A world of my own sealed off of my family which no one could take away from me. You can watch this on booktv. Org heres a look at some books being published this week, you Law School Professor examines how parties impact our political system and political tribes. The common good their gear for the need to restore the idea of the common good. Facebook cofounder argues the 1 was better than it works, will look at this impacting our globe. Also feminist Brittany Cooper provides analysis of the role of africanamerican women in eloquent rage. The watergate they recount the history of the hotel including the notorious scandal connected to its name and share stories of its notable residence. Subsequently earning a phd at cambridge university. A bestselling author looks at innovation preparing mankind for Space Exploration in his book, the future of humanity. Awardwinning journalist reports on the growth of the White Nationalist movement. Look for the titles and bookstores this week. Watch for the authors in the future on book tv, on cspan2. None one. Now the final author talk of the day. It is been long on a robbery committed by his cousin. Good afternoon welcome to the final author presentation what i hope has been an eventful day so far you are at the Trinity United Methodist church. We feel fortunate to have the space for the 11th annual book festival. This has been made possible by the generosity of jack and mary. My name is roger smith i have the pleasure of serving as a volunteer and i am delighted with your participation. The book festival is presented by several friends. We would also like to thank our wonderful members and individual donors contributions have made and continue to make saturday at the book festival of free of public event. 90 of the revenue comes from donors like you. It is a great pleasure to thank you for your support. Please allow me to go over some housekeeping details. Immediately following the presentation our author will be at the book signing venue where he will be glad to talk with you further into sign books you have purchase. A couple of technology reminders, take a moment to make sure your cell phones and other devices are turned off so that we will not have electronic interruptions. If it is your intention to take photographs please make sure your flash is turned off during the questionandanswer portion i ask that you raise your hand if you have a question give one of our ushers a few seconds to get to. It is important that youre holding a microphone otherwise viewers will be unable to hear your question. Also is make sure your question is a question rather than a statement or story. Our author today is here courtesy of the generation ability no wild. Ben bloom holds a phd from the university of california berkeley. He was awarded the New York Times foundation scholarship. Please join me in giving a warm welcome. Thank you for having here. I have been strolling around savannah all day with my wife and sixyearold daughter. I think every city should be required to have a nice monument every two blocks. More importantly, its great for hunting pokemon. The portion of ranger games takes place four hours west of here at fort bennett. A very different side of georgia. You might be thinking this is a book about war but it is not actually. The cover does have some soldiers on it but ranger games is about a lot of things on the periphery, its about family and the way good intentions go wrong and more importantly its about growing up. Its about the beautiful allusions that propel us to follow our dreams in the way that those solutions can crumble when we get older often making space for something richer in real or but sometimes wreaking havoc along the way. Ranger games is the true story of my cousin, alex, grew up with in denver, colorado. We were both weird kids growing up, the phd was in computer science. I was a gigantic master. For halloween alex was just as weird. He was obsessed with the military from a very young age. Fascinated with all things army. He always has his nose. In a book but they were the kind that if you stack them up next line wouldve black hawk down, red badge of courage, any military trauma he could get his teeth into. We started hearing for alex and he was a kid that he wanted to be a soldier when he grow. Common dream for young boys but he stuck with it, his freshman year in high school september 11 hid and i think that is the point when his goal started to get more real he enlisted shortly after his 18th birthday, by then his goal was to survive a brutally difficult program to make it to the elite special operative ranger regiment. He achieved that shortly after his 19th birthday was posted to fort lewis, washington. Four months later he served as a driver and an Armed Bank Robbery he was arrested afterwards and served 16 months in federal prison and after his release he started talking to me about the crime. Spent about seven years trying to get to the bottom of how alex had come to be involved in this bizarre crime. The big question i grappled with as i went through the process of was how do you support someone who has done something terrible that caused harm to both himself anothers. How do you help them reckon with what they have done. I will alternate some readings with conversation about the book i will open with a passage about what alex and i were like growing up in denver. The time where kids alex always had a simple dream, to defend his country and the forces of evil. None of us took this seriously but him. After school he would run off and is camouflage camouflaged te was a boobytraps and high behind cattails to watch joggers jump in the up as the ground exploded beneath their feet. There are not many women in the ads just grim men in hightech year trapping down ropes of helicopters to for getting g unforgettable jungle. Bl that you can be, in the army. Back then we barely spoke. Page seven i become known as the math prodigy. In the field i saw self intersecting manifolds of swallows. I would tell supermarket cashiers how labors were lasers work. I was, i realize completely insufferable. Human relations were not my specialty, too complicated. The 13 is taking calculus in physics at the university of