>> we must ask how good is the model. there is a story about a man from minneapolis who walked into a store, target, and asked to see the manager. his daughter was being bombarded with pregnancy related coupons from target. they asked are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant, he asked? the store manager apologized profusely. he called the father several days later to apologize again. only this time come the man was less irate. this has turned be apologetic. he said it turns out there has been sacked activities in my house i haven't been completely aware of. father said she is due in august. statistician had figured out that his daughter was pregnant for heeded. this is not even the creepiest part. [laughter] that is their business, it is also not their business. i can feel more than a little interested. some companies mask a much they know. for example, if you are a pregnant woman in your second trimester, you may get coupons in the mail for cribs and diapers. along with a coupon for free bowling stocks of the purchase of pair of bowling shoes. to you, it just seems fortuitous for pregnancy related coupons came in the mail along with the other junk. in fact, the company knows. it is merely covering the their tracks available what it knows doesn't seem so spooky. >> across this and other programs that booktv.org. >> you're watching the tv on c-span2. here's our primetime lineup for tonight. starting at 7:00 p.m. eastern, general john borland talks about his time as a prisoner of war followed by bob woodward, who presents his most recent book, the price of politics. at 9:00 p.m. eastern, former aig ceo or discusses discusses the e economy. and the ceo of charity navigator. we conclude the programming at 11:00 p.m. eastern what the author of generation roe versus wade, visit booktv.org for more on this weekend television schedule. >> let's think about how the typical american eats. 90% of the food budget goes towards buying processed foods. 84% of americans feed their children on a fast food restaurant responsibly. when a consumer enters the grocery store, they are met by hundreds if not thousands of brands. it might buy a pepsi or gatorade or tropicana, lipton tea, sierra mist, an energy drink, vitamin water, they might buy healthy juice for breakfast they could buy quaker syria, cap'n crunch, it jemima, and for snacks they might buy a price price of sony and potato chips and some chips and she does and tostitos and to be those or ruffles. what they don't realize is that all those brands are owned by pepsi. it is the second-largest in the world. or they might buy a nestlé product, but they peddle about 6000 brands. $94 billion in sales and $10.000000000 in profit. that's because nestlé is the biggest food company in the world and not just the united states. basically in every sector of the food industry, we have a few companies that are controlling all of those brands. twenty companies controlling the highest percentage of brands in the grocery store. of those, 14 of the brands control organic food. good food is basically controlling what people eat. then we have the grocery conglomerates. wal-mart to pack along with target and wal-mart is by far the largest. one out of every three grocery dollars goes to wal-mart. wal-mart has more wealth than the bottom 40% of all americans. and they wonder why they have a lot of clout and political power. these really big multinationals use this political and economic power to basically dictate food and foreign policy. they speak with one voice and they decide what the pesticide regulations should be, what nutrition labeling is. every aspect of our food system. they partnered with the biotech industry, which can also buy public policy. there was a report on the biotech industry and it turns out that there are 100 biotechnology companies lobbying full-time. of those come they have hired 13 former members of congress and 300 former staffers of the white house and congress. so the biotechnology industry, they have a lot of clout. wal-mart and monsanto are partnering up in some ways. one of the ways was recently with engineers and genetically engineered sweet corn. you may remember it from last summer. food and water watch and other consumer groups were trying to get wal-mart because they said they wanted to be sustainable and to not buy this sweet corn. but they did buy it. and when wal-mart buy something, it creates market. monsanto plans to have 40% of the markets for sweet corn to be the genetically engineered variety. of course it will not be labeled. so that wal-mart is going to release their lobbying records and we need to take a look at that. the model is basically putting pressure on suppliers to cut costs and use every trick in the butt to book to do this. i go into great detail in my book to deal with this. we don't have time this evening. but one of the things that wal-mart has done effectively, it buys consumer goods and a high percentage of products comes from the developing world, especially china. grain traders were the biggest proponents of mobilizing the food system. they find it advantageous to process and grow food or it's cheaper in countries where the environmental laws are weaker than they could have an easier time dictating policies. increasingly our foods are being produced in these countries. if you're talking about organics, it is difficult to verify that in the united states that the product is meeting the standard. we can imagine how this is happening in places like china. >> in much of this and other programs online that booktv.org. >> we have allowed a human rights nightmare took her on our watch. in the years since doctor king's death, a system of racial and social control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow law. a system of mass incarceration that has doctor king turning in his grave. the mass incarceration of poor people of color in the united states is paramount to a new caste system, one that schulz young people to decrepit schools and brand-new high-tech prisons. it is a system that locks people into a permanent status, it is, in my view, the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> booktv's first online book club with michelle alexander. you can watch or online at tv.org and read the new jim crow. join us live online at twitter and facebook with your questions or comments on the new jim crow. >> i would like to move to the role of publishers. it used to be that publishers would take care of all distribution and production and provide the advance. the series of services let them take a very hefty cut. now, you don't need production because you can print it on the web and you don't need an advanced because it doesn't cost that much to write. you don't need the distribution. so what is the changing role of publishers in this world where production and distribution are starting to be taken by different technologies? >> there is a lot in there. i actually disagree some bird the production and distribution, tasks involved, whether digital or whatever -- i think that is a very easy thing to do, to think that digital is free. it is not. there is a lot of backlash over some of the early books. [inaudible] there is a conversion process that takes place and there is care and feeding that must go into that. the early days when you are just giving books to get them into an internet format, first of all, there is still production, not just costs, but an entirely new competency of books and presenting mess. when you talk about children's books, i've talked about a publisher that produces children's books. >> if that is true, surely that is only true for the first copy. everyone there after it's free. because there is no marginal costs to make 10 million copies. >> yes, you lose paper printing binding. its marginal cost of the paper and printing and binding. the other thing is shipping. >> end of the warehouse. [laughter] >> there is a deep infrastructure needed to support digital operation. the other thing that i have mentioned about the state of the publishing world today is the future of reading and publishing and where your book is going to go. will there be a complete swapping out of physical media due to digital media and film, photography, that is. i believe there is not going to be a swapping out of books. children's books are different. i knew 10 years ago that publishers were in a way where they can't be jumping tracks. we are truly supportive of this message. we're continuing to support the printers and additional business. instead of a third business, get to a place where we are not talking about the conversion of e-books. we're taking what used to be in a physical farmer and putting it on the digital side. the creation of digital products and creation from products of construction that we can see with the author, developed to be a completely new product. the role of publisher, i think with that scenario -- is really the heart of what we do. it is really bringing that story and shaping it with the author and bringing it to marketing in the best possible way. i think that exists in a more exciting way to talk about the created digital products. >> it may be the only role, actually. there's almost nothing left otherwise. >> i say that's wrong. [laughter] [laughter] >> i will say this. my partner is a publisher. not mine, but she is one. i had a very explicit arrangement about who's doing what here. again because i came from or what a foundation, i was skeptical of everything. i thought, i can do that, i can do that, i can spell check. but i was wrong about a few things, i was right about a few things, i've learned a lot in the process. having an editorial is great. i could have hired a great writer through the process. the distribution of the physical, i ignored it completely. i am advertising against the nation's bookshelves. no person can afford to distribute 20,000 books into hundreds of bookstores and libraries all around the world. digital doesn't only do that because you cut off the physical marketing. that helps support the digital. there is a level of demand regardless of format. the actual marketing, my campaign manager named craig, we built this gravity plan, army plan, and harper & row got me on msnbc and all these things that would make it very hard for individuals -- that is a network game. a rolodex gene. there's a number of people that can make nothing happened. the flood of authors cannot all pull that off on their own. so i found that i was wrong that publishers are useless. [laughter] and i was glad because i wanted to make sure that we both both each other and had a good life. and i've learned a lot about the excitement and the upside and limits about what individuals have and you sometimes have to create your own digital presence. there is a flood of readers and writing out there in words -- tweets, blogs, books. have you discerned or convince somebody that you are worth their time? your attention is the currency. whether you watch a cat play a fiddle on youtube or reading about the future, but is an equal choice to some people. [laughter] [laughter] >> is an outright? we are competing for real estate -- mental real estate. some extra riders competing for it has just -- a publisher who knows what they are doing can add a little extra weight. >> i think that that is true, but you are an exception because he wrote a best seller book. the shelf life -- some books don't make into bookstores. we are living in a different world. i agree in this world that publishers are crucial and really worried about booksellers because that little person is beginning to disappear. outfits like amazon are transforming what has reached readers. there is a movement in the other direction that i think very few people have noticed. there were about 350,000 new titles published in the united states last year. that is a 60% increase in paper. many books were self published. independent authors put these books online and they have something to say. you might claim that there is a lot of garbage among that but i think that there's a lot of good stuff as well. i really feel that if you look at the publishing industry, i don't know if you would agree, but we are witnessing the transformation in its structure. some of the intermediaries are moving out. somehow the public is moving in strange ways. it used to be said that books are written for the general reader and now they are written by the generator. >> eucom oxus another programs online at booktv.org. >> one of the things that always grabbed me was the report within encapsulating the mentality pretty well. it was done by mark kaye. it's like, look, i don't do research because charities produced goods. things like product, buying a microwave, i think research actually captures the prevailing ethic among donors. part of my book is really a type of plea. there are good and bad and some in the middle. many read them so that they survive and the others don't. >> with little accountability and measure of effectiveness, ken stern looks at the world of nonprofit on "after words", sunday at 9:00 p.m., part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. >> you're watching the tv on c-span2. we are on location in las vegas at the annual freedom fest conference. one of the speakers here is senator rand paul. and also the author of this book, the tea party goes to washington. senator, this book came out when you were first elected. in the year 2010, you wrote it and it came out in 2011. how would you assess the tea party today and its influence in washington? >> we started and i think we were equal parts to both parties. we were unhappy with those who voted for the bank bailout, also unhappy with obamacare, those are the two big issues. now we have the supreme court ruling and i think if anything, the tea party may be rejuvenated by its opposition. i think maybe you will see a resurgence of the tea party trying to have an influence on who wins the election. >> when the tea party first started in 2006 and 2007, were you even think about running for office at that point? >> no, i was not. december 16, 2007, i went to the reenactment of the boston tea party, it was also the time to my dad's campaign was starting to hit nationally. then it grew and i went to some other tea parties. the first one i went to was in 2009 in kentucky. and the senator was talking about not running and others were talking about him not running. so i showed up and i was at my friends little league game and i said i will take 20 minutes off, i will go down to the square and there will be 20 people like me that are mad about the government. and i showed up and there were nearly 1000 people there. that is what my new something big was going on. >> at that point, did you think about electoral law? >> no, i was toying with the fact that if he doesn't run, i might. but many of the rally said there are enough people out there like myself. i tell people that i would sit at home, it didn't unhappy watching news, listings at the tv and go about my business. but everybody else was doing this. everyone was becoming unhappy and that that was exploding and the republicans were doing the right thing either. that's when i started thinking about it. >> a lot of this is about the 2010 campaign. some of the misrepresentations of who you are. what were some of those examples that you would like to point out? >> the tea party, a lot of people characterize it as not being a movement. some rich guys in new york were phoning the tea party. i never met any rich guys from new york when i was part of this. i never really -- it was so decentralized that it was city by city. there was like 10 different tea parties, sometimes to tea parties in one town. they always communicate with each other. this really was a bottom-up movement and the movement that really chastised both parties. a lot of us were very unhappy with republicans and when president bush said the free market that i have to give up on -- i had to give up on it and capitalism. that disturb a lot of us. we were unhappy with republicans and democrats and felt that we needed something different. >> in your book you wrote about how in addition to being a tea party or a constitutional conservative, you've been called a goldwater conservative by supporters and critics. it is both accurate and an honor to be described as such. >> yes, interestingly the conscious of the conservative was published in shepherdsville, kentucky. i met the publisher and he gave me an original copy that was printed there in shepherdsville. i have always been fascinated by goldwater. >> when you think of barry goldwater and conservative and libertarian, is there is a difference? >> well, in some ways the word conservative has been watered down enough that people are not sure what it means. george w. bush ran as a conservative. but he double the debt and he was very much a profit center himself. president obama is making it even worse, but we were not happy with george bush. many people consider themselves libertarian constitutional conservatives with a limited government. >> you wrote this in before it he spent any time in the u.s. senate. after couple of years, what would you change, if anything? has your thinking changed at all >> i would say that going up there, i understand more now how there is an impasse and how we are having trouble getting things done. i don't understand, even though i'm in washington. as i tried to take ideas that many democrats have said we have to do, but i can't get any democrats to talk to me. the media narrative is that we will not talk to them. i have had appointments with several different senators trying to get them to work on social security reform. they can be saved for 70 years or 75 years or really if we grasp what is good right now. it was 140,007,000,000. that discourages me and it was part of the problem. we can't count pennies, much less the billions that were cut. >> you have a new book coming out. >> it talks about people who put dirt on their own property. these are wetland violations. we think that you shouldn't be putting people in jail for regulatory crimes. in the old days when you put people in jail, there was a difference of criminal law and tort law. they had to prove that you intended something. we are not putting people -- there is a man in jail in southern mississippi for 10 years without parole for putting clean fill dirt on the part of his land. sometimes it is moving dirt from one part of you went to the other. the clean water act since you can't dump things into the waters of the united states. i agree with that, no chemical companies should be allowed to dump chemicals. but putting dirt on your own land is not the same as dumping chemicals into the high river. >> are some some of these issues we have dealt with in the senate? >> yes, i brought some families. the sackett family from idaho. they were being assessed as 70,000-dollar fine. there is never any rainwater on their land come they are told that the wetland, they looked on the website and the governments that are website is not perfect. they were raising bunnies and they were fined $90,000. it was the wrong license. they said that it can pay us within 30 days with a credit card. $90,000, this is a middle-class family. but if you don't, we will find a $3.1 million. these are the kind of stories that we have reported. these are the stories that should make americans mad and should say no more. this is a big government that has run amok. >> what is your biggest frustration in the senate right now? >> the debt is unsustainable. we are borrowing $60,000 a second. we have to cut spending. it is just not domestic welfare spending, but in the military as well. i tell conservatives that the real compromise is believing in a strong national defense and we have to compromise and say, you know, we have waste in the military and domestically. the pentagon says that they are too big to be audited. that is an insult. they spend $700 billion per year and they need to be audited and we need to figure out how we can save money in the military. there is $124 billion in the budget unaccounted for. we have to do something about that. >> how do you foresee the debt ceiling and sequestration of a? >> i did not vote for the next debt ceiling raised. last year when we raised the debt ceiling, we added statutory caps and we have exceeded those a dozen times. they exceed the caps from last august that say that you're not supposed to spend more than this and then we raise them. and they just deem it to be okay. eighty out of 100 say they don't care what the rules are. many ignore their own rules. forty-eight hours is not enough to read most of the bills. but it is at least someone occurred just last week they put one up for 12 hours. they said we don't care what the rules are. i think that's why the american people are unhappy with congress because we do not obey our own rules. >> we are talking with senator rand paul, in his first book, the tea party goes to washington. he has a new one coming out called government bullies in august of 2012. one of the side issues that you have a address in this book is where your name came from. we are at this libertarian conference. are you named after someone? >> no, but i still get that question. my former name is randall. my wife kind of gave me the nickname. i did read all of the books when i was young and i am a big fan. when my wife said you need to be rand paul and not just randall arendt anymore, i really wasn't running for office. i did knows it would be such a big deal. the first reporter talked to me and was very fascinated. >> what school did you go to? >> i went to duke medical school and did my residency nontechnology. >> you practice at all? >> the senate won't let me do it for money. i do it for charity. i go around the state into charitable surgeries. the senate has some crazy rules. if you are worth $100 million you are a u.s. senator, you can make zero earned income. but i still do some charity work and i do miss medicine. when i ran, i thought the rules were different. in the house of representatives, they did let my dad practice and there were some limits. but he was allowed to practice. but in the senate, i am not allowed. i've asked them to change the rules, but they are not into helping me. >> who is on the back of the book? >> that is my wife. it's a candid picture. she helped with my book and allowing me to do the project and to run for for office. >> what does she think about being a senator's wife? >> she wasn't too excited about the process of me running. there are times when you are attacked by your opponent. character assassination. one of the things we talk about was on our anniversary, right before the election, the media accuse me of something about my religion or college or something. she hadn't made any comments, but she came out on our anniversary and said do not mess with my man, and the rest is history. >> what is your history with governor romney? >> i have endorsed him and i said i would endorse a republican nominee. it doesn't mean that i will sit passively and not be critical of i disagree. not everybody agrees. i don't agree with my father all the time a republican. i try to be polite about it. the week or two after my endorsement i have mentioned that i was concerned he said that he could go to war with iran without any congressional authority. i think the issue of war is really important and it separates me a little bit from other republicans. the constitution intended that the power be separated. specifically we vested the power and the legislature because executives are so prone to war that we wanted to divide the power up. i'm very concerned about a decade of two different wars and i will do whatever possible to make sure that there is a debate in the u.s. senate and congress, should that be that something that people want to do. >> there were some supporters aren't too happy. >> my dad and i have always got along. he was well informed that it was coming. we waited until the campaign acknowledged that they didn't have the delegate. there are some people who love my dad so much and want him to win. i would like him to win. the numbers are down and some supporters are not willing to admit the numbers are not sufficient. >> your father's loss of his well-known. what percentage would you say? >> we believe in an original interpretation of the constitution. but even when you think you're coming from the same basis and foundation, we do disagree on occasion. always very polite, they let me still come home for thanksgiving and i get to sit at the adult table most of the time. [laughter] >> finally, what is your standing in the republican party in washington? >> i think it's okay. i try very much not to insult people. i try to work with both sides of the aisle and both sides of the republican party, the many different sides of the republican party. there are times that you will disagree with people and i think even in the senate i will work with many people from the democratic side on issues of internet freedom and ron wyden is an open guy in that sense. we might not agree on economic issues, but i'm civil libertarian issues, we agree about what it unshared ending the war in afghanistan. 64% of the public is ready for the war to be over. even republicans are 50/50 now. we won the war, we have killed bin laden, we disrupted the terrorist base. that we just don't have enough money to keep creating nations. >> one more question, what do you think about the fact that sometimes democrats use you as the evil bogeyman in their campaigns? >> i think that that means that you're being objective. but i think that i am not easily identifiable. i don't believe an empty partisanship. i have written on air force one to try to bring home my point is that foreign aid could be used for bridges here. i suggest that we let me come home at a reduced tax rates and take that money to build bridges. i've tried work with democrats on that. i've worked with pipeline regulations or they are going to exempt the old pipeline. i made them take that out because the old pipelines were the ones that were exploding. i think sometimes i'm not as easily pigeonhole -- pigeonholed as some others. i am proud of the fact that i don't give out my principles. sometimes i find like-minded people that have to be democrat. >> we are talking with senator rand paul, his book the tea party goes to washington. a new book coming out and it is called government bullies. this is c-span2. >> here is a look at some of the upcoming book fairs and festivals. the virginia festival of the book runs through sunday march 24. this annual event features several authors including douglas brinkley, and john lewis. it is also the new orleans literary festival that we will feature, it features presentations by william smith and patricia brady. florida will host the venice book festival in april. it will feature author presentations and readings in the historic theater in venice. the annapolis festival will be held in annapolis maryland on april 13. jake tapper and hannah rosen are all scheduled to present books. then montgomery will host their book festival. forty vendors of exhibitors of children's education and about 45 authors and put presentations. booktv will be live and check booktv.org for updates and a light schedule. please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area, we will be happy to add them to our to our list. post them to her while facebook.com/booktv. we can e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> for the next several hours, booktv is five from the 2013 tucson festival of books on the campus of the university of arizona. we joined in progress a discussion with author timothy egan. on the life and career of edward curtis. >> in 1904, roosevelt invites him and other natives to come to his inauguration. they want to see these people parade around pennsylvania avenue. edward curtis is invited as well. and he talks to them over several days. his portrait is going to be taken and he asks how to dress. he has a single army blanket. well, that is what the u.s. government gave him when he surrendered. so he took this picture of geronimo. he has a great look of defiance and he was part of the sioux tribe. red cloud is probably the only native warrior leader who forced the u.s. government to surrender on his terms. he got a pretty good treaty. he is 90 in this picture, live to be 92 years old. he is best known for a quote where he said, wightman made many treaties with us over the years. all i remember is they broke them. he also became very close to edward curtis. this is one of the pictures were edward curtis was very respectful. he didn't show his eyes. one of the few pictures were edward curtis did not show his eyes. my friends are going up to see the festival tomorrow, and if you can get there, i suggested. i want to show chief joseph here. he was going to a husky football game in 1984. and i thought, wouldn't this be cool to have him there? he is living on a reservation 30 years after the war where they were chased through that yellowstone national park and canada, where he said i will fight no more forever. he is still living as a prisoner of war. they invited him to seattle, took him to the football game and asked what he thought. and he said that i saw a lot of wightman almost fight each other today. [laughter] i don't think this is good. [laughter] >> that weekend, curtis has into the studio and he takes his picture. you see the way his hair is upswept and the beats he is wearing and all the other ornamentation. all of those things has importance to his life. you can't wear your hair a certain way and lets you have scalped a live person, your status -- your hair is an indicator of status. joseph goes home in a few months after this picture was taken, he dies. the official cause of death according to the doctors is he died of a broken heart. that summer he is invited to bury joseph. edward curtis is invited to put him in a decent grade. today you can see a monument on the reservation. so curtis got to know him. this is what started the change in edward curtis. i'm running short on time, so i will summarize here. over time as curtis lost everything, his wife and his family fell apart. four children -- the children later sided with him, but it was a terrible divorce. his wife got most of his studio work and many of those great masterpieces were broken up in his studio, smashed in the midst of a divorce. he is living in a men's club in seattle. for the last 10 years of his time. he is living and in details all the famous people to address me at my usual way. so if you go to the club in seattle today, it is likely we would see edward curtis staff. that is how he paid his friends. in the 1920s, he disappears entirely. he has a deep depression, checked into a sanitarium, he stopped drinking with people. it looks like he won't finish this. but he gets revived in late 1920s with the help of his daughter. he goes to the far north for his final shot of this north american indian. i really love this picture. he is a bear society priest as well. so he goes to the north. what does he shoot? smiling faces. look at that. that looks like a portrait you have taken on a couch in the 1950s or something. he goes to the north and he is ecstatic. he is in the arctic circle, and there are no missionaries. [laughter] >> writes to his friend and says that some misguided missionaries find his way to this place, because the elements will do their duty. [laughter] >> is ecstatic because he finds the culture intact and that is what he wanted. culture intact. so he goes up to one of those little villages. he is almost six years old. he goes to a little shack and he is so happy and euphoric. another thing is that is one of the comanche indians. they were the most fiercest tribe in the southwest. the apache indians were afraid of them, the americans and mexicans were afraid of them. everyone feared the comanche. when he goes to shoot his pictures of the comanches, people are in their sunday clothes and short hair and he shoot them as they look. the once fearsome lords of the plane are living on a postage stamp sized reservation. he does just to spice shooting that picture. one more, and then i will take some questions. here is line of winter, ages eight years old. he lived 1952, age of 84. he loses the north american indian in 1932. they get his copyright. and they sell it to a boston bookseller for a thousand dollars. all of these copper plates, all of these projects, just give you a sense of that, there was an auction earlier this year of a single volume of edward curtis, it sold for $10 million. the highest paid for a photographic image. he loses the thing entirely. he had a single room apartment in beverly hills shooting stills for westerns. he hates it. well, in the last three years of his life, he has come upon the north american indian. and she is stunned. she said is he still alive and well, he was alive at that time. she started correspondence with him. over the next three years he tells the story of his life. he talks about chief joseph. he talks about how he got the money and his proud of what he did. he said did