Barnes and nobles outside this building and they will be available for signing. Christmas is coming so dont just think of yourself. Buy a book and maybe one for someone for christmas too. At the conclusion, we ask everyone to leave quickly so that the next event can be set up. There is a button under my desk that none of you can see where if your cell phone goes off, it will catapult you into a crocodile pit underneath your chair. The event today is organized around nonfiction which is an annual Nonfiction Book prize. Founded in 19 1999, and it has all the best stories that are true. Sports, biography, autobiography. Eight is my huge privilege to be the prizes director. The award is named for Bailey Gifford which is an Management Firm and i am usually grateful to them and to the organizers of the festival for making this event possible today. I am thrilled to welcome two of the most recent winning books, their brilliant and landmark books and its a great privilege to have them here today. David fronts to my left. His landmark documentary film, how to survive a plague was nominated for an oscar, a Directors Guild award and won the peabody and glad awards. His latest book is a New York Times bestseller in 2016. Made over a dozen books of the year lists. The winner of the Bailey Gifford prize in 2017. To his immediate left, ais the author of chernobyl. A history of a Nuclear Catastrophe which won the Bailey Gifford prize. Been published in russian, ukrainian, canada, ukraine and United States. These welcome my two guests. [applause] id like to ask both of my guests to begin by giving us a kind of overview of the subject matter of their books. Which is to say, the aids crisis or the chernobyl catastrophe. Just kind of what happened and when and to remind us and educate some of us about what the specific events that your book addresses work. David, perhaps you wouldnt mind starting. Thank you everybody. Great to be here how to survive a plague is the story of the plagued years of the hiv epidemic. The years before any medication made any dent in the disease. When an infection with hiv was almost certain death sentence. Those years were from 19811996. I chronicle the story of the rise of the plague and the rise of activism around the plague. In 1981, its hard to remember, but the Gay Community which was the initial and epicenter of the plaguein United States was nearly totally disenfranchised. We didnt have elected officials or representatives. Out members of the press or very few in academia. None on television and we have laws in most states that made our lives criminal. So it was no surprise that the governments response and big pharmas response in the scientific establishments response, initially, was i guess passive would be too passive a word to describe it. It gave rise not only to the massive plague which started with 41 cases and has now claimed 81 million cases. When it might have been contained initially. That gave rise to this new form of patient advocacy. Citizen scientists who took on the plague themselves in ways that it turned out were essential and not just prodding the Research Establishment to getting to work but also in helping to identify compounds to bring to trials. To help design those trials and ultimately, to identify, discover tests and bring to market the pills in 1996 that made survival possible. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. Its a great pleasure to be here. My story starts exactly in the year 1986. It is the story of 1980s and chernobyl as the title of the book suggests, its about the Nuclear Accident which is still today considered to be the worst Nuclear Accident in world history. By different estimates, anywhere between 50200 million of radiation was released. An estimate would be between 50100 atomic bombs. It happens in the dying days of the cold war. Contributed in many ways to the end of the cold war and contributed as im trying to show in the book to the end of one of the superpowers. The soviet union. I tried to document this story, not just of the accident itself but also the event that led to that. One of them was secrecy. Secrecy that was on the level that not only some elements of the soviet nuclear energy, from People Living in the soviet union and i found but even things about things that exploded were hidden from the directors of the reactor, contributing to the accident. An accident of a smaller scale but technologically, of the same kind happened in the soviet union in 1995 which is today, st. Petersburg. What went wrong was never communicated to the operators and chernobyl. When the explosion happened, there was a massive coverup. I ask very often, what i was doing on april 26, 1986 when the reactor exploded and i lived at that time in the ukraine and soviet union. And i dont remember that day because we were not told for another three days that there was anything wrong at all. When we were told, the information was that it was a minor accident and everything was under control. The element of the story about secrecy and coverup and hiding truths from people who are effective the most is an important part of my story. It turns theoretically, in a happy end in that i concluded with the developments of 20172018. When the new shelter over the damaged reactor was built in chernobyl by international consortium. But thats the happy ending only to a certain degree. It was not enough to deal with the consequences of chernobyl. [indiscernible] chernobyl will stay with us for a long period of time and that is also one of the messages that i am trying to send with my book. We discussed todays presentation and thought, what is in common between the stories we tells. Beyond the fact, chronologically, there is a huge overlap. There was also one more thing and that was about the threat posed by radiation and still continues to be posed by aids. Its in many ways, and invisible threat. For people who dont want to face the reality. It allows people to stay in the state