been and it was navy versus whales, and it read almost like a divorce can proceeding. And it was divorce proceeding. And it was about a long running legal case having to do with navy sonar that purportedly caused the Mass Strandings of certain kinds of whales, and this was heading up to the supreme court. It had been in the courts and it was clearly heading up to the supreme court, so that piqued my interest. So i went out to, actually, laguna [inaudible] which is in baja to interview Joel Reynolds who runs the nrdc, at the time was the head of the nrdc l. A. Office and he had been the guy who for 20 years now 20 years at that time 15 years had been suing the u. S. Navy to try to get them to observe various environmental laws which they had been observing in the breach. And it wasnt until 2000 the year 2000 that there was a Mass Stranding and another major character in my book happened to be on the site and was able to collect some whale heads which was an evidence trail that this attorney could take to court. But what interested me about what hector said, he said his book was a surprising love story of sorts and so is this story. Thats what surprised me. After spending some time with Joel Reynolds, i got the legal details, and its not an in cold blood legal drama, its an administrative trial about environmental law. But what really hooked me was, as i started to dig deeper into the navys history because the way the press was presenting the story was sort of the environment versus national security. And in terms of, you know, the whales versus the navy. And, in fact the huge irony that i was able to uncover that really was an untold story is that the navy really invented the whole discipline of Marine Mammal science, that before the navy discovered and confirmed that dolphins and other small whales toothed whales echo locate and have what they came to call biosonar, nobody cared about whales except whalers. This is back in the 50s. [laughter] and nobody knew anything about whales and there were no seatologists or Marine Mammal scientists. So the navy started pulling people like john lilly anybody they could find who they could hire to study these animals. So what emerged was a story where they were trying to reverse engineer this biosew or far that these whales biosonar that these whales had developed to hunt and navigate in the dark depths of the ocean. So the supreme irony here is that downstream from that research was created these super sonars, if you will, that were in fact driving whales onto beaches. So it was just too juicy a story, too great a story to ignore. So thats how i got hooked, and i ended up spending, you know six years researching and writing the book, and i learned a lot about the navy. And it really was in the end, a story about two cultures that care very deeply about the ocean and about whales, but for different reasons. So to me, its really a culture war between the save the whale movement, if you will and the u. S. Navy that really depended on these animals to try to hunt for submarinings. So thanks. Mark . Wow. First of all what a pleasure to be up here with these great writers and thinkers here. And it strikes me how intimate these stories are. Including each about whales and the struggle over whales. And this was something that i kind of tried to remember the intimacy of the experience of Climate Change believe it or not. [laughter] because, actually, this is going to take us up like, 30,000 feet from where we are at the moment. Moving stories. To this phenomenon we now know of as Climate Change. Massive disruption in the atmosphere and ecological disruption on a major scale. And so we all basically have become aware of this notion of Climate Change. Ive been an environmental journalist for 30 years or so, and ive come to understand some of the basic ecological principles that sort of enable this planet to keep moving as we have this incredible balancing act on earth here. And yet what was, what you couldnt help but notice was that for most people this notion of Climate Change has been and i think to a great extent still is an extremely abstract concept. Its going to start unfolding somewhere down the line in this kind of abstract future that keeps getting further away and this notion that its going to be happening somewhere else. And even to other people to some extent. And so as a journalist and as a writer i actually really wanted to find a way, number one to tell the story of Climate Change and add something new to our understanding and bring it home in a way that actually makes what is occurring real. And what in looking around and ive kind of combined over the years an interest in sort of high finance and economics with environmental writing. And i realized there was actually this, the profound nature of the changes here on earth have their corollary in the economic realm. Theres this fascinating term and this wont be a science lecture, but i did learn it. And the great thing about being a journalist and a writer generally is how much you learn in the process of writing. And there was a concept for scientists called the end of stationaryity, and this is essentially that the earth is reaching a point at which the patterns of the past can no longer predict what is happening in the future because of such dramatic changes. Its a truncated version