you know that if you go to one and, you have to come close to look at a north american indian? he is so proud of this, but he himself has lost everything. she records his wife over a back-and-forth correspondence. so he does get his worth. he does in 1952. in the 1970s, a group from santa fe, a photograph is the busiest, he took some of the copper engravings. and they go to a bookstore in boston and they go to the basement and there is all of this stuff that they have. they buy the lot of all of these copper engravings and that starts the modern renaissance of curtis in the 1970s. today you can go to the galleries in prominent cities. as he has worked for the most important thing, and i'm going to close on us, is the native people are the folks who came to appreciate edward curtis for two reasons. one is the language, what he did to preserve the language is absolutely extraordinarily important. the second as i traveled all over indian country for this book. i went almost everyplace that curtis dead. every place i went there were pictures of people would say that my great-grandfather. i can look in the face and see my family. i can see somebody who connects to me. i see humanity. the most important thing though, and i will read a quote from a native poet. he did make them he did make them immortality and the humanity. the poet said these are the faces of real human beings. looking at one of these people brought tears to my eyes. i felt that i was looking into memory in blood. he was a moment lost in time, never before have we seen indians in north america is supposed to be losing their sense of the world. that was his last achievement. thank you. [applause] [applause] >> thank you. [applause] >> okay. can you hear me? [cheers] [inaudible conversations] >> we have a few minutes for questions and answers. if you're going to ask a question, please go to the microphone. if you will stand in line in either aisle, i will take questions. i must tell you that there is a statue of the north american indian on its way. it shall be on display. [applause] okay, let's take some questions. >> you just answered my first question. my second question is will be working on now? >> well, i cannot tell you. i lose a little bit of it when i tell about it. but let me go back to the one thing that i forgot to mention. mainly from academia, he posed his subjects. i didn't mention this in my talks. the criticism misses the central point. he was a portrait photographer. what do they do? they pose people. but he would spend time asking them how they want to pose, what facial expression when you have, he never denied that he was anything but a portrait test. but he was a documentarian and an artist and a portrait photographer. >> you had to take long exposures in those days because the recording measure was so slow to absorb light. when he's shooting something by raging river, this must have been determined as technical problem for him. >> yes, it was. i'm glad you asked that. he details a lot of that. he spent a summer with his kids. and he had a tent that was called the studio. and they would manipulate a back-and-forth to give different light settings throughout the day. people would come in and pose for them in the tent. he would go to riverside, for example. and he would wait for the light to change. as i mentioned, his camera was not flexible. then they had to get the thing back to the studio as well. the studio work is also interesting as well. they would spend all night on single pictures sometimes. he and his technician. because they would do edgings of these final prints on the copper plate. there is almost no pixelation. it is very clear in its final composition. even when the cameras change, everyone was suddenly a shutterbug. he used a glass negative and that is what he preferred. >> how much of it has survived? >> it has been quite good. they put a long time getting it back together. google it, it is preserving american posterity and it's in pretty good shape enact okay, another question. >> thank you for the story, so much fun to hear. what about your methodology as a writer. and this one compared to other projects you have worked on? >> well, this one was a great book to work on. the life story of curtis, i really was expired how a person starts with nothing. as someone who has a chip on my shoulder about easterners, the smithsonian would turn him down, here's this guy from seattle and he is always fighting these eastern elites who don't think he understands. one was to go into the letters and he kept up a lifelong communication with his best friend. he wrote back and forth all the time about who he was in love with. even during the great depression he kept the correspondence up. you could see this in the highs and lows. at one point his friend said he won't be able to get out of your hotel room because your head will be so big. carnegie hall, he gave the show. everyone applauded and said this is great. so my first methodology was to immerse ourselves into the man and the voice. letters and diaries and etc. this is the way i write books. i went to the indian country and took pictures i can spend all summer but i wanted to be able to describe this and i wanted to understand everything. .. >> and it takes me a year or year and a half, i try to write a thousand words a day when i'm in the middle of the. >> we like to get attention of. >> we have more time for q&a. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv live coverage of the tucson festival of books. coming up in half an hour contributors to the book "ban this: the bsp anthology of xican@literature," then the co-author of seal team 6 and brandon webb, author of the red circle will talk about their experiences and u.s. navy seals and katherine power's and barbara madison horowitz discuss case studies of sick animals and how they can help with human suffering. a panel on the alamo will conclude our coverage from the festival. we will be back in 30 minutes for more from the fifth annual tucson festival of books. >> here is a look at some books being published this week. activist and nobel peace prize winner jodie williams recount her life and work in my name is judy williams:the vermont girl's winding path to the new york peace prize. in saving justice, watergate, saturday night massacre and other adventures of the solicitor general, robert bork reminds us firsthand accounts of the collapse of the nixon administration. a professor of modern arab studies at columbia university analyzeds the united states's role in the conflict between israel and palestine in brokers of the feat:how the u.s. has undermined peace in the middle east. former governor of nevada of bob miller recounts his life in some of a gambling man:my journey from a casino family to the governor's mansion. in young titan:the making of winston churchill, michael sheldon recalled the early life and career of winston churchill. and in here i am:the story of tim and renton, war photographer allen hoffman recounts the career of the late photojournalist who was killed by mortar blast in libya in 2011. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week, watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> we had this incredible inability to digest information processes in our brain. we started to get where we could be a little bit faster but we develop the system called f 3 e a for fine, fix, finish, exploit and analyze, a cycle you go through, you find somebody, you fix them in a location at a time now, finish by capturing or killing, you exploit whatever you capture, you analyze that and learn from it. basically learning cycle, and we would do that and we could go through that process but it would be painfully slow because we are operating with different organizations, not all organic to mind and different agencies, intelligence agencies or what not. this may surprise you but not all parts of the government work together seamlessly. here we are at this cycle and these things, what we call blinks between the parts and one element would find a target but when the information got to the people who fix it with a predator or something to make sure they are there then, time would have passed and accuracy of information fidelity would have passed, then it would be passed to the rate force. again you had a loss like the telephone you whisper around the room and it is unintelligible by the fifth person. we are trying to do things in that situation, this madness. and so we started, we went on a campaign to fix that process, bringing in different parts of the organization, building our intelligence capacity, given ourselves a mind set that was different before and before it was if each element did its part of the process, they could take great pride, we succeeded and did what we were told and we liked that clean and said nobody is successful and let the whole process works. the definition of winning is the same for all of us only if we win this fight. that was different from what we had. by the summer of things got really bad starting in late march of 2000 in iraq when the country basically melted down and we started operating as hard as we could. and the operational templates, how fast you can operate. and we realize the size of za a zarqa zarqawi's network we would not be able to hit it at once, we got to 18 raids a month or about one every night. we thought we were moving at warp speed, literally we thought this is the most amazing thing we have ever done, we are the most efficient and effective special operations task force on the face of the earth, we were, but we were still losing. so we came to the conclusion that we have got to speed up so there had been a fixation on just going after the senior leaders of the organization, high-value targets, decapitation, we came to the conclusion that wasn't going to work. we started the war with the idea that if we got zarqawi, it would fall apart. if the key person is taken out does it really get worse? i worked in the pentagon. it made it a lot better. we realize you have to go after the people who do the work, the people who do logistics, communications, pass information, build car bombs, communicate, take those out so we came above the strategy. philadelphia loves this but i used to tell people it is like rocky balboa and apollo creed. we are going to hit them in the midsection and hit them a lot. from august of 2004 when we get 18 raids, two years later the same month, same force, same fight, 300 raids a month. that is ten a night. if you say that is a lot, that is impressive, that means every raid guy on the force is going on a raid at least one way every night. every pilot is flying one or two raids every night. these raids are not patrols. this is not, going in the door, somebody getting shot. extraordinary. to do that you can't use previous systems. you have got to be able to bring in this intelligent on an industrial scale. we got to the point where instead of plastic bags of information on a target, we would start to exploit their computers, their phones, take biometric data, it would be pumped back to west virginia from the target to see if we ever had that person before and if we ever had any dealings with him. we would move the documents that immediately, scan them, send them to multiple places in the u.s. and everybody would be analyzing at the same time and we would be trying to turn this, to learn as quickly as we could and we got to the point where we could hit three targets a night from the initial intelligence. we would find joe smith at 9:00 at night because we have been looking for it, we would find out from what we got on that target about john doe, we might hit that at midnight and another at 3:00 in the morning and the reason it was important to go fast is because terrorist networks repair themselves very quickly. as soon as if we were terrorists, as soon as mark is captured pretty soon i am going to hear about it and the first thing i do is move my location, change all those things, connections that i have and collett cutbacks because it moves to repair itself so you got to be quicker than they can repair themselves. both the hit targets and quicker than they can promote new people to develop new leaders and overtime we started seeing the relative age of leaders of al qaeda and iraq go down and the relative effected as go down because of that and so the off tempo became the rocky balboa strategy of kamel it as fast as you can so it can't breathe. and over time had the decisive effect, we're actually did along with a number of other factors. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. you are looking at the gallagher theater on the campus of university of arizona. if you minutes put tv will be back with more live coverage of the 2013 tucson festival of books. >> host: powerful members of congress in state noncompetitive seek often hold fund-raisers outside their district to increase their leverage over other members. number 5, congress spends more than $100 billion every year on well over 200 programs that are not authorized by law and number 6, congress routinely raises the social security trust fund to cover general revenue shortfalls. >> guest: if you look at the appropriation bills which have not been done last two years because of political dynamic that is going on and you go in and say we are appropriating x amount of money and you look at how many programs, it is up to $350 billion now of programs that are funded that are not authorized. which tells you there is an imbalance in congress, how do we appropriate funds that we should not be spending money on. it tells you the power of the appropriation committees and the power of pork or benefits when it comes to the states and what is most important, most important to actually look good in oklahoma, the amount of money i can direct or is it more important to think in the long term what is the health of our country going to be in the long run and how we make those decisions? and politically it puts you on the losing side of every argument based on the force up here. you have to work hard to explain yourself and your state. >> host: members of congress frequently do not have the opportunity to read the bill they are voting on. number 8, one of the more secret and anti-democratic ways in which congress spends is directing money in report language that only members of the committee can vote on or amend. number 9, each year congress spend countless hours preparing and debating a budget resolution it has no intention of keeping and finally number 10, congress circumvents its own budget limits and avoid public scrutiny by exploiting its arcane budget proceedings. >> guest: those are all true. >> host: the budget resolution, we are about to begin that season in february. is a waste of time. wikipedia -- >> guest: right now we have a $3.6 trillion spending, the big criticism of the last two years is congress is gridlock. oh really? how do we authorize spending $3.6 trillion? corporate gridlock spending money we don't have on things that are not absolutely necessary. that is what we're gridlock over. and we're gridlock to make ourselves look good to our constituents. there is no gridlock when it comes to spending your kid's future in washington. we wouldn't have spent $3.6 trillion if we had a budget last year. but we did a continuing resolution that passed which means it is bipartisan, passed the republican house and democratic senate and the president signed it and yet we borrowed $1.2 trillion we didn't have of which i contend $600 billion was wasted. literally did no benefit, directly for the citizens of this country other than those who took the money to administer or develop or give out the program. in a want, you could look with a want and just say every program, stand up that is actually effective and efficient and what you see is minimal. the reason that is so is members of congress have an oversight, congress haven't done their job, they turn a blind eye and say it is hard to emphasize, and get criticism when i do so therefore let it go so it goes back, now in that see our last year, $350 million worth of programs were appropriated money, that had never been authorized by congress or authorization had lapsed. it means the of the rising committees in congress aren't working. if we are going to appropriate money whether it is authorized or not why not just have an authorized appropriating committees and put the mall into one? we totally ignore our own rules. >> host: how much fear is there among members of congress of their constituents of criticism of not being reelected? >> guest: it run the gamut. you need to look at maybe a larger perspective. i was a businessman long before i was a physician, built a business, i became a physician as an older individual. i was known as grandpa in my medical school class and practiced for 25 years. my goal was to be a physician. i wasn't at the risk of my populace of it than my reputation with my physicians and my patients. if you put it in context it depends on the goal of a house member in the house of representatives or senator is. if the goal is to fix the problems of the country, to create at least as good a future for the next generation that follows as we have, and if that goal is above your personal goals of getting an office that has notoriety, power and position, you will be fine because you are going to keep that fear in perspective. your number one goal is physician, notoriety, and the secondary goal which helped you get to that goal is to secure the future, what happens is how you value your position on certain policies changes. that is not in your, that is not terrible. that is just human nature. so i make the point in the debt bomb that if you are ever going to solve this problem, if we are ever going to secure our liberty and the freedoms for our kids and our grandkids, we got to keep -- quit sending politicians here. >> host: did you get any hostile reaction from your colleagues from the debt bomb or breach of trust? >> guest: i did not breach of trust. i don't think many of my colleagues have read the debt bomb but i am sitting here talking to you about this. i make those beaches in my own caucus and i do that on the floor. i am ok to take the consternation and criticism of my colleagues. if i think our country is in trouble and it is in trouble we are bankrupt. it is a great article. if i take generally accepted accounting principles, same thing c-span has to operate under, same thing every business has to operate under, most county governments operate under. we right now have $88 trillion of things we have to pay for we have no idea where we are going to get the money. over the next 75 years. eighty-eight trillion dollars. that is about $1.05 trillion more in bills coming do than what we have over the next 75 years. if you didn't grow government or the economy at all, why have we put ourselves in that position? so the fact is we are now, the federal reserve has increased its balance sheet, created $2 trillion worth of funding money that printed $2 trillion worth of money and ultimately the pain of that is going to fall on the middle-class and the very poor in this country and it is going to defeat what both parties say they want and yet we don't have the courage today to make the tough choices even if it means we lose our seat to secure the future for this country. we put ourselves first instead of the country first. is not hard. any american citizen, go to our web site and read it, there is a lot of common sense ways to save money. just this last week the air force announced, this is a great example, in the federal government this year we are going to spend $64 billion on i t projects, $64 billion. of the g a o says at least half of that will be wasted. it will never get completed. it will never do what it is supposed to do. we have a program in the air force we said you ought to cancel this. we said this two years ago. you ought to cancel this because it is never going to work. here's how inefficient government is. this last week the air force canceled it. spent another $100 million on it before they canceled it. they paid a settlement fee to cancel that, $8 million but two things didn't happen. the person that was responsible for that contract didn't get fired and wasn't held accountable and the company that didn't provide the service didn't get sued to get our money back, taxpayers of this country. nobody runs their households that way. most state governments don't operate that way but we are totally incompetent when it comes to spending america's taxpayers's money. why do we continue to waste $32 billion a year on i t programs that don't work for the federal government? that is 60% of what to take additionally out and that is government, why do we do that? where is the leadership in congress that we are going to get this done? we have a special subcommittee that looks at this, oversight it, look at the bad actors, look at the bad actors in government and we are going to demand the people to make that decision that fired and companies that are not performing paid the money back. none of that happens. so you can be fraud the federal government, you cannot perform on a contract and do it with impunity. that is because members of congress are basically not willing or inexperienced to not know that you ought to be able to hold people accountable for what they say they are going to do whether it is a federal employee, a procurement employee or the company that is providing and that is just one example. happened this week. >> host: what was the business you built before you went to medical school? >> my father started a machine remanufacturing business for the following products and i started a plastic lens, plastic lens division and i did that in southern virginia. i lived up here for ten years from what was it? 1969, summer of '69 through 2008. >> host: does the company still exist? >> guest: it was sold and parts of it have been sold so portions of it still exist. >> you can watch this and other programs on line on booktv.org. >> good morning, good morning, thank you. i moved up my flight and i am going to go to the airport right after literally right after i spent about ten minutes here reading and i am going to read something quite short on the theory that less is more which is what i try to tell my writing students, speaking of them i have -- one of the reasons i am hurtling back to cold philadelphia is because i have to hold office hours tomorrow with a lovely little ivy brach. i best to get home and sleep well or try to sleep well although my wife and i say it we haven't slept well since the jimmy carter administration. thank you so much. you holding us up, that is the key. i bet i won't even have time to formally say thank you and goodbye so i will just say to miles our eloquent is little segway introductions have been and tell him goodbye and all the rest of view for coming. i am supposed to read some things. i was fretting what that would be because i wanted to make it very short. i wanted to read from the end of the prologue. one of the things i was trying to stress in the talk that i gave yesterday and the panel that i appeared on the day before is that for all of the undeniable, appalling, dark side of the ernest hemingway, there was also the light, there was this bone of generosity, and sometimes it came out best when a child was involved and not his own child necessarily, an ill child, who wouldn't respond to that? but he seemed to respond in a special way. i was thinking of reading something of a key west passage and i said no, that would be like a piece of coal offering something to newcastle so i am not going to read that. i am just going to read this little moment from the end of the prologue and indeed it is the end of ernest hemingway's life. when everything is lost, but there is still something there. look backward 17 days from his death to june 15th, 1961, in rochester, minnesota. man in our psychiatric ward of st. mary's hospital at mayo clinic is writing a letter to a 9-year-old boy. the man right in too -- two small sheets of notepaper in big, round, legible hand with his trademark downhill slant, irreversibly damaged ernest hemingway, his inner landscape now a paranoid's nightmare, has found within himself at the end of his life the kindness and courage and momentary lucidity, not to say literary grace to right 210 mm-hmm beautiful words to a kid he likes very much. when i feel revulsion at his board behavior toward other human beings, i read this letter, 210 words with the sentences pile driven by contain feeling and acute observation of the natural world would have been at half decent output for workday. he has a congenital heart did -- heart condition. he is the son of hemingway's doctor who was one of hemingway's favorite duck hunting companions. in the last week, hemingway has been brought once more from idaho for treatment to mayo. not long after this note to fritz hemingway willful is foolish doctors at the world-famous kranick into believing he is well enough to go home to idaho. almost immediately if the boss's shotgun will go off in the sunday choir of a house that sits a couple hundred yards up, the steep slope from the west bank of the big wood river. the patient in the locked ward of st. mary's on june 15th, 1961, has just learned doctors, savior's son is in a denver hospital. in idaho hemingway and fritz and for its's father liked talking about the yankees and rainbow trout but none of that will ever be the same again. st. mary's hospital, rochester, minn. june 15th, 1961. deer fritz:i was terribly sorry to hear this morning in a note from your father that you were laid up in denver for a few days more and speed off this note to tell you how much i hope you will be feeling better. it has been very hot and muggy here in rochester but the last few days it has turned cool and lovely with tonight's wonderful for sleeping. the country is beautiful around here and i have had a chance to see some wonderful country along the mississippi where they used to drive the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north, saw some good bass jumping in the river. i never knew anything about the upper mississippi before and it is really a beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall but not as many as in idaho and i hope we will both be back there shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences together. best always to you, old timer, from your good friend who misses you very much, mr. popov. best to all the family, and feeling fine and very cheerful about things in general and hope to see you all soon. . papa pa is these little last sentence he said the paper among some much room, still the beauty. thank you very much. [applause] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, live coverage of the fifth annual tucson festival of books being held on the campus of the university of arizona. now starting, a panel of contributors to santiano rivera 11, , anbsp anthology of xican@literature" , an anthology of chicano literature. >> it is my pleasure to introduce the panel on the new book "ban this: the bsp anthology of xican@literature". i am a proud veteran of mexican american studies and it is too bad they didn't lead me to anything good in life. [applause] >> before we get started, i just wanted to say something. this isn't really about books. it is about our children and it is about the freedom, and i just want to tell you we are really blessed to have m a s students with us today and i was wondering if you would stand up for a second. could you stand up for a second? [applause] >> these are our children. that is what it is about. i want to introduce you to the editor of "ban this: the bsp anthology of xican@literature," one of my favorite people in the world and somebody who's doing the battle, santiano rivera, poland, activist and as i said to these kids we met earlier today, this is a compliment, he thinks it is 1971 so he is an activist. i asked santiano rivera to introduce his panel of people. i am a little fan boyed out with these folks right here but thank you. i will turn it over to santiano rivera. >> hello, welcome, thank you all for coming. it is an honor to be here with you. [applause] >> i am a publisher, independent publisher and daughter and being here is a dream come true. it is an amazing story, we're bringing it to you in person, it is very humbling. it was humbling to meet the students and how this is directly affecting the -- i was able to reach out through the internet through social media and go coast to coast and bring together you can see one of the slides has all of the offers i was able to contact. some of marocs stars like gustavo arellano down here on the end and other ones who are up and coming and part of the next generation of chicano authors. one of the things we're trying to tell these kids this morning is they are not alone and the whole world is watching. it is mind blowing and the little surreal in a twilight zone kind of way that we are in this day and age talking about censorship of literature and art and history. let me thank you again for coming. let me introduce everybody. you already know luis, one of my heroes, i tell him on a daily stock, a lot of literature, american literature, walt whitman, and i like to push e e elr elreo, their american literary treasures and both need to be recognized. [applause] >> we are talking about people who are afraid of the word chicano, it is one of those loaded terms nowadays because of the way politics rules but we are talking about american authors. this is american literature. this body of work, these studies, it is american studies. it needs to be recognized and embraced by everybody. we are just like everybody else. that is part of the reasons that we are here. let me introduce the rest of the panel. to my left we have andrea serrano from albuquerque, new mexico. she is and author, put and musician, she has an amazing poem, i hope you guys check it out. to her left we have an educator, author and poet and she is from san diego, california and she has mind blowing amazing pieces, in particular is about the game that kids play as children called border patrol, you have to check it out. on the end we have another rock star with us who was gracious enough to lend his talents to this book and into this panel, this is gustavo arellano. if you don't know, he is coast to coast in weekly papers and some dailies too, if you ever open the paper and you have seen the stereotypical character guy, and the sombrero, he answers questions from anybody and everybody about mexicans. this is him. he is also the editor of the ioc weekly in orange county and author of paco usa:how mexican food, america which he will be talking about later today. it is a real honor for us to be here with you and to present this to you and i am going to hand it back to luis. >> some panel. [applause] >> santiano rivera and i spent a lot of time talking about this issue on twitter, all morning. the thing that has been haunting me lately is -- i thought would be a useful first question, i cannot comprehend why when the issues begin to transpire here, that the first national media coverage was in france and england and russia and the united states didn't pick up on it for quite a while. i am curious. i am not saying any kind of conspiracy or any other thing, but i don't understand what that is about? i know you will have an opinion. i was wondering what was it that kept the mainstream media from pursuing the story for a while? >> this has been going on for a long time. we have been talking about the chicano movement which goes back decades. there was a chicano journalist in l.a. ruben salazar who was killed by the police during the chicano moratorium. i have been reading a lot of this stuff. i noticed in the 70s the word chicano was part of the national lexicon in those times. was spoken about in congress, it was -- there was an article in the wall street journal about a bunch of chicanos in east l.a. and what was going on and over time we have gotten away from that word and that history that that word has become a very scary word because people's fear and ignorance. a lot of them media and a lot of people have clung to pushing that word and anything related to that word off to the side, it is tied in a hushed kind of word so i think it is almost accepted in the media nowadays that it has anything to do with mexican-american studies or chicano studies or anything, doesn't even relate to the studies, if you are not talking about immigration, the media, or a latino voting bloc, the media doesn't really talk about it. they will use words like latino or illegal. if you use words like mexican war chicano it scares people for some reason and it shouldn't. we are talking about books. we are at the tucson festival of books, which has the tinge of irony to it when it is in the same state where books are banned. that is a bizarre kind of irony. i just think that people are afraid and people are usually afraid because of ignorance. if people would just look and read these books, read luis alberto urrea's books, read occupy america or any of these band offers and for your own