Transcripts For CSPAN2 2015 Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit

... subscription to the printers row journal, the premium book section. you can also download that the trip books out for more information on that fast and for access to the digital bookstore. lastly, we encourage everyone to take photographs and upload messages to facebook, twitter, and as to grant using the hashtag puerto rico ls 15. with that i will throws it over to: mcmahon for the introduction, associate editor of the chicago tribune. [applause] >> thank you. thanks to everyone for coming today. thank you for braving the weather and coming to let fast. happy to have this every year and happy that you came today it is my pleasure to introduce scott simon. scott is one of those rare people that does not live in chicago does not spend all his time in chicago but feels like a chicago icon. i think it is partly because of the way that scott work chicago into the books he writes i think there is more about it like the chicago sensibility of us got. think it is okay that we can claim them as our own even though he is working elsewhere, living elsewhere. he is still chicago that. scott is a host of weekend edition saturday morning on npr. he has won numerous awards including an emmy and a peabody command he has written a half-dozen books among them when the city, political novel and this latest book unforgettable a son, a mother, and the lessons a lifetime. this book is about scott's mother and his relationship with his mother and the woman's name, i love this.in the book patricia lyons simon newman galvin. and sorry for and sorry for going to step on one of your lines, but his mother said this was a railroad train the name. there are three marriages. right. everyone knew her as pat command that's the way this the scott introduces mother to me the one and only time that i got a chance to meet scott's mother but it was a brief time and even in that brief time of watching her and of watching scott's relationship with his mother you could sense, i could sense this profound respect and profound sense of gratitude the scott held toward his mother. you can also get pretty quickly as sense of the kind of woman that that was. and, you know, we did not spend a lot of time together one evening, but in that time she was able to very quickly make you feel comfortable even make you feel like there was some devilish conspiracy going on guess what she was making you a part of it. and that glimpse that i got of her in and i glanced that i got of scott's relationship with her and this book becomes is wonderful, vivid, moving panoramas. and here to talk about the book scott simon. [applause] >> well, it's good to be home. the greatest city in the world and not only -- [applause] i don't know how it is over the years i children think that they are from chicago at this time. my wife, who is french command you would think of course she is proud of that, but she thinks she's from chicago. it's absolutely amazing. thank you for inviting me and can't particularly for what he said about my mother i think it summarizes are very well. before i begin i can't tell you what it's like to come back here and have a book a book with your mother's picture on the cover is on the new york times bestseller list. thank you. [applause] thank you. by the way, can't held at the cover. i have the australian addition here which wisely does not feature my picture. the small boy is on the cover that's not me. the publisher has to you know, move the fray after all. they photoshop the picture of an 11 -year-old model as an australian kid. it's pretty good-looking. let me begin with the section from the almost beginning. a tweet that i sent out. i children want to know if you are dead forever. i told him yes. i wonder about that, too. death makes life worthwhile. gives each moment meaning. i hope i live to 150150 and that our daughters can make it to at least 200 but death drives life. frightens inspires us. do away with definitely have a reason to get out of bed are into it grow work, or love. why would we do much of anything if we had the time for everything? if the certainty of death that moves us to sing and write poems, find friends and sale across oceans and skies. it it is because we know that we don't have all the time of the world that we try to use the uncertain and a noble time we have to do something that endures. death is sad graham, unwelcome, and invaluable but it is why we try to make something of life. it is why we have children. a couple of summers ago when i came here to the intensive care unit of the hospital on the near north side to join the mother i did not know that she would wind up buying their. city four years old. she had health challenges. it was at that time in life are we knew that everything obviously had to be taken seriously. i determined after that 1st night that i was going to join her in the isu. that 1st night the recliner did not recline. apparently they have apparently they had been lawyered up a lot of runs because somebody once leaned back a little too far. they had pillows and blankets. i was passing this very outdoors store on north michigan avenue and i decided they have mattresses so it gives you some idea of my relationship with the outdoors. i walked into the store and said to the measurement look, i look, i don't know anything about the outdoors except to love them. without missing without missing a beat he said, well perhaps i should direct you to bloomingdale's, sir. and i said you know, you're much too funny to be working in outdoor store and he said, well a said well a matter of fact i do a little m problem aside. so i took up shop next my mother. we talked about life and we talked about death and the hereafter suddenly became a very real place. it was no longer hypothetical. it was the next up ahead, as it is for all of us. as this book came out i did a peace the new york times asked about why perhaps i thought that the tweets that i had done from the intensive care unit -- refused to use the term went viral, viral, why they had taken flight. i have a lot of unsatisfying half answers. certainly it was the universal story of life and death and in the news business we saw misuse that phrase is a universal experience. but it is. with the exception if you are an abiding christian of perhaps one person. but even then he was returned to life, come to think of it. in any event it is a truly universal experience. i also think that social media platforms of kind of become the papyrus scrolls of our time where we share bits and pieces of our lives to get past our sometimes ignore. but i kept going back to the fact that the strongest reason was my mother. she was just so funny and interesting. there is a class of school kids in the philippines who began to read the tweet and wrote essays of us over my mother said some of those tweets. listening to la bohème mother can't keep eyes closed. mother can't keep eyes closed. maybe operable help. i always love when i went. here's one that got a lot of play, i consider this a good sign. mother. mother son to the mother says when that time comes three jewish husbands but no guilt. and then, of course, something she said that turned out to be utterly true, mother says, we can get through this, baby. the hardest part will be for you when it's over. as you may know the reviews have been quite wonderful. i'm not going to be modest enough to quote from any of them, but i will be smart enough to paraphrase. was otto of the "washington post" -- and it will take a great perceptive review to not only make not even the author but especially the author understand what's in the. he understood that the book is also a salute to a time and place in my mother's generation the remembrance of her friends in the near north side of chicago and the somewhat pre-feminist era, there were working women like my mother and menu in the 60s and 70s the term of art seem to be confirmed bachelors or sometimes simply creative. they were working clubs and shops and dated nice guys in the lot of kansas the meals. perhaps we can séances benchmarks. the hardest part, i think, going all the was to lose them. she got to the.when she cringed when the phone rang let me read you a section, if i could plus my mother's friends who are very important in my life. for years my mother's constant running mate and gal pal was the woman we called auntie chris. she had come to chicago from a great family and i ought both named priscilla and possess the kind of silhouette are teachers and gentlemen used to call classical. her aphrodite for help her find work as a hostess and dancer and clubs along west street, in which she 1st a town where she met my mother and she said bundles of big toothed tussle heard kennedy boys sitting with chicago mobsters. by by the way, i happened to read this section the other night in connecticut. how how pleased i was to meet three members of the kennedy family there. [laughter] hardheaded and droll and outs boca and republican who was suspicious of what she saw as the local barney and thought that my mother whom she loved could be sweetly naïve about men business command democrats. burn their bras she exclaimed standing tall. why would these gals want to burn their bras? my bras my best friend. worked as a secretary at an ad agency. silvery and we all wanted to hear. when my. one nice someone in the group came back the drugstore with one of the 1st at the machines that sports water to your gums. it filled a small tank press the button and a hard burst of water. the correct were dispute spurred from the nozzle. my mother and her friends filled the tank over and over. they they giggled as augustine drift. they aim to spurts at each other. it doesn't last very long. after refill the tank half a dozen times. i think a couple of the women with cigarettes. waited for the quiet task, and could you also use that on your teeth. i had no idea what she meant auntie auburn, blonde, tall, slim, and walked like a somber. she may have been the 1st person i knew this i knew who spoke with a british accent. she was about as british as dolly parton. from baton rouge and worked for her posh enunciation as assiduously as actors from the royal shakespeare company. trained playboy bunnies for clubs around the country. she she taught the playboy way to smile, say hello, and deliver drinks with the bunny dip. she disdained and when she dripped distain it was a powerful, toxic stream. the criticism that have been made. uniforms are the correct. uniforms. the last drink a tour through the morning. this was not a good time to walk a dog could not buy through delhi jonah. spread the tribune over the former studio apartment. a little sugar with squat and quiver of the unfurled front page. aim for mary daly. a very daily. -- aim for mary daly. the tribune was much better than the sun-times for that. the online version of the good. do you remember when we had the spring them from jail? highlight of my childhood. one night i will condense the story. they went out to well street for a hamburger. they they were stopped because they turned the wrong way down a one-way street. turned out neither had a driver's licenses. my and because she did not want to be asked that she would be creative and say is that what is going to in this talented the daily you need a special license before you can get a hamburger. they didn't think that was a good idea. they, mother in the middle of the night. we pulled on closes if we heard a fire about and my mother plucked a stack of 20s. i got to get to tell the driver chicago avenue police station please and step on it the station house is blindingly bright inside. a pretty mother with her son in tow. good morning, captain. we would like to see a couple of your guests. the desk sergeant did not need to consult his blotter. this officer surrounded. someday you'll come along. she sang in smokey does the voice and lb big and strong the man i love. an inspired choice for playstation house. no arrests, no bail, the mildest reminder from police to stop at stop signs a carrier license for operating a motor vehicle. i am young patrolman told marion sure i'm a cop, but really i want to be a singer she took his hand and brushed it with her lips then follow your dream, darling. i i set my mother's lap in the cab riding back north. the 2nd sergeant we saw sure was handsome. he was married. you checked his his hand. don't you? officers get better uniforms but believe me they all are wind up wearing this funny little golf shirts and saggy slacks. my mother leaned by my ear to tell me i don't want you to think the jail is always this much fun. what i remember of that group of women from my boyhood is lingering impromptu evenings with lots of spots of laughs, olives and cheddar cheese on rye crackers for the stroke of matches in the tingle of ice compact makeup mirrors folded with a snap to my heels in the coffee table, crinkled cocktail napkins with lipstick sponges, earrings pulled out and resting i coaster, tony bennett on this train table and occasional crying jack and the origins of cigarettes. the the orange glow of cigarettes, candles, and streetlights is below the windows. i don't remember or more likely did not recognize profound conversations but knew that the buzz of laughs and gossip was a phase that refilled my mother and her friends. most of most of the women in her circle have been married at least once. a couple would be again. my mother thought one or two might have preferred women, but in those times finding the right man was believed to be therapy for that. single working women have children on their own today. my my mother didn't think most of her friends what i wanted that. instead, these tough, funny command resilient women turn their care and tenderness on the child in front of the. they love you so my mother said. i love them. i was blessed. my mother's friends and my father for that matter passed onto me a phrase for the kind of man that they did admire classy guy. the accolade had nothing to do with money business, or breeding. banks in my school principal were classy guys. so are at least evenson, nat king cole the man who drove the number 36 bus down state street. a classy i had manners. please and thank you. picked up checks, left good tips, dressed with respect the word, sunflowers apologized personally, tried to be kind and courteous even if they sometimes have the farm. the best jokes were about themselves. countered in a man's character. a man's character. the past what they learned on the me and dozens of stories. they gave me something to steer toward. my mother's circles of friends also gave me a glimpse of good friendship. friends with the people you call the three am 3:00 a.m. the gets you out of jail but also the people who were with you at 9:00 p.m. on a slow saturday night. friends share crisis am and what was often the trickier test of tedium. my mother's humor and strength sometimes made it hard to see how much of her life had been busted. friendships with rugged, sheikh command appealing women differ otherwise to care about and gave 1st purpose shape, and laughter my mother and i were for 48 hours straight. we talked about her friends in the three marriages. we talked about her