good afternoon, welcome to the heritage foundation and our lewis letterman auditorium. we, of course, welcome those for joining us on c-span. we would ask a going here in house if you ll be so kind to check that cell phones are turned off as we prepare to begin. and, of course, the program will be hosted on the heritage homepage following today s presentation for your future reference as well, and our internet yours are always welcome to send questions or comments simply e-mailing speaker@heritage.org. hosting our discussion today on behalf of heritage is diem nguyen salmon, our senior policy analyst for defense budgeting. she is in or douglas and sarah allison center for aren t a national steve ells riches my with both u.s. defense platforms, government contracting practices, and brings her expertise to matters of defense hardware investment. before joining heritage she worked at the washington, d.c. headquarters, and later became the manager of analytics, global defense s
in a nonfiction book, this is the place to be. we have four really different books, but they re all really amazing. we have two finalists for the l. a. times book prize and i want to point this one out to you now and this one out to you now here. that s why i like to bring the books, so you can actually see them. we also have two finalists for the penn literary awards one in biography here, jeff hobbs book with, and one in science writing, joshua horowitz s book. and i think it s worth noting that this book here is actually on two of those lists, and he s our youngest participant. this is not his first book but it s his first book as far as i know of nonfiction, so it s quite an achievement. we also have books that are going to take us to places that really, in my mind as i read them can change how we look at the world. books are going to take us underwater, going to take us hundreds of feet underground, they re going to take us into the amazon and to pittsburgh and to birmi
would create a diplomatic relations and that was the original purpose in the book. no one believed including my publisher thank you dan simon, i started to doubt it myself. when it happened i had to rearrange the book and i was fortunate to update it. its arts with a detailed account of how it happened on december 17th, the beginning of normalization. the rest of the book is about the preceding 55 years or 60 years and i interviewed for many hours a former leader of the cuban revolution and government his daughter in havana said it should be called two old guys talking so i made that the initial chapter. host: tell us about ricardo. guest: you have to write this book because nobody knows him. if that is true, you are talking about a man who after many decades the cuban foreign minister, cute and united nations representative in new york at the cuban head of natural assembly which is speaker of the house of representatives. he has been a public human figure, he knows more
he dies under robert ely s command and this is a devastating a devastating impact. he feels this loss very sharply. i am just curious how do they compare with characters today in washington? [laughter] .. so i think he would find that interesting and i will take a pass on the question because it is just too hard because the civil war is just the meet period we can all agree that the country never has to undergo that again thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] host: and thanks for watching booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. and today we are live on the campus of the university of southern california home of the los angeles times festival of books. today there are several author panels ahead on the plushing industry biographies publishing industry, biographies of world leaders and science, and we ll also sit down with tom hayden, travels smiley and hugh hewitt among others while they take your
are fundamental rights to marriage and who gets access to those fundamental rights and who doesn t. those are the issues that the parties in one way or another addressed. i ve read all the briefs, i have to say i think the quality of the briefing by varies. these are not briefs that were written by law professors and so that may be a good thing but they re not as rigorous as we would like to have one more teaching our were teaching our students but it s also fair to say that in many cases they weren t written by or meet the standards of the supreme court briefs. that s not to say there badly done it s just to say they somewhat vary. the petitioners in their briefs all emphasize a mix of doctrine, other cases in due process and equal protection. personal stories about their clients and their parties, appeals to justice kennedy which are an inevitable feature in any case like this and preemptive strikes making their response brief. the respondents briefs, the state briefs empha