lists. .. next weekend. city people from all corners of the book industry will gather at book expo america. to discuss every aspect of the industry. i suspect many topics you about today will be the same subjects discussed next week. so please sit back and we offer you the c-span viewers an exciting chance to see behind the curtain the power of what you will see in the future. michael is a senior analyst in the research firm simba information. without further ado, i will turn things over to michael. enjoy the panel. thank you very much, gene. my name is michael norris and i am senior analyst from simba information. and with me today is mark laframboise, the legendary politics and prose independent bookstore. jed lyons, the president and ceo of roman and littlefield and had a national book network. geoff shandler, editor-in-chief at little, brown and company, and gail ross, the president and founder of ross yoon agency. before i do a good job introducing everyone i just wa
when segregated, when black folks weren t allowed to eat in restaurants or go to school or ride on certain parts of buses or drink out of the water fountain or even have equal voting rights at the time. uh-huh. that was what was going on in this country at that time, which was a terrible thing. and so that is what i was accused of, being a triple racist murderer. and in the book you write about growing up in a household that really was violent and difficult. facing your father across the living room with shotguns. yeah. my, my family life was not violent. the violence was outside the family life. but you got to realize that in may, this may i will be 74 years old. and so my mother and father come from a generation where they thought that if you, if a child put his hands on his parents or even threatened their parents, since they brought you into this world, they will take you out of this world as well. that was the type of, of society that i grew up in. but descri
here i have discovered the truth. to be the truth. well, it says yeah. [laughter] but the love of truth is the spirit of man. given where i was and for how long i was there, this is incredible, i have no business at all being here now. that is absolutely correct. now, you say that you were in jail 40-something years. what do you mean by that? well, i was in jail 47 years. the fact that we are born into a prison, actually, when we re born, we re born as perfect beings. perfect means complete with all of our possibilities intact. but we re also born into a world of sleeping people, the level of unconscious human insanity where hate and wars and death and destruction and inequality reign supreme. so we are actually born into a prison. so i was in the, i was in that prison for the first 40 years of my life until i was able to wake up and get out of that prison. and realize who i really am. well, let s come to who you really are in a second, but let s just for the vi