of this idea. And i thought, well, actually you know, its really not understood is actually, the huge impact of that shift, that enormous flux in the economic realm. We think of this as a natural phenomenon which, of course, it is, and i wont go through all that kind of evidence and the storms and the droughts and all those things but these impacts here in the Natural World have enormous impact on the economic world. And so i wrote a book, the reason i wrote carbon shock was, number one, to highlight this situation with Climate Change that i dont think had been paid much attention to which is, number one, the economic consequences of Climate Change number one. And number two from a writing point of view what was interesting is because you have enormous change happening enormous natural change and Enormous Economic change what do writers look for when theyre looking for a great story . Conflict. And the earth is now going through these enormous changes which is actually changing the kind of constellation of powers and interests in financial calculations that we hear. So i took in carbon shock this kind of swrowrnny to different journey to different parts of the world where the costs and consequences of Climate Change are being experienced now, and i dug in very deeply into individual locations and tried to tell stories and told stories of farmers and their experience of Climate Change in the central valley. Went to the amazon, i talked about the experience of Climate Change in the rain forest and i went to pittsburgh and a chinese city and also to the u. K. To talk about various cities. And so ive written this kind of episodic journey that i think gives you a snapshot into the fundamental economic challenges and changes of Climate Change and the points of tension in which the world is changing right now to the deal with this situation. Yeah. And its quite a journey too i highly highly recommend you take it. So you can see what were weve got here today. Weve got this amazing, Diverse Group of writers and books. And what i thought id do since the sort of overarching umbrella here is writing these big stories, we try to talk not so much about the specifics of the books now, but more about the process of what its like to approach Something Like a carbon shock or a deep down dark as a writer and what is required to be able to get that story onto the page. So i think well just stick with this order, it seems to be working [laughter] with jeff. And the question i have for him is um how you were able as a friend of rob peaces after his death to come back into his family and ask for their trust to give you their story . How were you able to, um build that trust with a family who, im assuming didnt really know you until maybe the funeral. Thank you for that question. And, yeah, you know, the first time i sat down with jackie peace, robs mom, and, you know again, i said we wanted we thought there was value to sort of establishing a record of her sons life. It probably wouldnt be published, you know hes not a famous person or anything. I had never done nonfiction, id never even read much nonfiction. And, yeah, it was clumsy and dangerous at times but as i moved along and sort of, you know, i started with mutual friends and friends of his from newark whod visited us in college and really good guys. And, yeah, just not really interviews, but conversations sharing stories, and as that widened and, you know, i was soon talking to drug deal ors in their homes dealers in their homes, scientists at yale who were a hot more guarded, actually a lot more guarded, actually, than the drug dealers. [laughter] you know, there were walls, and they came down pretty fast through this commonality of caring about this guy. You know, what was a lot harder was people were very possessive of rob, and his reach was very wide. So id be talking to someone, say, call him roy and wed talk for a couple hours, and hed say where are you going next . Id say im going to darius and hed say, well you go talk to darius, and you come back here, and you tell me what darius said, and ill tell you if its right, you know . [laughter] which is tricky, but its also very serious. As i soon came to realize. And you guys all know in nonfiction you are setting the you are setting the narrative, and, you know the written word, ink on a page has power and permanence. Its so important to get it right. And really stressful. [laughter] and hector you had sort of a similar situation where you had 33 strangers that you had to kind of get a rapport with p even though they had a commitment to telling their story. Im curious how you were able to do that. Um, well, i yeah, this project really helped to crystallize a lot of my ideas about journalism in my head because its something id been doing 25 years and doing it kind of intuitively. I think ive realized that when you interview somebody, they can tell if youre a phony. So they can tell, they can intuit what your objective is. And so a lot of these guys had been already subjected to a media circus in which people were asked them questions like did you have sex underground you know . Are you rich yet . Can you loan me some money . They sort of were already exposed to this tabloidization of their story. So the first thing that i did was to sit and say um, to introduce myself and to offer my