love of our as a working girl. she often ducked into the art institute between jobs. kevin nash at the tribune did the most wonderful feature that highlighted that part of the book and talked about our. my mother my mother said that she just wanted in on a summer day when she was recollecting this in the icu and noticed you could want from room to room or sit. it was like a retake -- like a vacation. van gogh. since this is a literary festival, van gough. i don't want to be corrected afterwards. inside there was tahiti, street in paris ballet dancer in a dressing room rolling on her socks from worship taken them off. we talked about we talked about her old boyfriends or at least as many as we can remember command we talked about her struggle with suicide. my mother had taken her life and said it puts a fly in her head. you never quite get it out. there are times there are times i describe in the book when she was certainly tempted and at least one occasion gave in to temptation. but it's a testament to my mother's endurance encourage that she lived to the age of 84 i lived up until the last possible minute. let me check. i have a section in the book where there is a man in chicago. my mother's best bit of entertaining command man in chicago. some of you might remember the name. and he ran for everything on the ballot. because he had the last thing daily in chicago he would just get enough votes from people who were confused at the might be some family relation that he would go on and do it again. he wore in uncle sam hat. and he actually became the subject of a supreme court case. because he won that case i believe he had to be on the tonight show the same length of time that richard nixon and john f. kennedy were on the show. i was putting i was putting out what we used to call an underground newspaper very similar. except they cannot begin until we finish our class. the democrats and republicans if i might refer to the republicans a local joke. the temperance party didn't. the national yoga party. we want getting responses from anyone except america 1st daily. he came over to her apartment on the north side. i want to describe that. there's good depiction of my mother. something that i hope journalists don't forget. why an old gray suit yes. nice to see your pretty face i forget what questions we asked. several later into real board allies. public schools are a mess to were three of these he year. i keep stuff like this in here kind of like an office so i can keep both hands free to meet people. lincoln kept his office in his head, to. people after them trying to be a lawyer, no education, the squeaky voice, long legs our editorial board have been in session for more than an hour. picked up his hat and began to make his goodbyes. goodbyes. my mother said i no you must have a campaign appearance to make. please don't run off until we have given you a drink. he did have one, scotch and then one more for the road. my mother brought out peanuts in some kind of cheese. you know, i ran a burst pool company. business is okay. the glory days back when i was young in the 30s they could not sit at desks. they stood on tools. i tell the cops give me an address and i'll give you a $0.50 restore. the books would reopen. get the business flowing. let me tell let me tell you. the 2nd scotch seemed to make his eyes a little watery. but i guess the glory days are always when you were young. you are so right. i get six kids all grown. i no people make jokes about me. i worry about them getting hurt. your dad that crazy guy in the uncle sam suit. i tell my kids and i'm going to tell your voice your what you have to do what you believe in. they all after christopher columbus, but he sure but on the gold. i said to my mother you are the soul of the gracious that day. he was a guest at our home she said. i'm not sure i'd want him to be present or even president or even dogcatcher, but he sure dedicated his life didn't it back you saw that it's over. i was trying to be sophisticated and senegal. i just saw the crackpot. you are gracious. want to leave time for some of your questions. i believe they have books on sale. i no we're coming up on the summer holidays. nothing says happy graduation for happy fourth of july or happy bastille day has effectively is a copy of unforgettable. i hope i have made plain that there is low sex this book. but also adultery life that, and some -- well mother had a real life. you know with all the attention the book has been getting you inevitably reflect she was not a boast, not a kennedy. she was not even a kardashian. by the way i should add i get to talk about the book at the library and the jfk library. i can look forward to the kardashian library. and my mother was not a hollywood star but she was gorgeous and charming and relentlessly honest a true star to the very end. and i want to leave you with this. my mother had a grand memory for family stories. we stories. we have a cousin here in the audience afternoon. and for jokes and all movies but in many ways are great gift is for forgetting she forgot all slights insults and outrageous. she tried to leave behind a lot of slights, insults, and outrageous and herds and mistakes. she was the only child of parents who often could not be bothered. she loved and married a man my father, who drank himself into a nosedive. she lost her daughter her mother took her life when she did her most command that she had to take her son out of that marriage before her husband made them all crash. she married a wonderful man here in chicago who wound up getting convicted of a federal crime. my mother's heart was shaken and broken a thousand times. she often felt lonely and abandoned and looked over the edge. but a lot of people would have used any one of those events if it had happened to them to immobilize the lives and paralyze themselves and put themselves in the therapy for the rest of their lives and say i can't go on until i worked this out until i reconcile this with everything else. my mother kept on going. she lived through a lot and she left behind. thank you. [applause] >> you know, i had a section i was going to read for c-span containing a highly profane phase. our people have later. other any questions? we want them to come to the microphone. i could not have been that complete. why don't you ask a question. is the organizer of this event. getting started. i can also repeated from here. >> my question is an audible how do you remember? >> well, how do i remember all the stories? this is what my mother talked about. we talked about this. sometimes we would relive the stories more or less word by word. sometimes has a thing guessing the book a mother and i could be like old comics only have to whisper the punchline to each other. so i think it was a combination of that. my mother would say something like do you remember girl a man with him she went out. he was an old lounge singer. a lot of rural stories with a tumble through both of our minds. other occasions why don't mind saying the sheer pleasure of hearing the story from her once again targeted at talladega. it was a combination of those things. i will try and repeat the question. yes,. >> what you are doing after that began. >> you mean after a began to work in media? you know, i think my mother was proud. when my mother said i'm probably have become that was a part of it. i think it gave my mother some pleasure when people would say, say you know at some.she became scott simon's mother. but you know what command most wasted and carol. i mean,, there's a man named mark shulman in town. our families go back a long way. my mother didn't want to see anyone in the icu. marco come by with cheesecake treats for the nurses. please let me see mark. families go back a long way. my 14th birthday she took me to eli stays delicatessen and we had not budget correctly. to make a long story short we had run out of the check. which is you know, a story the shulman's love. marco marie the exemplary dollars. so mark but the cheesecake treats and came in to talk to my mother and they had a wonderful conversation together and then he left of my mother said he worried about kids so much from boys in particular and you boys turned out just fine. i said, gosh, you know, you can believe what mark is done with his father's old cheesecake recipe. the evensong chicago cheesecake in new york. my mother said, i don't mean any of that. i mean the way you both have such beautiful families that is what was important to her. she was proud of what i did but on some other level couldn't care less. >> read the book. >> my daughters are 12 and eight and have not. yeah. my daughters are 12 and eight and have not read the book, but i think the big reason i wrote the book is because they are 12 and eight. it will mostly grow up without the grandmother. and it is very nice for them to be able to reach onto a shelf or hit a a button on their ipads and to be able to read about the grandmother. and we have had them on a good portion of the book tour. and it is nice to see how people react. but i certainly hope some of the language i use that they haven't. i'm sure. let me -- yes ma'am. [inaudible question] >> any conflicts. what do we say nowadays? is the pope and argentine? [laughter] i mean, i mean of course. i describe some of them. looking back on them they were astonishingly, you know, innocent. as it is not quite the word i mean, but in any event they did not amount to much. it did not dislocate our affection for each other. sure. i have a section where i talk about my mother loves to entertain in a one-bedroom apartment on the north side and believed in them cards. and here me through on this because she said that was a way of telling people that you are expecting them you are ready. avoided this kind of awkward so place cards. under one time some of you might remember i was once state student council president of illinois and my mother threw a party for people who helped me the reason these include people from the black panther party we all had heard and/or knees. and the bell rang and i looked at the table she had set for about a dozen people and she had place cards. mother, you can have place cards. the table below is to the people. it's just another word for sitting wherever you want. you can have place cards. my mother began to cry. i felt terrible and i kissed her and said all right. i'm sorry. first to people were george and alfred. george, who i believe is now a bank officer was head of our high school black panther party. and he came in, god bless them to watch over the table and said all right. alfred. the actual guests were not thrown by it. so yes of course, we had some of those distances. looking back on them in her last days there were mostly for, purposes. yes, ma'am. cedar street. one of my aunts lived there. >> yes. >> well, yes. the question is question is talking about cedar street. it's all co-ops i should think. >> myself, about. [inaudible] the book. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] >> let me try and begin to rephrase this with the c-span audience. a nice will last if i should write a book about rush street in chicago in a certain time because it really was a certain separate part of america and society you know, that had a lot of grace notes to it. and i don't think i will write anything like that directly but as was noted chicago gets and everything i write. so it sometime maybe. i would not rule that out but i don't think i want to do a specific book about it. yes, sir. [inaudible question] >> did i find the writing process difficult? i think writing a note to our daughters sixth-grade teacher is difficult. i think most people who do it for a living will tell you is difficult. sometimes difficult. sometimes i run the people who say i just read as a hobby for fun. i say to myself, well i no whose name isn't going to be in the book covering times in. maybe you have person officer this weekend who will say i just read for fun. no. no. writing a book is fun. that being that being said, it was a very nice way of holding my mother close and keeping her in our thoughts as i must say this book tour has been. but as my mother has said, the hard part will be when that's over as at some time it will be. but i think i no i say this in the book and have set in a couple interviews. you also come to grips with the fact that we don't really grow up until we lose her parents. there is some combination. there are lessons that some combination of grief and responsibility to just that only that loss contagious. and i think our mothers and our fathers, to be sure the poor everything they are into us and they stand us up on their own and that sometime they are pretty happy to sit back and see how we do. and i think that's the.where we are now. i don't know how we are doing for time. anymore. yes, ma'am. did you ask did you ask a question already? zero, all right. sorry. [inaudible question] >> i thought about this. my father was a comedian. and when i say anything that is ostensibly funny people say, zero, that's your dad talking. but i think a lot of people jim gaffigan, the great can, can i have talked about this. comedians are not funny. they don't give away. and they also tend to have, you know have, you know, a tragic aspect. so they are funny and effervescent person or family was my mother. you know there is no formal process, process, but she was the one that people always wanted to tell stories. my father loved to tell the story. years ago he was an article for the tribune someone said, what is it like? and this was during the best days of my father's career before the drinking became uncontrollable said to my mother, what's it like to be married to the funniest man in chicago. my mother said, i would know [laughter] and my father loved that. you know she was never anything less than a star. yes, sir. thank you for using the microphone. >> do you have any other books waiting to be written? >> zero, yes. oh, i don't have to repeat your question. yes, i always working on two or three in my mind. another novel. i don't want to talk them out of the yes. i always work on something. has my family will tell you i mean, my wife is french and we are set to spend some time in france this summer, which is wonderful. i am not bringing along a laptop because i'm not under deadline for a book. i am bringing along humor. >> yes. hi. i love your show. my parents are still living and i have thought about -- i am a writer and i have thought about writing about them. i always wondered, are there things not to say? other things that you held back? other things that you did not want other people to know about? >> i did not -- look i talk about suicide. i. i talk about adultery. i didn't hold anything back for those reasons. there is stuff you just hold back as part of the editorial process is you don't put 84 years of life and a 250 pages of some might that. so i -- there is nothing i held back for reasons of delicacy. for a couple of reasons. i think my mother is quite beyond that. but for another you know, you know, even in a difficult passages she's always the fear of the story and i also think particularly in her last days in the icu you realize how things that you thought were mortifying and for that