opinions. these are just words, this is just a book, these adjust ideas, it is just literature. i am hoping that through us being on c-span you people being here who may be from out of town, you will take something from this with you agree with it or not and say we don't need to be afraid of literature, we don't need to be afraid of books. hopefully that will carry on. >> when we are talking about coverage in the media, why wasn't this a big deal? why didn't this can national coverage, it is because it is about chicanos and we are pushed to the margins and he raise oftentimes and looking at the literature it wasn't just books by chicano on others that were banned, it was not the majority of the books. often times where left out of the national conversation, and being from new mexico, we don't make national mia a lot of the time and when we are talking about something like banning books we're talking about an act of racism, we fight it every time about education and funding, we are talking about racism and no one wants to talk about racism any more. there is this idea that chicanos don't face any racism and we're not a racist, and why don't you just get over it already. you don't get over it because the people in our books in bosses and passing laws against it. this is an just happening in arizona, it is right on that line. and while we being ignored my media? we don't want the cause for what it is and it is an act of racism. >> it is an indictment of the pathetic state of the american mainstream media today. during the 70s chicanos were all over. even the word and coverage, one of my all-time favorite magazine covers came from sports illustrated. it might have been 1970. the picture was the great minnesota vikings quarterback and the headline was simple, the toughest chicano. plain and simple. sports illustrated said this was a man who was chicano who for the rest of the country, that is not a mexican name. sports illustrated just created it as an aside. how sad that 40 years later, we have to beg the media to cover not just stories of controversy but stories that treat latinos and chicanos as normal people outside illegal aliens savages or poor unwed mother or that, it is an indictment of the me and especially nowadays with media consolidation and media layoff i see it getting worse and worse but the great salvation is social media, people who are not trained journalists who become loggers on their own and spread the message across the way. i first found out what was going on with mexican-american studies by bloggers, by facebook, by twitter. i did not have to rely on the new york times or the los angeles times or any other media outlet. that is an indictment of the media but also shows the path forward to get past these know nothings and go to the heart of the matter and teach what needs to be taught. >> it has to do with being in the eyes of the mainstream media the others are ignored. basically says to me and to you and to people who aren't chicanos you don't exist, you don't matter, your history doesn't matter over and over again. it is racism, it is crap. >> that will be the headline. it is crap. lizz huerta. so when decision comes up, i am repeatedly reminded there is no banning, there was no banning, you were box, you were banned. that is really interesting thing because as i told somebody who wrote a long thing in my facebook page explaining how lizz huerta's. are available in every bookstore in arizona the problem is what happened here, people can think of another phrase for it but banning. boxing doesn't work. is like newspeak. boxing seems to me away to say it was soft banning. the short hand has heard tucson and hurt arizona because the short hand is book banning in arizona or book banning in tucson. check out on google. there are twenty-eight million hits under tucson book banning. that is scary to me because that to me does not reflect tucson, arizona. that is the picture in the country so i want to ask about that, the sly use of terminology to manipulate what the story might be. i am not going to say we are all angels either but there's a weird use of newsp can bureaucratese to repackage and repurchase the agenda. talk about being boxed rather than they and. your book could have been called box this but it would not have worked. and actually the idea for the title came directly from luis alberto urrea when we were talking on twitter and angry about it and talking about terminology and you ought to publish an anthology and college ban this and i said that is brilliant. i am going to run with it, but -- >> too much coffee that morning. >> it was brilliant. talking about spinning something, in an age of spin and rhetoric. ever since the 80s when ronald reagan rolled back some of the laws that said you had to present both sides of the story and had to present evidence, that was the birth of things like fox news. nowadays you have spin on everything. when this happened people came out of the woodwork saying you are lying, that is a lie, they were not bad, they would just box, put in the closet. kids still have access to these books, just over there, have to go and get them. which is insanity because we're talking about students and one of the teachers, he has had to reformulate for me -- for years of teaching, and inside of his head, he can't let certain spots get out of that. he has a legal thoughts. you start putting away books, and boxing, what are you really saying by that action? what you saying by doing that? this book is illegal, dangerous. and the words you are reading our going to work your mind and do awful things like go to college and get educated and become a productive member of society. and an educated brown mind. that is what you're talking about. some of the media does it too and these guys, griping and complaining and not really a big deal, and they go to the library. and get some of them, interested in learning and reading, and the task within itself. and some much extra effort to do them on their own, and that seems silly when they can have it part -- the spin that people put on it. and people talking about putting barbwire around students and teachers, to even think things that are in trouble. >> the ban or the box or whatever you want to call it, and it makes me really mad because when i heard about all the other laws, and passing copycat laws that made me angry but the book ban hurt me and and i was lucky enough outside of school to enter it xerox copying, and having this read them and seeking out, and finding all of this chicano literature using words that made sense to me and using ideas that opened up my mind and to hear this is being taken away hurt me in a way that nothing else has heard and when it gets explained away, it is an insult to my intelligence and an insult to your intelligence, to the students is that you want to take away our books? do it on your own time on saturday mornings after school, and i commend you for that because at some point we get to the point, we don't need a system to paraphrase, we were not meant to survive anyway. we were not supposed to be part of it anyway, doing it on your own, keep doing it that way. the fact that this book that brought us together and published this book, going around a system that didn't want those words to exist the fact that you are still here and you were not meant to be any way speaks volumes about who you were so you are not going anywhere, we are not going anywhere. [applause] >> i think it is terrifying that you would take something, when you ban something and say you are putting in not box because when does it end? what is the next thing you're going to put in the box? when right to take away is done incrementally to the point you don't notice. put a frog in water, in cold water and turn the heat up slowly and it doesn't realize it is being cooked until it is dead. that could very well happen. it is things like this are allowed to go on. boxing as opposed to that is terrifying the spins a put on language and the spin they put on taking something away that is sacred and absolutely necessary. >> what is disturbing about this is the people who are advocating this are using excuses to justify what they are doing which is identifying specific books as somehow being evil and subversive and so terrifying that we cannot have our tucson children be exposed to reading them. you want to talk about newspeaker they're justifying their own excuses and what is more telling is some of these books, i know how they got to is this. mexican-american studies of anything mexican american studies does is automatically evil so let's ban it all, that shows they don't read single book there. i found this out yesterday. i thought i knew all the books but one of the books on the list is called two badges:the life of moe and lisa. that goes to back where i am from, orange county, calif.. evil conservative orange county, it is taught in the schools and 9 mexican american studies the high school because it is an inspiring story, true story of a woman who grew up in policy as a gang member, turned her life around and is now a police officer going "ban this: the bsp anthology of xican@literature" gang members and the inspiration. if you want to get on the conservative level it is one of the classic pull up your bootstraps horacio alger fables that would be lionized all across the united states if it happened to a non mexican woman that wasn't being taught by mexican american studies but the fact that it is medieval. they can newsp call they wanted to use the term in spanish the very idea that this is happening just shows people in charge of tucson unified the nichols. [applause] >> they told us they could stay stuff -- english translation is -- a ball of dummies. >> talk about spin. dummies. god bless you. >> and don't forget, the evil hypnotic burrito to him a tie students to do his bidding apparently. and curtis acosta, all these guys. i am really interested in some of these issues on a greater stage and i am always nervous. i said this you last year. i am nervous to come here and lecture tucson. makes you feel like a carpet bagger. i come from chicago to tell you how you people in arizona should live but i was lucky enough to live here and my wife was a reporter, a tucson citizen. you were a good home for me when i worked on devils highway. it feels like home in a certain sense and it concerns me and it concerns me about the bigger home as well and we were wondering if in fact what is happening or has happened, it is not about the books, it is about larger issues, the fate of the kids and so forth. is this the canary in the coal mine. is this the harbinger of what may be afoot elsewhere? >> this is obviously something that has been going on forever. how long have parents and groups been fighting against classic train them american literature, great of wrath, huckleberry finn, i know why the cage bird sings. your books and this is going to happen forever and ever. what is so galvanizing, is taking on a body of work. mexican-american studies, all the offers were mexican-american or chicano. people are finally realizing again worse now than we were in the past, and all across the united states. and we know from the 2012 elections, we had a candidate, recycling deportation, he was going to get people to vote for him. and mitt romney and a day later, and applaud that. who cares we have been demonizing them the past 25 years and let's demonize them now. in this sense it is galvanizing for those in the trenches, if i'm going after literature you find subversive you would already be going after civil-rights and language, or you really want 150 years. they are going after books. and learned the language and the love of literature and if you are that desperate, let's fight, let's do it. [applause] >> i like what luis alberto urrea said about the feeling of saying we are here to save you when the reality is people of tucson and across arizona have been fighting for a long time and the reality is in new mexico we get this idea of why is this happening here? we are a majority state. it did happen in mexico in 1996 in a tiny town, sisters and teachers started teaching chicano studies. it was not a big deal and then all of a sudden a principal who was also chicano, mexico got this whole identity thing going on, three days of panels. >> that is another panel. >> but the principle started coming down on them so they stopped teaching chicano studies and started teaching teaching tolerance curriculum from the southern poverty center and they got fired for being subversive and won their lawsuit and now they teach in albuquerque. we forget that this happened in new mexico. we are on the verge of it happening, the first female latino governor who is horrible for our state and horrible for the latino people. she is part of that read branding of republicans and she is gunning for undocumented people, she is gunning for women, she is gunning for everybody and a lot of us in our other states, we're watching what is going on in arizona but a lot of us are watching the fight that is happening because we are gearing up to fight in our own state and we have to support each other? these borders don't exist. these borders don't exist between us we are sovereign people and we deserve and have to demand our rights and so definitely no one is coming in and saying this is what you need to do, tucson, because we haven't figured it out, we don't but we do know we have to fight. .. >> the internet is great, social media is amazing and i wouldn't be here without it. but i think part of one of the bad things about social media is that there are big important issues that get passed over very quickly. and i think that now that this struggle was brought to our attention last night, this is a federal issue. there is a ban on ethnic studies and this has gone beyond going on at the state. this is a federal issue and this should scare everybody. when that is threatened, people need to pay attention. >> if they are going to start banning those books come and they are going to look at everyone else. it has been going on for a long time. but people usually take up arms and fight back coast-to-coast. it kind of gets glossed over and that angers and infuriates a lot of us and i'm hoping we can bring more people to the fight they cannot deny that it is american history. >> yes, i remember a professor in the history and she debated dinesh d'souza and he told her, well, we all have political correctness and she said oh, no, this is about historical correctness. and i thought, that was a really interesting response or it i do agree with you about all of us being together. he felt that tucson is a common ties spot. and i think we are pretty traumatize nationally as well. it is getting harder and harder to process what things to get up in arms. the issue that hits us all home is that this is about us. they may come after these guys right now, but then what? and that is the thing that haunts me. i always think them for upping my book sales. and it's a tough issue and i just want to say, don't you think that telling young people know makes that seem sexy? [laughter] especially around literature he was lacerated for who he was some students, it's like they are in a landmine, but the worst happen, blowup and you'll find out that you are still together after it blew out. that is interesting to me and he told the students and take the shuttle and go over with it. talk to me about the hope. what is the hope? it is kind of easy to be jeremiah or elisha and callout doom. fire raining down on all of our heads. which is how we feel. is the hope in the power of being denied? is it in the unity of these people? i always look at the back bookshelves where i knew that stuff was hidden. you know what i'm talking about. [laughter] >> yeah, so what is the hope, do you feel? >> i think that the hope of these kids, like you said, being told no. you can't read this. that makes it a taboo kind of inequality that is going to draw people even more to it. i was talking about people are kind of afraid, i think, not just here, but coast-to-coast, stick your neck out and make a stand and say this is wrong, especially if you are a bigger organization than you have some clout. because you are afraid of what is going to happen and the consequences and i like to tell people that i am a worse case scenario kind of guy and what is the worst thing and in this position, if they are speaking out, what is the worst that they can do to them. if the shrapnel comes off without landmine, i hope to inspire not only you but the next generation of kids to not take no for an answer and do not take the authority of a school board or a politician and to question authority and to act on their own. i'm an independent publisher. and i don't have that kind of a bankroll behind me. this is all easy to do that. i was able to go as an idea and these kids can do this too. these kids can form their own poetry readings and their own chat chapbooks and go out on the street and appear to come together in their communities and libraries are powerful places. [applause] >> we always there. we need to support public libraries. these kids can be just as powerful as any politicians, but they have to step on that landmine and we have to stand with them so we can do together. >> i completely agree and one i think about this, it's hard to have hope. and when you're hearing about things, like the book banned in the attack on the people, one that was passed in california so it is hard to have hope sometimes these students come together and it feels a little bit better. i feel like i'm going to be doing this ever and that is okay. the hope is that we continue to do this together. because we are going to be fighting like this for a very long time. i am okay with that if you are. [applause] one of the things that i notice is that artists are always in the forefront and trenches of the revolution and of change. we are always right there in the trenches and what is coming next. if you look at history, the emotional historians of the world, the books were laying the groundwork for tremendous change even though it is scary at times, sometimes you have to go through the scary stuff to get to the good part. so i have a lot of phone and i'm kind of excited to be a part of it. >> definitely a shout out to the librarians out there. you guys are the best people in the world. by far. the best people in the world, severely underpaid and i'm a reporter and i know the depravities of mankind the idiots always lose. so in that sense, the idiots were on the school board, this is actually the best thing that could have happened think of it this way. okay, maybe the system could be passed on and that is a phenomenon and nothing really happens. let's read, authors together, let's have these panels, start doing things on social media. a friend of ours from houston, he actually started a movement and he is trafficking in books and these communities and centers and they say this is a bunch of donated books, don't tell the feds, but here are these books, he got a shout out from "the new york times" opinion page. you guys are the ground soldiers and you have our undying support for those all across the united states and you guys have to take the lumps and bruises. so many people have had to take once and bruises so we can all enjoy what has ended up happening. you can never suppress a great idea. >> debts. my last hope is directed to you beautiful young folks we are on twitter and facebook and we will answer you. i want to tell you that this is the big hope on my part, this is the united states of america. we can all vote. [applause] we are reserving last part of this event for questions or conversation if you want to talk to us. there are microphones on either side. if you want to step up to the microphone, let's chat. i would love to hear what you'd have to say what any of us can answer what you would like to ask. don't be shy. >> we should all give our twitter handles. mine is all one word. all lowercase letters, minus the same. >> [inaudible] >> i am at sjrivera. we both have the same quarter together. yes, sir? >> american media is like the big yawn. people in america don't want to hear about it, they want to hear good news. they want to hear stuff that resonates with the consumer culture at but they are focused on celebrities and not stuff. but in the end, i think that there is also an element to how this all works. and that is because the media is so dependent on the money that comes from marketing. the market people that are marketing, they don't want to hear about it. they want the easy message and the broad coverage and they want to get their stuff sold. >> but they do want to scare everybody that we are flooding the borders and bringing crime and disease and they want to freak out the redder the blue side, depending on where you fall. there is a huge crazing block and what they don't want to talk about any of our contributions to this country, including our history and literature and art and pretty much our culture. they don't want to credit it. people want to keep their head in the fan. one of the points i like to make about this is that yes, today is chicano studies and small maybe it will be african-american studies. what has happened, what are the worst things that has happened is a niche of the mind. [laughter] thank you for your questions. not a lot. >> when i talk about the mexican american studies program, it was through the documentary presage knowledge. and i am so glad that my community, that the schools are taking this up. i was really glad to be a part of the social history part of it and that there was a cultural aspect and about a week go, they came down on mexican american studies and for all of the organizing that was happening, the anglo community, there was nothing we could do. it made me feel terrible about tucson and there was a tucson that i didn't know and that i didn't live in and that i didn't want to be a part of. then another good thing happened. the banned books were took up and started to be distributed. this is a way that we come together in terms of how do we choose our issues. so okay, we'll take some banned books, and here they are. >> thank you. one of the things that makes me crazy about this is the focus put on tucson. this is kind of a phoenix that session. you guys did not do it. you guys did not do it. there is a big fat dude not only on the children but on tucson, arizona. you know, that really outrages me and hurts. frankly, i just don't think it's fair. there are bullies that push this place around and you all have got the wrong pr people. we always break it down to an easier denominator. arizona or tucson. tucson bands the books. it's like go to tucson and bring the love and chicanos right -- they write good books. it is unfair on so many levels. i really don't know. the tucson folk festival is one of the things that i can do. and you're doing it. it moved me that bill understood this that he set aside a place to quietly sit with the students this morning and we would be able to have the students here. that is tucson. that is tucson. [applause] >> yes, sir? >> my name is jim roderigo and i have been driving all night from colorado. >> god bless you, brother. >> it's been 33 below for a whole week. anyway, i have come here to support. thank you, c-span. i'm over there watching you and i appreciate what you do. i wrote a little book called more than an american. because what we are, we are first human beings. they say american citizen americans are, and in the end, we believe the same way and we are human beings. there were two students doing a book report flight kill all the migrants. and i'm in a family where i'm the oldest and someone will remember that. just like when they say to legalize things, we have to do these things all over and one of them is learning english. and i think that they should. language is something that you cherish. your wife and your kids and sometimes you may dream and argue with them. the native americans take this so much. a lot of the schools, we were punished for speaking spanish. so round one, we don't want another one. so focus a little bit on that. i love kids and we are behind you guys. thank you so much for all the work that you do. thank you for coming in. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> my name is mike. my first comment is in support and my second one is the point of being contrary. i think it's good for all of us to continue to stir the pot often in the some people view a lusty as a form in ethnic cleansing. if you start banning the history of the chicanos, you ban other ethnic stories. that is a form of historical and cultural genocide. they are a local tribe. and i support everything that has been put on the table. i think that chicano literature should follow history. several comments came from the table and one was i am a student of history. the reference to historical correctness. and here is my point as a human being, as a human rights activist, how do you reconcile islam and entirely ignore indigenous people in this country? [inaudible] the genesis comes from the black mountains. so how can chicano studies entirely ignore that? because if you claim this, it is another form of cultural imperialism. [applause] >> i say that respectfully to my chicano brothers and sisters. >> i do not mean to interrupt you, but i think that you have different chicano studies across the country that have different kind of curriculums. many of my brothers and sisters are very welcoming and inclusive of our indigenous roots. some people like to preach about this and i know that a lot of the time you have indigenous tribes that are at odds with chicano studies student. we are all part of the same tribe, as you said. chicanos come from indigenous peoples. that is part of her history as well. the indigenous history is included. we are one. we come from not win. the borders that they have invented and john across our land, we all come from the same place. we all walk across the same continent. chicano studies is inclusive of the indigenous roots and history. if you look at some of the programs across the country, it's a very big part of it. i am sorry that you might feel that we are at odds, but we are not. you and i are one. we are all from the same place and we all have the same roots when it comes to that. to me and the rest of the panel, chicano studies is very proud of our indigenous roots. it is a big part of the movement. >> thank you. >> remember that when mexican-american studies were taken down, mexican-american studies were taken on as well. so unfortunately we are dictated by a larger clock and our time has run out. i am thankful to you for our time together and i hope we see each other out, we can continue to talk. [applause] >> by the book. thank you so much for coming. [inaudible conversations] .. books assets to releasing winter of 2014 and will feature abraham lincoln and amelia earhart. yale has announced the inaugural winners of their wyndham campbell literature prizes, will nine writers, fiction writers and three nonfiction writers were awarded $150,000 each. they were created by a donation from donald windham and his partner sandy campbell. the winners include jeremy scale, national security correspondent for the nation and the dean of hoffman of house of windows. for complete list of winners go to yale.edu. book expo america announced this election for 2013's buzz book panels in the categories of adults, young adult and middle grade. the panels will highlight offers jennifer senior, when the lower and matthew ward. for complete list of doctors participating in the panel's visit bookexpoamerica.com. several authors will be presenting south by southwest interactive, an annual technology visible in austin, texas, raise silver, amy web and douglas rochebomb will be selling books, it is operated by barnes and noble. the festival will feature a panel presentation on self publishing and graphic novels. south by southwest interactive will begin this weekend and it goes until march 12th. publishers weekly has compiled a list of the fastest-growing independent publishers from the year 2012. some of the thriving publishers included kelsey green and smithsonian books. the list sites hy e-book sales and market expansion as the reasons indy publishers have done well this past year. stay up-to-date about authors, books and publishing by liking us on facebook at facebook.com/booktv and call us on twitter@booktv and visit our web site, booktv.org and click on news about books. >> good morning. stacey schiff was a wonderful biographer of among others cleopatra, recently observed biographers all have two lives. okay in back? can you hear? in one realm, she says, to biographers, looking forward inning appearance. in the other you are moving backward with something resembling omniscience. what she doesn't say is along with the illusion of something like omniscience, the biographer usually has a lot of attitude on display. one can be worship full, a geographic, field pious, one can be at the bunker, muckrakers, one can defend or defame, expos, sensationalized, sentimentalize, one can be a myth buster or a mythmaker, not many generalizations can cover that whole spectrum but marcel proust could do it and did when he rose an early book before the big book, a little book called -- he says what in, 3 stores to us under the name of the past is not the past, in reality as soon as each hour of one's life has died it embodies itself in some material object and remains captive forever unless we should happen on the object, recognizing what lies within, call it by its name and set it free. as soon as each hour of your life has died it is embodied there in or under some material object which explains why it is so hard to clean out the attic. is not stuff, it is your life, piece by piece. it also suggests the power, the central role of the senses in connecting things. you have to cede to know is there to get it out and the idea that writing can restore something to less, that biography is an act of recover as brendel lineapple argues is applicable to biography and fiction and here is another thing the two forms have in common that has been splendidly put by phyllis roads who wrote in parallel lives we are desperate. that is the word, desperate for information about how other people live, because we want to know how to live ourselves. for me that is certainly true of biography but it is also true of fiction. and i want to give a single example. it is from docilely as steve's brothers karimov of them from a chapter called rebellion which comes right before the grand inquisitor. ivan, the oldest brother, is giving his views on the christian idea that there is an all-powerful, all knowing, benevolent god and that things will ultimately work out for the best. i've and makes his argument through stories and this is one of them. there was in those days the general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates so our general settled on his property of 2,000 souls, lives in palm and domineer is over his poor neighbors as a favorite dependents and buffoons, he has kennels of hundreds of pounds and nearly 100 dog boys all mounted and in uniform. i am sorry to put us all through this on a sunday morning, a beautiful day in key west. i really am. one day a surf boy, a little child of 8, threw a stone in play and heard the paw of the general's favorite haunt. why is my favorite dog lame? he is told that the boy through a stone that heard the dog's pa. so you did it. the general looked the child up and down. take him. he was taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. early the next morning the general comes out on horseback with the hounds, is dependents, don boyce and huntsman all mounted around him in full hunting parade. the servants for their edification in front of the mall stands the mother of the child. the child is brought from the lock up. is a gloomy foggy autumn day. capital day for hunting. the general quarters the child to be undressed, the child is stripped naked, he shivers numb with terror not daring to cry, make him run, commands the general, run, shouts the boy, the boy runs. the general sets the whole pack of hounds on the child, the hounds catch him and care into pieces before his mother's eyes. they say -- i am sorry. ivan goes on to explain how there may be in the an all-powerful benevolent god and may finally be a future harmony which is achieved through human suffering but even if this is so and of course is far from a sure thing i've and says he would personally reject any harmonious conclusion that required the suffering of that 8-year-old. ivan doesn't say there is no god. he just says that if his plan for us involves such horrors, he cannot and will not accept it. he hands back the ticket. i was 18 when i first read this, and my younger brother john, 15, had just died a short three weeks after being diagnosed with acute leukemia. for me, he had it right. and this fictional encounter had more influence on my life than all the condolences and family support and help in the world. i loved reading the brothers karimov and found