the sheehan family foundation and mark and pat suen. many thanks to jack and mary romanos, our sponsors for this gloriouss venue, the trinity united methodist church. we'd like to extend special thanks to our literary members and individual donors who have made and continue to make saturday's free festival events possible. 90% of our venue -- of our revenue comes from donors just like you. thank you. we are very excited to have a savannah book festival app for your phonene available this yea. it's very easy to get it from the app store, and there are directions in your programs. please try to download it. it'll help you today. before we get started, i have a couple of housekeeping notes. immediately following this presentation, brian curtis will be signing festival-purchased copies of his books in telfair square right across the way. if you are planning to stay for the next author presentation, pleasese move forward to seats n the front so that we can accurately count how many i spas are available for the next group. please take this moment to turn off your cell phone and no flash photography isel allowed. for the question and answer portion, please raise your hand. i'll call on you, and the ushers will come and bring a microphone to you. in the interest of time and to be fair to the other attendees, please limit yourself to just one question, and please don't tell a story. [laughter] brian curtis is with us today courtesy of bill sickles and chris akin and bo and chris anders who are here with us. brian curtis is a new york times best selling author of several books andf has contributed to "sportss illustrated". curtis has served as a national reporteril for cbs college spors and was nominated for two local emmys for his work as a reporter for fox sports net. please give him a warm welcome. [applause] >> thank you, nancy. good morning. how are we? i love savannah. you have great restaurants. you, every day is beautiful weather like this. [laughing] can i i just see a show of han. how many of you live in the landings? good lord tickets only part about about how phenomenal it is there but i'm truly honored to beer be in savannah to talk about one of the most impactful books for me that i've done out of my --,o tell you a quick story about rings. i don't wear a class ring. went to the university of virginia irks some men wear jewelry, some don't. i was researching this book and heard about rings. rings that are given to participants who play in the rose bowl. in particular, the 1942 rose bowl that i wrote about, players and young men from duke and oregon state were all given a rose bowl ring, signifying that they had participated in the story again. i didn't think much of it in my research until i had a military researcher work to get me the military files of a lot of these men out of the use archives in st. louis. and as i reconstructed their lives, and, unfortunately, there deaths as well, there were four men that played in this game who died on the battlefields in world war ii. what was interesting is that three of the four men when they were killed in iwo jima, places in the south pacific, the only possession on the body was the rose bowl ring from 1942. and those rings were mailed home to mom and dad, often arriving months if not years before their bodies actually made it home to america. i was relating a story to a gentleman named bill halverson, and the halverson is live up in oregon and is working on a book project researching him. his father had participated in this game and has served his country. he happened to mention to me with his father had died years earlier, he was buried with his rose bowl ring on his finger from 1942. and again this ring kept coming up in my research as i was crafting this story. i got a call about two or three weeks after meeting with mr. halverson, and he said i've got to chile a story. sure. i'm all about stories. everyone has a story. he said he met with you a few weeks ago in the lobby of the marriott hotel in downtown portland and i was telling you how my father, blessed be his memory, was born, excuse me, was buried with his rose bowl ring on. and i said yeah, you told me that story. he said well, i've got to tell you something. you got me thinking about the 1942 rose bowl and wanted to go online and buy some memorabilia for my kids and my grandkids. my children and i went online and we started googling and went on ebay and it was a rose bowl ring for sale. and it just warmed my heart as he's telling me the story that it meant so much to him that he wanted to buy this ring. then he said, we look at the ring more closely and it was dads ring. and i said, i don't understand. he said, many years ago there'd been a robbery at my parents house and unbeknownst to me one of the items taken was his rose bowl ring. so while i believe this whole time he'd he been buried with e ring on him in actuality someone had stolen the rain and that was selling it for thousands of dollars on ebay. he and his family cobbled up enough money. gone to the authorities and the authorities had either set the statute of limitations are gone, et cetera if the halverson said gather together money and bought his fathers ring back and i was back in the family possession. so this theme of rings kept coming up in my research for this book. what started out as an article for sports illustrated in the summer of 2013 ended up being "fields of battle." i thought this was a sports book but it didn't turn out that way. then i thought it was a military and war book but it really didn't turn out that way either. it really is a story of the young group of men and what sacrifice means and what service means, and what happens when you come home from war. so i was struggling to find my next book topic about four or five years ago. i'd gone about a year since writing my last book. i was reading a newsletter at the rose bowl put out and it was a little did you know fact section. it said did you know the only rose bowl game never to be played in pasadena was played in the room north carolina in 1942. as a former sports reporter and sports author i was shocked i've never come across that little-known fact. so i did what historians and