sympathy for what they had been through and to begin to ask them questions about what life was like as a miner. I wanted to know about the complete person, you know . How long have you worked in mining, what is it like to work in a mine, what was that mine like what reputation did it have . And so i began to gather this portrait of both mining life the life underground, why men make the decision, how for many of them it was a multigenerational job, it was a job their grandparents had done, all of the myths associated with working underground. I just heard all these amazing storyings. They say that the devil lives in gold minings. They say that the mine is a woman is another one, that a woman is bad luck in a mine although there are women who do work in mines. All this sort of mythology, the presence of ghosts at places where people had been killed. And also these incredibly beautiful stories and very lyrical about growing up with your dad as a miner. One man told me hes a big sort of scruffy mountain man kind of guy, jorge, and he told me, you know, when i was a little kid, like 7 or 8 years old, i would go to the mine and i would wait while my father worked inside and i would dig little holes and put planks over them, and it was like making a little toy mine. And playing in the toy mine while his father worked in the real mine. A lot of the other guys told me their first job was to put on this harness of wolfs leather, they had these big satchels bags when they were kids, teenagers, and fill them up with rockings. So they would be like beasts of burden. That was their first job in a mine. So this portrait of a mining culture and of the complications of middle class, you know its a middle class life that they were trying to sustain by working underground. And so they had mortgages, they had can kids in college kids in college trying to pay for their kids tuition in college. Some of them had two households because they had a mistress and they had a wife, you know, and thats the complication. One thing i realized from doing this is that the typical man who has two households usually is doing it because hes weaker than the two strong women in his life. [laughter] and that became very clear when i interviewed one who became infamous for having two women fighting over him on the surface. And so as i gathered these stories in the process of writing, you begin to lose yourself in this world and to feel the rhythms of it. And you search for the language. You do an interview and you ask people to remember things as best they can, and i discovered that human memory works in all these different ways, you know . One guy was especially good at remembering the physical details of their degradation, you know . He had been an athlete, so he was measuring, you know, that guy, hes going to be the first to go. His lungs are all bad. And this other guy his leg is all swollen up. Franklin lobos this athlete, he was really good at remembering all these physical details, and this older man had, like, a photographic memory for or a tape recorder memory for the speeches people made. So, you know, when a guy apologized for stealing the food, i could ask omar what did he say, and he would remember in these ways that really rang true. So it was a process of building this world of losing myself in it and feeling the intimacy of it. Wonderful. Josh you had a sort of different issue from my reading of your book which was that you had two very charismatic sort of heroes or protagonists that you could have followed through that book and it seems that since theyre advocates of the whales, theyre going to be willing and able to tell your story their story. But you also had the military and im just curious how you were able to get behind those closed doors because thats a significant part, you know, of the story you have to tell. And im wondering if you could tell about that how you went about that. Yeah. Well, what jeff said about the pressure you feel to get the story right when youre writing nonfiction, definitely i felt. And to my credit my publisher said listen, i want to make sure you dont just preach to the choir. Youve got these great environmental heroes, but maybe because my publisher also publishes john mccain, so he sympathizes with the navy. [laughter] hes actually very apolitical and said, listen, youve got to make this a 360 story. Youve got to tell the navy story, youve got to get some major develop some characters, get inside their life and that was a big challenge because the environmentalists, i had had an Environmental Press, one of them had had become a whistleblower so he had already crossed that divide about talking. The other was an attorney who, celebrity attorney and was used to talk to the press. The navy is a totally i mean i started from a place of total ignorance. I have no military family i knew nothing about i mean, i learned before i went to talk to them about submarines and destroyers and what not and sonar, but i knew nothing going in. To be honest i did the easy part first. I reported the environmental side of the story and got up to speed on wales, enough about me the hardware and what not to at least try that and i was perceived i think by most of them as an environmental writer, i was working to be as fast as i could and did is a very polarized story, very different