of denial despite the fact that the facts are there. And also conspiracy theories. Thats probably something that is true not only today, and the two stories we are telling in our books flex your point about the invisible nature of the threat is interesting. How did that contribute to the incredible ignorance and misconceptions about hiv in those early years . The invisible nature of the threat. If like chernobyl, it was made to be invisible. A decision to keep it unreported. It took years before the New York Times and hundreds of deaths before the New York Times put the story on the front page. New york city being the epicenter, it took work to keep that story from being told. But it wasnt something that was visible to the people in the middle of it. We used to say back then, that if you knew one person with hiv, you knew dozens. But it was possible to live right across the street from where those dozens lived and not see it at all. Most people in new york in the 80s and to the states throughout the plague years, were just never saw it. Our stories were kept from television. Images of our ravaged bodies were not broadcast. Nor were the stories of the work we were doing to counter it ourselves. The stories of empowerment and political empowerment and scientific empowerment of the community, those are things that eventually started making the difference in Media Coverage and getting the story out. I dont want to label the similarities between two profoundly different events. But theres the sense of a community, maybe as a national or Regional Community being at the epicenter of a disaster or crisis is also very true in the chernobyl story as well. Yes indeed. The immediate community, 50,000 people approximately. Quite a significant delay, took more than 24 hours after the explosion and the radiation was everywhere on the streets of the city for the authorities to tell them that something is wrong. There were weddings going on. As radiation was spreading. And there was no information. Those people were then resettled and then they extended the exclusion zone 230 kilometers. The question was the unknown. What is radiation . How is it spreading . If im standing next to you, if im shaking your whether im getting that radiation as well. People were resettled to other areas. Children were sent to other schools. The neighbors basically didnt know how to react to that. Again, they are rather different stories but there are parallels. And then what you see is not so much in terms of the one thats done by the states to deal with consequences. Altogether 600,000 people were mobilized and served mostly through the harmony, into this most dangerous place on earth. amostly through the army. They say it was a waste of Human Capital because so many were exposed and there was no need. They were throwing people at the problem. The other level of mobilization happened maybe three years after chernobyl and that was about the truth about her noble because the government was still hiding the truth. People wanted to know the fallout and what it looked like. Eventually, that leads to the rise of the first Mass Movement in the soviet union. In places that have Nuclear Power plants like lithuania. Out of those movements, movements for the independence of those that aspects we will come back lets slow down slightly about the differences in the way the authorities responded. I want to hear more about the first 24 hours and not threeyear period. But david, there was a high number of relatively rare and in that moment, obscure cases. Give us an idea of how federal authorities helped to respond to this. Its measured on several levels. The new york City Response was nothing. No response. San francisco was one of the other epicenters in the early days. It was ultimately decimated by the epidemic. To make money available and compassion available to people that were sick. There was nothing else to give anybody been they created caretaking networks funded by taxpayer money and the like. All this while, there was no Research Going on. It was something that nobody really knew because you assume the Public Health authorities were doing what Public Health authorities are typically the a get excited about doing. It wasnt until 1987, six years into the epidemic that it became really apparent that there was no research initiative. Were there people within the Public Health authorities who were advocating that this disease was extremely serious and should be better understood and they were being closed down for political reasons . Or was it indifference . What was going on . Largely indifference even from the reconciled. It was considered an illness specifically forgay people. Something that gay people brought on themselves. Sort of a moral punishment that people believed was taking place. In fact, Ronald Reagan was the divine response a filthy vice. That defined how government dollars were spent. After the actor rock hudson got sick and died, that any money or National Attention was freed up. There was no drug on a Research Priority list that was being studied. And realizing this, many people in new york who were sick with hiv at the time, gave you a Life Expectancy of 18 months. Came together and formed an organization to try to take this on. What they were doing initially is just expressing anger ultimately ways to express anger in productive ways. In ways that engaged people in ways they needed to engage. So we got mobilization on this story. We will come back to mobilization. But i want to ask him also. Both in the first 2448 hours where presumably, there were anxious conversations going on. But also in the unfolding months and maybe years. How did the response unfold . People in industry and government, Nuclear Reactors dont explode under socialism. When you say vague, which government . Do you mean in the kremlin . It was throughout. Gorbachev said when he got the information early in the morning, he was really shocked. The president of the academy