nut? “fin tfii ”at, “fin tfii iiin e‘iifiiéi “ni ‘fiifi if, fit”? it e‘ililié: “fin tfil lp it? it ii‘u‘é: republicans attempt to scrap the affordable care assistant. at this point he had already started receiving treatment for the brain cancer. as a final act of what has been described as the maverick, he signalled in a late—night vote that he was against the republican attem pts he was against the republican attempts with a simple thumbs down. a few weeks later, the republicans tried yet again. there was a lot of lobbying at senator mccain but no, he did not budge. and again voted against the republicans. more coverage of the memorial service taking place for senator john mccain in washington right here on bbc news. meantime, we will catch up on bbc news. meantime, we will catch up with the weather. then, summer

has returned. it feels like it, certainly. the first day of autumn as meteorologists are concerned but for many it does not feel like it. earlier, beautiful sunny scenes, many it does not feel like it. earlier, beautifulsunny scenes, but it has not been met that everywhere. further north and west a mixture of cloud. that is south lanarkshire and the cloud is that not that not only not high winds which will produce the odd spot of drizzle. a little bit of patchy cloud elsewhere. in the sunnis ganzi have temperatures as high as 2a or 25 degrees, for example in hull. but with cloud elsewhere. tonight there will be the odd spot of drizzle, quite breezy for the far north—west. east of scotla nd for the far north—west. east of scotland and england is holding onto some clear spells and it will be on the cool side but most places

holding onto the train 14 and 16 degrees. tomorrow, the best of the sunshine for the east of scotland and england. more loane and further west, wayne for northern ireland and the west of scotland where it will be breezy and temperatures between 17 and 2a degrees. this is bbc news... the headlines. official documents reveal that hm revenue and customs uses a traffic light system to rate the tax arrangements of people nominated for an honour. a man has appeared in court charged with the murder of a mother and daughter — who were stabbed outside their home in solihull. more misery for northern rail passengers, as more than two—thirds of services are cancelled — in a dispute over driver—only operated trains. the united states ends its funding for the un's palestinian refugee agency — deeming it irredeemably flawed. the organisation has rejected the

criticism and expressed deep disappointment. now on bbc news, kirsty wark presents a special edition of talking books from the edinburgh international book festival 2018, where she talks to american author t geronimojohnson. hello and welcome to talking books from the edinburgh international book festival with me, kirsty wark. ten years on from the election of barack obama, what progress does author and academic t geronimojohnson think that america has made in terms of race relations? he says too many of us have stood idly by of america is run roughshod america is run roughshod

by conservative racists. in his breakthrough novel, welcome to braggsville, t geronimojohnson details the life of a young white boy from braggsville, georgia, who wins a place at the prestigious berkeley university in california. the novel explores the complexities of race, identity and class, be it with the liberal elite in berkeley or in the traditions of the deep south. applause. t geronimojohnson, very warm welcome to talking books. thank you. you have been compared to some extremely fine authors — mark twain, toni morrison, tom wolfe — and i wonder if that's because you've got the capacity to put a magnifying glass up to american life, with all its foibles, and chronicle it in a very acute way, but also a way that makes us laugh, too. right, i think that may definitely have something to do with it. that's definitely what moves me about a few of the writers that were mentioned there.

but it's always felt to me necessary to me to try to have a breath of emotional experiences in a novel, or it can get too heavy. and if it is too heavy all the way through, considering some of the topics i'm dealing with, i don't know if that leaves the reader in a good position to face forward and think about how we can move forward from where we are now. i think the thing is, as well, you come at it from all angles. so every race, every variation, every ethnicity, gets it with both barrels and gets some love directed towards it. right. your most recent book is welcome to braggsville. before we delve into that kind of rollercoaster, rumbustious novel, i want to begin with your first novel, hold it ‘til it hurts, which is a deeply affecting, tender novel. at its heart, there are two young men, achilles and troy, who were adopted.

they are not blood brothers, but they are adopted sons of a white couple, and afghanistan vets — or you would call it in the book "goddamnistan vets". they take two tours together and much of the action takes place in new orleans, your home town. before we talk about the big issues you face, i also want to talk about the family dynamics in the relationship. here we have two young black men, adopted by — i would say a lower—middle—class white family, traditional five acres that they have. tell me how you came to that family dynamic. i wanted to put together a cast of people who were trying to do their best for each other but did not necessarily know how. and so this is what ends up happening with achilles‘ parents,

who don't really know how to prepare him for what he will face when he leaves his small home town where everybody knows him, and becomes just this anonymous black kid walking down the street, which is, in much of american society, a symbol for danger. people are worried as soon as they see this. also between the two brothers, with all of the tension and competitiveness that can arise between siblings, you mix in this notion of masculinity, you send them off to war, and they come back, and achilles really wants to do what is best but he doesn't know how because he is following too many different rules. and so this is part of what i was thinking at the beginning. but it's a very tender dynamic between the mother and the sons, particularly. because what happens is sending both — well, troy signs up so archilles better go. and archilles is the son you'd all want to have and troy is a bit more wayward.