researchers have done for centuries and i went to google. [laughing] and i typed in 1942 rose bowl. there wasn't a tremendous amount of research done on it but what few articles i read i was fascinated i have this granddaddy of them all game had gotten transplanted from pasadena over to durham, north carolina, and that's what started to pique my interest in this story. what i didn't know at the time that about the sports illustrated story and certainly i didn't know even during all my research is that of the 80 men who coached and participated in the game, only one is still with us today. if i'd written this book 30 or 40 years ago it probably would've been a completely different book i literally had to reconstruct a story of men's lives without the men there. without much firsthand or secondhand source knowledge. so one of the gratifying things for me in this early research process was just trying to find a family member pics i would be online sleuthing and reading obituary trying to find the name of the son or daughter, and i would finally tracked him down after two or three months. i would introduce myself on the phone and say, you know, mrs. parker, my name is brian curtis, i'm writing this book. i'd love to talk to you about your dad and world war ii and the rose bowl. and most of them would get emotional immediately and said brian, we would love to tell you the story but we don't know it. i had never talked about war, and dad never talked about the rose bowl. what we knew he played but we don't know much. as excited as i would get to track down these family members it was equally disappointed understand they could not be helpful to me. so i would get on a plane and go to oregon in the small towns of jefferson and albany and hood river and salem in the outskirts of portland, and try to collect as much information that it could from long-lost cousins or from local libraries or the archives at oregon state and similar doing the same thing at duke university where i found personal letters that were written home form the war front that probably have not been touched since you're donated to the archives. so part of this project was piecing together a military files, academic transcripts, what little newspaper stories there were about this game in 42-44, and and in coming up wia narrative. one of the blessings for me in doing this project is that i have been able to educate the families about their debt and the grandparent. i can tell them when he went to high school. i can tell them what classes they took in college, a lot of them got d's and f's. [laughing] and i was not shy about passing that information on as well. just so all the stories about how they worked hard, listen, your dad was as smart as you thought. [laughing] but i was also able for many of them to get hold of the fold military file so we knew when he enlisted in what dates they serve and what ship they shipped out on, and again it was duty for me because even though 80 or 90% information to research, i was able to pass it on to the families and give them a little bit closer to mom and dad. so really this is about building a story about a group of men who played in this now remarkable game, and ended up coincidence in the battlefield. what really hooked me on is that as did research to discover the story of charles haynes and frank parker. charles haynes played for duke university, grew up a couple blocks from campus, was an all-american wrestler and a boy scout and everybody in durham new vigor to enroll at duke. he didn't play much on a football team but he suited up for coach wallace and played in the game. shortly after that game, haynes found himself in the army. yet tried to enlist a couple of times earlier in the air force but his eyesight had prevented him from becoming a pilot. so haynes in supply solar two years from the game in 1944 and deciding in the hills of italy against the germans. it just so happens that about a month before october 1944, a few a few months before, july, he is at an intent meant while they were off the front lines and is talking just been named frank parker. frank parker happened to play in but same rose bowl game, for the other side, oregon state. so here they are two years later, not really knowing each other, but having a connection of playing in the granddaddy of 'emda all, so to speak. one of their jobs was to be the first up the hill. charles haines one day on october 4, 1944, charges up the hill, and as he makes progress, there's no bullets coming this way. there's no bombs. heo can't believe it. heg keeps going further and further. he hits the apex of the hill when the germans open fire. they rip open holes in his legs. he gets shot in the chest x a wound about the size of a softball is in his chest. bullets are flying. hisre fellow soldiers can't get him to pick him up off the battlefield. he's's belizeed to -- bleeding o death, he's thinking about his parents back home in durham, he says good-bye and closes his eyes. it starts to rain, it starts to snow. then an hour goes by, two hours, five hours, seven hours. seventeen hours he lay dying in the snow and mud on this hill in italy until someone grabs his a arm. charles, charles, wake up, wake up. charles barely opens up his eyes. he's still alive at this point. and who does he see, but he sees frank parker. and d frank parker, the man who had played against him on that football field two years earlier withtb help from another soldie, picks up charles' bloody body, the hill undern gunfire, gets him to a medical tent. eventually transferred to a hospital in naples, and charles makes a full recovery. frank parker, after taking him to the medical tent, turned around immediately and went back up the hill and saved other lives over the next 24 hours. charles haines gets released. imagine almost dying on that hill,, and a few months later he's back on the front lines because we needed bodies as americans in our war. frank parker and charles haines create a friendship. they say good-bye in may of 1945 in the austrian alps. they stay in touch a little bit when they get back in the states but never laid eyes on each other until approximately 1991. it was celebrating the 50th anniversary