myself looking for help and everything i read. i like brodsky in at a correction. and his attitude toward paying bills. brodsky, he throws the mall in a drawer and he sits down to payton three times the year. either aren't the telephone company did not appreciate this point of view. still, with or without the bill paying, brodsky's life was more vivid than mine and more vivid than the lives of my friends, and it is as real as any character and a biography and so it was with book after book. i fell in love with small boats and sailing through swallows and amazons. my friend and i learned cool from caulfield in the catcher and the rise. and there was poetry, i had more than one teacher whose religion was elliott's four quartets, we learned attitude from yates and the greek anthology, and we wanted to come kraut and laughing to the tool and i loved this epitaph of an ancient greek sailor, greek anthology, translation by dudley fits, wonderful teacher, tomorrow the wind will have fallen. tomorrow i will be safe, tomorrow i said, spoke in that word. this is the nemesis of the spoken word, bite back the daring, and that would say tomorrow. we marvel that keeps's ability to imagine what it would feel like to be a billiard ball where rolling across the smooth table. and the emotional range of shakespeare's sonnets. if we were going to be safely knew it would be by literature. it was the french historian jules michelet they put it best to turn to biography, to life writing. history, he said, you could think he meant to include biography and fiction, history is not a narrative, it is not analysis, it is a resurrection. this is what brendel what apple has in mind by recovery but how you do it is another more complicated matter, i will not try to get into that this morning. but bringing your subject back to life is a great and where the goal. if i may quickly wrap up. to as propound's excellent advice, we might also want to add and make it live again. [applause] we seem to running a little early. >> not a question, but huge appreciation for you and what you just said. thank you very much. >> very sweet. [applause] >> i am scooping myself a question on want to ask you in a session next weekend but why not seize the moment? first time i ever saw you and that you was 2003 in boston, on the 200th birth day of ralph waldo emerson. of the new have written a marvelous book, but with a gathering of scholars and historians, critics, the hole transcendental gained appreciating emerson, a whole variety of angles and low and behold used up in the middle of this meeting and you said i just wrote this mind on fire book about that and you wanted it known you don't analyze them, you don't see the side, you don't do chemical tests on paper, or anything, you said i'd take him straight. i read him as a kind of uncle waldo and when he says trust yourself every hard vibrates to that you can fire the line, running through number of tests, you said i think he is telling me to trust myself, follow the gleam of light in your own mind from within, it cuts through a lot of what we have been talking about and hearing about this weekend in the sense that when all else fails we can take this. an extreme remedy but it is possible. >> they do talk to you. >> thank you. >> one more. >> this is the most moving lecture i have heard, pushing the right button. i have read all the books you suggested by rather than the teenager as you did. do you have any other workable suggestions of books we should read? >> if you haven't read the mall, read my wife's books again. american childhood to. nice, thank you. [applause] >> in a few minutes we will be back in the gallagher theater with more from the tucson festival of books. >> what started for me in 2006 i was a reporter in miami, there are seven men from liberty city, at first it seemed to me a bizarre spot, robert hogan dollars, to be seven men, ground war on the united states of america, the nearest power, and the fbi office, the collection was how did seven guys declare around it in the united states america it is ridiculous and there's an informant involved, early on was clear the connection was an undercover fbi informant opposing an al qaeda operative and that was the only connection to terrorism at all and i did stories in miami and kind of put that in my back pocket and overtime more and more cases being announced and a similar pattern, people charged with terrorism were involved in these fantastical thoughts in the office building but never had been on the road or the ability to fire weapons and those weapons were provided by an undercover agent for fbi informant posing as an all-time operative and a terrorist organization of some sort. right around 2010 i began to question how to figure out how many of these cases, how many of the hundreds of pieces of 9/11 involved real terrorists who were in serious imminent danger and those involving people with no capacity for terrorism on their own but informants providing them with a meeting and so i apply every year the reporting program. and a project that could take a year or more and said to him doing something that to the holistic look at all of the terrorism cases that came to the u.s. court since 9/11 and how many of them involved terrorism and how many involved those with no capacity for terrorism on their own and working with monica we produced a story that looked at that in its entire area and we found more than 500 terrorism, one of every two involved the informant that you can expect provided information and in the case of 150 defendants the informant either played a part in the plot or as in the case of 50 or more than 50 federal where he provided the means and opportunity for people on their own who never had that capacity. and the underlying part of the finding is weak and should dozens of men and never had capacity for terrorism, those who had capacity were very few, like the bombing of the subway system, and times square, these were danger of terrorism, and you count on one hand the number of people who pose a serious threat and the other is people like liberty city 7, going to trial right now, they never had the ability to acquire weapons that the fbi provided them with all the means they needed to go from being men on the fringe to the danger of terrorism. >> take the insight, the stories are quite astonishing. >> one of my favorite pieces are complicated but hard to tell quickly the one of my favorite pieces to tell is about a man in illinois and according to the document you don't know exactly why the fbi targeted him but they decided he was a potential terrorist threats and had an informant go talk to him and every time derek converted to islam, authored by his family for and working in a video game store and had no place to live. the day before the informant came in his car had broken down and the informant goes into the video game store and starts a conversation with him just before ramadan and in that conversation he tells that story, you could come live with me and he has a car and food and derek being religious as this must be the work of god and over the course of several months they talk about islam and encourage him to get involved and take action for the terrible things the government is doing and derek says in his brash way i want to smoke a guy, killing guy. he didn't know the name of many judges, but what if we tax the shopping law and derek said i want to do that and getting very excited about it and at that point the fbi has a sting in place that the major policy was derrick didn't have any money and the fbi needed over action. they needed him to acquire weapons and the informant says i know and arms dealer who can sell you grenades. i know you don't have money but the stereo features, if you to the stereo feature this he would take and in trade and here is the grenade. i don't know much about blacks are trying pretty sure no arms dealers going to take stereo speakers for grenades. said he goes to the shopping mall and the arms dealer is an undercover fbi agents. derek brings over hysteria speaker and hand them over and the agent hands over the five grenades and other agents russian and the restaurant charge him with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and he is serving 25 years in prison and what is relevant -- revelatory about that is he was a danger to himself, a danger to other people, during the sting operation, if it wasn't for you have probably would have ended up stabbing someone with a steak knife. he was capable of a minor crime at best but through this elaborate sting operation the government was able to go to the public and say here it is, another terrorist caught, another plot foils. >> you are journalist and historian as it were, you were able to talk to people and find out what they were thinking in this process and especially made an effort to get a sense of why the fbi would be doing this and what the rationale is from the euro point of view. >> there are a few people who work in the eye or critical of this but in general is a program, we find among the fbi, a general support of the program, and the fbi's view what they believe is al qaeda as it existed on 9/11, there is and has the capacity for terrorist organization like al qaeda to send them overseas, people who will commit a horrific crime. instead they are concerns about global. people already here in the west are disaffected and disillusioned, bad feelings about the united states and want to do something and they will watch and al qaeda video, jihadis video and that will inspire them to act and what the fbi refers to this as is al qaeda moved to this franchise model unable to create terrorism of its own and inspect them with this idea and carry out this attack and what the fbi is specifically looking for is people who are on the spectrum the fbi turns on one side as operational and the other side is sympathize so they want to find somebody on that line and the sympathizers' side, the crossover to operational and catch him before he becomes a terrorist and the sting operations are intended to draw them out and find those committing an act of violence and arrest them through the only means the fbi has which is the deficit, prosecuting them according to some sort of law which is conspiracy to you would use weapons of mass destruction but through the sting operations identified some first. it is easy to be sympathetic to the fbi's view. if you are a case agent and have -- bomber that building. of the subway system. you don't want to say let's ignore him and six months later he actually does commit an act of terrorism so is easy to understand why the fbi would pursue these cases but what i put in the book is there has yet to be an example of someone who on their own is incapable of terrorism, someone who is a loud mouth, who doesn't have any weapons, and meets an act to allow cooperative and says here is a bomb. the only people providing capacity is the fbi and the sting operations are an evolution of drug testing does where in the movies it is glamorize where a guy has an empty briefcase and the 2 people believe there's cocaine inside and they hand over money and the of the briefcase and they rush in and arrest a person. tasting like that works innocents because the data clearly shows if they're not buying or selling drugs from the fbi in a sting operation they can do it somewhere else. what is difficult to obtain is the weapons people would use in terrorist operations like a large bomb and there has yet to be that case where we have someone who on is done as a sympathizer, and an act of terrorism, just hasn't happened. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we have allowed a human-rights nightmare to occur on our watch. in the years since dr. king's death, a vast new system of racial and social control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow. a system of mass incarceration that no doubt has dr. king turning in his grave today. the mass incarceration of poor people of color in the united states is tantamount to a new cast like system which shuttles our young people to decrepit underfunded schools to brand new high-tech prisons. it is a system that's poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent second-class status nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control once did. it is in my view the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> get ready. booktv's first online book club meets at the end of the month. watch video of michele alexander at booktv.org and read the new jim crow and on tuesday, march 26th at 9:00 p.m. eastern joins us live online at twitter and facebook with your questions and comments on the new jim crow. >> this is a poem i first heard, in turkey. come whoever you are, wanderer, worship for, lover of leaving, doesn't matter. ours is not a caravan of despair. come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times, come yet again, come, come. a couple reasons this is meaningful to me is actually in the book sacred ground, what i look at the statue of liberty, a beautiful woman of welcoming, the inscription is bring the retired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, this notion of america, and radical welcoming and openness, bring your traditions, plant your seed and americans will and let them grow into institutions and congregations that are welcoming and open to others. that spirit of welcoming and openness is at the heart of the american mission, at the heart of the slum as well and nobody articulates that better or more beautiful. i need to confess i get emotional when i talk with people about the issues we will be addressing tonight. particularly the issue of interfaith relations and also the issue of the idea of america. right after 9/11 several of us, a lot of us gathered at a mosque here near u.s. c. and i heard a sentence that changed my life and it was this. to be religious in the twenty-first century is to be interreligious. it is that dedication that draws me to the way he thinks. so i am going to apologize only once for being emotional about these things. if i get choked up, just chalk it up to that but one of the great moments in his book is his telling about the genesis of this book. >> this is actually ramadan 2010, august of that year. i waking the 4:00 and have my last meal before i do my prayers that begin the time of fasting. .. >> it was an institution that was supported by the muslim community that would be a service to the entire nation. it was the fruit of their vision. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> booktv is back live from the university of arizona at the fifth annual tucson book festival. in just a moment, come into authors discuss their experiences as navy s.e.a.l.s. >> welcome to the fifth annual tucson book festival. we would like to thank the city of tucson for sponsoring this. the presentation will last one hour come including time for questions and answers at the end. please hold your questions to the end. at the end of the section, the authors will meet you and books will be available for purchase at the signing area. we respectfully ask you to turn off your cell phone. howard was born november 8, 1961 and was raised in georgia and went to cumberland college before enlisting with the navy. where he served as a search and rescue swimmer and anti-submarine warfare operator. he completed the necessary steps to be a navy s.e.a.l. he then worked as a special development group which was classified as a special unit within the u.s. military. following his honorable discharge, he cowrote the biography. he had graduated from marietta georgia and brandon webb was born in canada in 1974. he was raised mostly in california and worked on a fishing boat from the age of 16 years old. he joined the navy and was a warfare systems operator. he completed basic underwater demolition s.e.a.l. training and he was assigned to the s.e.a.l. team three. he's the editor and chief of a media commentator on snipers and related special operations and military issues. he is the co-author of the 21st century sniper, the complete practical guide and his memoir, the red circle. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] >> i would like to turn it time over now to howard for a presentation. >> good afternoon. can everybody hear me in the back? there we go. i will keep this thing up here where i can talk her into it. there is a lot of myths out there about navy s.e.a.l.s and the kind of people that we are and what planet would come from and i want to give you a cross-section of what it means to be raised in our country before i did that come i want anyone who is currently serving or have served in the military to police stand out. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] [applause] >> thank you all for your service. just so you know, navy s.e.a.l.s are a hot topic issue right now. chicks dig it and all that stuff. the guys you saw stand up is every bit important and we all have a mission to fulfill. without those guys come and nothing gets done. there is something happening in the country that i just don't understand. we need to love each other. let me talk about the success of that recently my first book, "seal team six", i was real fortuitous with the timing. [laughter] [inaudible] although i was accused of such a thing, it was fortuitous timing. i am more proud of this book than almost anything i've done in my life the letters i have done show me that i might have been spared for a reason. that is the "seal team six" book that you saw last summer. you guys are the first people in the first television people. easy day for the dead will be out in october. before that, i had to military success. does anybody know why they give you these metals? because they don't want to give you a raise. [laughter] silver star is one of the need is created and that will get you a cup of coffee. the purple heart, i have mixed feelings about that. i basically look at that as a navy marksmanship medal. just so you know, before success, this is how i grew up. i was raised and born to a 50-year-old mother. i was born two months premature. i almost died because the facts around my lungs have been developed completely. after that i was adopted and moved to a small town in georgia and a be used. daily. not like beat with a test, but be with the belt regularly. then i decided to run away from home. it would be nice if the federal government, i had a tough life, i can turn out like jeffrey dahmer, given that background -- but this is the house i grew up in. this is a good picture of the house. the house i grew up in had a sagging part in the middle. i stayed in the part that was not heeded because i was the adopted child. you can figure below my room. i have a hard time with kids today to have horror stories about how bad that they have it. my parents and give me an iphone. you poor thing. [laughter] but i told you that the success came to me abruptly. i say this in my book and i say it all the time. i went from rockstar to rock bottom. i felt good about myself as a member of "seal team six." you guys have all seen black hawk down. that is the only bad time i ever had and i was shot three times. i went from more than human, it was kind of like a wake-up call for me. got your attention, god got my attention. when i got shot, my thought process was this happens to other people. oh, my god, i am being shot. we are out of ammunition. you hear about people seeing a body on the ground and everything goes on slow-motion, i didn't see that, pitchfork or anything. but one regret that i did have was that i until the people that i loved that i love them enough. i was raised that you are a weak man to ask for help or tell to be loved him. you have to be a real man to tell the people that you love them. so i made got a promise. i think i was bargaining with him at that time. if you get me out of this, i will make sure to tell the people that i love that i love them. my daughter, rachel, she was sitting in the front row. when i came back from somalia, she and i really didn't have a relationship for about four years because i was in a dark place, wounded, divorce, lived in the jim beam bottle for about four years. but she can tell you now that i never miss the opportunity to tell the people i love. if i die tomorrow, i know that i was given a second chance and i was able to fill that. through all that, what brings me to my main point today is we are the best nation in the world at taking people and turning them into soldiers. we are the worst nation in the world of taking soldiers and re-assimilating them into society. you'd be amazed at the number of. >> host: stress letters we get. people are coming back, and they are asking for help, thank god. part of the reason is we have made it okay to ask for help now. someone who is a navy s.e.a.l. sniper, they always we must be okay, does it make you aware, this means that you need help. it makes me so mad when i hear young people today, adults do they say that if we would have had things like this country or that -- do you realize that everything in this country that we have is god-given? not one person sitting in the room, me included, deserved to be born in america. by the grace of god we were born into the greatest country in the world. we are americans and i think we have gotten to the point where we are willing to exist. let uncle sam help us out. let's make him responsible for our well-being. let me tell you that when uncle sam was dumb of me, i was sitting in a wheelchair in georgia contemplating suicide. i was no longer an asset, so i felt like i was a liability. the shooter that shot the modern feels the same way. i am out and would like to address content the skill set and how my going to feed my family clinics we have to find a way to get our soldiers, especially the elite soldiers back into society. i think part of it is this. i speak to a the loudest schools and colleges and i think somehow we are missing who is responsible for our children. every school that i speak at, teachers tell us it's not the kids, it's the parents. if i got a paddling at school, i hated going home because it was double jeopardy. you're going to get it again. teachers say now that if you discipline children now, it's not their fault, it's your fault. so we have made other people responsible for our children. that is a dangerous alley. i came home one day and my stepdaughter is on her cell phone in her room and i hear noise in the driveway. you see these little cars that have the tailpipes on the back. okay, look at the people driving those. to this guy drives up in my driveway, get out of his car, starts walking across the driveway, pulling his pants up, he has a chain hanging, a piercing in his lip, thing in his nose and a bunch of hardware. and i am carrying the trash out looking at him and i don't know if i am more appalled at what i'm seeing in his face or the fact that he's going to walk right past me to my door. so i got his attention and said hey, where do you think you're going. he said i'm here to get your daughter. i said, okay, get back in the car, go somewhere, put a belt on and pull your pants up, get the hardware out of your face, and instead of walking past me, talk and asked me to see my daughter and i might let you do it. so you guys know how that works. i go in the house, not an evil person. and i get is laid on me. you are being very judge mental. you're judging someone based on how they look. i said if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, it probably is a duck. she told me she hated me and i needed to grow up. so she came to me a couple weeks later and said you were protective and i just didn't get it. and i said remember that in life. if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck it's probably a duck. we have to take care of our kids. two primary choices in life, as americans we are not listening to this. except responsibility to change conditions if you need to. i could've stayed in the jim beam bottle. but when i came to the realization that something will change in my life, i have to be the one to change it. when you are in that dark space, it is not the light that moved. find a way to get back to the light. this is a country of people and those of you that know the book, this is the little boy that stepped on a landmine. he was dying from an infection. we bandaged him up and as bad as we have in the united states, we have some school shootings, we are not fighting for our lives everyday we don't have landmines in the playgrounds, we don't have rpg is flying at us as we go down the street. we are the most blessed nation in the world. here is what i think we are missing as a country is the ability to love each other. nobody ever asked what somebody's color was in the navy s.e.a.l.s, religion, whether sex was, if they were gay or straight or anything. the only thing we ever asked is are they american spirit if they are americans, i will go in and help you or i will die trying. i am not here to preach to anyone. but if you read john 150113, that says greater love has no man that he lay down his life for a friend. they're there are people willing to do that day in and day out way more than i ever did. so we have to appreciate those people. what you're missing about those people, they are doing it for love and not doing it to be a tough guy. they are not doing it to have a badge on her chest or so that kids think we are cool. they are doing it because they love their fellow americans. i will tell you one more story and we will start the moderation. this is how far firsthand that i have seen us as a nation. i am stopped at a red light and i look over to the right and there is a man laying in the road in savanna, georgia, he is laying in the road, water is running past him, i see him struggling trying to set up. and i thought i will change lanes and maybe help him out. my heart grew for a second because i thought these two young men get out and i thought, thank goodness, we still live in a country where people help each other. that would've been a dog, people would've helped each other. one gentleman snaps a picture. does his little gang sign, snaps a picture of this gentleman in the street. when i pulled over and picked him up, i came around behind him and put my hand underneath his arm right there and said, pull your right leg forward. and he couldn't do it. and i'm helping him and i tell him again if he doesn't get it, so i reach down to feel his leg and it is a prosthetic leg. long story short, he couldn't get up because of the prosthetic leg. when i carried him and sat down and drink some coffee with him, and he spilled more than he drank, this man was a veteran from vietnam. he had his leg blown off. he climbed into a bottle, never climbed out of the bottle. i would have been not manage several more millimeters would have been a closer to the bullet. just remember that you don't know where they came from and you don't know what's going on in their life. but regardless of what you think of that person, will we have to get back to his loving each other. i don't want to tell everybody that wanted to sit here and tell y'all that i love you, but i'm going to do it. i love you all as americans and thank you for coming. [applause] [applause] >> thank you, howard. we appreciate it. some of the things that the audience wanted to hear from you guys is that both of you, you had a time in your childhood growing up. it wasn't exactly easy with for the way that a lot of us had it. how did that prepare you for training and becoming a seal and who you are today? >> that's a good question. i just got back from africa. it's like everything is trying to kill you over there. i recovered from a nasty flu. i apologize for not being my normal self. [laughter] howard and i -- one thing i have noticed, whether it is howard or myself are a lot of navy seals, we come from these crazy different backgrounds. the one problem that i see what everyone is you dealt with adversity in life. i had a little bit of different upbringing. i left home at 16 years old as well. and for the most part i had loving parents. they were hippies were trying to figure out how to be a part of the navy s.e.a.l. team. i have actually worked on both from such a young age. i actually had a try scuba diving boat that i worked on. long story short, we end up taking this trip around the world and i made it to tahiti before my doctor may ask about when i was 16. i left home at 16 years old in the south pacific and on my way back and put my way through school and joined the navy and was an aviation warfare at the time that i was warfare operator. learning how to deal with adversity and understanding not, my parents let me play sports, they let me leave it is important if you do get knocked down that you give back up and learn from your experiences and keep driving on. i really prepared myself for that training. what i think of hers other guys as well. >> one of your things in your book says that you are in the middle of the basic underwater demolition and navy s.e.a.l. training. he said that there is a point that during training, i could actually visualize myself and that is when i decided i would make it through training with a tried and order a conference and i guess you are beat down mentally and you don't want to quit. that was after hell week. there is still down in your mind about something that is going to come up that could trip me up. i thought i would physically die doing it. once you flip the switch, like i am going to succeed or they will put me in a body bag. that is pretty powerful motivation. you can pretty much at that point congress anything. that was the defining moment for me because like i said, i had a picture of myself going back home and showing the one man in my life that i actually had the tried and on my chest. nothing is going to stop me now and that is the type of thing that you have to have your life. >> when you are in the middle of hell week in your instructors plea away from the group, instead of kicking sand in your face, they were begging you to quit. >> and have us saying that you don't want to be that guy. out of 220 students, i was that guy for the first five weeks. it was brutal. i trained with the regular navy fleet and i was mentally prepared but physically with the calisthenics, does not have a level that i should be in. i was on every extra duty, physical training, sign up, i had to show up early with a group of winners to do extra physical training. the fourth group of the meanest instructors, it is usually the guys that gravitate to that training. >> is like the wolfpack. i figured out pretty early on that it was more a mental than physical. they didn't like the cold water, they didn't like to be all that. so i have been there and done that. and once they realize that they couldn't break me, it was like i turned the corner and they keep you up straight five days per hell week. and it was probably like a 20-mile paddle around san diego. and her beau crew finished first. one of the instructors that tried to get rid of me, he jumped in our vote and he is yelling at other people, and he says if you dump your vote right now, and i said let's do it. so i said, okay, i'm going to flip this. i had that look in my eyes and they left me alone. >> i can't let my son read my book yet because he's too young for the colorful language. [laughter] >> tell us about your comments on the competitiveness of the navy s.e.a.l.s getting through the training and how that creates the camaraderie that you have among the navy s.e.a.l.s when you go out. >> first of all, also mail, ex potentially, then you have the guys that are graduating and when you get to the team, you think you're the most gifted warrior. there is something about, and i equated to being on the pro football team, there is just one super bowl. you will have the same mission, you're all trying to win the game. you have medics and guides. it's a beautiful thing to see and hold. just like i said, it's like a professional football team that dominated the super bowl and you come back and it's the highest of highs. if you do that same thing and it doesn't end well, we come back and man up and take responsibility for that. and we do something called lessons learned. when you do that again, you don't make the same mistakes again. i hope they are broadcasting this in washington dc. [laughter] [applause] >> that is what we have to do in our personal lives. that's what we have to do their own finances and families. that's what we do and we take responsibility for that. in our nation makes a mistake, they ought to fess up and say we did it wrong, but i'll tell you what, we are sorry, we will try to do it better next time. that is what it is like for those guys. the competition is there. but when it's said and done, we are on the same team and when you act cohesively, that is why the navy s.e.a.l.s are the best in the world. >> i think that covers it. >> brandon, i will ask you. what i love about your book is the navy s.e.a.l.s training. any time you have, you come back from deployment and you get to go to training. how do you keep that constant level of one to progress and not rest