colorado. The only real, ground i had they between the tattered street hockey nets in his driveway where he would occasionally scurry around my knees. He was five years younger but already abutting start. Our fathers have both made their efforts at manley education. Alexs father was a assistant coach of the hockey team. He played adult leak with dental first fineness while father was a quarterback coach George WashingtonHigh School Football team downtown. Both raced bicycles competitively and pick up street hockey skiing, golf, client and pumped inordinate quantities of iron. Summers we went camping in the foothills, fishing they stuck earplugs in her ears jam 12 gauges shotguns against our shoulders and had a squeeze the trigger. It was better with alex and me. Even when he was in School Reports began filtering the shoveling snow for neighbor coaching and defending classmates against bullies, their tournaments all over the country with the Club Hockey Team and he became more more serious about the army. Seems to me he had the basic model a world of attachments and product tieins were available to him. His ability for of heroic accomplishment. I knew when i published ranger games that some people would take it as an antiwar book. Its really not that either. In talking to alex against the huge appreciation of their bravery, discipline and integrity and deep care that they show each other. My grandfather landed in normandy shortly after vide. Although those stories meant more to alex than me ive come to appreciate the warrior eat those that he passed down, the deep bonds of trust and the willingness to keep on going no matter how tough or painful it gets. In the Ranger Indoctrination Program he and his buddies endured held together. They had to group up in teams of six and hold telephone poles for 48 hours taking them some brief shifts. That was just two days out of a month long process of extreme physical pain and endurance. After surviving the cut most soldiers quit but alex did not. He began learning what his new job would entail as a cherry private under the guidance of the tabs. Highranking soldiers who had seen combat. This next passage is about how this folded over into the offsetting. The months for transformative, at night and on weekends they ventured into tacoma with new eyes. Every door was a potential breach point. Every dennys study partitions into lines of fire. Civilians like more like another species entirely. Cherry private scratched as men and women with giant proofs of hair puzzled over menus like their childrens mouths, one night alex and his buddies went out to see the new xmen movie all they could talk about lined up in the dark among teenagers who had no idea there surrounded by rangers is how simple it would be to take down the theater. Theyll try to outdo each other which was almost identical to that of the hangar. Three exits, red zone, and interiors base with sheep to hurt, piece of cake. Talk of hitting spots was a good way to show whenever they watched ice movies they laughed at how much better they could do the job themselves. Tabs are fluid but the sharper of the privates were really picking it up. In this there are likely to enjoy the special mentorship. Even after his replacement as blondes team leader, the specialist popped in once in a while as he broke down in 16 or shined boots tasking for a ride. He was friendlier to the privates taking more than a few out to facilities problem seem to be a favorite of his. Summit that the use of it was cool mcclement the transporter after one of his movies where they want criminal aaronson and audi. He tried to hide his nervousness no matter where summer wanted to go, supermarket, pawnshop, he made a little lesson out of it. Mercer intel, side door by the booth, red zones, by the counter in the kitchen behind that softserve thing, you forgot the bathroom, bank, you are dead all of us were flabbergasted by alexs arrest. The first question was why, where did this come from. Gradually the story began to filter out alexs father cannot visit him for the first few weeks finally he got into talk to him and apparently alex had believed the plans for the bank robbery were just one more of his games. The Training Exercise that suddenly got real. Some further reports began filtering out us strange stuff going on and it seemed like he was in a weird state that we cannot quite wrap our minds around. Later he told us after his arrest he had been waiting every day for representative to appear and tell him there have been a giant mixup. It had been a Training Exercise and theyre going to send him to iraq to be with his unit where he belonged. When i began talking about the crime he seems so fragile and adamant so searching to convey the truth to what has happened. I thought it was my job is his friend and cousin to support him. The more research i did more evidence i found that suggested things were a bit more complicated. Was in the thick of the family tension that i started to get to the truth that the social psychologist most famous stanford prison experience called alex up and asked him to appear in a special episode of the doctor phil show titled when good people do bad things. The next passage i went to read was from a taping in the studio audience. By the time of the taping i was a nervous wreck i had a feeling he may be lying alex was so confused the real story wasnt accessible if it existed in the first place. Doctor phils big catchphrases get real, get real about your problems and are so terrified that he was going to call bs on alex and tell him to get real about this crazy story in front of 3 million americans at this moment when i was supposed to support him and get at the truth so this is from that moment i got to alexs segment. Lights, action. Doctor phil admitted another gorgeous clapping count texting grammar. Since is that send us off to the horizon. Now i have a worldfamous psychologist Doctor Phillips and bardo is here today were discussing his book, the lucifer effect. Understanding how good people turn evil. Me tell you something. You need to read this book and you need to read it twice than you need to give it your kids. And bardo chuckled alex was sitting stiffly in his chair, one shoulder