of that rose bowl game, and the folks at oregon state wanted to recognize their only rose bowl champion. so they hosted a banquet for whoever was still remaining and able to attend. they also invited any of their opponents who had played against them at duke. and there were just a handful of duke players that came. but one of them was charles haines. and charles haines said i know we at duke are going to host our own reunion in a month, but i can't wait to see the man who saved my life. i need to see if he's still alive.av and charles haines traveled from durham out to corps valleys, oregon. -- core valleys, oregon. and as i write about in the introduction of the book, sure enough, he starts weeping as he he looks across the room and sees the man who saved his life. four weeks later frank parker and his wife travel to durham, and the same kind of reunion takes place. and until their death, the men stayed in touch. charles haines went through a couple marriages. his last partner, girlfriend, mailed me last year many of his last possessions including some of the gifts that frank parker had given to charles haines. and i wrote about these two men in this book because here are two t guys -- one dirt poor from oregon, one who had lost his father at the age of 11 or 12 in a car accident. his uncle married his mother. he had to work all through high school and college just to make ends meet. and here is charles haines in durham, middle upper class family, father was an executive at an american tobacco company. they bothve that off in war -- o off in war. they both kill dozens of men. they both get awarded medals for their service in action, but they h come home to america, and their lives couldn't have been more different. charles haines was a war hero, opened up a restaurant, gregarious, had fun, took cooking classes, was known for walking, around durham in full duke regalia. opened a construction company, was very successful, had a couple wives as i mentioned. frank parker moves back to oregon but stayedd in italy an extra year after the war. he couldn't go home to face his lifetime sweetheart and wife with. he thought he had fundamentally changed as a man because of the horrors that he saw and the crimes, in his eyes, that he had committed. so he delayed returning home. he suffered from alcoholism most of his life. he became a fisherman, never went back to complete his college education. lived his life on the sea, almost died a few times. after his wife passed away from an aneurysm, considered suicide multiple times. finally one of his eldest daughters got him to a v.a. hospital in kodiak, alaska, and then in portland, oregon, where for the first time after 50, 60 or years he started to open up and talk about some of the demons of war. some of the other players from the game came home, suffered from drug abuse and alcoholism, some committed suicide. we talk about the greatest generation, and in my eyes they all are. finish but we think about ticker tape parades and homecomings, and these men who were really boys sent to islands and places far away struggled with this the the rest of their lives. and part of fields of battle, the book and narrative, what started as this sports book about how the rose bowl went from one city to another ended up being a story about these boys going to war. but my own curiosity kept it from ending at war. because i said to myself what happened to these guys when they gotot home? did they become teachers? did war impact them? did football remain a piece of their life? youai know, i'm a former sports broadcaster, and for those of you that follow sports, you often hear broadcasters use war metaphors when talking about sports. it's t the battle of the centur, they left it all out on the battlefield. these are soldiers. my men need to hit hard. after doing this book, i realize how silly that is. because war is nothing like football. and what i learned is that these boys, as eager as some of them were to sign up at 19, 20, 21 years old, thought that war was a game. they thought that war would be just like football because their coaches would say, men, go over thereoo and fight hard and be strong and hit hard. all it took was about an hour in battle more these young boys to realize that war has nothing in common with football. now, as a side note, some of the lessons these boys learned on the football field did certainly help them in war; overcoming adversity, getting knocked down and getting right back on your feet, the tough get going when toughness faces them. and there are countless stories not onlyhn with these players, t other athletes who have fought in war talking about how the lessons they learned on the sports field kept them alive. so it's a triumphant story in ways. we won the war, for those of you who don't know. those of you in savannah, i hate to say it, but the north actually won the civil war as well. [laughter] the parts of the story that were great often overshadowed the sadness of not just the death, the suicides, the alcoholism, but stories like jack yoshohara. he was 2 years old when he came to america from japan with his mom. they settled in portland. he was raised in a public school in portland living a life in the small japanese community in downtown portland, going to public school, was a great athlete. picked up the game of football, was a great basketball player. matriculated to oregon state and made the football team under coach louis vuitton steiner -- lon steiner. and everybody loved him. the only thing that set jack apart was his japanese last name and where he was born, but for all intelligents and purposes, jack -- intents and purposes, jack was an american. so he played sparingly throughout theug 1942 season for the oregon state team, and everything was going well until december 7, 1941. and pearld harbor gets bombed, and immediately anyone of japanese ancestry was looked upon with suspect, certainly on the west coast. so at the time there were about 42, 44 japanese ancestry studentsen enrolled in oregon state. some of the landlords kicked them out of their apartments or dorms. they were spit on, they were called names. many of them immediately withdrew from school to go