on your laurels and say we are to meet to talk? >> i think it comes down to the only easy day was yesterday. so you are not early on. a lot of the successful businesses on the outside. but it's a little bit different. if the operation goes that as opposed to the sales presentation, the consequences are little more severe. that is why we train all the time and if you consider normal full performance at 100%, we would train passed that level and train harder than we fight. the training more than prepares you for what you're about to face. sometimes we get into bad situations. that is why it is so important to train so much and at such a high level. >> you talk about the difficulties of coming back out of the navy s.e.a.l.s and readjusting. you were shot in action. how hard is it coming back and re-assimilating into life after being in a group like the seals? >> that is actually harder than being shot for five more times and going through that again. this elite group of people there are people who would jump in front of a bullet to save any life. to have that caliber of person, and you think, the civilians are screwed up and are not like that, and it's like i'm going to stab you in the back by making you not look as good. my whole adult life i have been in the military and once i had gotten out and had that, coming back into society was the hardest thing i ever did. and not being willing to admit that i needed help. and that was a big thing. the minute i realized i needed help, i got counseling for survivors guilt. it basically means something you deal with where you come out of a situation and in my case, 18 guys had died, one of them was my best friend. and i'm wondering why god let me live when people much better than me have died. it's something that i deal with every october 3. it's not as bad now, i have a lot of counseling to get me past that and decide that i will have another career that i love. the little things like being able to carry on a conversation. a conversation that maybe nobody in this room will understand. when i come back to georgia, population 920, they are talking about how much the water table is that i cannot relate to that. they definitely can't wait to this. they are looking at you like you have two heads. so it's better not to have this conversation sometimes. i think the military is doing a better job of reassortment waiting. especially the counseling that you get. i was given a check for this and had to re-assimilate the best i could. >> i love this part and i just want to read it and have you comment on it. excellent. i don't care how they vote on gun laws or school prayer, i want them to know what the heck they are doing and that they are made of that kind of unswerving skill that will not be rattled and moments that count no matter what is coming at them. i want to know that they won't flinch in the face of debate or danger or death. i want to know that they excel at what they do. you never even throw a punch in the name of freedom. whatever it is that you do, you're you are making a stand either for excellence for mediocrity. >> i think that for me it is one of the things that i had driven home in the seo community. they have a thing called aim high and mid thigh. the book towards the end, i try to share the lessons learned in my career and we are talking about the things that i learned from some really great mentors and in the navy s.e.a.l.s we reach outside of our own community and we really look to other leaders in the world. you're asking me about the leadership traits. if i had to pick three traits that i still follow to this day, the most important one is leading by example. and that you can't expect things from people if you aren't willing to do the same things yourself there's not a whole lot of leading by example. it's a sad thing. you have to put your career on the line for your subordinates. i am up for a promotion next year, i'm going to stand up and do what's right. i had a couple of those moments in my critter that i talk about in the book. i forget what the third one is. [laughter] >> it was praise in public and criticized in private. i run a media company today and have writers all over the world and ip people and i never -- it's going to be a private conversation. >> i have one last question for you. while i'm asking is, if you guys have questions and answers, if you could line up behind, there is a speaker over here and the microphone over here and a microphone over here. if you will line up, we will get you in a minute i look at your schedule. i notice that you stay busy. is that part of the training that you have gone and have committed to? what are your expectations for yourself? i will tell you that we have all heard of if you want something done, give it to someone who's busy. i did two or three presentations a week, travel all over and see 150 patients a week. that is my life and i love it. if it fills me and when i talked about the survivors guilt, i think now the reason that the i was spared was not only to make a difference with my patients, but reaching out to people like this and basically every second i will capitalize on making the most of it. >> other than i don't own a television. and i don't watch a lot of tv. but we have both lost friends. i recently lost my friend in benghazi, libya. glen doherty. it is one of those things that we have seen so many great individuals make the ultimate sacrifice. my philosophy is i don't have time to feel sorry for myself. i have to go on and live in part for these guys don't run anymore. >> we are going to go ahead and open up for questions and answers. but i'd like to put out a brief plug here. also the branding that was just recently published. the book was published, behind the scenes. number nine on the national bestsellers list. and also for howard's new book, an easy day for the double? >> no easy day for the double. >> that's coming out in october. if you haven't read "seal team six: memoirs of an elite navy seal sniper" and "the red circle: my life in the navy seal sniper corps and how i trained america's deadliest marksmen", i thoroughly recommend them. if we have questions, we can start with this gentleman. the questions are scripted. >> did you have to get any permissions or were your writings of you before you publish? >> mine was so dated, black hawk down makes up the bulk of my childhood. but i did send it to a retired general and he read it and advise me to take a couple of things out, which i did. and you don't want in your book. >> there were parts during my transition that i left out, which are sensitive and the men ghazi book, i would love to review that. especially with the military guys coming out in the seo community, they are all pretty heavily reviewed legally. i think just to explain why some guys don't submit for a pentagon review as it takes too long and that is a problem that none of the guys don't want it sitting on a bureaucrat's desk for six months. it is typically 12 months before you see it in print. >> sir? >> you have any suggestions for re-assimilating the navy s.e.a.l.s or other military personnel who are coming back who needs some kind of assimilation assistance? either from the military or the government? >> i am glad that you asked that. first of all there needs to be an extensive psychological valuation done, and we have some type of delay based on how severe the trauma is. i am convinced that if i could've had a three-month downstage, when i got back to the team, i was screwed up. the guys around me, i was not in a good place. the first thing that we have to do is figure out a way these guys make a living. i make a great living now, but it's been through trial and error and all this stuff and they need to be made aware of the educational assistance program and all the stuff that they can do, even something like having a job here. a lot of companies pay me to come motivate them. i grew up barefooted and now his fortune 500 companies pay us money to come motivate them. and i thought, you guys are billionaires and that ought to be motivation enough. the market is out there for these guys and they have no way of making that introduction were having a handoff. we are like the day-to-day interpersonal lives. when i came out, could you imagine what kind of business you have? >> i can fast-forward and we are coming back with us next skill set. we have to have a way to get these guys introduced to the right people there. >> i would just add that special operations committee, as much as we have our own issues, we are probably less affected by the transition issues, which do exist in our own communities. the problem is that every man and woman, all of them that are coming back and you are out on your own and you're seeing a lot of people that are homeless, men and women and they just need a little bit of a helping hand. what the government is providing is a mentor in addition to some downtime, someone who has been there and done now. that is what glen doherty did for me. the guy that died in libya. he took me aside and said we will make sure that you kids get some tuition assistance. having that formalized and paid for, they can be paid on and off-site. >> ma'am? >> this question is for trendier. in your book when you talk about making changes to the sniper course, it seems like things were made quickly. were you surprised at how successful it was and specifically the change in the rate and what the thing that was attribute it to? >> that is our mental management program. we are always adapting and not afraid to try stuff out. i would attribute a couple of things to lowering our attrition rate. as howard will attest to, it is one of the toughest military schools that you can go to. probably one of the only schools where you can go and come back and not get your tried and. want to go or so so, we had about it date and you're there at the course. and we started teaching the active, we started implementing what we call positive teaching techniques and coaching is better than sit there and yell it's a good or bad for doing all the bad things, you have this fresh mistakes that they are making. they didn't even know what the heck it was. but now they do and that's all they can think about. it's like telling a little kid that is going to prevent not to strike out. so we start saying, okay, this guy is doing something's wrong, what are three positive things that i can tell them to do to correct it and i want him to do properly and that he can focus on. the other thing is having a positive mindset. you have to have a positive mindset. 100% score is what they told them that was achievable. whereas if you're shooting at 90, it's pretty good. and that's like you really at the top of your game. there is no reason you can't shoot 100%. the first class were told that to come in and shot 100. incredibly high class. we must mentor that with an olympic gold medal medalist. they're a couple of students for each instructor that can not leave these guys behind and i remember they were out in the car and all the guys are making fun of them and it's a positive mindset and visualization. and these guys were getting made fun of for being a carbonite. in the habit these wino guys waiting to listen to cds. [laughter] >> i hope that answers your question. >> there is a film called act of valor that was filled with some real navy s.e.a.l.s. one of the interesting things is the filmmakers are the philosophies of functionality and loyalty. being this really fast-moving collection and so for me it is like what is your vision or how can we connect with some of these navy s.e.a.l.s that are back in the community. some of the techniques and philosophies that are really valuable. that's just something i'm really interested in. and i'm like, how can we connect >> i can sit down and have a beer and cigar and i think that you basically are going to have to reread certain books. you don't have to be a navy s.e.a.l. to have a superior mindset or to be able to achieve great things. i have read probably 100 motivational books and my life and read things that helped form me and shake me. as far as just like logistics, part of that high-speed on-the-fly, i don't know that that can be talked about, you just have to get in and start doing it,. >> other than the writing, i run a website. and i just got approached by a former guy and he actually has a business now and his whole purpose within the industry and i don't remember, we swapped e-mails a couple days ago. he's going to advertise on a website. so you can watch that service that he is providing. >> if you buy our books and have your friends read it, that will help as well. [laughter] >> thank you for coming today. my question is about the different special operations and special forces units like delta force fields and i have read that there is a lot more working together between industry groups. it is just a lot of competition between the two. >> there used to be a lot of competition to the point of being detrimental. the general took over and said you guys are going to play nice with these guys. and once we started training together, you find out that everybody gets better because these guys might be better at a certain aspect than we are. we might be better at certain things and they are. once we trained together, everybody improved. so that dangerous mentality of it's us against them, we are better than them, that mindset kind of went by the wayside. because once you all train together, with one eye was the small one, getting together in training together. we are talking about politics and if we could get "seal team six" book to washington dc, get all the democrats and republicans in one room, have snipers and say okay, you guys are playing nice together, before you leave this building. [laughter] >> that would be great. >> that is my kind of filibustering. you're not going to just work 125 days per year and get paid exorbitant amounts of money. you must get your butts in the chairs and solve problems or my guys are not letting you leave. that is the mentality that you have to get to. i say that in jest, but it's the mentality of teamwork. as corny as it sounds, teamwork with those guys and when you're crosstraining with them, everybody benefits. >> unfortunately we only have time for one more question. going to the right, if you could please go ahead. >> you have answered part of my question about joint operations task forces. my son was accepted and he also got an exception to be an officer candidate. when he went into that, he had to go. he has worked with a lot of you guys from "seal team six" and he is a joint operations task force now. we want to thank you for having his back. and for doing such a great job. i am at a loss for words. i think what you do over there is absolutely wonderful. i don't know how we could have done it without you. all the training and all the other places in the training bases. >> thank you for that. thank you to your son for his services. i would like to close out by asking a question and nobody asked as per the question i get asked all the time is how do you go from being a "seal team six" sniper and being a chiropractor and taking care people? it is the same job. you just put people out of their misery in a different way. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you guys. >> for those of you who are interested, brandon webb and howard wasdin will be signing their books. it is located south and west of the student union along the mall parkway. thank you so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> this isbooktv on c-span2. live coverage from tucson book festival held on the university of arizona's campus. those were the authors brandon webb and howard wasdin discussing their experiences as navy s.e.a.l.s. the festival is going to take about a half hour break, but our live coverage will continue at that point. up next, two authors talking about their book. .. it features over 40 vendors and exhibitors in the children's educational area and 45 authors and poet presentations. >> i'm trying to find a new leng presidential character. for example to others ago i wrote a book on the first ladies and i thought it would be important to understand the presidents from a different angle and that is why not study the person that knew them the best? so for example what possibly could i as an historian contribute to the body of knowledge on lincoln or george washington? pretty much everything that could be about lincoln and washington has been written. the the greatest historians has made years pouring through the letters and the evidence to produce this book on lincoln or this hundreds of books on washington. so my thought was eureka, why not look at the first and handed them the best, the first lady's. historians have largely ignored the role of the first lady as they largely ignore the role of mistresses in shaping the men. why and i suspect a lot of my colleagues tend to be older men educated in a certain way that didn't study such matters and most historians as always they were not educated in matters of the heart so therefore they ignore that. so by studying the first lady's for example the first thing thomas jefferson did after spending 17 days cooped up and they long sides of philadelphia writing the declaration of independence the first thing you did was he went shopping. he went shopping for martha. he mr.. she was pregnant. she had a miscarriage and he bought her some gloves. then he begged off from serving for the rest of the summer so he could go home to be with his wife. every winter of the revolutionary war right there on camp george washington suffering through the freezing weather valley forge was martha washington with her white bonnet right there. so by studying the first lady's we get new insights from the president and from others. washington's closest adviser was alexander hamilton and one of the chapters in the book talks about hamilton's history of womanizing. for example bill clinton was not the first and bill clinton was not the worst when it comes to misbehavior and high office. there's a long long history of it and eliot spitzer and arnold swore to make her and john edwards, david petraeus had nothing on alexander hamilton. if you read for example letters written by martha washington during those winter camps she was like a soldier. she didn't complain about the weather. she didn't complain about the harsh conditions but she did complain about one thing. there was a tomcat that was misbehaving and that was and kept her awake at night so she nicknamed the tomcat alexander hamilton. [laughter] echoes of all the young girls that would come into town. i also wrote a book a few years ago called road to the white house and it was about the presidents at ease. what hobbies did they have? what are their fears and hopes and what were they like his fathers and husbands and how to their kids turn out? as another lands. for example we are all still trying to figure out richard nixon so for example i looked and i said nixon in his free time liked to bowl alone and sometimes wore a black suit to do it. i mean that begins to explain things, write everyone? who does this? all books in that being trilogies write write everyone? so here's the end. affairs of state i tried to take a different perspective on our presidents and for example we all know about george washington but we study washington with brilliance. we study washington's courage and the crossing of the delaware on christmas night which say the revolution but george washington's girlfriends when he was a kid. you find a teenage washington on more than one occasion basically goes back home in tears because he was turned down and puts pen to paper and he writes roses are red, violets are blue type of poems. he once wrote that an arrow has been shot through my heart when yet another girl turned him down. this is another look at washington and during my doctoral studies my professors didn't tell me about washington 's teenage girlfriends. i think it provides us with important lens and a new way of understanding the presidents. we all know that our country's leaders have oftentimes been shaped by the hand of a woman, often their mother, often a wife but i'm here to tell you sometimes that of a mistress as well. it's in the news today as we tape this program general david petraeus is still dominating the headlines with his alleged affair and misbehavior. related to the book what my first thought was when this happened when it came out was during world war ii, general eisenhower was having a long-term affair with an attractive young reddish driver named katie summersby. what general -- a young female model instead of a major or captain or a medal winner? now imagine if eisenhower's affair with kate summersby came out during world war ii and has happened to petraeus, what if we got rid of him flex during the great depression franklin roosevelt was having affairs. franklin roosevelt had two very long-term affairs. one with missy lehand and marguerite his personal aide and secretary and cook and dresser and undress her apparently. what if we found out about fdr's misbehavior and what if we threw at your out of office as the economy was recovering? all the way back to the french and indian war, a very young george washington was writing very romantic letters to a woman who was not mrs. washington. her name was sally fairfax, very attractive, older, sophisticated lady. what if washingtwashingt on's letters have become public during the french and indian war or the revolutionary war? much as petraeus e-mails became public in would have to get rid of george washington? bill clinton is not the first not the worst and petraeus is not the first and not the worst. been there, done that and there's a long history. it pains me to say that even abraham lincoln visited a prostitute. i know, say it isn't so, right? but it happened. the details on it are sketchy. there is not a lot of letters written about this but here is what we can piece together. lincoln's best friend was joshua speed and speed was perhaps as dashing and as handsome and i guess quote unquote lucky as lincoln was homely and awkward and unlucky with romance. speed felt sorry for lincoln and they called one another by their last names. speed invited lincoln to work it is general store and speed didn't have a place to stay so lincoln led speed stay upstairs in the general story. during their friendship speed was using the services of a professional woman. and you can imagine lincoln upstairs with a pillow over his head trying to mind his own business and speed is going at his business. lincoln says to speed i have got to have a woman, it's been too long. here's what appears to have happened. only abraham lincoln would do this. it appears lincoln as speed for a letter of introduction. [laughter] with a professional woman and i don't need agriculture it was the profession. there was a reference to agriculture. what we piece together is lincoln visited a prostitute and he had a lot of money. not elliott spitzer money when you visit escorts but a fair amount of money and the prostitute apparently charges lincoln five bucks which is an enormous amount of money. so lincoln says maam i have to tell you i am honest abe and i can't afford it. i only have three. she no speed so there's a possibility he will pay her when he gets the money. he doesn't have the money. what we know is lincoln got embarrassed or his honor got the best of him him but once she's at the link and you can pay me later or maybe this one is on the house lincoln ran out the door. so they say when you visit a prostitute, this is not from personal experience by the way but it's not a happy ending but a good ending. so what i thought i would do for the main body of my remarks today is a couple of my favorite stories not just about mr. sis in history but more importantly about presidential characters. but don't worry there are some juicy stories involve terry one of them and involves her 22nd and 24th presidents, grover cleveland. now when grover cleveland was a young man there was a controversy because cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman named maria help in from pennsylvania and she might've been a prostitute. at the least she was very casual about her relationships. now, cleveland was a bachelor and of course he is running in the 1880s. fathering a child out of wedlock wasn't done at the time. and it was such a big to do for other reasons. one was that the republican opponent to cleveland, the republican nominee and a group of very righteous preachers started a campaign that no woman in the country -- lock their doors. like dracula is here and cleveland is prowling the streets. really an aggressive campaign attacking cleveland so he -- it became a huge story. one of things is at turns out that james g. blaine likely had more affairs than cleveland and his wife barak and leslie gave birth six months after they got married. so blaine was keeping all this condemnation on cleveland and the one thing we dislike more than a politician that makes mistakes is a hypocritical politician, right? so it blew back on blaine. the other thing that made this a bit of a scandal was this. the republicans again were pushing this issue and they would have a little kind of a jingle, little song and they would say mom out, where's my pa? when cleveland finally wins the presidency the democrats complete that little song by saying mama wears my pa, going to the white house ah-hah highs in hi senator joyner. the scandal was this, grover cleveland's best friend and love partner was a guy named oscar polsky and cleveland was born in new jersey and spent the first of his career to become the mayor and governor of new york. but he was a very successful lawyer and they were law partners. they practice lot together and went out together and they would go out drinking and being together and it appears they also enjoy the services of maria help and together. when maria halpin gets pregnant, she has a son in either oscar pulls in or grover cleveland were the father and maria, case things by naming the child oscar cleveland. oscar folsom had been married and had a daughter. cleveland was a bachelor so cleveland accepted responsibility to pay for the child to go to an orphanage. here's where the other part of the scandal comes in. oscar folsom dies a few years later in a carriage accident while he was driving his carriage recklessly. he was drunk apparently. he leaves a widow and his young girlfriend says. grover cleveland makes an enormous amount money and has this law partner in cleveland kind of takes care of the widow and the young girl, pays for them and sets set them up in a nice home for his best friend and former law partner. he becomes the godfather of the will of the little girl frances. they are very close and she calls him uncle cleve. that sounds a bit creepy to me. he calls her frankie. he pacer center to college and she goes to wells college where they weren't really educated. what happened is as frances was growing up cleveland's relationship with her changes, changes from uncle cleve to godfather to a romantic interest. cleveland start sending her letters and poems and sends her roses and it gets full-court press on courting her. >> can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org. booktv will be back with more live coverage of the 2013 tucson festival of books. [inaudible conversations] is the one of the things we don't mention the book that always grabs me was a report, at paragraph in the report of a focus group and i think the name was mark k is what sticks with me and i think mark actually encapsulated the mentality pretty well when he said look, i don't do research because they know that charities are going to do some good. where i put my time in researchers and things like products. i will do research. i don't need to do the research for charity. i think that actually captures the prevailing ethic among donors. part of my book is really i would say all charities are not alike and there are good ones and bad ones and a lot of the middle. you have to give money to the best so they survive and the others down. stay with little ability of measure of effectiveness with charity for all author ken stern looks at the world of nonprofit on "after words" sunday night at 9:00, part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. >> here's where the story starts to get interesting. an unconvincing a lot of things but i'm giving you the basics. petraeus is sent off to ft. leavenworth. a lot of people in the army didn't really like petraeus. they don't like officers who are too bookish or who stood up too much in petraeus was very much guilty on both counts so he sent to ft. leavenworth kansas. a lot of people are thinking of code that's great. a fair-haired boy and we are sending them out to pasture literally. he gets to ft. leavenworth and he realizes something. he realizes that this is actually the intellectual center of the army, they write doctrine and form the curriculum of the commanding general staff college. they organize the national training centers and they drew a loop to all of these together. the lessons from one affects the lessons of the others which affects the patterns of the next and he says to himself as he is learning what kind of powers he potentially has, he says holy cow, and he talks like that. he says things like holy cow in jeepers. he says holy cow, they have put in an surgeon in of the engine of change. he views himself as an insurgent meanwhile, there are a lot of meanwhile's. meanwhile, there is a professor at the school of advanced international studies in washington d.c.. an eminent military historian and also a leading and neoconservative. he was one of the people that signed the petitions that we invade iraq and overthrow saddam by force. he is also a member of the defense policy advisory board. he goes over to iraq to take a look at what's going on these the only member of the board the cassini sees its disaster. there is this insurgency mounting and nobody knows what to do about it. now he comes back feeling really upset because again and feeling kind of pains of guilt because he was advising this administration. he had abdicated for this war. his son who like him had graduated from harvard had recently joined the army and was going to be sent to iraq and going to be sent into this mess that he sort of helped create. so he thinks well, he has to do something about this. so he sets up a seminar in basing harvard vermont indian goes through his rolodex and his military journals and he invites everybody that he can find who has written anything remotely interesting about the subject of counterinsurgency. he comes up with about 30 people and they all assemble in basin harbor for five days to discuss these things. the pivotal thing about this meeting and it's not so much what they discussed, is that they met. most of these people didn't know each other before. they didn't know of one another's existence. they thought they were out on a limb, on a daring limb writing stuff that nobody was going to read that was way against what was going on in the mainstreamainstrea m army. a lot of these people were junior officers and some of them are mid-level officials or think-tank types and they realize they formed a community. they might be able to do something if they work together so they come away from basin harbor with a great sense of mission. meanwhile petraeus sitting in leavenwoleavenwo rth he knows a lot of these people who are at this conference. some of them were his students, his colleagues are people that than under his command and he decides one thing he is going to do in leavenworth is write a new counterinsurgency field manual for the army. there hadn't been one for 20 years and he draws on this script from the basin harbor conference to be his inner circle, to be the people who help him write this. he goes outside the usual doctrinal channels within the army. so for things happen at the end of 2006. one, the midterm elections. the democrats when. lush fires rumsfeld and hires robert gates. two comets announce, denounced the petraeus will be going back to iraq as the top commander. number three, bush announces he is ordering a surge of troops in iraq, another 20,000 troops to number a number for that he has changed his strategy to it essentially a counterinsurgency strategy. he calls it clear and build which was an old phrase. it clear in area of insurgentinsurgent s and you stay there and you hold it. he don't just turn it over to the iraqis right away. then you help build an infrastructure and help the government provide basic services and build trust within the community and help of a security structure. so these four things did not happen by coincidence. it was all part of this plot and by the way when i use the word plot, i generally am not a conspiracy guy but these people refer to themselves as the plot. they called themselves the cobalt or the west point mafia because a lot of them came out of the social science department at west point which had a tradition of forming networks among their own graduates. this was very -- and for example all of