matter tragic really aren't in the large scheme of things. it's just life and if you have a full and rich life and my mother certainly did, that we will happen. so there was nothing held back for those reasons. probably not helpful for you >> yes, it is. >> somebody else want to use the microphone. >> thank you. you have written fiction and the more. how is your mother in the character different from a fictional character? >> oh, you know, my mother interestingly, i think, has made it into a couple of my novels as a character one way or another. if you take a look at the novel i did about family during the seizure of sarajevo you will see a little bit of my mother. i think if you read political comedy i wrote called windy city. you will see my mother and a couple of characters. you know, i would have to reflect on that. i used to roll my eyes about was soon say well, the characters begin to talk you when i interviewed them i would say you want to see someone about that every maybe they should but the.is i think characters do begin to speak with you. if there was a pleasurable aspect it was being reunited they have a the help of the capture a sense of her and become aware of the fact that the continuing dialogue -- she said to me in the hospital she said we will this go on forever? and i said no. by that she met the pain and the dread. she said that you and me will go on forever. and i said yes. and i think writing this book confirmed that for me. there is some level of conversation that will not only persist for the rest of my life but in some ways it is a kind of -- it is a sense of humor a form of reflection, and attitude that will get into my conversations with our daughters and they will carry and pass it on their families. [inaudible question] >> out of my mother's feel that dying in the icu? nothing else is on offer. they could not move or because they thought that -- i had a scheme. everyone is to finish up. i said the people because i couldn't -- a mother didn't go to the hospital thinking that she would wind up dying there. i call my wife one night and said i can't stand. she loves the city so much and i can't stand the thought of her never seeing again. if you take a look at the wonderful animation you will see the windows part at one point on the hospital review. the movie view of chicago with the hancock building. that was not the view from her hospital. it was in a four parking garage. i said to my can't stand the thought. just let me put her in a wheelchair and take her in the street. want to we are already us sherman park. her daughters can be playing on the swings. i just wanted to feel the windy and and look at the city she loves. and you know the dr. said said, well, she is a lot of oxygen. i said, i no what this is about. i give you my word, if she dies there you only have the thanks for family and he said, you know, they have portable oxygen ranks. but alas her health just got to throw for that. we didn't do it. people asked me if i have any questions about end-of-life care, feelings about end-of-life care. no, not really. this is about human life. can we take one more question? [applause] [applause] >> exciting books and taking more questions. >> and that was npr host scott simon talking about his memoir unforgettable. we will take a short break from the lit fest as the room is reset and the next author gets in place. it will take about ten minutes or so. after this break you will hear from author kevin schultz who has just published a book about friendship between norman mailer and william f buckley junior. this is book tv live coverage from chicago. [inaudible conversations] >> a state department requires foreign service officers to be well informed and knowledgeable across many disciplines. here's. here's a look at some of the books recommends to employees. to start paradigm and argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world and guns germs, and steel. the past winner of the pulitzer prize for general nonfiction works at the origins of al qaeda in afghanistan before the events of september 11. terri just record to have recast the challenges you faced >> it was not a choice initially. i think i started working in the 1st or 3rd person. and then i realized that the struggle of the text was how to get a reader not to think they already know because i think these are all problems, ancient. and they have stayed with us you know now we can say centuries. and so how do we reenter in the way that allows us to have to interrogate again? and the 2nd person because it meant that the reader had to say this person is doing that and that person is doing that and i perhaps, see myself standing here. and those people who said they did not see race i don't see race you are a little obsessed by race because i only see human beings begin to say things like, well, that person must be the bad person or that but it must be the brown bunny for that is probably a white guy. and then suddenly race enters the space. and then one has to take a position around whether or not one is capable of holding the actions of one of those people. so that was sort of the thinking. another another part of me love this idea that if you are talking about sort of minorities that you are actually talking about the 2nd person, the position of the other is the 2nd person. there was that kind of sort of deliciousness around the way that 2nd person meant the use of the word other. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> and you are looking at a live shot from inside the auditorium at jones college prep one of the event sites for this year's printer robust but -- printers row lit fest. not quite ready for the next event yet. this is book tv television for serious readers. and this is book tv on c-span2. we want to know what is on your summary west. send us your choices. you can post it on our facebook page or you can send an e-mail to the teesixteen. book tv. what is on your summer reading list? book tv was to know. >> here is a look at some books being published this week. .. welcome to the 31st annual chicago lit road book fest. my name is tom and before we get started i would like to thank our sponsors and thank all of you for coming. today's program is being broadcast live on c-span2 spoke tv. we will leave sometime at the end for audience questions and you can just come on up to the microphone up to the side of the stage so the home viewing audience can hear the question. you can keep the spirit of lit fest going year round with a subscription to the printers row journal. that's the tribune's premium book section fiction series and membership program. also please download the trip took ask for more info on that fast. we encourage everyone to post messages and photos to facebook, instagram and twitter using the hashtag pr al f15. before we begin we ask that you turn off your cell phone ringers and any flashes on your cameras. with that please welcome our interviewer from today's program jane daly. [applause] >> hi. thank you. i'm jane daly from the university of chicago. i teach american history there and i'm very happy to welcome my colleague from the university of illinois and chicago kevin schultz. kevin is a historian of modern united states in american politics. he wrote at davos book on religion in american politics in the mid-20th century. the book is called tri-faith america how post-war catholics and help america to its protestant promise. the title gives you a hint of how exciting and interesting the book is my urge you all to read it. that was a scholarly book and this book is equally a scholarly book. the difference between a scholarly book and a book that is not a scholarly book i think in the modesty of the author and making them visible all at the incredible archival work that he has done all of the notetaking and the months and months of questioning and finding sources thinking critically about things. kevin has written a wonderful new book that is just now being published and i believe the hardback copies are out there which i think you should all buy buy. this book is called "buckley and mailer" the difficult friendship that shaped the sixties. it of course deals with the friendship between william buckley and norman mailer a friendship i didn't know existed until i read your book. so i guess i will start out by asking you how did you know this friendship existed? how did you get started on this book collects. >> thank you very much for coming and that generous introduction. this book was so much fun to write because they knew of both of these larger-than-life figures. norman mailer does novelist and one of the inventors of new journalism and somebody who is just a great first-person voice on the 1960s and a huge personality and william f. buckley there was an equally large personality on the right founder of national review and it never occurred to me that they would be friends. after norman mailer died he sold his papers to the harry ransom center at the university of texas in austin and a couple of those letters got picked up in a magazine and i was leafing through the magazine one night and i read some of the letters. i just stopped cold because i read one of the letters between norman mailer and buckley and there was cutting humor. there was deep inside into what was going on in the 1960s. they were obviously friends and i have been sitting around thinking about what to write our next as far as my next book. in the 1960s i wanted to tell a story from the 1960s and it has become this time in our past that is almost mythologized but not quite. you see madman and some of the movie. people are talking about trying to understand it and i was there too. i thought by taking a figure on the left and a figure on the right those articulate really smart brilliant voices and investigating their friendship was just a way to tell a great story about the 1960s. as i looked at the archives i looked at the letters and i looked at the debates and i looked at the television shows that they were on together. there are they are debating the cold war. there they are debating the civil rights movement. there they are debating vietnam and their whole friendship takes you on a tour through the major events of the 60s and hear these brilliant articulate funnyman who are trying to figure it out in these gorgeous letters back and forth to each other so i thought that's it that's the book right there. i can tell a story from the 60s being attacked from the left and being attacked on the right it is funny and fun friendship and. >> is surprising to to us these days and it's really kind of sadly indicative of where we are politically that they could be absolute die-hard local opponents and they both ran for mayor of new york city which was another thing i had forgotten. they founded as you point out they found that there are magazines within weeks of each other. the national review on the side of ugly and the village voice which again i didn't realize norman mailer had a big role in founding that. there were clearly political opponents in the sense that there has been some major questions of the day but they were not enemies. they were friends. that's part of what i think makes for such a compelling story. why did they get along so well? >> came from vastly different worlds as you point out. what was the bond that help their friendship together besides a love of arguing which i think was clearly something they both enjoyed. >> absolutely did of love to argue. a couple of things. he said they came from different backgrounds and that's true to a point. norman mailer was middle-class jewish boy from brooklyn aspirational family playing stick while in the but 170 iq or 162 iq, just a really brilliant guy. goes to harvard. buckley on the other hand, he's catholic and is pretty staunch catholic buddy lives more or less what he thought of as a quintessentially waspy life. raised in connecticut in a huge mansion with 114 rooms. the house has around called great elm. he yes private tutors flown into educate him. there were six pianos in the house so they were ringing at piano teacher that would go from one kid to the other. there were 10 children in the family. they had different backgrounds but he goes to yell so they are both white men they get ivy league educations. they end up serving world war ii band of action and on the periphery of action but they both have that is a common experience and both of them have a complaint, dramatically different prescription for what america should be that they have a very similar complaint of one another about the common culture of post-war america about the "leave it to beaver" society in the post-world war ii culture that's built. in a common complaint against the 1950s culture they realize they have something in common so you have these two brilliant guys complaining about the same thing even though they want the country to go in completely different directions. add to there and background, common complaints and their really ensign love of arguing their love of cracking jokes and making fun of each other and that's where the friendship came from. >> their love of making fun of everybody else too should be in there because they are not sparing to anybody to talk about as they are on themselves. tell us about this thing they have in common this critique of america. what were they unhappy about? 's you can dislike "leave it to beaver" or dislike ozzie and harriet but you don't have to start a magazine against it. so what was wrong with america in the early 1960s for these world were to veterans? >> the interesting part for me about writing this book was to analyze this post-world war ii culture. it isn't some accounts the richest society of rep told. and, equality -- income inequality was at the lowest it has ever been in since i should add so there were a lot of great things about society coming out of the greatest generation and yet here are these two people coming from that generation who are just pillorying them. i wanted to analyze that. what were the things they were complaining about? 