versions of the facts and the truth and the history, and the legal case is fundamentally adversarial and two different stories like a divorce proceeding. In any case i was fortunate eventually what i discovered was retired active duty military people, retired admiral, retired officers, retired admirals have a lot more leeway and these folks will not retiring in the 70s leather 50s at the peak of their power and they stay engaged in the background and informally or formally the policymaking they stay involved and there was one particular admiral at woods hole oceanographic, and he wanted to make sure the navys i got cold and he reached out to me and i spent a lot of time with him, i was a good student and studied hard and that is complicated stuff. I learned enough to report it well. He started introducing me to his other buddies, retired guys, we have been in the bunkers in the cold war and i got to talk to everyone eventually. And he introduced me to somebody else and i circled back and there was one guy who held out to the end one of those things your publisher is saying it is time to go to france and i called him up and left a message, and a deadline, if i dont hear from you i will go by what other people told me. He saw me like the last person i interviewed and he gave me lots of good stuff. Anyway, i felt very grateful to be taken into that world because i came away with tremendous respect for these guys, the fact is they are not the villains of the book by any means they just had a different mission than the environmentalists. These are guys who moved 32 times in their careers and to move families and nobody got rich and they are working in a classified realm and one of my protagonist hannah navy pass that made the story interesting and he had been so serious about his vows of not talking about activities, it was operating in this area of the navy. It is a tribal culture, made a much better book. And amazing story and that starts to unfold and you see not just the narrow view but a broader view of what is involved. When the big file comes up right before right after the 9 11 event it breaks your heart because you know things are not going to go well. You had a different problem here too. Taking on a much bigger subject. One of the things we exchanged some emails at the introduction to your book you talk about trying to find those tension points of telling a story and that is one thing where i read that and what exactly does he mean that this is the perfect venue to explain that and how you came in to the story and the way you were able to unfold a giant story into one that is manageable and you learn a lot as a reader. Yes. This was a story telling challenge. Some people have a vague familiarity. I thought a lot about how it was going to strategically approach this topic and then i started reflecting i like science and reading and scientific discovery and a way to understand where we are on the planet. I am not a science writer. I dont write for discover or the science exploration magazines. Journalists are alike, we have a hypothesis, we apply the scientific message and we test reality against our hypothesis so what was interesting is once you start getting into and understanding the developments in science that is abroad whirred, science, climate related science has so many different aspects, there is tension loaded in every New Discovery when it comes to scientific knowledge and i will give you some examples. In each case i wanted to understand the scientific backup to the basic fundamental shifts that going on and then extrapolate from their what the interests are as a result of the scientific discoveries so quick example a couple years back, over the last 7 to 10 years there has been growing Scientific Understanding of the key role the trees play in absorbing Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. Your average free, even the ones in griffith park, made up half of co2 one of the biggest greenhouse gases. So all these people would start to talk about it in sight to the turtles trees can absorb co2, maybe we can use trees as a tool to absorb co2. And all these Big Companies started actually saying guess what, maybe we are pumping greenhouse gases, maybe if we buy a forest in brazil. They can offset our greenhouse gases. And it is an idea you cannot set your emissions. And, and packing the notion of a company. And i went to the amazon. And global issues. We have all these out from major multinational, scrubbing the amazon, and to preserve companies in america and europe. This is an enormous story, and there are Indigenous Peoples that are extremely remote and this was basically finding the book is deeply grounded. It is only the basis, the scientific basis they define the stories, so another quick example of each chapter at the heart of it but i was reading work about the impact that agriculture has and will was interesting was how tree crops are particularly vulnerable to the changes in temperature because when it gets warmer, peaches and deeper cuts and cherries dont get cold enough to hibernate and come out three months later. Cherries are the most sensitive. Anyway, that is interesting because lets find a cherry farmer and sure enough, i find a guy who is not the head of the Cherry Advisory board, a great song about that. And keep his family farm still