this happened not by coincidence. for example petraeus when he was in leavenworth wasn't just sitting in leavenworth. he had a vast network of old college throughout the bureaucracy. he is reaching out to to them and to deliver early forms of back channel. he cultivates this woman in the white house named meghan o'sullivan who was president bush's chief adviser in iraq and international security council. he sees she is wavering from existing authority, talking on the phone practically every day. now picture this. this is really kind of outrageous. he is petraeus, a three-star general in ft. leavenworth. he's talking on the phone every day with a senior adviser to the president of the united states. she will be asking him, general casey who is the four-star general actually commanding troops in iraq, general casey says we only need one more brigade. what do you think lex petraeus would muster this argument that she could funnel to her seniors on why this isn't enough. so when he comes to washington they meet in out-of-the-way restaurants. this is not apollo brad will situation. this is strictly professional but can you imagine? this is someone who he's essentially subverting the chain of command. he has always kind have been an off the reservation kind of guy. he had gone his own way and doing what was necessary and here in leavenworth he's doing what needs to be done. at the same time, there is a civilian analyst who used to teach history at west point named fred kagan who has written a study advocating a surge at the american enterprise institute. petraeus and his contacts use their connections to get this study into the white house directly to the president bush, into the pentagon to the new secretary of defense to some of his subordinates in iraq who are chafing at the restrictions. so basically by the time petraeus comes to be top commander everything is all lined up. it's all lined up so they can go and and impose the strategy that he wants to impose with the full united states government, the army and the president of the united states. it's not a coincidence. it had all been very explicitly coordinated. >> can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org >> at the end of the working day say at 2:00 a.m. the prime minister would say soup out loud very lovely. that was the signal that the working day was over. the secretary could leave to begin typing up the day's memos and he would have his -- which he had before going to bed. churchill loved all game especially gives andy raised geese on his farm. at one dinner as he roasted egg goose and laid it in front of them at the table you said quote this goose was a friend of mine. and only research into churchill's life and never found a mention of a vegetable. and he made fun of vegetarians from a called. at a meeting he equipped to lord sure well quote well gentlemen if you had finished toying with your beat roots we will get on with more important matters. all the and third fastest i have ever known died early. after a long period of senile decay. another churchill favorite food was irish stew with plenty of onions and surprisingly sometimes pineapple. this is a meal that churchilchurchil l served to general eisenhower from a planned the invasion of europe. and of course caviar. churchill loved caviar. when harry hopkins brought caviar back as a gift from the soviet union. churchill ate small portions when traveling he had his mills served on his quote tummy time, not on the clock. churchill loved picnics. whatever the place or the weather even in wartime, it was a wonderful photo of my book showing churchill in a three-piece suit enjoying a picnic tea sitting on a rock by the side of the road. he picnics with roosevelt with hyde park, picnic on the banks of the rhine with his generals and in the north african desert with friends. he established his own picnic rituals enthusiastically singing old indian army toasts and calling for verses that could only be recited at picnics. much has been said and written about churchill and alcohol, some of the truth, most not some exaggerated. i go into detail in the book about churchill's drinking habits. churchill had been told, roosevelt sorry had been told that churchill was a drunk a charge one or two of his critics repeated. churchill did consume more alcohol than we are used to today but not a great deal by the standards as his contemporaries and drink did not affect him or his work. >> we are back live at the tucson festival of looks. in just a minute to others talking about their look what animals can teach us about health and the science of healing. it was in spring 2005 at the cardiologist barbara natterson-horowitz discovered animals can suffer and die from diseases identical conditions in the parallel lead dr. horowitz in science journalist kathryn bowers to study other medical connections between humans and animals. here they are now to discuss their findings and their book "zoobiquity." see our. >> r. arthurs will be in the signing area so they will be signing books there. and if you haven't already turned off your cell phones, please do that now. i would like to introduce the authors of "zoobiquity". first this is dr. barbara natterson-horowitz a cardiologist who has been treating human patients for 20 years at ucla medical center. currently she is cardiac consultant for the los angeles zoo and a member of the zoo's medical advisory board as well as the director of imaging for the ucla cardiac arrhythmia center. barbara lectures about cardiovascular physiology cardiovascular pharmacology and bioengineering at the school of medicine at ucla. her writing is appeared in many scientific and medical publications. arbor earned her bachelor's degree from harvard university and received her medical degree from the university of california san francisco. she lives in los angeles with her husband to children and two dogs. that would also like to introduce kathryn bowers writes about health biology and evolution pitch he teaches writing at ucla and began her career as journalism as an editor of the "atlantic monthly." she also works with james fallows the washington editor of the atlantic and for cnn internatiinternati onal in london. kathryn later served as an assistant press attaché at the united states embassy in moscow where she received a state department meritorious honor award for her service. kathryn holds a bachelor's degree from stanford university and lives in los angeles with her husband, child and one dog. barbour and kathryn are here today to discuss their book "zoobiquity" what animals can teach us about health and the science of healing. "zoobiquity" was a discovery book best in 2012 and a 2013 aaa prize finalist in the book is coming out in paperback in april with a redesigned cover. it's up here. thank you so much for being here and thank you for all of you for participating. i love this book. i really enjoyed reading it and i'm really excited you were here in understanding recitations about the book in general and now i will turn it over to you. >> thank you. >> hello and kathryn and i are delighted to be here today to talk about her book and re-bid loved when i finish the presentation gets questions from you and we are really interested in what people who are interested in animals and are thinking about these kinds of connections. let me tell you my story. i was about 10 years ago happily practicing cardiology at ucla medical center. i was seeing patients with heart failure and heart attacks in a true fibrillation, typical cardiology kind of stuff and then i had this wonderful opportunity to become a member of the l.a. zoo medical advisory board. the zoos around north america have expert veterinarians who are -- who who have boards into medicine and they are highly highly trained but on occasion the region to human medical communities typically academic medical centers for assistance or collaboration around subspecialties. in my case because my specialty was cardiac imaging, they happen to have a need for some cardiac imaging for some of their great apes. i had this wonderful opportunity to go to the zoo sometimes. i would typically be working here at the medical center at ucla and i would get a call from one of the veterinarians at the zoo. i remember one of the earliest cases i was called for. the veterinarian called me and said far, we have a chimpanzee who has woken up with a facial droop. when a human patient wakes up with a facial droop we typically think about the throat. one of the next diagnostic steps we take is we do a kind of echocardiogram, a cardiac ultrasound that looks inside the heart to see whether there is anything inside of the ventricleventricle s are the heart valves that could have caused a stroke. that that is what they wanted me to do with the zoo. so i jumped into my car when i got the call and they drove here this beautiful state-of-the-art hospital the gotleib animal health center. i remembered walking into the examining room for the first time and the chimpanzee had been sedated. she was on a ventilator much the way a patient that i would do this procedure on would be in. i walked to the patient and i took a probe and slid it into the back of her throat. i put the probe down and this is what i saw. a four chamber beating heart, a left left ventricle and the right ventricle and they left atrium and a right atrium. they looked almost identical to the 10,000 human hearts i have been treating for over the years. for a moment i was surprised that i was almost immediately surprised at my surprise because i knew that we were closely related to chimpanzees. i think probably everybody in this room knows that our closest common ancestor is the chimpanzee. we had it, and ancestor sometime between five and 7 million years ago so we were closely connected i think everyone had heard about this important scientific discovery revealing that we have a nearly identical human genome, 99% chimp and human genome are the same. i view these scientifically yet i felt kind of surprised. why? it wasn't so much the shared anatomy and it was the shared pathologies, the shared disease because what i was looking at when i was looking at this cardiac ultrasound was a disease process. you'll notice here, this is the right age room at the heart. these that are bouncing here are blood clots. those blood clots are inside of a right atrium that is too large. and the left atrium here is too large and they are changing at the ventricles that are abnormal. i realized as i was looking at the echocardiogram that this animal had the same rare form of heart failure that many human patients that i have taken care of had the same collection of blood clots in the increased atrium. during that period of time i was going to the zoo, and i was seeing what i assumed to be human diagnoses. i ruled out a heart murmur in them a call and help the veterinarian look for something called constrictive peritonitis in a sea lion. i am listening to the heart of the lion after procedure that the veterinarians do collaboratively to remove a significant amount of fluid from the sack around her heart. i continue to go to the zoo and hear the veterinarians talk about diagnoses that i have to seem to be human. i learned for example that aortic dissection -- the aorta is the largest area of the heart. from the aorta of many other arteries come off to feed blood to the rest of our bodies but sometimes the aorta can tear. it takes the lives of thousands of americans a year, people like albert einstein but i learned as a veterinarian that it's also the leading cause of death among adult male gorillas in captivity. i learned that tumors and cancers that i had assumed to be very rare such as the cancer that sadly and prematurely took the life of steve jobs a rare form of pancreatic cancer is common in certain wild animals and in certain dog breeds. and i learned sexually-transmitted diseases, which i had somehow, i had never thought about it in humans are common among wild animals who have multiple sexual partners who don't practice safe. and we learned about -- i learned about the epidemic of chlamydia that is ravaging populations of the cool voila in australia. so kathryn bowers and i -- kathryn is a science journalist and it was great good fortune that a mutual friend introduced us and we started talking about the commonalities and we thought maybe we should really explore this. what pursued was five years of research and writing and this fantastic voyage of discovery. early on we wanted to create a simplified rubric for when we were talking people in the medical or groups of scientists to talk about this and we simply asked the question, the methodology was if i saw human patient at ucla we looked for it in an animal and veterinary literaturliteratur e so we asked to animal get sudden cardiac death? diabetes? melanoma? can an animal get a brain tumor or arthritis? what about leukemia or aortic dissection or a sexually transmitted disease? each and every one of these questions we got the answer, yes. as an aside i should tell you that when we give this lecture to groups of veterinarian's are veterinarian students they all look at this and they're like yeah, of course. this is what we do. we take care of these diseases. veterinarian's are taught imperatively from the first day of school but when i show the slide to groups of physicians and many of them are very prominent, accomplished physician investigators the response is that the audience starts to laugh or talk or make. this is new to the vast majority of people so this is an opportunity to close the gap. let me share with you some of the things we wrote about in the book. a book is divided into disordern disorders which are important to human health. so we have cancer and heart disease. we look at sexually-transmitted diseases and then we look up more psychiatric illnesses. we look at being disorders and we look at obesity and self injury. i'm going to share with you some of the findings that we arrived at in some of the chapters just to give you a taste of what we were interested in. most importantly why we think making these connections could have relevance to human health and frankly ultimately that to animal health because we did in the realizing that it is a bidirectional benefit. let's take cancer. breast cancer is obviously an unbelievably important condition that takes a tremendous toll on human population. we learned that veterinarians had recognized breast cancer and pretty much any mammal. mammals of course by definition have as seen seeming camels and kangaroos and wales. but interestingly we learned that there are certain mammals that need to be predisposed to breast cancer. we learned for example that venezuelan jaguars who are in zoos few are treated with progesterone have a higher incidence of a significantly elevated incidence of both breast cancer and ovarian cancer and in fact there are certain dog treats in which spaniels for example some groups have an elevated breast cancer. what was really fascinating to us was that there is a mutation. has anyone ever heard of this mutation? brca1 mutation is an act around teeth mutation and what i thought was only a human genome that produce -- predisposes certain women and occasionally men but mostly women to ovarian cancer. it is overrepresented in ashkenazi jewish women and i'm in ashkenazi jewish women. i have been screened for this around the time the kathryn and i were working on this so i had a heightened concern and awareness. it was really fascinating to learn that the same mutation would predispose an animal like a jaguar also to breast cancer. i have to say that it was this association that led us to an early version of the chapter title. we initially were going to call the chapter jewish and jaguars but then something happened. actually let me come back to this in just a second. we we are sitting in the library doing research on comparative cancer. that is cancer in animals. we literally stumbled on an article in the journal and it was entitled the epidemiology of dinosaur cancer. and it was such an if that in addition to the veterinary perspective, there was the perspective of evolutionary biology. that not only were our diseases not uniquely human, they were not unique to our modern times and at that point our chapter titled expanded to jewish, jaguars and jurassic cancer. i'm just going to go back for just a second because we learned that yes there are some animals that are predisposed to breast cancer but there are some mammals that veterinarians are where have a low incidence of breast cancer and those are professional lactaid or is so dairy cows and dairy goats, animals that breast-feed their whole lives. that is protect his for breast cancer and that was fascinating because it parallels the human epidemiology of receiving and being protected in human females for breast cancer as well. there are all of these associations and as kathryn and i were discovering these associations and thinking about how we would put them into words i was coming back to ucla every day to talk to oncologists and epidemiologists and sharing this information in the cafeteria sometimes, in an elevator. did you know that venezuelan jaguars have an elevated incidence of cancer and dairy cows almost never get it and that was really intriguing and exciting was that my human colleagues for unaware of the fundamental information that veterinarians were highly aware of and we were really excited about the possibility of creating bridges between our fields on the understanding on the human side and the animal side. just to give you a taste of some of the other topics we covered, we looked at the issue of obesity in that chapter was called -- we called it planet because we are not the only species that are experienced in obesity epidemic. for the veterinarian said there are any of the audience today they are very aware that our companion animals are getting fatter and there's a parallel obesity epidemic. some estimates are that between 40 and 60% of our cats and dogs are in the overweight range. it's so interesting. there are some cats for example who are being put on a cat diet. which you can get a low carbohydrate and low protein diet. the even learned about some veterinarian's from the u.k. who do liposuction on dogs who got lipoma is that were so enlarged that they threatened the orthopedic health of the animal. so it's a little surprising or companion animals are getting fatter. we overfeed them and we under exercise them, same thing but it's interesting we learned that wildlife biologist and veterinarians have noted animals getting heavier and that is opening up the interesting possibilipossibili ty that there could be environmental factors whether we talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals or other factors that might be contributing to a species obesity epidemic. quickly i don't want to talk long here because we have a conversation. it might've ended with physical ailments except that we were or i was encounterencountering a lot of psychopathology the hospital. many medical patients whether they were there for heart problems or some other physical problems also had psychological or psychiatric issues. as we were learning more about evolutionary biology we learned that according to darwin who wrote the origin of species and the scent of him and his first book which is much more well manned -- well-known is the expression of emotion in man and animal. it was at that point that we thought we really should explore this issue of comparative mental illness in animals and humans. so the book ended up being about cats mental disorders in house psychiatric disorders. let me give you just a taste of what we did. we apply the same methodology we use with the physical ailments with the mental ailments. we asked to animals get obsessive-compulsive disorder, separation anxiety? being disorders? suicidal behavior, self injury? sexual dysfunction, addiction? the answer to each and every one of those questions again was yes. let me just ask the people who are sitting here, i think everyone probably has an animal or almost everyone has an animal or has had one. we you consider raising your hand if you believe if you ever owned an animal that had a mental illness? this may be a self selecting group actually. given the show of hands is like me this disorders you are familiar with our -- ones. this picture which not surprising is an example of a dog with separation anxiety which is characterized by barking, panting and pacing and whining and destructive behavior. what we learned about it that was really intriguing is how similar certain forms of separation anxiety and dogs can lead to the human variety of separation anxiety. from the developmental window in which both disorders emerge to the pattern of distress there are many interesting parallels. we also look at the issue of obsessive-compulsive disorder. there is a disorder that veteran and typically called k-9 compulsive disorder. they don't use the term obsession with animals because of session requires language to access. but there are many many similarities between k-9 compulsive disorder and ocd and humans. one of the most intriguing aspects and similarities is that in dogs, and other animals as well who are experiencing compulsion, many of them have to do with grooming behavior so, cleaning and by the way the same thing is true on the human side. one of the most iconic symptoms of ocd in human beings as handwashing. or hair brushing. what does this grooming connection tell us about this disorder? i suspect it tells us that grooming across species from mammals and reptiles to birds and even fish, grooming helps to soothe an animal. an animal rooms for cleanliness and he make room as part of a bonding ritual that but grooming can soothe an individual. one hypothesis is that when an animal is in distress, there is amplification of grooming. the grooming behavior gets turned up. so the becomes more significant. the preening and so there's a way of understanding human ocd through this lens of veterinarian medicine. one really important key to all of this is that we learned how much some of the same particularly the psychopharmaceutical are being used on the animal side as on the human side. so one of the most commonly prescribed medications for companion animals is a drug called reconcile. reconcile is a trade name for four ox a teen. four ox a teen is the trade name on the human side for prozac. many many dogs and cats and even birds and exotic animals like polar bears and other animals you see are in fact taking prozac and there are many interesting associations with that. i really wanted to illustrate some injury of humans. i think many people at this point are aware that self injury does secure and humans. the most iconic form of self injury something psychiatrists call cutting. when kathryn and i asked the question to animals self-insuree didn't know. we assumed maybe it doesn't happen and maybe then maybe this is something that is uniquely disordered and uniquely human but we learned as soon as we talk for the first veterinarian that we asked that animals from horses to reptiles to birds to all kinds of dogs and cats do self injure. what was really intriguing was that veterinarians have specific ways of conceiving of self injury while it happens in how to intervene and how to prevent it which we really felt could be broadened across to the human side to help psychiatrist and parents and patients deal with this very vexing issue. another form of self injury we learned about in animals has a corlett on the human side. there is a human condition called trichotillomania. it's compulsive human behavior characterized by pulling out one's hair. it can affect any part of the body, eyelashes are very common targets of this behavior but it can affect the scalp and this poor woman has taken out a lot of the hair on her head. we learned that there is what we believe is a corlett in the veterinary world, something called plucking disorder. feather plucking disorder and this is simply the animal plucks her feathers out. the veterinarian's know whether it's plucking or dermatitidermatiti s where a dog and until there is injury, that three things are associated with it. one of them is isolation. the second is wortham and the third is general distress. with that rubric, they devised ways of countering the behavior. for example, for an isolated animal, and isolated word that is brought into the community with other birds. the horse along in his stall is ideally brought into a herd of animals and even the presence of a non-horse, even a little chicken brought into a stall next to the horse can dial down the self injuring behavior. then the issue of boredom was really unique because the veterinarians we talked to spoke about finding ways to enrich the environment for the animal, making it harder for them to find food and creating foraging opportunities. it was hard to know whether that approach might not in a fit of self injuring teenager alone, isolated in their room without enough to do and the way of thinking about that is -- but there is another way that is profound and a real opportunity these were opportunities for us to see what stand in the way of confiscated medical problems. just to finish this up, we also looked at eating disorders. we asked the questions to animals get being disorders and first we thought now. if you have an eating disorder, teenage girl standing in front of a mirror saying oh i look. of course, that is not within animals going to do. if you say does a stressful environment affect eating in humans, it everyone will say yes. some people, stress causes them to lose their appetites and in other individuals stress causes an amplification of eating. if you ask in the presence of social difficulty and competition, could that affect in animals being? it depends on how we phrase things. we learned that there is a disorder that affects kids and and -- pigs and it can affect female pigs. it occurs when a female who is under stress response to the stress by reducing her eating. these pigs become mac aided. their hair grows course in long and that actually is a change we sometimes see in human anorexic patients, thinning and coarsening of the hair. the female pigs start going into heat and some female patients who have anorexia nervosa also lose their -- in the learned about the way that farmers the farmers intervene to improve the behavior. at the corollary to that weight as good an animal ever develop bulimia nervosa and of course not directly. in an animal is not going to have a disorder of the sense of size and they're not going to be able to go to the store and buy a bunch of food to gorge on but we learned that veterinarians are aware and concerned about a disorder called regurgitation and re-ingestion. they told us that some marine mammals when they are stressed will respond to stress to a form of self induce. the great apes have been seen and observed to rock back and forth or poke at their stomachs until they initiate the and it has been seen in beluga whales and dolphins. it's a distressing behavior and there are interesting parallels. one of the fascinating parallels to human nervosa is that it's it is well-known among girls once one starts bulimic to hager can spread. there is a contagion to the behavior in middle schools or at summer camps or dorms. the veterinarians told us that the same thing can be true with animals who are engaging in this behavior. so again, many parallels in many opportunities to generate new hypotheses and think of these in an expanded way. let me and with a cardiology example because i'm a cardiologist. .. >> these images were splashed all across television and all across the country. so those terrorist attacks, natural disasters, upsetting experiences can trigger cardiovascular death of human beings. but through this project we have learned that we humans are not the only animals that can be scared to death. we learned about a syndrome that veterinarians have known about for many decades. that animals like monkeys and dear and zebra and other animals, rabbits and shorebirds and tomatoes and others can, in fact, be scared to death. that is unbelievably important to human health. it remains one of the leading causes of death in this country and around the world. in the united states alone, there are many unanswered questions. the first set of issues, what with the environmental factors that triggered the episode? why are some individuals more susceptible than others? welcome in these kinds of questions can be help to significantly if we are aware that there is a comparative perspective. but range of other animals could face sudden death. some are pre-exposed in some are protected. these kinds of questions are not possible if we physicians remain narrowly in our own silo. i would like to end with two thoughts. our book came out on june the 12th. "the new york times" published a beautiful piece of art on the cover of the sunday review section and in the book excerpt they included and featured a joke that we heard from many veterinarians. the veterinarians told this joke to us in a good-natured way and partly in a response to love and marry deal is an inadequate amount of stuff coming from the position side for how they are educating what they do. the veterinarians joke is what you call a vegetarian who can only take care of one species and the answer is a physician. if we human beings are animals, one way is that we are all veterinarians, that we physicians have a single goal. it is to think beyond one-way a single species works and an approach to these problems and i will conclude by reading to you from the last paragraph of our book. the future depends not fully on how we humans fair, rather it will be determined by how all the patients on the planet live and grow and heal. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, that was great. so we have about 25 minutes for questions. i think what would be the best way to do that in this room is we have two microphones in the aisles. if people are okay getting up and going to the microphones come and that will help everyone be able to hear the questions and we can go back and forth from one microphone to the other and take questions for the allotted amount of time. >> i grew up in australia. i also lived 12 years in germany. when i listened to this discussion i notice the cultural difference and especially the southwest of germany. there is sort of a stipulation where you should walk your dog wants a possibly twice a day. and i noticed in alabama in the '90s that it was an issue about evolution, being a european, with an australian accent, it is slightly different than the view towards animal psychology. this was sort of a disconnect between animals and humans, and it seems to have affected policies like health care and other issues. i would just like to ask how did you feel? the cultural theme of the book, is part of a culture needs that needs to be understood a little bit more? >> just to touch on here, we actually had the opportunity to interview some from europe. there have been different attitudes, at least the ones that we have introduced. one important piece of this is how america is gradually shifting its feelings about evolution. of course the statistics that we will hear is that 40% or even half of the population doesn't even believe in evolution. and i think that has imposed a barrier in terms of considering that probably is a barrier. there has been a shift even in the time we have been writing the book. we hear increasingly conversations about mental illness and animals and about emotions in animals, which is something that we kind of have been forgetting to talk about intellectually, even 10 years ago. our perception is there has been a liberalization about that. frankly we have heard scholars say, they just need to get a dog. >> on the culture wars is this. the because of the training, they are helping people and animals reunite. >> there was last year at the discovery of the south pole. and the animals that live there. it goes beyond the motion and it is a connection between animals and humans that is so much more closer. i have been here quite a few months and i seem to gravitate towards this end it shows animal cruelties and animals being mistreated in chickens in their pens. is there any trend in america toward that end how animals are being treated in that? >> yes, [inaudible] >> thank you. we have a question from another microphone. >> yes. one of the areas i have worked in for 50 years is infectious disease. and we have ideas out of necessity. as was referenced to the others as well, in physiology, there are structural differences and i don't know if you are able to point those out in your book. studying certain animals in certain diseases and it's a real priority. >> thank you very much. as a physician, if someone had asked me 10 years ago what is that the connection between animals and human health, i would say, oh, product probably investigation and these are the infectious diseases that are typically passed from the human reservoir. so we had no knowledge of the congenital diseases and maladies shared mental illnesses. and this is something called the one health movement, which really puts together animal medicine. but that strength has been on infectious disease. sixty or 70% are going to be coming from the animal reservoir. so this is very important reason for physicians and vegetarians to collaborate. our experience is that most physicians were aware of infection in human health and move beyond it to some of the most recognized areas. that was actually our point of departure. >> in our last chapter we looked at a woman who is responsible identify west nile virus is it debuted in america. without her work, that was a real case of a veterinary hero. >> one of the really tragic aspects was accepting her findings. she realized that there was an epidemic, an emerging epidemic affecting elderly residents of queens and the bronx and almost parallel, some started to die. and she was very brilliant and she realized this was probably the same virus. but her findings were rejected. she was a veterinarian coming from the zoo and there was no recognition of that is a scientific peer. >> thank you. >> i have kind of gathered at the observation and testing, farm animals in captivity, household pets, was there any studies done with animals from the wild. >> we actually try to use as many wild examples as we can. we are in the wild cases. we talked to wildlife biologists to get as much as we can. it is challenging, particularly ocean life. but animals in general, yes. i think payment concessionary medicine has not been up to par with human medicine and i was wondering if you could shed light on that. also, just thinking about the way in which we use animal testing before it reaches human trials. i wonder if your knowledge between human and animal zoology could question the ethics of that. >> you know, those are wonderful questions. one of the most surprising moments that we had was during a history of veterinary medicine. one of our chapters look at addiction. when you get into addiction, you start getting into pleasure and pain in the narrow circuitry that underlies that. quite by accident, we stumbled upon this very sad reality. but there has been the assumption that animals could not feel pain. as a consequence, there were some studies that were done without adequate anesthesia. but this remarkable parallel, the same problem exists on the human side and i went to medical school in the early 1980s and when i was a medical student, i remember i was on my ob/gyn location and a woman was in labor and the baby started to count and there was real distress and in my residence and will you put a scout monitor on the baby. and i'm going to take a scalpel and i need to do any kind of anesthesia. i remember her telling me that no, you don't have to worry, he can't feel any pain. and again, that was 1984, probably from a 1985. things have advanced. another parallel that as we reconsider assumptions, we can help those animals and humans. >> the date content debate on that is do fish feel pain. >> thank you. question over here? >> you did mention some environmental factors that you discovered with mental disorders and animals. and how that might translate to humans. did you find any environmental factors in any thing that might aid us in working with human beings? >> that is a great question. one of the important reasons that physicians need to collaborate is that wildlife can actually act as a catalyst for human disease. they were found to have lots of abnormal carcinomas and it was a similar outbreak of other cancers among the women living on the coast. there was a facility that was creating the ocean and i know that there are many examples of toxins and infections. is that related to sun exposure? we are really just beginning to explore that that was the environmental peace. >> for me was toxic chemicals and from my perspective, it can go to a microbiology level. the viruses and parasites that lived that affect the way we live. >> even where you are on the globe, there are animal experts the look of blood sugar and the species at a high latitude or out of well and the environmental findings that we don't consider. >> the idea is a human environment versus a different environment. >> yes. >> i noticed on one of these slides for obesity, would you speak a little bit to this? >> we have many more examples than i expected we know researcher at penn state who is a dragonfly expert that knows everything there is about how their muscles work. and how their muscles get healed, this researcher calls them part of the insect world. one day he was out collecting around some ponds and he noticed that some of the dragonflies are doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, flying around, they were hovering and males were engaging each other, which is a pre-courtship behavior. and there was another group that were all around the edges of the pond. they were not engaging with each other, they were acting kind of strange and doing what he called gliding, going up to each other and then avoiding each other. so he took some of those home just to see what was going on with them. what he realized is that their blood sugars were different from how the dragonflies. and it was making them gather fat around their abdomen instead of having mad cow to fuel their wing muscles. he called the insect blood. it is almost what would be a prediabetic state. what he discovered really was metabolic syndrome in dragonflies, which is something that human beings can get. what he realized his all of these dragonflies that were showing the symptoms were infected with a parasite in their gut that was influencing the way that they processed blood sugars. so it actually is evidence of obesity and he said they don't look fat, but that their body is processing it in a way that the metabolic syndrome work. >> are there any other questions at the moment from the audience? >> were there any illnesses either mental or physical that were exclusive or heavily favored in one of the other animals or humans? >> that is a great question. every species, whether human or any other species is unique and has differentiated to have its own disorders and issues. the point is these huge overlaps have been overlooked and it is probably the most iconic answer to your question. this was after the sclerosis that affects the arteries of the heart. what causes heart attacks, which continues to be the leading killer and that kind of thing. but they die from congestive heart failure and other forms of heart disease. >> [inaudible] >> first of all, thank you so much for coming. we are becoming more and more aware that heart disease and cardiac disease presents very differently in males. and develops differently in males, which is mycobacterial diseases and such. i'm curious as to whether or not you are seeing the same thing in with animals? >> that's a great question, but i don't have an answer for it. there is a wonderful group called the great eight part project. it has been with human cardiologists and pathologists to study this very significant problem of heart disease among great apes. many are endangered and so it is an important issue for the survivor of those species. so it's a very significant study that's going on to look at all of the factors, whether it is gone, genetics, environment, those that are contributing to these forms of heart failure particularly. i have no doubt that they will look at gender as well. check back in a couple of years, but that is ongoing research. >> i noticed that you recognize animals with psychological conditions, having those coproduces the main humans and that have them. i thought that was really interesting if you want to elaborate on that. >> so when we started first realizing that yes, animals self injure or that wild animals learn naturally released 100 years, many of them seem to seek out psychoactive substances. there are big horn sheep that will scale cliffs to get these hallucinogenic lichens. some of them like it so much that they will grind their teeth down to the government gum just tried to access the lichen. the wallabies in tasmania, in tasmania, which is one of the largest producers of medical grade opium, there are miles and miles of poppy fields. and some of the wallabies will jump over the barbed wire fences to eat the poppies and become intoxicated. as we have many examples of mammals and others. an eating disorder can happen in an animal, even addiction can happen in an animal. some of these wallabies keep going back and the behavior. some of these are not uniquely human. some of the shame and guilt that the families feel when these problems emerge in some of it might be blunted that these are expanding problems that have probably been going on for tens of millions of years and those are our natural roles, i think. >> especially some of the preventable things that we did or didn't do. this is a much more expansive view of how that really works. it can take some of the pressure off a person going to a condition or having someone else do it. >> the truth is we learned about the epidemiology of dinosaur cancer. where there is mutation, there is a potential for cancer, and that is not something new. >> we just have a couple more minutes. [inaudible question] >> can you talk about the chances for suicide? >> we were talking about suicide and animals and the question was could you talk more about that particular issue. >> yes, we were concerned when we were asked the question and we were sure that the answer would be no. we thought what could the fitness benefits possibly be of suicide. we have decided that we would ask these questions in an open-minded way and try to pursue the literature objectively. it depends on how you define it. if you define it as, let's say a patient with severe depression who writes a suicide note and ends her life, that is one form of of human suicide. there is also conditions as well. suicide bombers and jim jones in indiana and different kinds of suicide. we learned first from insect experts about numerous insect examples. for examples, there are species of crickets when they are are infected with a certain virus, it causes a reaction in the nervous system that compels the crickets to walk to the edge of the lake. and jump into the lake. the cricket cannot swim. but the parasite is inducing not suicidal behavior. why is that? and we actually have video of this, which i won't show you, because it's hard to watch. you see the cricket drowning and dying. but as it is drowning and dying on me see the parasite exiting the crickets body, and it needs to be in the lake to complete its own lifecycle. so it's become a symbiotic process. you see the parasite climb up to the top of the of grass and sat there and they literally are visible to birds as they are passing by who grab them and again, the grasshopper dies, it is an act of suicide, but the parasite needs to complete its life cycle in the intestine of the bird. so there is an ecology that is promoting this kind of suicidal behavior. >> and we have possibly expanded view as well of this in humans we met we have to wrap up, but thank you so much. thank you for being here today. >> thank you to all of you for attending. the area for these guys which is located south and west of the student union along the mall walkway. we will get your books signed. please go to the signing area where the authors will be rather than coming up to them. we have to escort them out here pretty quickly. have a wonderful afternoon, consider becoming a friend of the festival. thank you so much. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv on c-span2. live coverage of the 2012 tucson book festival on the campus of the university of arizona continues. the festival is taking a break, it will be 30 minutes before the live coverage continues. at that point, our final program of the day is a panel on the alamo and we will be back in 30 minutes. >> we have allowed human rights nightmare to occur on our watch. in the years since doctor king's death, a vast system of racial control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow law. a system of mass incarceration but no doubt was having doctor king turning in his grave today. the mass incarceration of poor people of color in the united states has resulted in a new caste like system, one that shuttles the young people from decrepit underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons. overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent second-class status, nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control. it is in my view, the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> otb's first online book club at the end of the month. watch video of michelle alexander apple tv.org and read the new jim crow. on tuesday, march 26, at 9:00 p.m., join us live on twitter and facebook with your questions and comments on the new jim crow. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. we are on location in las vegas at the annual freedom festival conference. we have rand paul and the author of this book, the tea party goes to washington. senator paul, this book came out when you were first elected in 2010. how would you necessity party today? >> we were unhappy with republicans who voted for the bank bailout, we were also unhappy with obamacare. i think maybe you will see a resurgence and have an influence on who wins the election. >> when the tea party first started, or you even thinking all about running for office it was just starting to hit national waves ushered up at the square. there will be 20 people like me and there were nearly a thousand people there, and that is where i knew something big was going on. >> at that point, did you start thinking about this? >> no, i was toying with the fact that they were not running. so we started talking to reporters. there were enough people out there, and unhappy, three things and everybody else is doing this. that is when i started thinking about it. >> a lot of this is about the 2010 campaign. >> what were some of those examples that you had to point out. >> the tea party said they aren't really involved in the movement. i never met any rich guys from new york. really the tea party was so decentralized, it was city by city. they do not communicate with each other. there really is no sort of top-down. this was a bottom-up movement and the movement to chastise both party. and when president bush said to save the free-market, had to give up on capitalism. so we were unhappy with republicans and democrats and really felt like we needed something different. >> the right in addition to being called a tea party or constitutional conservative, i have also been called a goldwater conservative by supporters and critics and it is accurate and honor be described as such it. >> interestingly it was first published in shepherdsville kentucky, which is run outside where i went to meet the publisher and he gave me an original copy and i reread it and i've always been fascinated by it. >> when you think of conservative libertarians, is there a difference between them and where do you see yourself? >> in some ways the word conservative has said people are not sure what it means. and president obama was making it even worse. so i think many people sort of designated themselves as constitutional conservatives with a true belief in limited government. >> before you spend any time in the u.s. senate, now after a couple of years of being in the u.s. senate, has your mind and thinking changed at all? >> i understand more now how there is an impact in getting things done. what i don't understand, even though i am in washington many democrats said i can't get the media narrative to talk to them. i have appointments trying to get them on social security reform. they can be saved for 70 years or 75 years were really in perpetuity if we gradually raise the age and discussing the possibility of entitlement reform. >> what about your own part of this? >> some don't want to talk about it. i am equally critical of my party in the sense that all 47 u.s. senators on the republican side and then we lose five or 10 republicans and we tried to cut 7 million a year and compare that if you want to cut 7 million at a time, that is a lot of cuts. that is part of the problem with washington. >> senator, you have a new book coming out. >> it's called government bullies or it. >> people are looking about violent crime and those who put dirt on their own property. >> we really think that we shouldn't be putting people in jail for regulatory crimes. there was a difference in criminal law and tort law. it was called mens rea or intent. we are not putting people in here, a man in jail who is in for 10 years for putting clean fill dirt on the low area of his land. it was from moving some land to another part of land. some of it was well intended in the beginning. >> putting dirt on their own land is not the same as dumping chemicals. >> this family from idaho, they would be not having rainwater touching their land, the government says, well, look at our website. >> one-family was raising bunnies and they had a license, but it was the wrong license. they said you can pay us within 30 days with a credit card. and if you don't pay within 38 days, we will find you even more. these are the kind of stories that we have reported in should make americans matt. this is a big government with a government that has run amok. >> what is your biggest frustration? >> we have to cut spending. and it's not just domestic welfare spending to much in the military as well. i tell them that the real compromise is conservatives like myself the pentagon says they are too big to be audited. and we need to figure out how we can save money in the military and there's a lot of money that is unaccounted for. >> we have to do something about that. >> how do you foresee these bad feelings in the sequestration today? >> well, i didn't vote for the last debt ceiling raised, but i will vote to raise it if we have a balanced budget amendment. people say that is too hard-core, we will never raise it. welcome you need to because we added statutory caps. and they bring a bill to the floor that says you're not supposed to spend more than this amount of dollars. and they just deem it to be okay. eighty out of 100 said i don't care what the rules are. so they routinely ignore their own rules. just last week that is why the american people are unhappy. >> this is booktv on c-span2. this is senator rand paul, he has a new book coming out. his first book was "the tea party goes to washington." the new book is government bullies. one of the issues that you have addressed. >> my wife actually shorten my name. i was randy growing up. i read all of her novels when i was 17 and my dad is a fan and he actually gave me the books for christmas when i was 17 years old, for my birthday. when my wife said i need to be rand paul not randy or randall, i thought, okay. >> you are an ophthalmologist. where did you go to medical school? >> i went there and did a year of general surgery and when i came back for my residency. >> the senate won't let me do it for money, i do it for charity and i go on around the state and i do some charitable surgeries. there are crazy rules. if you work $100 million a year and you are a senator, you can make zero earned income. i'm not allowed to do any work outside of the senate. >> i do this and i thought when i ran that the rules were different. they did let my dad practiced some, there were some limits, but he was allowed to. but in the senate i am not allowed to at all. i am asked them to change the rules, but they are not interested in helping me. >> that's my wife, that's one of my favorite pictures. sort of an animated pose. and we did it as a joint project. >> she wasn't too excited about the process of me running and it was difficult at times. there were times when you are attacked by your opponent, your character assassination, and one of the things we talk about was on our anniversary, right before the election they accuse me of something about my religion or something about college or this and that. she came out on our anniversary and said, do not mess with my man. >> after my endorsement i did mention that i was concerned that is a big issue for me and the issue of war is really important. it separates me a little bit from other republicans. i don't think that we should go to war with authorities. the constitution intended that the power be separated and executives are so prone to war that we want to divide that power up and i'm very concerned about a decade of two different wars and i will do whatever is possible to make sure that there is a debate in the u.s. senate and congress. they waited until the delegates acknowledged it. there are a lot of people do love my dad so much that they still want him to win. i want him to win, but the numbers are done and the supporters are ready to admit that the numbers are just not sufficient. >> your father's political philosophy is well known. what percentage do share with him? >> we believe in a very original interpretation of the constitution. but there will be issues. even when you think you're coming from the same basis and foundation, we do it disagree on occasion. but always very politely. they let me come home for thanksgiving and i get to sit at the adult table most of the time. [applause] >> finally, what is your stand on the republican party of washington? >> i do okay and i have tried very much not to insult people. i try to work with both sides of the aisle and both sides of the republican party and the many different sides of the republican party. and there are times you will agree with people and times you will disagree. i worked on internet freedom, ron wyden is a very open-minded guy i think the public is coming around we have been through 10 years of this. we won the war, we kill bin laden,. >> i am thinking that that means he will make a target for you. i'm not easily identifiable. some of that foreign money that we are sending overseas, i suggest to repatriate the corporate capital from overseas mother come home at a reduced tax rate red and i have worked with or try to work with democrats on that. i have worked with the pipeline regulation bill where they are going to exempt the oil pipeline and i made them take up the cause because those were the ones that were exploding. sometimes i'm not as as is easily pigeonhole a bowl as a partisan republican and i am proud of the fact that i actually do work with the other side. not working to vote my principles, but i've have like-minded people that just happen to be democrats. >> this is booktv on c-span2. we are talking to senator rand paul. the tea party those washington is his book. and a new book coming out, it is called government bullies. this is c-span2. >> in a few minutes we will be back in the gallagher theater with more from the tucson festival of books. >> one thing that isn't mentioned in the book was a report in the consulting report of one of the focus groups. and i think that mark kay actually encapsulated this pretty well. saying i don't do research because i know that charities can do some good. >> all charities are not alike, there are good ones, bad ones, ones in the middle, we have to get those that best degree and they survive and the others don't. >> with charity for all, author ken stern looks at the word of nonprofit on "after words" at 9:00 p.m., part of booktv does the weekend on c-span2. >> really i have never seen any report in any main news has been the story of these people that live with a constant siren goes off every time a rocket is close by. they have 15 seconds to get into a bomb shelter. i went to visit some elderly people who are the founders of the screw. and they were probably 65 plus years old. many of them in their 70s. this was in 2009 and it was during the operation. part of what triggered it was this constant bombardment. it was responded to with the rockets. the rockets have been going there, there have been over 12,000 rockets in the last 10 years. >> there are larger institutions people have to get up and run every time there is a siren. they do it because they know that they could be killed. whether in great numbers, it depends on worked out. these people were taking antidepressants, the children were in the area and they were bedwetters, the people that i went to see were being bused to a town for three-day weekends we could sleep in a hotel with no disturbance. these are old people. one of them said to me, how can you come here? my children won't come and visit. aren't you afraid to be here. and there were explosions going off nearby. i didn't even hear sirens. we were less than a mile from the gaza strip. the mothers mother said have to get their babies into the shelters, there is a little piece of that quote in the book written by a mother. and she says, which tile do i grab? which one do i take first? .state is ongoing, it has this recent so-called truce with hamas. everyone knows it will start up again. we were in virginia in 2006. these were larger rockets and we went and saw some of the places that they had struck. half of the houses were gone, people have gone to jerusalem or someone else, most of them were living there. some were in shelters for a month living in the shelters. the state of war in israel is such a problem. even if it is the south, everybody has a relative there it's not like america where you hear that this is everybody's problem. the phone starts ringing when things heat up. that was an interesting thing. some people are debating to take a shower not, am i going to sleep in my normal pajamas, and i don't think those are things to think. consciousness is what happens that is what the israelis are best at they don't just sit around and worry. they have dinner and play cards and they have bar mitzvahs and it is a culture that celebrates life in the face of danger, and that is what i really would say sums up the culture. >> shifting from since you mentioned the north in your book, you mentioned that when you were there in the city in the north of israel [inaudible] what was his deal? >> you were very upset that the war ended when it did. they said we will live in shelters for three months and this will be the end of it. but here's deal was that they were rebuilt and prepare for next time. .. it's also a spirit of holding and life and yeah the people were and everyone knew it ended badly because it was cut short that they just wanted to be able to get peace and live their life again. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. on your screen is the inside of the gallagher theatre on the campus of the university of arizona. this is live coverage of the tucson festival of books. now this is our final panel for today. it's a panel on the alamo and it features james donovan's book "the blood of heroes" about the fight for the alamo, stephen harrigan's "the gate of the alamo" and michael wallis's book on davy crockett. live coverage on booktv on c-span2. >> welcome to the fifth annual tucson festival of books. my name is paul hutton. i teach history at the university of new mexico and i am charged with moderating this while gang of writers up here, which is a thankless task. but speaking of thanks, we want to thank the book festival organizerorganizer s, their staff and their volunteers who have once again made this such a wonderful occasion, this time unbelievably under bad weather. imagine that but i must tell you when i woke up this morning and saw the snow on the catalina is it reminded me of why i love the west and why live in the west. it will be beautiful tomorrow for the rest of the festival. we of we of course want to thank the city of tucson and the city of arizona preps for sponsoring this particular session. a special thanks also to c-span two and book television not only who are broadcasting this session but for all they do for literacy and the world of the book and for us authors with their broadcast throughout the year. i actually watch book tv all the time and have really learned a lot. we will have a question and answer right after the presentations by our authors. kind of save the last 15 or 20 minutes for that but if you do have questions please go to the microphones so we can hear you and the tv audience at home can as well. our authors will be signing afterwards to the tab just to the south and west of where we are. right outside. our topic today is remembering the alamo. i don't know about you but as i get older it's just tougher and tougher to remember anything. but the alamo certainly is one of those things that keeps coming to mind and perhaps today we can find out just why, what is this obsession all about? why have these men devoted so much of their lives, years they will never get back, to the story of the alamo. some of them, because of their wayward habits, have less time to waste than others. james donovan speaking of that, is the president -- i do know these people pretty well. james donovan is the president president of jim donovan literary, a literary headquartered in dallas and he wanted me to tell all of you to rush out right after the show and make your pitches to it. he loves that. >> the more the merrier. >> he represents really truly outstanding authors here. and other writers as well. he represents these authors steadfastly. he is also an author himself. he is an author of several books. two of the most famous being a terrible glory, the story of custer and the little little bighorn and his most recent book, "the blood of heroes" published by little brown, the book we will be discussing today. next to gem is michael wallis. michael is the author of 17 books. he is an award-winning author. many of his books are on the history of the american west and he is most famous for writing about route 66 which has become increasingly popular in dallas the 20th century oregon trail. he really is an amazing story. he also wrote the real wild west about the -- ranch in a biography of lloyd and his latest book is "david crockett" the lion of the west published by martin. i'm going to push the the books down so the authors can hold them in front of them when they speak. my children though are most impressed by michael's voice work in the pixar studios production of cars and cars two and he will be doing the voice impersonations for us all later. also with us today is another show business type. he is stephen harrigan novelist and seems screenwriter and a editor for monthly magazine. his screenplays or cleopatra one of my favorites and i think it's particularly pertinent for an audience like this for me just to quote one of my favorite lines from all hollywood history and its stephen harrigan in this line. is after caesar has burned alexandria including the great library there, with all the treasures and antiquity and he meets cleopatra and he says to her, sorry about that library. [laughter] speier were kidding, right? >> i am not kidding. he actually wrote that life but he also wrote thank goodness the last of his tribe for hbo and king of texas for tnt, a shakespearean take on texas history. his novels include challenger park about athens, remembering clayton. see, i did it. and of course his award-winning book the one he will be discussing today with us, "the gate of the alamo." published by knopf. all of his books are published by knopf. well, so the question of the day is with so much to remmler now we have 9/11 on top of pearl harbor, on top of the main. why the alamo? why do we remember the alamo and we will start with mr. donovan. "the blood of heroes." >> because people love last names. think of custer's last stand, the alamo and there are some others, masada. there is something that we love about last stand and the alamo was one of the greatest. besides that it's paired with some of the great names in our history like davy crockett, travis of course is well known nationally but is an interesting character and plenty of others but anyway there are so many reasons. >> michael? >> we can also say we remember thermopylae because the editorial throughout history and not just the history of this young nation have had these significant remember dates and in many cases those remember dates are used quite effectively to incite passions, to help them incite wars and to incite conflict. they are tied into national emotions, passions and it's an effective way to do them. certainly, in the case of this battered little mission, sam houston used it very shrewdly with that immortal battle cry, remember the alamo, you know? and i think that the alamo is probably -- and i say this in my book. i think it's probably one of the best-known battles if you will in american history. with the possible exception of gettysburg and i think i go do want to say it's also one of the most glorious with the possible exception of several decades later when mr. custer got his comeuppance on that grassy hill out in montana. so the alamo is so many things. it's a place of myth and it's a place of reality, just like all the people who participated in that battle. in my way of looking at it and i will just use a common phrase that i use for most of the trans-mississippi west, no white