back home. remember that the federal government began to very quickly intern many japanese-americans, so they went home to sell their possessions. but jack wases a college studen. jack iss was a football player - jack was a football player at the pacific coast conference champions. he was headed to the rose bowl. so a couple days go by, and people gave jack dirty looks, but all is well. oregon state is practicing gettingtt ready to get on a tran on december 19th to go to durham. and acr few days before on a ray day, two men in suits and trench coats show up on the practice field at oregon state, and they go s over to coach lon steiner d whisper to him, and coach steiner says, jack, jack, come here. and jack yoshohara kind of jogs over, good student, good player, listens to his coach. these two men promptly told him they were with the fbi, escorted him off the field, told him he was not allowed to go with his team to play in the rose bowl game. flash forward a few days later at the train station in portland, and they had a great farewell of people from all over portland. you've got to understand the magnitude of oregon state in 1942 playing in the rose bowl game. this legitimized the university. this made the entire state proud. and who was there on the train platform, but jack yoshohara crying, waving as his team went away on this train trip. jack would go back home in portland, he would listen to the rose bowl game on a maul radio in his parents' home. within months his parents were forced to close down their restaurant, jack was forced to sell all his possessions including a car. they were sent to what was an animal livestock holding area in portland, him and his family, and a few months later sent to an internment camp in the desert really of idaho where jack would spend his time. you i know, jack yoshohara passd away not before oregon state recognized him and the other japanese-americans that were basically expelled from school and never completed. they were awarded honorary degrees. he was given his rose bowl ring. i was able to track down his daughter, lynn, who lives in the northwest. and so much still resentment and anger in the family more how they had been treated. -- for how they had been treated. and it was fascinating to get to know the family. i did my research, i promised that i would treat her and her father's legacy the right way because i t really believed tha. and so the family opened up a bit to t me. but flash forward to september of 2016, and oregon state recognized the 75th anniversary team. and i helped the university contact all these families to come back. now, remember, i told you that everyone is deceased from that game or team except for one, a duke player in louisville. but theuk sons and daughters cae back, many for the first time to oregon astronaut. jack yoshohara's daughter, grandkids and great grandkids came back, and it was probably one to have more emotional and memorable s nights of hi life to -- my life to see the 'em base brace of the descendants of these former players and the common bondll they all had shard together. and at duke they honored that team about a week later. of course, oregon state won the game, so they were much more enthralled and anxious to honor thee team. jim smith is 96 years old. hehe lives in louisville, kentucky. about asn fine a man as you'll ever meet. he's a widower. mind is sharp as a tack. i've befriended jim. i now call he and his family good friends. jim and i went back to duke, we had a a the chance to talk to te football team, to go out to practice, and they honored jim only the field before the game. or, excuse me, at halftime of the game. but every day that went on not just in my research, but after the publication of the book, the book took on new meaning for me. how many of you in this audience served your country in some capacity? thank you. thank you. [applause] probably many of you a relative who served, whether afghanistan or iraq or korea or vietnam or world war ii or world war i. thank you. because families sacrifice, to come as i i learned that one of the greatest appreciations i got from this book is the respect i have for the men and women who serve our country. because what they see and what they go through is dramatically changes their lives. and so this book has made a difference for me and my life in my appreciation and is speaking to groups, seeing the eyes and faces of men mainly but women as well. because as i'm talking about what these world war ii guys went through, that veterans from vietnam and korea start to tear up, or from iraq and afghanistan, because they can kind of understand where they came from. for gentleman lost their lives who had played in the game, and something else that hit me is their lives were stopped so young. one of the gentlemen was bob mani who was killed on iwo jima, and remember doing the research and went to go find if his wife was still alive. and it went to see if his kids were still living. but, of course, he was skilled when he was just 18 or 19. there was no wife. there are no legacy children. i found a third or fourth cousin somewhere in pennsylvania who may be hurt about a guy named bob manny, but for all intents and purposes it's almost like this gentleman didn't exist. that was to some of these other men. and i've made it a point now to make my contributions to places in their memory, if only the summit continues to recognize, and that's just for out of 80. imagine the tens of thousands of men who have sacrificed their lives in all of our wars, who did not leave behind a spouse or children or grandchildren. i think we always need to keep them in mind. the parallel stories that are right about in "fields of battle" is this climactic rose bowl game and war. but at the same time these teams are playing for a football game, fdr and churchill are in d.c. planning for war. and in these little nuggets that i would pull out of my research, the oregon state can get on a train and as i write about in the book, it's got air conditioning. it's got menus. it's got beautiful white linen and silverware, things that these young boys had never seen before. and they stopped at all the small towns and they got off in