in business because it is warming up in the northern part of central valley. Great tension person growing copscrops facing enormous changes, right now in our time trying to figure out whether he can hold on to the family farm. When talking about the question of tension, in every case, multiple aspects of science, you can unpack the science and end up with a great personal story, great conflict over resources and that is what i tried to do. I was talking to an editor of the other day about publishing nonfiction and she said basically there is no market anymore for nonfiction books because the feeling is it is just facts, you will go to the internet or go to would journal article by you will not go out and purchase the book. I wanted to open that question to everyone with one comment. I mentioned to jeff earlier that when i read the death of robert peace, knowing full well he is not hope there always is. There is nobody playing me. Mario is the everyman who steals the book every shakespearean character you ever imagined. That is in part because he has incredible mood swings and antonio, this is a wonderful role and he does take it for a ride. Going through, i did ask my publisher for the first time ever, i was always reluctant to ask how many books have isil . It was a rather large figure is all i have to say. I actually did the math and figured out how much money has been spent, it is a rather large figure i have to say, so if people are reading books. Even a book the sells 5,000 or 10,000 copies, it will share books books and or, books are in libraries. I have a book that i wrote in 1990. I still get asked questions, it is assigned at universities. Books are this incredible way of transporting stories. Right . Before books existed the odyssey had to be repeated from person to person. The singing of it, making that story into a poem is away of remembering it. Now in prose, in books, we tell stories it is an exercise in the power of language and your love of language. You are here because you love books, you love words, you law of process. A world created to you by of the writer. Those that is what it is, to hold your attention and they happen to have an incredible amount of faith in the intelligence of the american people, the french people, the chinese people, and italians, mexicans they all read Copious Amounts of books and you can go to a bookstore in mexico city, paris, brussels, los angeles and all those places and there always crowded with all kinds of people young and old so books are extremely popular, storytelling is more vibrant than ever before. I believe it is our challenge to in a world dominated by film and dominated by the internets and whenever twitter is, it is more of a challenge to hold peoples attention, but books that are really difficult have huge readers. People are still reading ulysses. I recently started tackling ulysses page at a time. Why am i doing this . Because i love language and law books and i love being inside james joyces head. I have tremendous faith in the future of books. I believe to be an author you have to think in our field, you have to think of yourself and not just as a gatherer of facts but you also have to be a storyteller. When you sit down to write a story, i want you to think you are a person sitting by a fire and you want to hold their attention and that is the essential act at the heart of nonfiction writing. Publisher at the table i cant be as rosy i guess some people here. The fact is i know too much to be optimistic about the future of books because every year there are fewer and fewer readers and partially because the good writers and gravitating towards television and there are lots of reasons and everybodys Attention Span is shorter but i do feel that books, nonfiction nonfiction actually is more important than it has been in the past and the story the role of nonfiction, book writing is to tell stories and we all deeply need to share and tell stories and i think the role over the past year the role of nonfiction authors is to inseminate other media because there are fewer and fewer readers. It is just a fact. However, my book is not being made into a movie yet but i had a meeting at sony with rios people yesterday and i dont kid myself for a minute that those people read the book but they wanted to meet with me and for taking notes and they needed just not just property but a story to tell and the characters. So i do think weve the book readers and writers, even smaller group, it is the cult now of book readers but it is important to the larger culture. Is not measured just by how many people are reading books. I wanted to ask if we have any questions to be ready because i have five minutes left to get questions from you and while thinking about the questions we dont have time for comments. If we want to have a discussion with the writers joyous at the signing area but as we get ready for those questions if you want to raise your hands i think we have some microphones and i will let mark respond before we get to the first question. I actually think the evidence here is the book is alive and only point i would add is in the era of 24 7 news cycle and the bombardment of anybody with news and data and information it is clear there is a merging, i dont think it is there is a merging, more and more informed writing, an