it is about loyalty and it seems to me that is about nature versus nurture. it is certainly about this conflict between from where do you draw who you are? is it genetics, or your environment, in which you have been raised? the funny thing for them is because they go off to war, at a very young age, and have an extremely traumatic and concentrated experience, we know that whatever nurturing they have had, and whatever nature they brought into it, are both changed over this 18 months of basically been charged with killing people. this is essentially theirjob when they're deployed. and i wonder, just to digress a bit, i want to talk about afghanistan, because when you are writing this book, you knew a lot of people in the military. and you spoke to a lot of people with ptsd particularly.

at the time in america there was no discussion about how to help these young men re—enter society. so they spent a number of months literally being under fire, being afraid for their lives, and then actually going through the changes that you go through when you become acclimated to being afraid to go about your life, when you become accustomed to people shooting at you. and then you go home but your triggers are still there, right? you still have all of this, all of this emotional vortex carrying you along. so i really wanted to explore that in the novel, because itjust... nobody was talking about it at the time and it seemed a shame. it resonated with vietnam and korea as well. of course, right. you imagine after something as traumatic as vietnam, and people came home and did not know how to deal with these vets, it might be a better place. i think a lot of the philosophy

around reintegrating after vietnam or korea or even world war i was just be silent. you don't talk about it. this is also a part of the code of masculinity, right, so you don't talk about what is bothering you. you basically don't talk about anything. that is why i would say not that most men die of masculinity, to the extent that we die of like, heart disease or stress related conditions. and so i was... i was also thinking in the novel about what it means to be a young man to be given the ultimate responsibility and the ultimate duty and then have that licence removed and kind of find yourself basically a warrior in peacetime. and a warrior in peacetime. and also a warrior in peacetime who is also an african—american. and then comes back to new orleans and faces black—on—black violence. we have this violence,

black—on—black violence, weighing against archilles‘ experiences in afghanistan, when this is the first time he's been around a lot of people who look like him, and he is supposed to shoot them. so that ended up, i think, allowing me to create kind of a richer story, in a way, yeah. and also when you look at the domestic lives, and achilles returns, and he always remembers that he's come back from afghanistan, and there's no doubt that his mother was warning him away from his two—time, three—time girlfriend, because she was considered white trash. his parents wanted him to date somebody of higher standing than janice. you have this notion of class and race, what might be white trash, being juxtaposed against the slow and steady work of love. you do that in another character in the book, ines, who isn't actually african—american

but, as you put it, can "pass". one of the great things you do is burst the bubble of the gap year, or the "gap yar", as it is called there. she's done her time in afghanistan as well, but he still thinks that she is a bit snooty. he thinks that she is snooty and also, oddly enough, he is more attracted to her because he does not know that she is black. so that kind of sets them up to have a reckoning and conciliation in which they change the way they look at themselves in the world. yes. which is what you do in both novels, which is undercut what we think, and i think you do that so well. because you have this incredibly energetic, vibrant page of writing, but at the end, you've got to stop and say, right, i need to think about that for a minute. which brings me on to actually how

you literally right, you literally write, because you are a professor of writing and do lots of different things. you participate in different writers‘ programmes. you say that you are a serial monogamist. when you do one project, you do one project. when you have one relationship, you do one relationship. how do you literally put your life in writing together? i have to admit last fall i was a little bit promiscuous... we like confessions. and i saw several projects at the same time. and that was fun. but for me i think it is better to focus on a single book because it lets me look at the world i am living in and filter those experiences through a unique mind. because each book has a unique mind. i read a lot of religious texts as a child. yeah. there is something of the language of bible that i think is part of these influences as well.