's so i set up a tripartite image of what the culture stood for, what the police were the central belief in the rational thought that would carry the day for us. we could trust in the bureaucrats to cures from the great depression or when the second world war for developing interstate highway system dig to get us places. there was this belief in rational thought congress. it's a fundamentally fundamentally american believe that in the 1950s it was at its peak. another part of this trip that i develop in the book is belief in a really friendly corporate capitalism or the government is going to take care of the corporations and corporations are not going to necessarily push back too hard on paying high taxes rate nobody likes to pay too high taxes but this was a time when the president of general motors when his secretary of defense as i can imagine a time when i would have to make a decision or something would be bad for general motors and also be bad for america and vice versa. >> intervened there to see if anybody can guess what the top personal income tax rate was under eisenhower. i think it was 78. hard to imagine today. >> and then the third part of my painting here's what i call the rules of society which has to do with sort of the basic demeanor of the people the rules about a woman's hair and how high her skirt had to be a ernie and a man's haircut above his ears and what kinds of shoes he would wear and also how you would address somebody to principal or your boss, mr. or mrs., very formal. there were these rules and embedded in these rules were the hierarchy of society of how you were supposed to live in order to get ahead. both buckley and mailer looked at the society and even though it was the richest society in the history of man with a greater share of equality with higher taxes as you make mention they felt sort of limited. they felt like they couldn't be truly free and they couldn't push beyond in mailer's case this sexual imitations or the use of bad words. he wanted these kinds of freedoms and but we for his part wanted freedom from the bureaucratic state. he wanted freedom from government to get government off our backs to use buckley sprays. >> you talk about freedom and what it means and what to do with it is one of the glues that hold the friendship together and that pulls them apart because the debates are quite divisive on this question. freedom has got to mean more to them than haircuts and you know good manners. i will say that mailer flunks the haircut test at any point during this decade but i wonder if you could tell us it might be illustrative to talk about their attitudes toward the civil rights movement raid you are saying we have these rules in the society where everyone says mr. or mrs. my thought was except to black people in which white people in the south at least liberally withheld those terms of respect because they did not want to recognize african-americans as people worth addressing with dr. mr. mrs., professor. >> the story of the book starts with this budding friendship which starts in 1952 in chicago. these two guys are brought together both in their late 30s and there was this equally young promoter who wanted to get the left and right are doing this man named john golden who decided he would host a debate between buckley and mailer and he was the william promoter because he would host it two days before the title fight. he was going to promote this debate exactly the same way as the fight. outside the grand medina theatre in downtown chicago get the billboard out the set up the mailer and yet posters everywhere. it was setup set up to be like the title fight. they were brought together and they had this fierce and very funny debate. buckley his first line out of the gates is i don't think i can hold the attention of mr. mailer because he will never stop looking at the world's glands and they went back and forth like this. you read this and you think what fun it would have been to have been there and there were people like abbie hoffman and a lot of the new left comes out of this and the out of this in any right as they are. at the end of that debate they really realize that they don't want to score simple points like a debate that it occurs to both of them that they are both trying to shape the future. they're both trying to push out of the bounds these cold war assumptions this post-war liberalism as we have come to call it. they want to create what comes to be called as we all know what the 1960s. they want the radical movements on the right and the left to push beyond. one of the first that comes up as you speak of is the civil rights movement and this is of course a movement for freedom. it's called the freedom movement the march on washington for jobs and freedom. freedom is the key phrase there and buckley and mailer have very complicated relations with the civil rights movement. neither one of them looking back on a can we say were sterling supporters of civil rights although to be fair mailer did support the civil rights movement and he did think the honorifics you are talking about worm more specific than just name. it was respecting the person as a human being as a fellow human being and yet for his part he didn't have that many african-american friends. he had all sorts of problematic understandings of what black people were. he thought of them as hypersexualized, living for the moment kind of people because they never knew if they would be around tomorrow. he wrote the famous essay in 1957. james baldwin hated that. james baldwin and mailer were really good friends. james baldwin hated that and had a love letter to my friend norman mailer. at least he supported civil rights movement. he understood that kind of freedom honoring someone as a human being is capable of living up to their fulfillment. mailer understood that. buckley for his part has a problematic relationship with the civil rights movement and basically he helps articulate the conservative opposition to the civil rights movement. >> which is how would you characterize that? >> against everything. he could have taken a conservative libertarian argument which would say something like the state has no business telling who sits next to who. this is not the states responsibility and instead he crafted to arguments that we recognize today for better or worse really. he first of all thought most african-americans weren't get civilized to have access to the vote. he felt the same about uneducated white people too but of course there will wasn't a systematic movement trying to prevent white people from voting while there was this huge movement to prevent black people from having to vote. so there was this not civilized argument. the other argument that buckley coined was what was called the bootstraps argument. where whereas he would say the irish and the jewish came to america with nothing on a ship tell us about your views on the social questions facing america today. >> it's a great question. i think this was a moment in american history when the experts were still whirling. people were looking to the smartest people in the room to explain what was going on and at this moment there was this incredibly small group of mostly white men but not entirely but mostly, who were brilliant in their way who were articulate, who led these larger-than-life lives who could appear on the page six tabloids as much as they could appear in the book section or an op-ed piece writing about the cold war. they were fun to listen to. i think people really enjoyed listening to them. i've had is as they talk about in this book people come up to me and say i disagreed with everything else ugly ever said and yet i'd love to watch them. i love to hear him use the expansive vocabulary that he is famous for and they love the way he showed respect to the opposition. he let them air their opinions and have a voice. then he would destroy them. >> he would destroy them with his intellect and wit and not by yelling at them. >> exactly so i think a the combination of these things really matters. i have been asked quite a bit recently where are the public intellectuals of today? where the people who are these larger-than-life people who can illuminate us on isis and the kardashians at the same time. this is the kind of thing that buckley and mailer and gore vidal and james baldwin were able to speak on all the subjects. i think there has been a decline and i don't think we are less really and now than they wear them but i do think there has been a decline. i think part of the reason is because we now have 114 channels to choose from so everyone can go to their own corner and listen to the voices that they want to hear. at night -- back in the 1960s and 70s there were three networks and very few outlets for people so you are almost networks if a large platform. >> somebody must have thought the way to draw viewers is to have two people who disagree debate each other as a post today having five people all of whom agree with each other have a joint conversation about the things they agree about. have we lost the capacity to tolerate opinions that don't conform precisely to our own? >> no of course not. maybe on tv we have but as human beings i don't think that at all. another thing that has happened is that changes that especially mailer on the left in the 1960s were advocating have taken hold and that is to broaden the table to invite more voices to sit at the table african-americans would women all sort of underrepresented voices to come to the table. to an extent they won. now there was a time in the 60s when guys like buckley and mailer they felt like they could speak on behalf of the country. they felt like they could speak to the nation. they could be the walt whitman eliminating the whole country to itself and with the rights revolutions of the late 60s and 70s that became exposed as always fiction i guess but it became exposed as such and that would take a whole lot of tenacity of whole lot of guts to say i can speak on behalf of the nation. i don't think anybody has done that quite successfully at and not as successfully as these people have. >> wait a few weeks. i think there are a number of potential candidates out there who will definitely speak for america. it sounds a little bit like they invited so many people to the table that they lost their seats. >> in some ways that's exactly right. >> you talk about these larger-than-life figures in when he's has larger-than-life mailer was married and divorced six times. married six times and only divorced five times. buckley was married once. when you talk about larger-than-life the named truman capote springs immediately to mind another one of our great novelist interesting brilliant character. he had a ball. the black-and-white ball and i've never understood how truman capote he had a ball but there was a ball and it was referred to as truman capote's black-and-white all which everybody who was anybody went to. can you tell us again why is that important not just something that makes us all long for elbow gloves? >> the story of the ball again as i wrote this book it was sort of, i wanted to engage with the 60s and there they are in truman capote's novel in a fistfight. there they are debating james baldwin. the story told itself. it was so much fun to write and so one of the great pleasures is that i could tell the story of truman capote's black-and-white wall. in 1966 he had just finished and cold-blooded it was this huge success and he didn't have a hook to write truman capote. he had all this money now this time but no book to write. he always wanted to throw the black-and-white masquerade all so he did. he rented out the ballroom and the plaza hotel in new york city and he invited all of his friends and what's interesting about the story and wide the black-and-white all is said estimating moment in time is because you look at his friend's word and it's all these literary intellectuals all these politicians were there. the editor of the "washington post" was the belle of the ball and that ensured a huge number of politicians coming from washington d.c.. secretaries and families of former presidents. they were kennedys there in truman's fair in all sorts of families there. then of course new york socialites the circle that truman capote he mostly swam in. so he embarked these new york wealthy elite the cultural literary intellectuals and they were there with franks somehow turned lillian hellman and things like that. there was this moment when americans both buckley and mailer wrote about it afterwards. there was a time when americans could pat themselves on the back and realize the health of the nation was good. >> this was 1966. >> this is why they almost get in a fistfight he kisses at moment where it starts to break down their relationship but also the sense that america as a whole is conscience of the part of a common good that can speak to everybody. as the elegant black-and-white ball are walking into the plaza there were porters there taking pictures and norman mailer the worst dressed in the whole entire ball. there were people protesting saying there's a war going on. how can you celebrate while this is happening? do you fistfight between buckley and mailer and i hate to spoil it but mailer has two or three or 12 drinks and he sees george bundy working in the defense department for lbj. he is holding forth on how the war is righteous and good and mailer goes up to him and challenges him and says how one earth can you possibly believe this? this is the black-and-white ball. lillian halim is there and she starts dressing down norman. how are you picking a fight at the ball and he said he felt like he was the younger brother and his younger sister was dressing him down in front of the football team. he went back to the bar and had more drinks and look for someone else who could fight and he saw his old friend william f. oakley. he's goes up to him and says put up your dukes, let's fight about vietnam and buckley says -- seasoned mailer's impossibly drunk. he puts his arm around him and they walk off together. it's an amazing moment and not just a celebrity story but filled with the substance of the breaking apart of american life as reflected through this friendship. >> to push you a little bit on the breaking of american life because you admit this idea of the commonweal meaning this idea that there is what's good for america is good for general motors and vice versa. this is an idea that both mailer and buck wade subscribe to but certainly someone like james baldwin knew all along that there was not one vision of this commonweal. there were at least two and probably three. can you imagine tom hayden crashing the black-and-white all or stokely carmichael even better crashing the ball. are they oblivious to the generational divide? are they unwilling in 1966, are they unwilling to even factor in the civil rights movement as an important component part of the commonwealth or as a final critique of the commonwealth or did they just turn their backs on these things and argue with each other? >> yes and no. in 19666 is right is black power is coming. the more nonviolence movement of martin luther king is still carrying on. starting to pick apart and 65 66 and 67 absolutely absolutely but there still is hope that we can reform this idea of the commonweal to the way that buckley and mailer wants to see fit. i don't want to say they don't see it taking apart but they sense there's this break is coming. there has been too much built up in the early 60s. their there are challenges from the left and from the white -- right. as represented by these conservative parties starting to get votes throughout the country. the right of the left are attacking the common middle and think very vision has a chance to carry the day so they are fighting for this vision. but they don't see is the distraction of a comment wheel. they don't see this possibility that americans will give up on the good of the nation in favor of the good of themselves. >> when you say the destruction of that, and we'll both of them see this happening and it alarms both of them in here i think it began as the world war ii generation. they may not have been fighting for the same things at least not at home but what are the signs that the commonweal is falling apart. is there something broader suggested that the whole thing is going to topple? >> it's a good question. there's a