chicago to stagg field to practice and stretch their legs. well, it turns out as i was doing my research the origins of the manhattan project, those scientists that were working in the early stages of all the scientific things that produce the bomb, or working in an undisclosed lab about 200 yards from where the oregon state football team was practicing in chicago. and then when they suit up for the game, both teams, and again that oregon state won a genuine first, 1942, fdr and churchill are in the white house at one of the early conferences of the war deciding where should we send her allied troops first, where are we going to attack. so it was kind of these two parallels going on that i i was following this sports journey but also our journey to a war. another little-known fact that i discovered is that pearl harbor, when it was attacked, actually to college football teams in hawaii at the time of the attack. the players from a university outside of portland, oregon, were there as was the team from san jose state university. they were there to play a round robin of games against the university of hawaii. so they are there having breakfast, , these teams get hee to board buses to go toward the island. they start seeing these bombs drop in the water and they are seeing planes overhead. and these boys turned to the waiters and waitresses and the folks working at the hotel and say, what is going on macs don't worry about it. it's just u.s. navy exercises. so they go back to eating food coming pretty shortly thereafter the smell of oil after hotel six or seven miles away stores to waver in. the japanese bombers are now spotted. word comes over the radio pretty shortly, and those men were immediately and scripted into the hawaiian police forces. they were given guns. they were given rolls of barb wire, , told to poop patrol the streets, laid barb wire on the beach is it would be weeks before most of those boys have returned to the united states. in fact, a handful of those boys never left hawaii. they served in the army or the hawaii national guard in hawaii, got married, , had children and never came home. it's these little tidbits that are learned along the way that are at least fascinating for me. two quick last ironic stories. one is wallace, the head coach at duke university. previous had won national championships at alabama. and wade during this time decided that if my boys were are going into service, so was i. so this 49-year-old football coach shocked the college football world at duke went short after the rose bowl loss, enlisted into the army, rose in the ranks, would go overseas in 1944, would participate shortly after normandy, control the 242nd artillery, the begins in the war, with a spouse himself, and at one point in the battle of the bulge in the snowy forest on the edge of belgium, he is freezing and he jumps into a foxhole to try to get some and says to this young lieutenant, this young private, may i borrow a cup of coffee. and wade is freezing, the gentleman takes off his coat, gives wade the jacket, gives him ake cup of coffee, gives him fo. wade says to this gentleman, you know, what's your name? be -- stan. where are you from? well, i'm from oregon. he had played on the oregon state rose bowl team that had lost -- or had won, excuse me, against wallace wade's team. so they're inns a foxhole two years later in the middle of war. here is one of these other coincidences of these two teams coming together.ea and there are more of those stories that i write about throughout the book. the game actually ended, the winning score was an unbelievable catch by a tiny little guy named gene gray for oregon state. at the time caught the longest rose bowl touchdown pass in history that won the game. four years later those same hands and arms that had caught that winning touchdown were now gone. he had fought as a pilot in the war, and after the war decided to stay in the army air force and lost both his arms in an awful training accident after the war. so this book is meaningful to me. i hope for those of you that get the chance to read it, you can take something away about service, about sacrifice, about a unique time in our history, you know? some of the same things for those of you that are sports fans we hear about today, paying players, academics, concussions, all the same issues, by the way 75, 80 years ago. so i hope you enjoy this book as much as i enjoyed the journey that i wrote about, and i'm happy to take some questions. thank you. [applause] >> if you have a question would you please raise your hand. i will call on you. the actual come over in the people from c-span would love it if you're feeling comfortable standing when you give us your question. raise your hand, please. >> being a sportscaster do you have a a favorite player or a favorite team that you follow? >> you know, i can't answer that question. [laughing] >> you've got to be a yankee fan. >> i am not. [laughing] >> i'm not buying your book. >> are you a yankee fan? [laughing] that i love the yankees. i don't know what to tell you. [laughing] no. actually i'm a fan of the philadelphia eagles. [applause] i grew up in wilmington, delaware, just outside philadelphia because of the work i do i kind of backed off my allegiances from pro or college teams. i'm generally a fan of whoever is winning. [laughing] >> other questions? >> could you talk a little bit about -- >> weight. >> could you talk about the decision to cancel the rose bowl? i think a lot of the other bowls were played near their actual sites, portugal, et cetera. >> great. thank you for the question. you know, when pearl harbor got bombed a lot of folks across america wondered if the game was going to go on but rose bowl organizers had a reset the game pick oregon state and duke wanted to play. some of the men of course immediately enlisted or went off to war but we are america. we're not going to stop just because we got bombed. but slowly day by day there started build the backlash by the military against playing the game. why? why? because 50, 60,000 people in a stadium in southern california is attempting target for the japanese bombers and are still so much insecurity about it. about a