Important Role of helping navigate through a very complicated issues the we all face in the world so books have this Important Role to stalin and follow the market as navigating through this world where we are getting all the disconnected bits of information. Thank you for being here. Questions very quickly, very quick questions. A thought process involved in dealing with 33 characters and whether to group them in every way, tell 33 stories or deal with so many characters. In the paper back there will be a drama as i dramatis pers personae but each have their role that is extremely important. May abdicated responsibility, anta mario emerge as a leader, and he was having an affair his wife and mistress were fighting on the surface he end ed up being my comic relief occasionally and a very sensitive person, played an Important Role so there are five or six guys i come to again and again. My everyman was the person who when i first met him was emotionally the most shattered, taking medication to deal with his nightmares and after that, i had groups of older guys versus their guys, northerners versus others so i groove them, i had guys who would stand for those groups and explain were different. I also really felt obligated to mention all 33 of their names each once. Generally speaking there were guys who have roles and when their time came mario was the central character and other people would come in and have their moment. Almost everybody has a moment where they do something important in the book so i organized it around what the story needed in each chapter. Next question. We saw some back here. You have questions for one another while we wait on this. I am interested in nuts and bolts. If i walked into your writing space when you were researching, what would i see . All along those lines, when do you know you are done researching and ready to write for are you writing after you research . I see this rock above my desk the entire time i wrote it because i write about the rock, it came from a beach in spain, experienced a Devastating Oil spill, called the prestige, devastated an entire coast of Spain White House volt marine economy and ecology and became a symbol of lack of accountability. It is covered with oil by the way. Anyone else have a rock in their . I have a whales ear bones and somebody gave me which is the size of the fist and is the hardest bone in any animals body in the Animal Kingdom and it is protect their ease. My workspace is in the garage. It is the mess. Baby junk and my junk and everything is digital. My recorder is a digital. Word folders are digital but it is the mess of paper and all this stuff. Under this alley behind the place, and have some characters in it, the gentleman lives in that alley, and he minds the baseball game everyday and pitches and bands. Never kept track but it seems to be about nine innings. Being nice to my kids and we have a neighbor across the way named george who is always in everyones trash. You walk around in the dumpsters, really a obsessed with how everything is organized and gets really mad if your hands are out of place. Anyway. That sounds like a whole novel into itself. I rented the studio in pasadena that was a block from law wine bar and another block from a cafe so i go to the cafe at 6 30 in the morning. I was the first customer and i worked for a few hours and i would go back home in the afternoon and have a glass of wine and call it a day and in this office i am doing i had some rocks from the san jose mine, they were rocks of the war that had the copper and gold in it and it was a beautiful stone. I had pictures of the miners with their ages. Had a map of she l. A. And boxes and boxes of my notes which were incredibly disorganized so i spent some time organizing them and had on a computer with digitized files of all the interviews and transcripts. The movie people transcribed all my interviews. That will never happen to me again. It was great. Oh yes, the guy was talking about the beer i would find the files that have tea is the one that said that. I was very fortunate. I would like to thank you all for coming today. [applause] what the signing area 1, [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] or watching booktv on cspan2 48 hours of nonfiction books every weekend. We are live on the campus of the university of Southern California for the 20th annual Los Angeles Times festival of books. And why cuba matters. Before we get into cuba, for those who dont know why you are, give us a brief biography. I am an archaeological dig. I am 75 years old. I come from michigan and wisconsin. I was a student in 1960 at the university. I have always been a writer. I became an activist and freedom rider in the early 60s and i was in the anti vietnam war movement, 50 years ago this week, the first peace demonstration in washington and we are commemorating that on may 1st and Second Coming up in washington. Then i went on to 18 years in the California Legislature and off and on i wrote, and i right for publication, the nation, i right hubble log tom hayden. Com and books that reflect my experience combined with whatever study or interviews i am able to do which brings us to cuba. Listen, yankee why cuba matters just came out. You had to update it because of what president obama did. I believe from intuition and study that