of science who was also a scientific advisor to the group that designed the reactor told us they were absolutely safe. You can put it in the red square and nothing would happen. The most amazing thing that belief was also in the industry itself. They didnt know or think these things could happen. The worstcase scenario, they shut it down and it goes away. That meant that first of all they were not psychologically ready. They were in a state of denial. Its difficult to accept and if you accept it, what are you doing . What are you doing about that . So it took a while and then there was a system where the decisions even about resettling had to to be taken at the highest level. Gorbachev was second in command. The other thing, the way how the response was organized and it shows what was wrong about it. Today david was speaking about different epicenters. Chernobyl has more than one epicenter. When you look at the map for the most contaminated areas. 1 would be around chernobyl where its supposed to be. Another would be a distant part of russia because they were in the video active clouds and rain wouldnt get to central russia but all of that radiation fell in other centers. If you look at that, they saved millions in the big cities but there were hundreds of thousands of People Living in those rural areas. I dont want to be in the position to make that decision. The problem was they never told the people who lived there. Youve got the denial and disbelief that something could fail so catastrophically. That there was on an incredible scale. The information was kept secret. I have information on one of the brave journalists who was researching that story people in that chernobyl area that settled in the areas that were more contaminated then around chernobyl. Four editor ordered her not to do that. She said she needed that day off because she had to do an abortion. That was considered to be a legitimate reason. She said that in interviews. To come back, here we are, these stories are unfolding. Mobilization. David, you generously left off a moment go. Can we pick that up again. 1987 and nothing is happening. I should also say there were some things happen. The federal government was releasing money to study ways to quarantine gay people. They were finding ways to use the new hiv antibodys test to identify people who were either at risk or infected and come up with policies about containing them. Proposals were being discussed on many state levels and city levels. But also by the federal government for ways to round us up in our ability to infect other people out of the equation. We knew that everything was very dangerous, politically and medically for us. I was a journalist at the time. As i was telling you earlier, i had gotten so freaked out by what was happening, i decided to report elsewhere for a while. I was in nicaragua when chernobyl happened. That was the country that identified with the soviet union and began to lie to people about what was happening but when i got back in 1987, it was just as this anger was coming to a head. There have been a lot of activism before that. Was created by a group of hivpositive activists. Who theorized ways to keep the rest of the community safe. It was presumed 56 percent of the gay male population were already hivpositive. When it was discovered that nothing was happening folks started gathering just to protest. Just to express some sort of breach. The group called the self act up which stood for aids coalition to unleash power. A title that were presented the 80s, i guess. For the first 34 years, they just closed bridges and tunnels. They protested at wall street and the fda and they started recognizing that the people they were demanding action from didnt know what to do. That they were as lost in all of this for patients given this death sentence. Thats when they began this new innovation and grassroots activism which created what they call the inside outside approach. They were armies of people mobilized who could force open any door it turned out. For meetings with the heads of pharmaceutical companies and people in charge of research at the universities. Etc. Even politicians. Once they had those doors open, they needed this elite group to go in and to begin a dialogue. There were patients now working in partnership with researchers and funders and pharmaceutical companies at just about every stage of the study of new diseases. The study of new drugs and the bringing of those drugs to the market. And it just wasnt ronald and nancy reagan touched personally. Work from his whipping affected by the epidemic. Because it was such a dangerous time in america to be known to be gay, the closet was a crowded place. And hiv made the closet door and visible. You could no longer hide. Hollywood leading men of enormous proportions. Had been living in the closet very comfortably until he got sick. There was almost no other explanation was that he was gay. That anybody would accept. Liberace, who was another great performer and a flamboyant man somehow convinced the man he was straight. And that he was dying of, a watermelon diet that had gone bad. People tried to stay in the closet but it was just not possible to he started seeing the times coverage of the epidemic and all the major newspapers coverage was most profound on the obituary pages. And you would open up the obituaries and find half of the people, sometimes maybe more for young men. Relatively young men who died of mysterious ailments. Thats where you started recognizing that this disease was reaching into all aspects of our communities. All states and cities. And i think, ultimately, in just about the majority of the families in the country. We begin to become apparent that this was a disease that impacted everybody. Before we go, lets talk about the mobilization chernobyl resulted in. Tell us what the inside outside approach was point what does that mean . The organization of activists created the study groups. There was a