week after pearl harbor i believe december 13 general dewitt who was in charge of the west coast for the u.s. military telegrams, called the governor of california and said, i request that you not play this game and not had a parade. the governor of course at the time abided by their wishes and canceled again. there were editorials in the charlotte observer and "new york times" go back and forth about whether or not we should play this game. and when is the right time to restart sports? as soon as the game was canceled and word spread, chicago raised its hand. the cotton bowl in texas, nashville come all kinds of cities said wider to play the rose bowl game here works in the end wallace wade, head coach of duke, was a very powerful coach of the time and said well, , we are in the game. why don't we just post it here in durham? quickly after the cancellation of the game it was announced that the rose bowl game would be played in durham. the tournament of roses who oversees the game tbit and official sanction. so it still counts as an official rose bowl game. there were still people in north carolina i didn't want the game to be played now they thought they would be a target for german bombers coming over. in fact, as a write about in the book they wanted to get an aerial shot of the stadium filled but before they flew a plane over, they made multiple p.a. announcements to the crowd to say look, etc a plane, it's not the germans bombing pickets actually the good guys trying to take a picture. so it's a great question because it led me to my own thoughts about 9/11, which for someone like me is the best i can recollect. i was too young when vietnam was going on and i wasn't born in paris and obviously the world wars i thought about 9/11 and the first game and that's played in the yankees played and the nfl struggled of when should we play football again. the closest i can compare it to was what about about about 75 years ago. when is the right time to play sports? right? is it there to get a country back on its feet? are sports there to serve as an unnecessary distraction, or do they take away holies and manpower and we should be focused on other things other than sports? i don't know the right answer. it's a great question. >> thank you. brian, you've written a number of books, a lot about sports, but could you answer the question of what are your favorite books that you've written, and why? >> i think, so i'd written eight. i think for me the two most impactful books because of the difference it made on me, not the difference it made on people, not how many books would sell, not what was a vessel or not, was probably this book because of my learning about service and sacrifice. and then the book i wrote five or six is ago called the legacy letters. and i had written five or six sports books up to that point and i was looking for a book that had more meaning. when 9/11 happened i was living in los angeles as a sports reporter, and always felt guilty that i couldn't do more. i wanted to go to new york. i wanted to help. i wanted to search the rubble at ground zero. all i could do was give blood in los angeles which i did do. so flash forward years later when i was looking for a meaningful book i wrote about a camp that exist for the children who lost a mom and dad in 9/11. i'd read this article and i said, that's my next book. and so i partner with an organization called tuesday's children which is still in existence in new york that was created to serve the children and the families, the widows and widowers of 9/11. and what i did was i decided to see if families would be willing to write letters to their lost loved ones on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. and the response was overwhelming. i got to know many of the families intimately pick as you can imagine there's lot of emotion even ten years after. so would be a 14-year-old girl writing a letter to the dad that she lost at such a tender age, or the two-year-old who never knew mom or dad, or the widower who still can't get over the loss of her husband that had never gone on a date, has never really been able to move on in life. so that book had a clear impact on me. it makes you want to hold your kids tighter. it gives you a better appreciation for how quickly life can disappear. so all my books, it would be this world war ii book and the 9/11 book, the legacy letters. yes, sir. >> thank you. brian, >> brian, you mentioned a number of, a number of soldiers, a number of players who went on to live afterwards. but for their sake because you made a point of saying that the four or who were kill never had a chance to have families, never had a chance to have of children, do you remember their names? could you say that for us, please? >> thank you for sharing that. i can remember three off the top of my head. bob nanny, everett smith, al hoover, and the fourth will come to me. one was killed on patrol in iwo jima. one got off his ship in the waters outside of -- and was shot before he ever reached the shore. al hoover was a marine, and legend had it that he died on a grenade ton save some of his comrades. as ire kind of pieced together things, i think a grenade did kill him. i'm not sure that he intentionally had jumped on a tremendous -- grenade. and the fourth name i'm going to think about because i'm embarrassed that i can't remember it. >> [inaudible] >> that's okay. [laughter] it's a great question. other questions? yes m -- >> my sense is after world war ii battlefield veterans didn't have a lot of services available to them where today, hopefully, that's a lot better. is that basically true? >> it's absolutely better. i mean, obviously, we know some to have issues going on in the v.a. today, so some may argue it's worse. yeah, they came home, there was no such thing as ptsd, right? it wasas called the scars of war or bombas trauma or things like that. so the v.a. did exist, but really it was certainly not there for mental. it was there if you had lost a limb to try to teach you to use a prosthetic at that point, the elementarynt prosthetics. i think, for me, i think after the gulf war we started to have a different appreciation for soldiers coming home. and