great moment that i was delighted to discover where in 1968 buckley invites mailer onto a television show that he had that was well viewed and propped him up and elevated him to yet another status higher up on the celebrity status and he has mailer on after he writes this incredible book which tells the first hand account and norman mailer was the star of the book as he was for most of norman mailer's books and it's the story of the march from the lincoln memorial to the pentagon pentagon, sort of this antiwar march and when you get to the pentagon they are going to invade the corridors of the pentagon and destroy america's war machine. they all know that they are not going to do this but this was the stated goal and when the protesters got there they were going to levitate the pentagon and get rid of the evil spirits and things like that. mailer writes this remarkable book and buckley has mailer on the television show on firing line and it's a great interview. you can youtube it now. one of the questions the buckley asks is the one that the conservatives and middle americans wanted to know what the left at the time were protesting against the war. it says are you now an enemy of the country correct. does this make you as a representative of the left and enemy and mailer is flabbergasted. the language he uses if he says he has a steering love of country. he loves this country and what it can be so his mission was to make it the best it possibly could be. he failed in that in many reasons for his own personal failings was that his vision wasn't as inclusive as it might offend or as brilliant as it might have been that he and buckley both shared the steering love of country. i just love that phrase and when you get to the later 60s and people protest and get laid commonweal against the war machine and seeing the country in those ways that's where buckley and mailer pullback from the new left and the new right. in doing so there's a little bit of your rowboat -- irrelevance. >> you said something that sparked an idea and now it has gone away. what is it? talk a little bit about their humor because you said it was fun to write this book and i think one of the reasons it was so fun is because they were really funny. if mailer writes his own obituary as if it were written by buckley so it's a. if buckley style talking about baylor's death which is just one of the things that they like to do for each other. there are all these jewels in the archives. you would never know it unless you look. i think was 1979 boston magazine as mailer to write his own obituary and it's very very funny and it starts off talking about how his old friend bill buckley called him i can't remember what the words were because they were buckley words about 12 syllables long and the acronym was. >> rmv but the piece you are referring to is 1975 a charitable organization was auctioning off tonight with bill buckley. they were looking around saying who could auction off bill buckley alex willmar men mailer so in the archives i found this typewritten here to auction off the night with bill buckley and norman mailer writes this description of what bill buckley is like and i couldn't repeat it because the vocabulary word searches huge and it's really funny. i'd try to figure out what all the words were. i tried to explain it to somebody and they said those words don't make sense. he mailed off a clean copy to ugly right after the auction and he said for you and buckley writes back and he says thanks i haven't had a thesaurus around long enough to figure out what you just auction off but i will try to sound as smart as you made me sound. let's get together for a drink sometime. it was a great archival find and that was one of the things -- do every single debate they were and they just had so much fun making fun of the other one for their vices. but it was a friendly kind of making fun of. they weren't attacking too deeply and i knew when they were making these personal cuts they still were going to debate the deeper subjects that they didn't let the personal given the way of the deep philosophical arguments that they wanted to have. >> that's one of the biggest changes from today is that it does seem to be very ad hominem. people do attack each other rather than contesting the ideas that they are putting out. i think mailer and buckley certainly didn't pull their punches and both of them punched hard but they didn't call each other names. >> well they called each other names. but what they did too was the defendant the other person to their own parties. so in late 1963 and north carolina of all places buckley was talking about in his speech talking about norman mailer. he was engaging with the radicals on the left saying what is wrong with the left is what's wrong with norman mailer. it's not his wives or his girlfriends what happens when you try to live a life free of foundations. when you give up christian ethics and these kinds of things. they look at how radical you are and there's nothing to groundview. he talks about mailer's bad words and his descriptions of sex acts and things like that. the students at the university of north carolina attacked him for using foul language. he said how can you engage with the ideas of norman mailer if you don't engage with the ideas of norman mailer? do you really need to understand what the left is argued -- all about if you want to argue with them. >> i do want to monopolize you. i think we have people who are anxious to ask a question so we will take some questions from the audience. yes maam. it would help if you could go to the microphone. sorry about that. >> you haven't talked about their relationships to the women's movement which were very powerful. both of them are antagonistic and norman mailer loved the idea of women being independent enough to sleep with him but not big enough to be political in the world so i would like you to talk about that. >> there's a whole chapter in the book on this exact question and i'm grateful. the first time i ever presented on this friendship i had no business doing it. i was thinking of this book and presenting it. the first question someone asked was that one. how are you going to write a book about the 60s based on two old white guys and where's the women's movement? 's both of them were so wrong when it came to this movement in a lot of ways and the section where i talk about this at the last section of the book where buckley and mailer are starting to watch the 1960s and early 70s watch american life move on both of them being quite as -- as they were in the middle 60s. at this moment where they have to recalibrate before they can get involved in public life and one of the big challenges the both of them faces the rights of women. the story of mailer has a perfect encapsulation of this. he imagined itself as the leader of the sexual revolution of the 60s but it meant to have as many lovers as he could possibly happen not be punished by the constraints of society. hugh hefner was one of the people that appears in the book as the paragon of the sexual revolution. so in 1969 "time" magazine calls of norman mailer and wants to interview him about the sexual liberation and women's movement. he thinks he is the star because he's the one promoting this and when it comes out "time" magazine is cape kate millett was on the cover of "time" magazine. she spent 30 pages destroying mailer's fictional understandings of women and how was based on power and conquest. it wasn't based on equality at all and mailer realized these movements for freedom for pushing in directions that he was unprepared for and he was really unwilling to acquiesce. so he writes a book about it like he does because he's norman mailer and to promote it in to sell books because he is a paramount promoter above all else he has this debate at town hall in new york city which brings for feminists up diane trilling the poet jill johnson and two other women in that debate him. he comes in a three-piece suit and he's walking around. he calls them all ladies the whole time. he's in on the joke in some ways. he knows he is being made a buffoon of but rather than take their side he plays the odd man out trying to sell books in some ways. after that he takes a step back from public life and he starts writing about celebrities. he is no longer the walt whitman to america and it takes them a full decade to recalibrate. when he does recalibrate he's writing about utah and a murder that takes place there as opposed to writing about what life in america is like today. it's a great question. >> thanks. i was fortunate enough to read richard hofstadter's the pier and i'd style of american politics just a few weeks ago and it's great hearing you talk about this. i was thinking that these two men are so brilliant that they couldn't make themselves demonize what the other person was saying. they had to really think about where the other person was coming from and where the other side was coming from so they couldn't go to that level of vituperation that we kind of do now like sean hannity. >> that's exactly right in every single one of their letters not every but every time that the long letter they say let's get to you there sometime and after dinner we can retire just the two of us and i can cure you of all the problems in your thought and you can cure me of all the problems in my thought. they have this impact for each other's intellect. they had this respect for people people -- for each other as people. they did think the other person might be able to teach them something and that was the spirit of engagement that they had. it wasn't about scoring points. it was about figuring out the best way to live a fulfilling life in the united states. these guys have all sorts of flaws as we just talked about without respect was the ground of their friendship. >> it sounds like people on television today are not as smart as buckley and norman mailer and they might do better if they were smart enough to figure out the rebuttals to their own arguments might be. >> i also think they are not rewarded for being as capacious thinkers for being as engage with the other side and think about who crosses lines. maybe you get jon stewart debating bill o'rielly but that is seen as a sideshow and that's maybe not a bad parallel. bill o'rielly is very successful at what he does. jon stewart is a comedian and a very effective and good one and i don't mean to criticize these people but they are rewarded in different ways than how mailer and buckley were awarded. >> speaking of crossing lines mr. buckley played a key role in the stifling of the john birch and the republican party would perhaps be better off if there was someone to speak and fill that vacuum. kimmie speak to that? >> one of the things that buckley was central in doing and why he's such an important figure in american history is he in the 1950s not single-handedly but it was safe to say he was a key player who took these very strands of conservative thought traditionalist ideas that we need to follow the rules scrupulously these libertarian ideas i'm bring them together into what we now know as the republican party in some ways. part of the reason he was so successful at doing that was because he did excommunicate the most ideologically pure voices. he got rid of all ayn rand. he didn't get rid of her. he started excised or from the movement. he got rid of the john birch society and chastised the pope are not living up to church additional living. he wanted to curtail the uglier parts of what have been american conservatism and getting rid of its anti-semitism. he was very active in getting rid of the anti-semitic threat of conservative thought in the 50s. that was the conservative party that he will. i do think if you look at the republican party today he might say something along those lines would be ideological. needs to be excised or curtail the given a smaller part a smaller voice in the conservative party but i also think he would be instrumental about wanting the republicans to win. >> let us suppose that the publisher w.w. norton was developing a new text called anthology to modern political literature. which letters of buckley and mailer would you submit is an excerpt or which transcript would you submit is being most representative of the conflict between liberalism and conservatism in the 1960s? >> well it's funny they use the word between liberalism and conservatism because one of the things that united them was they saw america's having a liberal center and we have appropriated that word and we think of that is as the left-wing. playboy magazine what a great intellectual life. we have this intellectual heavyweights battling it out in chicago two days before price spike in the transcripts going to playboy magazine over two issues of "playboy" magazine. upon a drinking a martini and buckley and mailer's names next to it. a month later there is a letter to the editor from norman mailer saying i don't care what you call me. call me a communist a rebel a left conservative. whatever you do don't call me a liberal. liberal is the liberal center that both the left and the right were attacking. but to get to your question specifically, one of my favorite letters that i found between the two of them happened after selma selma. bill buckley was invited to prop up the new york city cops the catholic organization of new york city cops and he was trying to defend the police action at selma so it didn't go over well. let's just say that and there was a huge theory going on in an "new york post" attacking buckley for defending the plan and the police at selma. buckley discovers the fathers of the holy name society had tape-recorded this lecture so he calls a press conference immediately. a press conference is full. they play the tape and when he starts to talk about some of the tape breaks. it's watergate all over again. everyone is leaning an up and they fixed the tape there are 30 seconds missing and it was the moment when he was talking about selma. he has not recuperated at all in the press. then there was this beautiful funny back-and-forth. his letter comes than a month later from norman mailer and it says i suppose you have just replaced me as the most hated man in american life. he talks about how the left should view the cops versus how the conservatives should view the cops. buckley writes back and engages with some of those ideas and the series of letters with this dynamic interplay on times are changing great how should we view them and understand them without becoming the most hated in american life. >> that's illustrative and one of the points you make in the book which is each of them is fearless and they are vilified. each one of them is vilified many times that they are not afraid to say what they think and to tell people things that nobody wants to hear. i think that's another one of their hallmarks. you have to have a strong ego. you have to have thick skin but when they talk of themselves as citizen intellectuals they see that as their duty is to say things that people may not want to hear and may really come back at them for. >> they both have tremendous egos without a doubt. they both were told from a young age that they were the smartest person