also listening to music. i think all of that goes in. are you religious now? it depends on who's watching this show. mum, i am very religious. my friends, you know the truth. no, my mother knows the truth. i look back and feel that the religious upbringing i had was one of the most important components of my development, because it gave me a sense of what it means to believe in something outside of myself, something higher, and even if someone later leaves their religion, there's still this space — this imaginative space, you know, in your soul, this kind of outward sense of belief and belonging. and also it is important to me, looking back, because i have an appreciation for what it means to believe something that other people don't, or to believe something and feel kind of like you are an outsider, right? and also a sense of the totality

of that veil, right? once it you put it on, it determines everything you do. but it also, coming back to this idea, you believe what other people don't believe and vice—versa, but it gives you a compassion rather than an intolerance? certainly, certainly. i think that at the global level, we often see a lot of religious conflict that would lead us to believe religions are inherently intolerant but when you read the text themselves, they pretty much all extol the golden rule, and there's a great quote from the dalai lama, that everyone does not need to become buddhist, they simply need to practise whatever religion it is they claim to be following. let's come on properly to the much garlanded braggsville, which the new york times said was the funniest send—up of identity politics and racial anxiety in years.

it begins with a 500—word sentence which crackles with energy and sets the pace. the style challenges the reader. what did you want to think in that first huge rush of language? "this is not for me." or maybe it is. but i wanted to let the reader know very early on that it was going to have this kind of frenetic pace and also, it wasn't going to be a book that wants to tell you what you already know in a way that you have already heard it, and i feel like this was the important thing, you're going to start talking about contemporary society or social issues, no—one needs me to tell them what they already know in a way they have heard it said before. braggsville itself is a place of 700 souls and it is where a young boy comes from who goes to berkeley and he doesn't fit in until he meets three other people of varied

ethnicity and they call themselves the four little indians. tell me about them. the four little indians are quite, quite different in that d'aron coming from georgia, in the south.... all the way through the novel, "are you daron, are you d'aron?" he talks about dropping the apostrophe early on. he has this anxiety about being a southerner. on the west coast, there is a bit of derision about people who are from the south, so he's trying to figure out how he can fit in and sound smart but he is also coming from small town coming from a small town where he was the valedictorian and that was easy but it seems like everyone at berkeley was a valedictorian and so how does he stand out? he ends up falling in with candice, who is one—quarter native american. or as she puts it,

one—quarter indian, the kind you found, not the kind you were looking for. then you have charlie, who is this african—american kid from a poor area of chicago but who, through an athletic scholarship, ends up attending a residential school and it gives him this great education. lastly, we have louis chang who wants to be the next lenny bruce lee, the next kung fu comedian. one of the key things i was interested in was d'aron or daron, whatever we are going to call him, was originally black but you changed him. why? when i first started on the novel, i imagined he would be a black teenager from a small town in georgia, but as i tried to get started, it didn't make sense that this teenager would move and leave a small town in georgia, go to california and agree to return

and visit and participate in the civil war re—enactment and also have no historical sense of it. it's something his parents, growing up in the south, would have advised him against. you get a lot of explicit instruction growing up a person of colour in the south — always be respectful when the police stop you, you know, don't talk back. your parents basically give you a laundry list of things that you should do to ensure that you will come home in one piece each night. and that being the case, the story wasn't working because the main character would already know... all that. not to go back and do what he did. but they go back because the professor

on alternative history course, is talking about the civil war re—enactments that are becoming more popular again, one of which is in braggsville and the four of them, they go on an adventure which has dark consequences because they decide to do what? they decide what they want to do is stage a fake lynching at the civil war re—enactment to give people a sense of everything at stake. and see if they can start a conversation about what this history means. give us a reading. so this is from the scene when they are in school, in class, and they come up with the idea to do this project. "the table was shocked — the entire class, in fact. they had heard tales of civil war re—enactments but they were still occurring? the war between the states was another time and another country, as was the south. are barbers still surgeons? is there still sharecropping? what about indoor plumbing? like an old loony tunes skit,

tex avery tag ensued. charlie gawked at louis who gawked at candice who generously suggested it as a capstone project to the professor, who googled the event and announced it coincided with spring break. serendipity has spoken." so here we have a really big pot shot at the liberal elite at berkeley. you have lectured in taking classes there but because you are fearless, are you taking a pot shot at the liberal elite? no, no. it was more of perhaps a sustained volley. but let me explain what's kind of happening in the book, i'm thinking very much about the far right and the far left and these incompatibilities and using them as a space to explore all of the positions in between. when you talk about different black experiences where

you are in america, it's so obvious. like atlanta, the african—american experience in atlanta is completely different in the projects of philadelphia. atlanta is unique in that regard. i didn't realise it or appreciate it perhaps as much as when i lived there because i remember moving to oakland and working with a group that was giving kids access to the sciences and they told the kids that they should be very grateful to be around so many other people of colour who were successful and be grateful to be in the same room with other people of colour who were successful and i was puzzled and asked the speaker afterwards, why do you act like this is an anomaly? this happens all the time and he says, no, not out here. maybe in atlanta, not out here so that is a big difference between atlanta and most of the other cities. atlanta is still a viable, what you would say, like a chocolate city where there are enough people of colour who are plugged