while our v.a. services are not where they should be, certainly we understand better the mental costs of war than these gentlemen did. because remember, you know, imagine seeing someone's head blown off next to you. imagine seeing the horrors of war and then never, ever talking about it. not to your wife, not to your kids, not to a therapist. and then expecting to come home and immediately get a job or finish school, get married and live life happily. and that, to me, is why so many of these gentlemen are the greatest generation. because of what they did endure and were ableti to carry on and have successful lives. you know, women we overlook played an important role of world war ii, in world war ii as well. i write i about in the book, mot of it was on the home front or serving as nurses, but certainly in those daysin we think of, you know, the little woman staying at home, taking care of the kids and the gardener while the man went out, and that was true for some women, but a lot of women served. here american women's federation putting together bandages, caring for wounded when they came back, etc. yes, ma'am? >> [inaudible] >> do you speak to a lot of veterans groups, and have you beeno asked to speak to the ones that go to washington, d.c.? i'm not sure what the program is, flights of freedom or -- >> i believe it's called honor flights. that's actually one of the charities i contributed to in honor of these four gentlemen. honor flights pays world war ii veterans, pays for their flight and a family member to fly back to washington tock tour the word war ii memorial, which if any of you have ever done, do it. i'll speak to any veterans group, kwr07b9 a -- i don't care whether there's two in the room or a thousand. i've never gone to d.c. to do it.o certainly, if anybody wants to invite me, i'll come do it because i feel that's part of my payback to them. it's the least i can do for their service. any other questions? yes, ma'am. you need a microphone. >> [inaudible] >> i can't answer that question until you get a microphone. [laughter] >> what's your next book? [laughter] >> now i am able to answer the question. [laughter] i have no idea what my next book is. [laughter] i, i did two that came out in the fall of '16. i took a little time off and, frankly, i'm kind ofit struggli. that is not an invitation for any of you to give me an idea. [laughter] i was joking with bo and chris who have been such gracious hosts, theyin asked me what's oe of the most common things. everyone either wants to know what my next book is or they've got a great story to tell me to write about which probably happens to a lot of authors. so i don't know. i know that i'm not going to do it for money, although someone will pay me for it. i'm not going to do it for any other reason than i'm attracted to the story, i'm passionate, and it's going to make a difference.e and if i t never come across the next 50 years to one of those, i'll never write another book. but i'm only going to do it for the right reasons. [applause] we can have time for one more question. does anybody have another question? yes, sir, in the back. >> have you read the book, "the boys in the boat," and if you have, do you see the parallels between your book and that book? >> it's a great question. how many of you have read "boys in the boat"? [laughter] how many of you have read "fields of battle"? you see the problem we're having here, people? [laughter] i believe they're for sale in the tent. [laughter] fields of battle is a tremendous book. the books that laura hildebrand has done, unbroken, you know, the genre of historical nonfiction of which this falls in, thosech books kind of pave e way for publisher and commercial interest in books like this. taking what ostensibly is a sports story like rowers in the olympics almost 100 years ago, but making it into much plaintiff -- much more of a human interest story. in no way am i comparing my book to theirs. their books are phenomenal. the publishing world goes in cycles. a book works so then everyone wants the write a book in that genre, and maybe in a few years this genre of historical nonfiction related to sports may die away. and maybe in 20 years it'll come back again. so it just depends. yep. >> [inaudible] >> and i'll take one more question. [laughter] well, one more question. i'm going to ask myself a question. and say, brian, what is your one takeaway from writing this booksome -- book? brian, that's a great question. [laughter] i think the takeaway is that everybody's life is amazing. and to me, whether you fought in war or didn't, whether you've lived a very quiet life here in savannah,iv worked at a company, clocked in for 35 years, raised a good family, you're a hero too. and i think too often many our society we put certain folks on pedestals as heros because of something famous they did or the sacrifices they did, but every day, i mean, i was walking over here just from the hotel looking at people curious about the sacrifices they've made for their own a kids or for their marriage or for caring for an ill person. so for me, while the veteran and war and everything else has become close to my heart, it reaffirmed my belief that everyone's got a great story, everyone should share that story. so even if you think your story isn't important, make sure you shareou it with someone. make sure you share it with your kids. unfortunately those folks that pass away, when you talk to them right before death often they will say their biggest regret is i didn't write a book or star in a movie or make more money, it's i wish i had spent more time with my kids or told my kids a little bit more about my life so that i know my legacy is going to be carried on. so maybe today bo and chris anders, who are so kind as my hosts and have sponsored, i hope it's okay, they will pay for all your dinners tonight -- [laughter] if younn go to dinner and share with a loved one your story. so thank you very much, bo and chris. [laughter] thank you guys very much. [applause] >> please join me in thank brian curtis. as you exit the venue, you will see our wonderful volunteers with yellow buckets to accept your donations to the savannah book festival. it