in the room and people needed to listen and respect them. one time when they are on firing line together buckley says suppose you are in the soviet union. would you be more afraid of the mailer or a buckley administration and mailer laughs and says i'm glad i'm not the only egotist in the room. but yes they were fearless because they were confident but they also weren't afraid to pick fights and as we talk about with the women's movement to risk losing fights and looking like a buffoon. to their credit but it also came with all this baggage. >> is a person who lived in that era also as a baby boomer and a person who would be considered a conservative because i voted for richard nixon but i like what you said about the appropriation or perversion of the word liberal because jefferson and adams disagreed. those were trying times or so intellectual people can disagree disagree. i wanted to mention one little thing. buckley and i remember buckley admired him. i have read mailer and i don't like the language for the very intellectual person as well. you didn't touch on the fact that he shot his wife and didn't touch on belly of the beasts that we will leave that alone. >> he actually stabbed her. >> and she still didn't divorce him. it took a little while. >> you mentioned earlier in your introduction he mentioned a little thing that irks me on the thing when he said buckley grew up -- the acronym white anglo-saxon protestant. there's one other group which is protestant. that's another core group. that would include j. edgar hoover and richard nixon who grew up in poverty, not poverty but you know so i'm just saying that's an area that the young catholics were rebelling against their church and there were a lot of them marching on the left with father mohaqiq etc.. that was leaving out a group of americana so that's what i'm saying the wealthy buckley and kennedy family and catholic frustration also wanted somebody to look at as well. who became a punching bag is the jaeger hoover and the protestant people that came from poverty. >> i used the phrase waspy. i did mention he was catholic but i use it as a cultural marker is the refined life he lived. i have a part in the book where he talk about what it meant to him to be catholic. he was no fan of vatican ii and the changes. he didn't hate all of them but he was not a friend of them. he was a devout catholic and claim to have never wavered in his belief his whole life. i'd like you are suggesting seem to think that made him, we talked about the competence of ego that made him -- made them work called that because he was sure he was in possession of the truth with a capital d truth. this was something he had been taught through his faith. when you have possession of the truth and catholics were vilified and sometimes discriminated against in d.c. this and it helps them develop this. i've rebelling against the wasp elite absolutely right. his catholic faith was really important him and foundational. >> i was going to say he killed the father but he actually killed his alma mater by writing it which you could see apart is the product of the catholic at yale facing a roomful of protestants. the class of el i don't remember his graduating class but that would have been a good group. >> exactly right although he did give his papers back to yell so if you want to study buckley you have to find them. >> i see so he did love his alma mater. that is as good a point as any to end. i'm afraid we have to answer the program can continue. thank you for coming and especially for supporting book fest. do we have time for one more question? i'm sorry but our author will be here to sign all the books you are going to buy right outside the door. thank you so much. thank you kevin schultz. [applause] >> on behalf of the lit fest thank you to kevin shultz, jane daly and most of all thanks to all of you for attending. mr. shultz will be signing books and taking more questions in the lobby right outside. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> we have one more event to bring you from chicago like this afternoon that's author alice goffman talking about her book on the run fugitive life in an american city. it will start in about 10 minutes or so. this is booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] bill gates co-founder of microsoft and the bill and linda gates foundation recently released via "vanity fair" list of seven books he is reading this summer. booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. and thanks for asking. as you know i taught economics for the past 18 years went to seminary before that so i usually like reading a combination of economics and ethics. on the stump speech people thought that was kind of a humorous joke that i take it pretty seriously. i'm starting off with peter wallison hidden in plain sight. it's the latest definitive account of the causes of the financial crisis and if you don't have an account of the causes of the financial crisis it's hard to solve that issue going forward. we don't want that happening again. there are some signs that we are heading in the wrong direction with a few economic variables that debt and gdp gdp are off-track again little hint to the mortgage and the federal reserve etc. is heavy lifting to do. that's the main economic piece i want to read and the rest is the western synthesis between the judeo-christian and the greeks and the enlightenment reason. i taught that for 18 years so i'm reading a few books, whose justice, which rationality by alastair mcintyre in notre dame fame one of the top philosophers in the country and then i have on my stack of moral vision of the new testament by hayes. he's considered one of the foremost authorities on epics of the new testament so not on the religiosity but the morality contained within the new testament. then i got a book economics as religion from samuelson to chicago the chicago school bionelson. i've been dabbling in several books for a long time but i want to dig in a little deeper because i think they are here. the final one i have gone through the stack is a fun one called bourgeois dignity by deidre mccloskey. she is quite a renaissance scholar herself. she has been combining economics and ethics in literature for the past few decades. she's a chicago school trained economist and been validated by a bunch of nobel prize winners. high-end read has a 6-volume set in the works. i just refer to the second volume and it takes on the causes of long-run economic growth. most people are familiar with this but as the issue that is improve human welfare more than any issue you can name. i think i can say that with good competence but her argument is all of human civilization income per person is about $500 a year per person for all of human history until 1800. in 1800 degette hockey stick. you get massive explosive growth in fremont company's -- countries. there isn't a lot of speculation on the true cause of that and i did my ph.d. in economics on that. .. we need to do a little work and examining that, getting back on track and paying attention. kids in inner cities right now, lower income folks and there only hope is to enter a free market economy with a well-paying a well-paying job. and so if we are teaching the next generation of business is morally bad why would a kid want to sign up for the proposition? it is not attractive. this book is usually important. the book is similar and dealt mainly with the history of virtues. that is my reading list, light reading for summer on the beach. i look forward to the stack. >> and book tv wants to know what you are reading. tweet us your answer or you can post it on our facebook page. >> presidential candidates often release books to introduce themselves to voters and to promote their views on issues. here is a look at some books written by declared candidates for president. narrow surgeon ben carson calls for greater individual responsibility to preserve america's future in one nation. >> the united states supreme court has taken the position that money is a free a free speech issue, and so you cannot put limits, you cannot pass a law putting limits on how much people can spend in the federal election but the supreme court will not let you do that in the federal election i have to explain to people you cannot override that with an act of congress. the the only way to override a supreme court decision is to have a constitutional amendment. it takes a two thirds vote of each house passed by three quarters of the states the best you can do is have disclosure. we have suggested that congress to pass a law requiring every organization of any kind that mentions of federal candidate by name any time during a two-year election to be required to disclose all the contributors so at least we know where the money is coming from. that would be legal. they won't permit limits on the total amount of spending we also made other recommendations, some of which are little controversial. some years ago congress permitted earmarks were member of congress or the senate could designate how money would be spent in appropriations bills and their particular district or state. unfortunately, this was abused. one of my college classmates from the university of missouri randy duke cunningham actually sold earmarks to defense contractors and took bribes. he was sent to jail spent a jail, spent a little time as the guest of the government as he should have. other people in your marked to fund some somewhat questionable projects. we have suggested that earmarks be returned. there was a requirement that the members name has to be put on it. in the community in the community report you know which house member or senator earmarks are spending command it can only be spent in the house members district of us in the state. the reason for this is this would give members of congress some skin in the game. they would have a reason to support appropriation bills. right now often the appropriation bills are not passed by the beginning of the fiscal year , and the government operates on a continuing resolution. this is a crazy way to fund the government. you could never fund the business this way. but that is the way that congress has operated. we recommended going back on a limited basis to earmarks. not everyone agrees. we understand this is considered to be reform but i think that going back to that system would be helpful also, we have recommended having a national primary day for all elections, not the presidency. the states can do the presidential primaries and caucuses. but all but all primaries for the house and senate would be on the same day. that would hopefully that would hopefully have a larger turnout. these media would pay attention focus attention on the fact that this is primary day and then maybe we get more people voting. one of the problems we have is that in some states you register by party and some of the states you can register as an independent, but you cannot vote in the party primary of either party. you are closing out of the process even though in many cases the whole election is in the primary. in other cases independence choose not to vote. but then they are conceding the outcome to a a relatively small group of voters in many cases ideologically extremes to pick the candidates in the race. >> you can watch this online. >> hello, everyone. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> we are live inside the north auditorium at jones college prep, one of the event sites for this year's chicago tribune printers row lit fest for this final event. however, at the last minute forced to cancel. a young african-american, young african-american man living in philadelphia. so that concludes book tv live coverage from the 2015 chicago tribune printers row lit fest command you can watch any program that we have covered over the weekend on our website booktv.org. thank you for watching and enjoy the rest of your weekend. [inaudible conversations] >> next on book tv providing a history of the bedbug a bedbug, a species that may be more than 250,000 years old. [inaudible conversations] >> all right. good evening, everyone. thank you for making it out. [applause] broke is a science writer and journalist, a contributing editor to popular science where she authors the blog our modern slaves and tonight she will be reading from and discussing her new book invested how the bedbug infiltrated a bedrooms and took over the world. it came out april 8 8th of the university of chicago press and has received great feedback already. for example, the new york times book review wrote a book about bedbugs is by necessity a book about nearly everything. deftly takes us through this microcosm of the universe as she traces the culture and biology of a resurgence gorge. i got a favorable review saying the book is for anyone who wants to replace the fear of bedbugs with knowledge. a quick housekeeping note we have c-span here for teesixteen. very happy book tv. very happy to have them. during q&a we will have a microphone being passed around for whoever wants to ask a question. if you have a question wait for the microphone. without further ado please welcome. [applause] >> thank you command thank you for coming. this is my 1st ever reading. i am excited and a little terrified. bear with me. i want to do an icebreaker. i we will show you the trailer which launched this week. my friends collected this for me. it gets a little racy. if you want to see anything about bedbugs sex my want to cover your eyes and ears. >> seven crazy bedbug facts with me. that's one. bedbugs might seem trendy but they are actually so hundreds of millennia ago's. stop acting like your brooklyn infestation is the next. henry miller love the dirty words and phrases. they appear in seven of his most famous novels. during the vietnam war american army scientists tried to build a detective it used bedbugs to sniff out enemies. it it did not work. fact for, to words, dramatic insemination. it's our bedbugs say i love you. the male climbs on top of the female and stabbed her in staff from the belly with his needlelike pain is ejaculating right into her body cavity like right in there. fact there. fact five, for bedbugs is a family affair, literally. a single mated a single mated female can spark an entire infestation. i'll just let that sink in. fact six bedbugs make up crazy. how crazy? we have tried killing him off with everything from gunpowder to baseball bats to dd dna still bounce back. fax seven, there are bedbug infestations in all 50 states. yep, yours, too. i'm talking. i'm talking to you. want more? check out my book invested how the bedbug infiltrated our bed took over the world from the university of chicago with additional support from the albert p stone foundation. okay. stories about bedbugs. it's thank you for putting that together. here is a bedbug saying hi. you will see more pictures. so what i am going to do there are a lot of stories in this book. some of them are funny some of them are weird. some are quite fun. what i am going to do is tell you about why i wrote this book and take you through an abbreviated history of the bedbug up and so why we are where we are right now and then we can open up to q&a and you can ask anything. some going