into the economy at every level. there is representation at every level. it is rare. when i lived in atlanta, i worked in banking for a minute and there was a time when banks would put underwriters on buses and take them on tours of southwest atlanta so they could see with their own eyes these large homes owned by wealthy african—americans so that when they went back to their offices to do their credit scoring and their underwriting, they wouldn't stare in disbelief if an application crosses their desk with an african—american buyer making a million wanting to buy a $2 million house. they are just resistant to that being a possible reality. which brings me talk about barack obama and whether or not, it's almost a decade since we knew he was going to be the us president, and how did you view his election?

the great thing about his election is that it showed us what was possible and it also opened the doors to the unfinished conversations that we still needed to have at the time and are only now having, so it wasn't until after... everything we see now with trump actually started under obama in terms of the alt right and the militias... under obama's administration, the militias grew 1,000% across the nation. people started stockpiling assault rifles and there is this general anxiety of fear that he might in some way retaliate for this perceived historical injustice that people of colour had experienced in the country. all of this anxiety is mixed up with, will he live

and what is the pushback going to be? we are seeing the push back now. the right is running roughshod. yes. are you pessimistic about america? no, i'm not pessimistic. it's just that i don't focus wholly on the aspirational as a writer. i think that everyone has to do what works for them and it's very important for us to have books that look at how things could be and it's just that these two novels, i felt it more important to talk about things as they are now and to find a way to talk about the difficulties we are facing as a society, right now, in this moment. i want someone who reads the novel to walk away, any of my works, to walk away with a slightly different perspective and perhaps a little bit more of an opening in their heart,

and for me that means i have to have some of the criticism as well as the hook. there has to be a movement in the book were there to be a movement in the reader. thank you forjoining us on talking books. t geronimojohnson, thank you! good afternoon. september sunshine for some but not for all. it has been a mixed fortunes. look at the scene sent in by the weather watcher from the isle of wight. but compare it to have it looked in the far north of scotland. drizzly conditions as you can see. the north and west have this year all the cloud. a few breaks in the north—east of scotland and for northern ireland. wales and the south—west, too. some sunshine here.

as we close out the afternoon, the best of the brightness will be down towards the south tees, but there will be some further west than patchy cloud and sunny spells for the south—west of england and for wales. temperatures in up to the 20s, wales. temperatures in up to the 205, 24 wales. temperatures in up to the 20s, 2a in london, perhaps 25 in hull. extra cloud for the north—west of england, cloud over the hills, cloudy for scotland and northern ireland, but breaks in the cloud, especially for part of aberdeenshire and around the moray firth, where temperatures could get up to 21 degrees. during this evening and tonight it will be that western areas that are seeing the cloud floating around, the odd spot of rain and drizzle here and there and so rain and drizzle here and there and so mist and market conditions. both the north of scotland and east of england, cloud remains, but it will not get too cold. most places holding into the double digits. tomorrow, first planted it is a similar day. the best of the brightness for the north and east. a cloudy day across parts of the

midlands, brighter than today across the south—west and wales. later in the south—west and wales. later in the day the cloud and outbreaks of more persistent rain from northern ireland and scotland, quite breezy here and temperatures could get to 26 degrees in the south—east. for sunday and monday, the cold front comes so sunday and monday, the cold front comes so the sports. that will bring some rain but it will introduce some colder here, at least cooler air for the north—west. it is another one be across the south—east for monday however with spells of sunshine. here is the weather from stretching from the south—east of scotland down towards the south—west. patchy rain at times. behind it temperatures and lady campbell, 111 down around 70 and in some places but there will be spells and sunshine. tuesday and wednesday temperatures will be lower than the weekend. but it should be dry, a filament of cloud but some sunny spells as well. that is all from me. goodbye for now. this is bbc news.

the headlines at 3pm: the memorial service of us senator, presidential candidate and vietnam war veteran, john mccain, takes place in washington. former us presidents george w bush and barack obama will deliver eulogies at the national cathedral. president trump has not been invited. official documents reveal that hm revenue and customs uses a traffic light system to rate the tax arrangements of people nominated for an honour. the united states ends its funding for the un's palestinian refugee agency — deeming it irredeemably flawed. more misery for northern rail passengers as more than two—thirds of services are cancelled — in a dispute over driver—only operated trains.