higher than the other eyes alternating between mcgraw and the audience. It really is very insightful today were talking about when good people do bad things. Rule number one in the military but i want you to look when one former ranger said he thought he was following routine orders. They turned in their chairs to look at the screen at the back of the stage in place of the doctor phil local an 8foot tall alex stood in his bedroom had bowed, the drumbeat started up almost at once. It follows was a short series of edited sentences use of which i had heard not one which was individually untrue so the only possible unifying with some bizarre military dilution that none of us could comprehend. The music finished and there is a pause. Okay said doctor phil with a sigh. Healing ford in his chair and scrutinized alex having not been in the situation all of us are saying wait, what . Alex went through his fullbody fidget so what youre telling me for continued spreading out all ten of his fingers a motion shooting electricity from his fingertips is that you did not know he began flapping his clenched fist that you are involved in an Armed Robbery of a bank . Alex losses job. He became better and instead i found myself turning to luke elliott summer. A very intelligent and charismatic i who committed other crimes including stabbing a Co Contributor and tried to put a hit out on the prosecutor i ended up developing summer admitted directly to me that morality had always been a mystery to him. Paradoxically alex has such a hard time think anything was run wonder if it had something to do with some on process guilt this is a passage i managed to secure from summer at a rural area in kentucky sitting in this dismal visitation room. As my time with elliott loan down we talked briefly about the additional sentences he received for his final two sentences. Stabbing and trying to put a hit out on the prosecutor he corrected me about my understanding that he received ten years each. Thats just what was structured. Is really to 20 year sentences which he was serving concurrently. I asked why the authorities were willing to do them. I think the prosecutor finally realized some bat insane but he sent me to prison anyway. That still got me hot. The last phrase it dropped into a voice so cartoonish that it can help it interpreted as playful like a 10yearold threatening to blow up a school. He sounded the way of yours before when illustrating his family he painted a vivid scene of killing everyone in the room. As we waited for the manager i looked at a few notes. Elliott asked me i was planning to represent him in the book. Worldfamous psychopath he offered grading. I dont know about that i must wish i could be a dillinger type character a rough think robert type. Then he switched to his last corny singsong voice rolling his eyes up to the ceiling that reminded me of the intimate amount of chucky cheese. The guards fell in aware escorted out to the empty visitation room. The rough texture of cinderblock showing through the faces elliott pointed out the small marks where he had been permitted to stand and kiss mandy where their previous the app. The only intimacy he would be allowed with her by the next 37 years. I asked if this was permitted only after they told me it wasnt. Elliott was being led to the secure door at the far side carrying on a onesided conversation with the guards on then the concrete vault just swallowed him and he was gone. I am a civilian and i had no experience talking to military folks before he started researching the story. We have been taught to interpret the experience of soldiers to the length of trauma increasingly in the last ten years. An unspoken code prohibits us from questioning too deeply into what they had to do on the battlefield. But he challenge that lens for me. He claimed that his experience abroad had been appalled for the robbery. When he fled to canada when he was born he claimed he had stage the whole thing to gain a platform to combat war crimes. He claimed to have evidence that he was withholding and it never materialize. When i started talking with him he was still very adamant that have been his motivation but what i went through his Google Search history that they recovered from his desktop i found no political no protest literature just a lot of guns, poor and gleeful speculation about what to do with the money. Here in that cavalier way they may realize that what Holding Someone accountable means sometimes rejecting their own account. Memory is notoriously unreliable when it comes to what you dont want to remember. It shifts around to edit out our transgressions. The more i research the story the more i began to see the voice that has to be given moral authority is not the voice of that does it. Alex had his count of events but ultimately the story belongs to the people in the bank that went through the terrible experience one of those people began talking to me about four years ago her names is jessica she was a 19yearold teller in the bank at that day. She was the lead teller that day. She is extraordinarily generous with her time and extraordinarily forgiving toward alex. So the portion of the book that shows what happened on that day depends heavily on her account i will read a passage from that now. But 3 inches of plexiglass cannot stop is a teller sphere. Among fbi agents that work bank cases mistrust of the bandit barrier is the subject. I first heard it from a 20 year veteran in the field office. The teller just shovels money underneath i think it was my first supervisor toby anything who can contribute bandit barriers tsunami to shovel money underneath. She had been instructed by the modern bank robbery was the was a widescreen action movie. She knew where to find the silent alarm button talk to any see release that would make the movie stop. It seems strange that in this branch there is a narrow gap between the plexiglas and ceiling. At 51553 seconds a man in a ski mask read through the entrance, planted 1 foot on the countertop left for the barriers. The cry was more of a surprise that of terror quickly modulated down to an air seal. Leadership said everybody who had been so friendly and welcoming to hers that she figur