to read a little bit from the prologue. late in the summer of 2004 in new york city i watched my dr. take a a ballpoint pen and trace the perimeter of the wealth of unknown origin of my right leg which had spread from eischen around to the center of my calf. calf. he told me if it extends beyond this line go back to the emergency room. there were others we have blamed them on everything from spiders to mosquitoes to tex. wind disease antibiotics to extinguish an infection i i likely picked up scratching too much, kind of embarrassing and prescribed a pack of steroids. the lyme disease is negative. although negative. although the pills made the red streaks disappear, the relief was not to last. despite five visits from exterminator they always returned and always after i i had slept in my bed. whatever was looking in my room at night was still there. as you can probably guess what was there was bedbugs. i was incredibly shocked to find this out there it i had heard the term but i never -- it never occurred to me that was an actual species. they were not in the news very much. has anyone had bedbugs? a lot of brave people. for the others, is there anyone who has a friend who has had bedbugs? okay. so as you know yourself or have heard from your friends bedbugs can be difficult to deal with emotionally, physically. you emotionally, physically. you have to go through a lot of bagging of your close and laundry. it's it's also emotionally taxing to know there is something in your bed biting you. this is your sanctuary. i thought that was it just a strange thing until 2,009 when i get bedbugs twice again in the same summer. one was at my now husband's apartment and the other time was in my apartment's. we lovingly joke what i got them from him while rob will run -- or my roommate get a futon off craigslist but i had to deal with them twice in one summer and that was painful. not long after that i was seeing them in the news all the time. the empire state building and victoria's secret and all these lawsuits. at that time i was working as a science journalist. i want to join in and write about bedbugs because i have them before. this is what happened when i started doing i started doing that. this is also when i got the idea for doing the book. during these interviews i learned that the bedbug which most people thought we had conquered after world war ii with the debut of modern pesticide was in truth in ancient past. a live with our ancestors since the pharaohs ruled egypt and possibly much longer stretching back to the places seen before humans existed when the bugs may have made a living on the blood of bats and are close relatives who occasionally sought shelter in the same cave. from there the bugs showed up throughout history solidifying our bond was removed a permanent camps in cities and conquering the world as tiny bloodsucking colonists. this new information made it increasingly odd that i had grown up with no knowledge of the past. for my generation to be oblivious i realized was as strange as the thought of future children not knowing the cockroach, and camorra flight. i began to understand what i think is the most intriguing aspect of the story, it's not a fluke but a fluke but a return to normal, and ecological homeostasis. that actually led me to this book project. what i learned as i alluded to in the animation in the beginning is the bedbugs have been around for a a long time, maybe stretching back to 250,000 years ago, although there's a lot more research to be done. regardless, they have been around for a long time came out of caves was some relative of ours or some other thing we interacted with and then radiated throughout the world. you can trace them to historical documents, documents religious text, poetry, all these historical references, radiating throughout the world eventually going across the atlantic, the americas, and ending up your i'm going to do -- sorry. i know it's kind of gross. i wanted to show you this to show you an actual full body of a bedbug. this is a bedbug having sex. i figured why not just get it out of the way. the mail bedbug is on top. it might it might be hard to see but it looks like a stinger coming out. that is a bedbug ps. i also wanted to show you this so you can see what a bedbug looks like for the next line. the oldest known physical evidence of a bedbug discovered in the late 90s at an archaeological site. really dry. i found a bunch of insect remains. this is probably in what was the sweeping chambers of the tomb builders. and you can see just like in the last picture the legs are gone and the head is gone and you can see that same body shape in the bottom of the abdomen is gone. additional evidence additional evidence that bedbugs have been around for a very very, very long time so through all this time we are very used to dealing with bedbugs. some people would be engaged in these thinks called bug hunts. i hunts. i don't know if this is a staged photo or what because i cannot imagine. this is from 1907. i don't know why someone would set this up for a family photo, but this is an image that refers to bug hunting. people would actually go through there bedding and look for bedbugs in life and other things so that they could get a good nights sleep. and also, through history just like we try and do now we try to kill bedbugs because we do not like them anymore then than we do now. really incredible great links to do that. you might notice this is an image from the 1940s to my guy with a gas mask on. hard to see but he is in an army bed. drawers pulled out in the background and bunkbeds and trunks. but he is doing his opening that castro at the bottom which is probably cyanide gas and he's going to leave and that is going to fill up the structure and kill the bedbugs. that is the same material that was used during the holocaust and gas chambers may incredibly lethal and bad. so we were willing to risk you know risk, you know, health and life to get rid of bedbugs, which is kind of crazy. [laughter] >> this is a real ad. i'm pretty sure this was from time magazine. ddt. then came ddt in the story changed. bedbugs were so pervasive and common up until around world war ii or just after. the insecticidal properties of ddt were discovered writer on the start of the war command it was used in the war to kill mosquitoes and mice and other -- lice and other disease carrying impact -- and sex. and then after the war it was commercialized in the us and other places and we loved it. ddt is good for me. i don't know what that is all about. it was not intended to be used necessarily on bedbugs. it was a broad-spectrum insecticide. it left a residue for a long time on surfaces. bedbugs hide during the day. usually the high during the day and come out at night. they will ship the schedule for people who are on a different schedule. if you are a night worker they will come out in the day when you're sleeping and go hide at night. regardless, they are hiding in corner somewhere. ddt was helpful because it would stay on the surface and they would walk through and pick it up and eventually die. that is also why ddt was a problem later for environmental reasons because estate in the environment longer than we wanted to. but as this was happening we knock numbers down significantly because we had never encountered anything like this before. we also started -- there was evidence that bedbugs build resistance to ddt and little pockets all over the world. totally inevitable when it comes to evolution, devolution, but overall numbers were down and little pockets are starting to emerge. so even though bedbugs were really rare during decades they still existed. here is one example. this is one of the 1st guys i interviewed for the book and one of the reasons i thought that there might be other interesting stories to include in the book and to pursue for the book. this is an entomologist named harold arlen. he in the 1970s was was working as an army entomologist, sometimes it surprises people to hear. one of their jobs is to help protect troops from different insects that might bother them are spread disease to them. and he was stationed in new jersey at four dick. and there were some army recruits getting bitten by something at night. it was his job to figure out what it was in the rid of it. as you can guess it was bedbugs. he had -- even though this was a guy who study these kinds of insects generally he had never seen bedbugs in real life before. yet only seen images of them in books or slides that you look at under the microscope. this is pretty typical for all people that were studying insects, all entomologists as well as exterminators and other people didn't even know existed. so he was so interested that he decided to take some home with them as you do command he collected them into a jar and took them home and wanted to study and. bedbugs only a bedbugs only a blood. he had to keep alive. as you might have guessed if your looking closely the way he kept them alive was to feed them on his own arms and legs. he took these jars of bedbugs stretched pantyhose across the top. i think they did escape a couple of times. he advanced to better barriers but he has been doing this ever sense. he's been feeding these bedbugs. for reasons i won't get into they ended up being important for research. the research. the thriving area of bedbugs research, but i wanted to read to you briefly that experience of coming to his office. he was working at the department of defense is a contractor. and this is when the photo was taken. attached a small, flat box to his arm. he modified one sides of the boxes originally intended as a display case for a price corner metal. as he pointed out he explained he used it for feeding demonstrations. i table to my right they still on the edges. and a more typical feeding he would hold its jar against his arm or leg the nurse warned once. i could i could see a handwritten label that track the dates of each meal. collectively they held around 6,000 bugs. she fell around once a month. by my my calculation that meant he only 72000 that bites every year. i asked if he ever had an allergic reaction a role of the palais to reveal one of these brights -- bites a bright pink wealth. as the bugs on his arms i leaned in for a lot watching as they grew plump and turned red. what does that feel like? kind of a slight pinprick. hard to describe, like someone is taking a paintbrush, and artist paintbrush and moving it around. as he described the end it mechanics he gestured with his hands as he paused. the small box stayed put. he glanced down and held out his arm to me. as you can see some are are getting larger. this one over here is getting pretty big. go to the next. now bedbugs are back. why is that? there are probably more reasons than what i'm about to tell you. the main reasons that have been identified 1st we have the ddt resistant bedbugs. then in the 80s and 90s get easier and cheaper to travel by airline. it happened in the us. they came into effect. more people and they are also more people on the planet than ever before more cities than ever before, than half the world population area. they can still end up anywhere. but and cities they have a much easier time spreading from one family to another. you can imagine a big apartment building and someone accidentally bringing bedbugs and. it can spread easily from one family to another. and the other part of that is that -- the only insecticides -- the main insecticides we are allowed to use legally in our bedrooms, we can't use ddt anymore. these work in a very similar way in the bugs nervous system compared to ddt. all those bugs and their offspring that had ddt resistance also had a craft resistance to the main chemical tool we were able to use and they also have developed other resistances. there are other ways to kill bedbugs. chemical pesticides are one way that is relatively cheap and easy. it's an attractive way for a lot of people and that is getting increasingly harder to do. and so now the bedbugs are so common they are back in our poetry and art, music. this is actually off-broadway musical called bedbugs. this is a bedbug. i saw it twice. and the creator is here today, which is great. this is just one example of a bed bug proliferating in the art. cathartic for us to express ourselves because the bedbugs are actually kind of terrifying. i do have one other quick -- do you want to go ahead -- i i wasn't going to do this but i think we are okay on time. we talked earlier about the bugs and the kids originally living and some of them coming out with some of the early relative. after that we eventually started building structures like apartments and churches some of them started roosting and brought bugs with them. there there are some scientists looking at bedbugs in those artificial roofs and also looking at the bugs living on people. people. separated for a long time and the trying to figure out how they are related. in an attic outside of prague. you can't totally seek him them although i will show you 1200 bats. it's too it's too hot for them. they go back down and hide. this guy was counting bats. they were looking at the dna basically and comparing it. the bedbug might actually be an interesting model to study evolution and cialis pieces puts on the two different hosts. at the time sitting at a bar and prague the idea of bats being on recent funny. less than 24 hours later i was not so sure. i made up -- yeah. yeah. i am not scared of animals. there pretty harmless. they were lining the raptors of this apartment complex. there were people living downstairs. the bats of -- the bats are protected for reasons i will get into. the shrieking chorus and earth the ammonia stents made it hard for me to follow commentary. every minute or so about ventured from the group and jump with each pass. i knew they would not hurt me. they are interested they are interested in beatles and they were used to the occasional scientist. still, knowing of fact does not settle the reflex. it took me a while but i eventually moved my way to the chimney. i had tweezers and plastic containers. this is what it was like. it became a game. the next step was to guess whether the boat was dead or alive before i went and because we needed more live bugs the dead ones and did not have time. in the beginning i cannot recognize the signs of life but after ten minutes ten minutes i could see the live bugs emanated a vitality i cannot pinpoint. they they were brighter and the pitch of the legs is more purposeful. i found a live one and caught it between my fees tweet caught it between my tweezers. pop off the top, but the new bug inside and slap it on. i settled into a rhythm. i shouted when i capture the bug and cursed while last one. it was pretty gnarly. as my collection bottle filled up her member of the passage with where the poet's throne and the low security prison in philadelphia for dodging a world war ii draft. the rich man i can catch the most bedbugs. he allegedly cheated. drop hit my head in another. it it was bad people. on that note we can open up to questions. >> what was the biggest myth that you uncovered through your research? >> there are a lot of them. a lot of times people associate bedbugs with poor