is because of your generosity that we are able to keep the festival saturday free. please help us to continue. thankk you. thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] >> if your mom read it, what was her reaction to this line -- and, again, that is fiction book, but -- we were made for tv family, and when he called action, we hit our marks and delivered our lines like pros. the scripts were all the same, we had the formulas down. >> actually, that doesn't have to do much with my family, but it does deal with pop culture and sort of talking about the cosby show. when the cosby show came out, a lot of middle class black people embraced it as like, oh, we're finally on tv. a brownstone in brooklyn heights, two parents who were professionals and in many ways the first time we saw ourselves in that particular way on tv. pop culture is very important to the main character, it's how he sort of filters the world. so his relationship to the cosby show becomes a way of talking about the lie behind that kind of cosby show fiction. and, of course, now we know bill cosby -- [laughter] you know, bill cosby's own life has underscored the separation between the televisual reality and how things actually are in the world. whether he's talking about the cosby show or road warrior or hip-hop, pop culture or becomes a way of filtering out the world and doing his own emotions. and actually that, like i said, i had to exaggerate to make the story interesting. that section has nothing to do with my family which was a proud family of zombie movie-watching folks. >> did jet magazine really put in whenever black people were going to be on tv? >> sure. i mean, in the '60s, '70 diahann carroll was going to be on the tonight show, so jet magazine and weekly would have a run-up of a listing of any black person that was going to be on tv, it was so rare and so lovely that, you know, the black press would tell you when you were going to be on tv. >> well, you know what? we've talked for an hour, colson whitehead, and we've had a lot of -- >> you're kicking me off? >> i'm kicking me off. [laughter] more importantly, we're getting america involve here. [laughter] we're going to begin with a phone call from charles in albuquerque, new mexico. charles, thanks for your patience. you're on with author coulson whitehead. >> well, first of all, you don't have to thank me for my patience, i think it's been wonderful. i've really enjoyed listening to the show, not only your insightful questions, but, you know, colson opening up and letting us have a bird's eye view into that magnificent brain of his and the creative process. i have been the blessing of being friends with a person who won the national book award for poetry, be he always talks to me about having to find the harvest time. sometimes there's drudgery and you're stuck knowing, you know, how is this character developing, does this character have a life of its own, do you want to craft it towards a certain way, and colson was talking about making sure you maintain the movement of the book forward and the linear structure and things of that nature. and also the beauty and difficulties in opening yourself up as well when you do historical novel, the fact that you have to take some creative license with what you're doing so that, you know, it does help in terms of the story development but still, you know, being true to what, you know, the story he's trying to convey is. and my question has to do then with, you know, there's been so much that colson talked about that i thought was amazing and interesting, and the story development he's talking about he has, you know, he has sort of his ideas, plot, the structure, the background. and is there certain times when he gets bogged down, you know, and not know exactly where to go with where he wanted to take something, but he persevered. sometimes you've just got to write those pages down, you know? >> that's true. >> yeah. so my friended had said is about, you know, persevering, you know, in the face of sometimes you have this daunting task ahead of you, and it can be overwhelming and just cranking out them few pages a day. and if he could talk about -- >> let's hear what colson whitehead has to say, charles. >> no, thanks for listening. it is, you know, it's work. and some days you're definitely in tune with the project and everything's sort of coming together, and then some days you're just struggling through a paragraph, and if you can do one paragraph a day, that's a victory. a novel is a marathon, and so even that one paragraph is a lot. for my own, my own way of keeping sane is if i can do eight pages a week, that seems like a good accumulation. that's like 400 a year, that's a novel. that's my dork key way of thinking about it -- dorky way of thinking about it. some days you get up, you don't feel like working, see a movie, read a book. [laughter] maybe pages are tuesday and wednesday, saturday and sunday. sometimes it's tuesday through friday. but, and it could be one page or three pages each day. but if i get eight pages, that sort of keeps me, keeps me sane. and some days i wake up and don't feel like working or i'm not feeling it and i'll just revise and, of course, that's work. it doesn't take the same part of the brain, but you are making progress toward the end of the book. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> for nearly 20 years "in depth" on booktv has featured the nation's best known nonfiction writers for live conversations about their books. this year we're featuring best sell ising fiction writers for our monthly program. join us live of sunday, march 4th, at noon eastern with jeff shaara, whose novel gods and generals was made into a major motion picture. his most recent book is the frozen hours. his other books include to the last man plus 11 more novels which recount the military history of america from the american revolution to the korean war. during the program we'll be taking your phone calls, tweets and facebook messages. our special series "in depth" fiction edition with jeff shaara, sunday, march 4th, live from noon to 3 p.m. eastern on booktv on c-span2. 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