hats and no black hats but a good many grey hats gray hats or in this case for caps. >> he i think that's a couple of reasons the alamo has resonated for so long in so deeply. most immediate i think was celebrity. as michael knows better than i, davy crockett was one of the most famous people in the united states at the time and he was a very unusual politician and congressman. he came up from a different path, so ... if sarah palin have been killed in afghanistan in afghanistan. there is just this amazing confusion about here is this guy, this very colorful regal character who is almost literally off the map and is killed in this battle in a foreign land. again we have to remember this was mexico. it was not the united states. the other reason i think it's more to emotional and strikes deeper is that is because the alamo has been portrayed for so long as a model of deliberate self sacrifice on the part of the alamo garrison and jim can speak to this more than i can. i have never quite believed the story that travis drew a line in the sand and the men who are willing to stay died across the line, but that story has such power because it makes us believe that yes there is this thing they would die for in these schnirman chose to die for so became this emblem of nobility and sacrifice like thermopylae and other events like this that just sort of resume through human history as examples of how we ought to behave. >> the alamo is very much a creation myth and of course texas unlike any other state i think in the union has a particular self identity that transcends even being citizens of the united states of america. both donovan and harrigan reside there and wallis and i are wise enough to live on the borderland of texas in new mexico. >> he is going to be secretary of state. despite the fact that the alamo is so central to the texas identity he, it resonates nationally. a became a national event, a national moment. i think even more so in the 20th century than it was in the 19th century and so i thought perhaps you gentlemen could speak to that. there is a national significance of the alamo. should we start with you steve? >> you have real white guys in blue blazers talking about the alamo and it's no accident because we were -- well jim is a little younger but we were born at a time when we were caught up in the most fervent period of the alamo which was the davy crockett movie with bess parker playing davy crockett and the wild frontier in 1955 and then in 1960 john wayne's the alamo was made in these two, the combination of these two movies inspired the generation and now multiple generation of american kids. it was a huge cultural phenomenon like harry potter would be today. and so, it's natural to get caught up in it. david crockett was the entry point for most of us. he was a very fascinating yvonne keillor, cool looking guy with a coonskin cap and then i think the other thing that was so provocative was the fact that there was a movie when we were kids and i'm speaking for me. i'm assuming it's true for most of us. we were kids and we were watching a movie for the first time in their moviegoing lives in the hero dies. i think that was very disturbing and haunting too many of us and we are still trying to work that out frankly. >> he was actually the most disturbing in walt disney because truth be known the first of those three episodes, really in that initial run, aired in december 1954 and by the time the third episode ran later in the new year, he realized he had to kill this guy way too soon. because it was a phenomenal success. i have a personal introduction to this book and that is how it indeed i did crockett. i'm a kid sitting indian style on the living room floor at my parents house before the rca victor tv with rabbit ears on a sunday night thinking about the snowstorm coming tomorrow and sledding and all of a sudden this lanky farmer marine jumps out at the tv set right in my lap and it's parker. i was a goner. so were many of you. it didn't take too long before we put racoons on the endangered species list. [laughter] the price of racoons went way up i had a real raccoon hat and the ones i see today are -- hats. that was one of the first times we had the whole commercial aspect with film. there were thousands of crockett products, pajamas and curtains. just like pixar and disney, they were masters of marketing. i am sure they won't admit it. there was even davy crockett. >> he i've got them on now. >> he still wears them. [laughter] >> i think paul is absolutely right. like all of these figures from history, especially the american west, this mythologized west, these men and women that go through all sorts of incarnations. sometimes they are in vogue and sometimes they're out of vogue. as we all know it's true with billy the kid and it's true with so many people. it definitely is true with crockett. we have a home area of that series which i'm sure we'll get into about how this poor man's career came to an end at 49 years of age. you can pick or choose anyone you wish. the only thing you should know is that he did die and it is true. >> he now, that was way before my time, all the tv stuff. so i missed that in the first go-round, but i think another reason may be at might be yvonne subconscious or semi-conscious but it still resonates in the century and across america is that the men in the alamo and involved in the revolution, they consider themselves their fathers and grandfathers had fought in the american revolution and they call themselves sons of 76. they saw fighting the same principles as their fathers and grandfathers had fought against king george. it's very much an undercurrent that we identified because it was some of the same principles that we still believe in. >> i am teaching a graduate class right now of 20 bright graduate students who all want to be professional historians and we have been talking about the west and we talked about davy crockett and we talked about the alamo. by students have very different attitude towards davy crockett in the alamo than the members of this panel or myself. they are not even sold on the idea. a couple of them were puzzled why we are even discussing the topic of crockett, but that goes to a greater question. the alamo is at the center of the modern culture wars over american history and the american past. one of the things we do is we come from so many different places around the world and so many different races. we try to use our history to give us the commonality as a people. lately we have been fighting over that history and my students see the racial component of the story of the alamo to be one that threatens its position in the pantheon of great historical stories and i sort of wanted to get your thoughts on this. how did the alamo survive into the next 50 years? >> well, i know you said that the panel would not agree with your students but i might. i really think you have to look at that racial component in the whole so-called texas war for independence, that whole episode of history and i must say as a caveat beforehand that my maternal roots which are irish by the way -- >> excuse me. >> he it came out of texas and they were unreconstructed confederates for the luck of the irish didn't end up -- but actually raised beef and didn't break the law so just keep that in mind. i'm not here to disparage texas that all but along those lines, i think as i like to say, the texans do think that god created texas when we all know that crockett and vented texas. and i think he did a very good job of it. the alamo is the biggest tourist attraction in the state of texas and it has served the state well economically and so forth. and yes a lot of the principles of the alamo had kinfolk that fought in the revolution and five in the war of 1812 but i think it's also worth examining the reasons why the alamo happened in the first place and one of the big reasons that happens is because of the institution of slavery. i think we lose sight of that and i don't even know if they have been teaching texas history to the school kids down there. all the states have these history classes. oklahoma and texas and i'm not sure what kind of pablum they are feeding them, but hopefully that is being adjusted. truth be known the real story, it's always so much richer and better and spicier. but basically, if you get down to brass tacks, texas was mexico. it was the republic of mexico at the northern outpost and belong to the republic of mexico. santa anna, commander of chief chief -- commander-in-chief and he is a whole can of worms in himself. we could do a whole panel just on santa anna, and most complex and interesting character shall i say. but, the white migrant immigrants who came in to colonize my home state of missouri from the mid-south of tennessee from the surrounding southern states into mexico, that was going along fairly smoothly at first from the austin colony and so forth but then the mexicans went and spoiled it all by writing a new constitution which abolished slavery. and these white guys, they are coming and what did they bring with them? they brought slaves and they were starting a cotton system, a plantation system in the state of texas. some of the principles -- jim but we did join the mother church and marry a hispanic woman and so forth but i should also point out that both jim and bouy where two of the biggest slave people in the country bringing in help fight jean lafitte and jackson back in 1814 and they were praying and the men through the port of galveston and they were big land speculators. that is why crockett went down. he didn't go down to texas. out of patriotism. as we like to say he had no dog in that fight at all. he had been beaten in congress frantically because he stood up to andrew jackson over the issue of india and renew -- removal. he flawed flouted on that and it cost him his job. as he likes to point out he was beat by one like it man and that is what is he famously said. you cannot go to hell and i will go to texas. his friend told him you can come down here and clean up and do pretty well and resurrect your career. personally i think euston -- houston when he got down to the red river and the santa fe trail he should have gone back up to the santa fe trail and kept on the west. but he didn't. and that was his mistake. >> go ahead, i'm sorry. i think we also should remember that the texas revolution was also in context was also part of a larger movement in mexico. mexico had gained its independence in 1821 and passed in 1824 a constitution somewhat based on hours, very liberal and full of democracy and democratic values and then when santa anna was elected in 1832 or three as president he started rolling that back. he sent them home and start picking his own men for the senate. he took on dictatorial powers or at least near dictatorial powers. there would 19th mexican states at the time in at and at least half of them there was some kind of uprising and some are larger than others. he led an army that met the militia in may of 1835 and killed hundreds and hundreds of them. the last holdout was you know texas to the north so he raised a larger army and did that. so, it just wasn't happening alone. i think slavery was a factor. i don't think it was the major factor because slavery was going on anyway. even though as against the law, they just ignored it. they were hundreds of hundreds of miles from six the city. is still a struggling young republic and you know they advertise slaves in the newspapers they had in texas and sold openly. the slave culture was just gearing up as michael mentioned. they were -- they had two to 3000 slaves. you read dozens and dozens of letters and the alamo men going to texas to help in the revolution, to heed the call of their brothers and cousins and americans and men in the revolution. i think one mention slavery and all the rest talk about fighting for democracy, fighting for freedom and fighting against tyranny and it's kind of refreshing because we we are so used to democracy. we take it for granted we don't think about how wonderful it is. really and honestly we don't but in 1836, this was only 60 years after they declared as though they were mostly american and clothes and they declared 60 years before their forefathers and democracy was a unique thino them and fresh and they were almost happy to fight for this, for this wonderful thing. and of course when they heard the calls from their friends and relatives and fellow americans from texas that they needed helo help. it's something we don't think about. it's the alamo holding out against santa ana but we don't think it's part of a larger group of movements. see even in the alamo -- "the gate of the alamo" you do with race and a sophisticated way and you also do with deal with the idea of memory especially in your novel remember ben clayton. one of the things that fascinates me about the revolution is the fickleness of fame. 300 men are murdered by santa anna at goliad in cold blood and they are not immortalized in stone. they are not remembered. there were no movies made about them. could you comment on that? i have always been fascinated by how some of the sum men are famous at the alamo and they are mortal. >> again it goes back to i think to the myth created immediately after the alamo both because of who died there and because of probably because the feeling of guilt among the rest of the texas insurgence because they had let this go down and also because of that moment of choice which maybe was bogus and maybe was not. but you know, one of the things i think i would like to tie in to the previous discussion as well because you asked, would the alamo be viable? i think only if the story is recast or be calibrated so that it includes the mexican side of the story. i try to do that as much as i could in my novel and its it's really compelling. when you live in texas, you grow up among people for whom the alamo is either a sacred object or a bludgeon. i was talking the other day to who leon julio de castro who's the mayor of san antonio, a 37-year-old very sophisticated intelligent and well spoken mayor of san antonio and his mother was a well-known teacher, activist in the 60s and 70's. she was quoted recently in "the new york times" last year saying i hate the alamo and everything it stands for. i understand that and i think a lot of people growing up with hispanic or latino heritage can relate to the triumphalist pressure that they feel from the anglo side of the story and it's interesting because it's portrayed and it really should be as a mexican story, as a story as jim was saying is the mexican civil war. many of the anglo people in the alamo were mexican people by choice and ever many native lauren cahon those who were in alamosa one time and several died. this was a story that took place away from american soil into place in mexico. it's a story that mexicans can be proud of. but it's been portrayed in a way that makes it seem like it guys and coonskin caps that took over mexico from the mexicans and it's not that way at all. >> davy crockett and jim billy at the alamo were already famous sort of like the all-star team of western history gets together only wild bill hickok and custer at the little bighorn. that's just great stuff. travis though the other central hero of the story was not famous and there is a particular epic moment in the story of the alamo that makes him famous. and it's sort of your dream i guess if you are a hopeless romantic like travis they wanted fame and he wanted glory and wanted to be remembered. he gets his moment on history's stage stage and as you write in your book "the blood of heroes" be really makes the most of it. >> are you referring to his death? >> no i am referring to -- [inaudible] >> he you had mentioned there are differing thoughts of the line in the sand. i found enough new material. i wrote a 24 page afterword about the lion -- the line and presented the evidence and analyzed it. i think there is enough evidence and admittedly most of it is hearsay or secondhand evidence but i think there is enough to say that he drew the line. he was a very eloquent man as we note from his letters. victory or death, just a wonderful writer and i think it's perfectly in character with him. >> the the line, you talk about democracy and of course the struggle is part of the internal struggle for democracy which is how i view it instead of an internal civil war in mexico but that could be why i'm out of step. but nevertheless, the line in the sand is so central to the story because it's the ultimate democratic moment in which people, we can't even get people to go to the polls to vote in an off year election. nobody shows up. these guys are voting with their very lives, stepping across the line to sacrifice their lives for liberty and that is the essence of the alamo story. the most of famous of those is davy crockett. a national figure before he arrived at the alamo and famous in san antonio at that time. and of course the titanic figure in our national memory since that time. his death has become his last few moments on earth have overshadowed it and in fact much of his life as i thought perhaps mr. wallis can illuminate that for us. i call on the other two gentlemen because they're both wrong in their opinions on it. donovan is a novelist gets to make everything up. i'm sorry, -- is a novelist gets to make everything up. that's so confusing. >> actually i think crockett should be remembered not so much for the way he died but how he lived. you know when i started in on this crockett book, i went back to my meeting of crockett in the living room in 1954, which forced me that night to not watch disney i've got a secret but to go back in my bedroom in four through the encyclopaedia britannica entry about crockett. and it grew from there but eventually of course i outgrew the 9-year-old story. the main problem i have with the best parker story izzy were the same dam outfit years later as daniel boone and he is confused everyone. the lay people on the street say you are writing a book about boone aren't you? i said no, no two different generations. anyway i digress. the thing is i am always delighted when i get to know these people whether it's an oil baron or an indian chief or an outlaw or a frontier figure like crockett. i am always delighted and in no way do i want to stop and darken the image of the myth. i think there is a place for the myth and there is a place for the myth of the alamo and a place for the myth of crockett. i'm a great believer in myth but i'm also a great believer in the truth. that is the story that i find more interesting. back to slavery, a lot of people wouldn't figure this out, owned slaves. he certainly didn't own as many slaves as to people he encountered in his life in tennessee and washington and that would be andrew jackson was a very wealthy man and a great landowner despite his folksy image that he liked to create. or james polk. two men who became bitter enemies of crockett. here is what i remember crockett four. not so much the alamo but i really value him as a courageous man because of the indian removal act. i live in oklahoma. i live in a land where so many tribal people were dumped including the five tribes of the southeast which we white americans have or george or the given them the name of civilized tribes which is a ridiculous name to give it. but the cherokees and the creeks and the choctaw and the seminoles were all brought on trails of tears to indian territory and one of the men most responsible was andrew jackson who you know as we know as old victory and who they know as sharp knife. it was a cruel act. they are called the five drives because particularly the cherokees in the creeks, if we worship the white guys gods and take on the western dress and customs and mores and even have a plantation system, and they had african slaves, then they won't map -- mess with us and we did anyway. we moved them out of georgia, tennessee and alabama and so forth. two rivers and on land and brought them in. crockett, the only member of the tennessee delegation stood up to jackson and said you mess with these people and that didn't play well with crockett's constituents let me tell you, back home. we need more men like crockett in congress today ,-com,-com ma people who are not afraid to go against anything. their party, their leaders who think for themselves, who don't worry about how it looks, about lobbyists or special interest and they think about the good of the whole country. >> michael wallis for president! [applause] >> that is why to me, and i don't overdo it in crockett. he pulled his fancy trousers on in washington when they get a time just like he did his buckskins. he was not a great intellect that but he was not a pumpkin. he was arguably one of our first celebrity heroes, a common man who were in congress who most of the others were fancy statesmen. he didn't wear his buckskins into the halls of congress. he wore a coat and try to make his way. he was not a very effective congressman but by god he went there and he stood his ground all the way around in that great slogan of his which he definitely uttered, always be sure you are right and then go ahead. he did that right down to his very last breath. >> what michael doesn't mention is that even more of an indication of the measure of the man is that he voted against the indian removal act despite the fact that his paternal or maternal grandparents were massacred by cherokee indians. he thought the cherokees and the civilized tribes were getting a raw deal. >> you have any questions you will want to line up now. this would be a good time to do so well mr. harrigan weizen on crockett and his demise. >> on his demise? i am working on a novel right now about abraham lincoln's early life and i have taken the liberty of starting the book with the news that the fall of the alamo comes to springfield. my thinking is that lincoln certainly knew that crockett -- and probably thought maybe i could be like that guy. there were a lot of similarities to these guys who came from absolutely nowhere, leverage themselves up and had this ferocious ambition. and so i think crockett as a character runs deep in american history and he is a real striver, somebody who is not satisfied with what he has got, who has a deepening sense of principle and fairness. as michael said, a lot of these guys don't hold up too well in the cold light of provisionism but crockett sort of does. and you know i think is worthy of being an american he wrote. >> is a very key point. there is no question in my mind that crockett had a direct influence and it shows up in papers. this isn't just my wild thinking. he had an influence on mark twain. he had an influence on abraham lincoln. he had an influence on will rogers. and if you look at the measure of those four men, very similar, self-effacing humor the kind of awe shucks style but not afraid to take shots at the establishment were turned to joke around on himself. >> our first question. >> in the disney series there was a character named george russell played by buddy epson and i grew up in alabama. i have heard that the broadband broadband -- he would live to be an old man and died in 1831 and franklin county alabama. do you know anything about george russell? the buddy epson character is not very accurate. he was kind of like cisco and poncho and it wasn't like that. russell of course is a very big name in tennessee history and through other sections of the midsouth. so yes he did exist and there is russell and crockett's autobiography and i'm sure the disney screenwriter pulled a name out of there. when they were first casting the show they considered buddy epson to play davy crockett which in some ways because of humor would have been more accurate. >> thank you all for coming first of all. very interesting. my question is for any or all of you was the alamo and davy crockett and custer in there too what gives you as individuals the courage or the feeling that i can write something new. i can come up with something that people will find interesting. >> if you look there are a lot of good books written that are based on other books written about a subject. people don't do archival research or deep research and if you look in their there are notes in the book of all the citations and sources of other secondary sources. i've found with both of these subjects that if you did deep enough because very few people dig deep enough you can find something new. i was very gratified. i didn't find as much new 40 years earlier in 1836 something that happens on the texas frontier with hardly any newspaper man around but i did find something so that is why i tackled it, because i wanted to learn more about it. >> in my case i was seven years old when i first saw the alamo and the actual alamo not the movie and it's so haunted me and disturb me that i felt like i needed to somehow find a way to tell the story for myself. when i started to write this novel about the alamo i realized i had to find a way to bring people into it that but felt new to me which is by -- y. by main characters not davy crockett but a fictional character working both for the government and for the united states. i felt like by creating characters who were human and not on one side or the other i could take the reader into that place and show him or her and me what he must have been like her might have been like in the 1930s. >> there is always something new that you can find if you do as jim said, if you're willing to do the work. i don't think anybody agrees with me. one of my favorite parts of the gestation of the development of a book is the research. it's the digging and the snooping. >> that's the best part. >> the second best part is when the book is published and going out and promoting the book and talking about it. unfortunately there is another piece of the puzzle that comes in between the two, when you have to walk into a room and closed the door and put your derrière on a chair and make it happen. >> is a very dark and disturbing place. >> we don't want to go there but i am struck by harrigan's repeated comments about how disturbing he found the alamo when he visited and when he saw the disney show. of course i read it and its in his main character is deeply disturbed and now i realize it's autobiographical. >> yes, sir? >> i have a davy crockett fast. >> do you still have a? >> could buy that. [laughter] >> the question is, could you comment on the fact that he didn't have a coon skin cap but somehow that became popularized or whatever? >> he had a skin cap. i think the skin path has been overdone though. let me just point out one thing. in the front piece of my book right here, you can't see it here but it's a portrait by chapman in washington d.c.. it's crockett's bar none favorite image of himself. he is holding a proper hunters had at pennsylvania hunters had. boone despised animal skin hats and always wore a hunters had. a little point. there were people who said that they saw an animal skin hats. who knows? it is worth debate. it's interesting. i think he was rather taken with the idea of an animal had which is the subtitle of the book, the lion of the west and a character who portrayed him in a rather outfit with all kinds of friend jenna bob skin hats by the name of nimrod wildfire who left onto the stage. crockett went to the opening in the washington theater, the largest theater in washington city as they called it at the time and he came in with his entourage and was seated in the first row and no one knew how he would react to nimrod wildfire coming out. that is a great moment i think in crockett's life and really in history because crockett sat down and then nimrod came out on the stage with the bob skin hats and smartly walked over to the edge of the stage and made a big sweeping bow to crockett. and what would crockett do but to get up and humble him. he got up and he made a big sweeping bow right back. that i suggest is myth and reality colliding right there. >> i would like to note that he didn't wear a coon skin cap. there were several descriptions including one from his daughter martha fields on the eve of his departure from tennessee and a few others who saw him on his way to texas so he did wear a coonskin cap. >> there is an 1833 biography of him which talks about his first skin cap terry did you want to weigh in on that headgear? >> he spent more time on his coon skin cap and anything else. >> i am totally agnostic on the coon skin cap. it was cold and it was march and it was cold. he probably had a cap. and air flaps may be. >> not a cent too like a college professor which i am i will point out to the audience that of course dressing in animal skins is part of the mythology of heroes. you can think of the tales of hercules and william tell. then in america translated of course and to benjamin franklin who was a role model both in his autobiography and in the almanacs that he wrote. when dr. franklin went to paris and franklin was one of the most brilliant men of the enlightenment, he knew exactly what the friends like to call the savage. the fur cap is a symbol of your commonality with the people that you are one with nature and that you are an american. >> franklin wore the tale. >> but the tale in texas. [inaudible] >> there is a sub literature on pfizer's and ear flaps with a coonskin cap. >> we also are pretty sure that unlike people who wore the hats today and turn them around crockett never turned his coonskin hats around which would have impacted his marksmanship greatly. [laughter] >> i sense is this deteriorating. let me try to bring it back. where we began which was the last stand in our last couple of minutes. jim of course you're glad of heroes is now most people recognize and i certainly do as the standard of the battle of the alamo from the fabulous 1960 book any of also written about custer. these are the two pick of the moments in terms of the wedge and a -- legend of the west end where the conquerors are conquered and they use that event to create a shining legend perhaps you could provide insight into that. >> was there a question? >> do you see a relationship between custer and the alamo besides the fact that -- >> although he supposedly took his jacket off before the final battle, that figures into the legend and the mythic area, but what i do in this book and the same as michael you are so obsessed with finding out what really happened and trying to sort out the myth from the fact and trying to stick to the fact that it's really takes a great shift for me to talk about the mythic and the legendary aspect. >> it does. a lot of times you just have to give the reader, and i don't think it's a copout, give them what i call a jump ball and lay everything out there and build the case if you wish or not, to give them what could have been what people think happened and let them make up their own mind. a minor example would be whether you were a coonskin cap or not. crockett's death is very controversial. there is not as much controversy around his death of the young travis who is 24 -- 26 or bouy or some of the other principles from the alamo. but crockett, you find this great dichotomy. there were some who even said he dressed as a senior reader early and stuck away from the alamo or that he was a sniveling coward. that is not a majority view but a lot of people -- how did we grow up thinking, 300 slain in infantrymen at his feet. somewhere in between it is probably the truth. i am one of those two after going down to austin and looking at what is called the diary kept by a high-ranking mexican officer looking at what sam houston wrote shortly after the alamo, specifically about the death of crockett i believe and i will throw it up in the air, that crockett has approximately seven defenders of the alamo taken prisoner. not swinging rifles over their heads that they were taking prisoners and were brought ultimately before santa anna where they raised the black flag and they petitioned for his life. this great naturalist, crockett. no mercy was given and they were killed and that was the end of it. so that is why i do know that however he died, at the alamo, on that day on march 6, 1836 davy crockett died. but davy crockett rides on. >> from the ashes of of the alamo rights of course the great american legend and of course as defenders of the alamo they were burned in a great funeral pyre almost like vikings of old and i find that quite -- well i want to thank all of you for coming and think my panelists. if we could give them a round of applause. [applause] thanks a lot, paul. >> i want to thank the audience and i of course want to thank c-span2 and they want to thank the tucson festival of the book. a big round of applause for the tucson festival of books. [applause] our authors will meet you at the med and median signing area tend b south and west of where we are here in the student union at the university of arizona and it's right along the mall. books are available for purchase at the signing area. thank you all very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] ..

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