people, and that's totally unfair. they don't discriminate. they will go to anyone. there are populations that are much more vulnerable. it is expensive to get rid of bedbugs and can be physically demanding. you can imagine certain groups of people might have more difficulty. a situation like a big apartment complex of public housing. maybe the maybe the people running the places and i was willing to spend the money. that is one that is important. >> how to protect yourself those of us who have had experiences. >> i i don't either. i ended up getting them in a hotel room. who knows how bad i am. but i usually do when i'm traveling. i just try and be more mindful. is no guarantee your going to find them. a check around the edges of the mattress, check there board. but i usually check around those areas. i'm usually looking for really bad infestation. you you are more likely to take a moment. even after i don't see anything i try to keep my luggage every day in the closet. i go home i will do laundry. even that time in chicago they were hiding in the bedskirt. you can search everywhere. doing laundry just being more aware of yourself. is pretty unlikely to get them. if you don't carry a billion to the movie, just don't take stuff around you so much. >> the psychological trauma? do they actually carry disease? what is the worst physical reaction? >> they don't. they are not known to carry disease. scientists have been researching this for decades pathogens living in a non-them, but there is no evidence that they can transmit those to humans. there was a study that came out last winter that we will poll we have to pay close attention to, some evidence that they can spread the parasite. but that was something that i think is interesting and people have to look at. there are some -- as far as physical symptoms there are some cases where people -- and it's usually all the folks who have bad infestations who grew anemic after having so many bytes. there are some people that have a really bad allergic reaction. is not usual but blood blisters and athletic shock. the definite mental health thing is serious. there are 25 there is one study that showed even people who had no pre-existing issues of anxiety and insomnia. and it seems like one of those. the people about the symptoms can get those symptoms after having bedbugs. for people that have existing mental illness it can exacerbate that. even in cases of key -- cases of people committing suicide. they had other problems but that is what took them over. one over. one women who had a suicide note and mentioned that in it. it can be quite serious. >> you talk a lot. [inaudible question] >> i no they eat beetles. there are other species of bugs that have other species of bedbugs-thanks living with them. >> the ones that bite human beings come i'm not sure if they are for eating bats are not. i think they might be -- the mighty loss of things but i'm not sure. >> bedbugs have been around for a long time but there is a lot of investment now. different sites have not eradicated them. do do you think will possibly when the war at some time? >> i think there are some species that we are really good at eradicating species we don't want to eradicate, but bedbugs are usually -- usually pests and invasive species, there's something about them that makes them especially hardy. insects are hard to eradicate. there's even a study on mosquitoes. they tried to eradicate mosquitoes of a small island it did happen. [inaudible question] >> there is -- there anecdotes that they are more common in the summer. apparently exterminators get more calls in the summer, and that might be the case, but no one has study that yet. it makes sense. .. i usually describe it as the wild west. there are a lot of helpful people out there in shady people out there is you can imagine feeding on people's fears whether intentionally or not. >> why can't they trap these things -- track these things and get a simple way to track and collect them? it's the same issue with moss inside the house. >> there are traps. you can go through the beginning of patents and find traps and we have tried to trap them all kinds of ways over the centuries. one way they used to do it, they would take being leaves and put them under the bed and the bugs would walk through them and get stuck on them and then they would sweep them up and burn them or whatever. now some researchers have gone back to look at that under strong microscopes and they found that they weren't getting stuck, the they had these little hairs me talking hairs me taking them to their feet so they are trying to develop a trap based last i heard it was not quite so easy to make a synthetic version of that. there are new traps but i don't think are on the market yet but bugs communicate through pheromones like a lot of other bugs and they have found this cocktail of pheromones that might work for a trap but even if you have the best trap that can attract them easily it's no guarantee they're all going to get in the trap so it can be a good tool but it's not like you put a trap out and they all -- the other part is roach traps and stuff like that has food in it and it's a little tricky to attract them to their feet. that is why they are working with pheromones and stuff like that. >> what's the timeline from one bed bug in my home is this a day or is this a year? >> a kind of depends. as you saw in the animation and infestation can be inspired based on genetic research on one female so they are pretty good at inbreeding. not all species like to do that but that bugs are good at it. timeline, i don't want to lead you astray. i know that it depends on what age. definitely within a month or so i would say but it depends on how old they are when they are found in how comfortable they are temperaturewise. are you guys itching at? [laughter] >> so how long can they go between feedings? >> that's a good question. you always hear people going bed bigs -- bed bugs can live for year without eating. that's probably only true in institutions where there is cold called the bald and their metabolism slowed down. there hasn't been a ton of research but a little bit that has been done suggest a couple of months maybe a little bit longer. it depends on the other environments, the temperature and humidity and all that stuff. i know that freaks people out. >> often do they attack domestic animals like dogs and cats. >> i have heard and it does for some time they will bite animals. there is also research that shows they preferred human arms that are less hairy. they can feed on bats. maybe in a bad infestation but probably they would prefer to munch on you if they have the choice. >> don't get a hairless cat. >> don't get a hairless cat anyway. i'm sorry, some of you may have hairless cats. i'm sorry. [laughter] >> let's say there were bed bug eggs. how long ago survive? >> that's a good question. so they usually hatch within a week or two. i can't remember the exact number of days but i have heard some people try to tell me they can last five years without hatching and i don't diet. i don't knock anyone is research that that egg hatching is like a thing that happens. it's not something you can slow down that much, maybe the temperature. they can be hard to kill. not all treatments kill the eggs so that's a good question too. probably not a really long time. >> everything you're saying makes it sound like they are everywhere and they move quickly. why don't we all have them all the time? >> they are doing that there are reservoirs of them basically so like i was saying earlier multi-dwelling units, multiunit dwellings is the term. permanent buildings are hotspots and they can be for bed bugs. not necessarily everyone has them all the time but they are spread to places like that and continue to be a problem in certain spots and they leak out from most spots depending on who is in directing where. >> but if i or somebody i know has been one of those hotspots then why is this not just a contagion sweeping the nation quickly? what is limiting that? >> in certain situations if you catch them early enough you can treat them easily so if you have enough money and you have enough time and you catch it early enough you can drop down their numbers and get rid of them. i think that has something to do with it. why it hasn't spread more i'm not really sure. the numbers are off as far as exterminator treatments go. there are tons of cases everywhere but that doesn't mean everyone that doesn't mean every time you leave your house you are prone to get them. usually you are interacting with people in public spaces and it's less likely to pick them up there than to go into someone's home and has it. probably a lot of those places the public housing but i went to in ohio a lot of those folks were interacting with each other and not getting out of lock and another thing that happened that is really sad once people have them they isolate themselves or they will get isolated from friends and family. i got an e-mail from a woman the other day telling me about her 73-year-old mother who is living in an elderly home and they have bed bugs in the place did not take care of her for two years. when she moved out she brought them with her and she hasn't seen her grandchildren and two years because they are afraid to visit. she's afraid to have them visit so that probably has something to do with the too. i don't know how much evidence there is out there to support that but i would guess that has something to do with it. >> you know for those people like yourself and others here everywhere who have the problem it's so horrific and you are talking about the history of humanity and those bugs have always been with us. before they had ddt and the various chemicals that we use, it sounds like they did have methods but how did humans survive? said so horrific. did they possibly have better techniques for killing them than we do blacks could you talk a little bit about the history of this because it seems very frightening to base this without modern pesticides. >> i think part of the reason we are so frightened of them is because they seem to be gone for a while and it was the shocking thing of them coming back in people not knowing they existed. i don't think people necessary like them that do neither. i would be interested in seeing the mental health like when did we decide anxiety and these things were thing worth talking about publicly and how they all interacted with bed bugs. i tried to talk to my grandparents about bed bugs for the book because they met before world war ii when bed bugs were common. my grandma was like they existed but that's not something we would have talked about that then. like if someone had cancer cancer or someone had this no one talked about stuff like that so it may have been a different public mentality in dealing with these things. as far as better treatments back then, probably not. i think the people were more used to them in these practices passed down through generations and dealing the best that they possibly could and it was just a part of existing. >> what about suburbs in places like phoenix or someplace like that? are they less prone to have problems with bed bugs or do they have problems and is a something that isn't really talked about? >> they can certainly been the patterns that you usually see in bigger cities they will start to spread to smaller and smaller cities. i don't know about phoenix specifically but like i said earlier people in stand-alone home certainly get them but when that happens unless they have a lot of people coming in and spreading them other places it's easier to contain because they can treat the house. they are not going to crawl across the yard to the neighbors as easily as they cross the wall or the hall to another apartment. [inaudible] >> i can't hear. >> do you think we have -- the population recognizes this when they see at? >> recognizes the bed bug? >> do they know what it looks like? >> there was a study on that in the u.k. where they are grad students that went students that when a bunch students that went out and showed people images and said what is this? older folks knew what was the younger people were like i don't know what that is. i would guess probably a relatively similar thing would happen here. people are more aware now because they have been in the news so much and there has been a lot of images of them in the media and on line in that kind of stuff so it's hard to tell. i think people are recognizing them more than they used to. >> what is the weirdest thing that you have encountered in researching this book lacks. >> i feel like some of them i actually can't say. >> you can say it. [laughter] some of the stories, there are are a lot of very powerful folks studying bed bugs. there are so many stories. i saw a picture of harold harlan earlier. he was an agency guy. there was one point where he was showing bed bugs and they started meeting and he started pointing them out to me. he said have you ever seen bed bugs made before before and i said no i have not seen that but thank you for pointing it out. so really small things like that i guess but i'm just going to leave it at that. >> so i was wondering our bed bugs the same the world over? is that one dominant type of bed bug now or are there different bed bugs -- bed bugs live on samoa? do we all have the same bed bugs bugs? >> there are actually 100 related species but not all of them are -- only a couple bite humans and arrested them feed on bats and birds so they hang out there nested routes like her bedrooms with the two main ones in the u.s. and temporary regions is the common bed bug and then there's the tropical bed bug that is similar in the tropical regions and there is some overlap. there are some parts of the world where you might find both but other than that those species are the ones worldwide affecting people. >> as someone who has e-mailed you for your advice have you become a bed bug guru? do you people like spam your box with photos asking you what to do? >> i get a lot of letters saying is this a bad bug and i'm like actually i can't tell. this spec. i know what a bed bug looks like at that the other species are similar looking so you could live somewhere where you have swallowed bugs in your attic and maybe it's that but i do get a lot of e-mail syntax usually from friends and acquaintances although i get some from strangers and i usually tell them i'm really sorry but i can't help you because i don't know. usually it ends up being more therapy. i just tell them it's going to be okay in here are-somethings that i would do. i don't recommend specific exterminators but if they want to tell me what their exterminators using i will get them at by some of the latest scientists -- sciences on that and whether or work. >> tropical bed bugs, how do they look? >> they look very similar to the common bed bug. there are about the same size. >> i just thought of one more riches that if we could eliminate the bed bug you know, would there be any negative consequences? >> couldn't get rid of mosquitoes without killing off tons of birds. the things the mac bed bugs i would presume and if so what? >> there are

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