well. at one stage, i was trying to do a quick sketch of the key themes going forward. so i started off listing things like telecoms, banks, etc.. let's take a step back and try to look at how we are covering the financial and corporate world in general. that matches that to how the financial and corporate world looked. so i tried to draw maps of the city of london and compare it to what the stories were is that we were covering and i was struck by the fact that there was a big discrepancy that pretty much all the media was focusing on, the equity markets, and writing a

lot about those things. but there was a great big sway of debt and derivatives which was pretty important to the city of london on wall street, but resulted in being covered. i thought of making some noise about that. one thing led to another and i moved across to the capital markets team in early 2005. at this stage, that wasn't viewed as a particular glorious promotional move. running capital market pages, covering the debt markets for many years, in a very solid manner. the glory positions were the banking editors, economics editor, things like next. it wasn't the capital market, it was quite a long way away. most of the capital market coverage was on page 423 of the ft stuff. someone pointed out to me

because i had gotten pregnant, i was going to the capital market tough it would all be so quiet, nothing ever happens. i arrive in capital markets, and one of the things i decided to do, this is the story of j. p. morgan, to go down to attend a conference of a body called the european security forum. they hold it once a year. i went down, and walked into the acropolis center, a great big hit of french architecture into a plus, velvet, conference room, find out what was going on in the credit world. the scene that i walked into felt almost immediately like walking into an alien jungle. there were a bunch of people

walking around, there were lots of people talking about very large sums of money but doing so in a language that i, even though i had been working on financial papers for the best part of the year, did not have the foggiest idea what they were talking about. it was like hearing a strange new dialogue going on that frankly was fairly -- very alienating. it almost felt familiar too because before i became a journalist i worked as an anthropologist. i worked in a place where i did my field work in the mountains. i studied in particular, wedding rituals. i used to go into these large, alienating weddings and not have any idea what was going on, and everybody was speaking a strange language. people would be running around, it would be very clear that

these rituals played a key role in assembling the shrine and capturing the ideology that bound them together but trying to pick the language and work out what was going on was a huge challenge. but there was something about me that may be very intriguing. on the basis that if i could learn that, i could learn the language of ceos, i tried to figure out what was going on. so i did what most journalists often do when they haven't got the idea what is happening, i went through the brush or materials and starting reading biographies of the people from the tribe, on the podium, and i noticed something very strange, almost all of them had worked at j. p. morgan, which back in 2005 was kind of weird because in those days, everyone assumed -- it was goldman sachs alumni who

ran the world. suddenly it was j. p. morgan that seemed to be all over the place. so i asked my neighbor was going on, why they were working at j. p. morgan, why did these to work at j. p. morgan, and he said a sentence which changed my life for these shaped the last year, you have got to understand, there's one thing about the credit world that is absolutely key. they are everywhere, they created it. like many cliches, that was not entirely true, they were not the only ones who created the world of structured credit by any means that it turns out they have a lot of veracity. so i left that conference determine to try to work out this strange credit jungle and on the other hand to keep an eye on why and how they had come to place such a key role in

building this credit world and for the next week to or three years, we labored away in the capital market team. it was a group of us, not just myself, trying to make sense of this shadow we world. in the last year or two it is fashionable to work out who predicted this crisis and who didn't. i would not claim to have predicted the scale of the terrible financial cataclysm that has overwhelmed us but what was clear to us back in 2005, and 2006 was that not only was there an extraordinary revolution going on in the credit world but the only thing more extraordinary about the revolution going on in the financial system was the fact that it was going almost entirely unnoticed. there were a few papers writing about this stuff, pretty few. but for the most part,

politicians were extremely uninterested in asking questions about how the financial system worked or asking questions about why credit was so cheap. in fact the only politician who ever volunteered the words securitization to me before the summer of 2007 was barney frank. in the u.k. there was no interest amongst parliament and much interest in washington. i became increasingly concerned because it was clear to me that the scale of activity was not really occurring or expanding very rapidly but doing so with little oversight and in a condition where there was almost nobody who was able to understand how the minutiae of the credit world worked alone at up how it fit together. there was not in some way, entirely beholden to the system or did not have the best interests in preserving it either because they were being paid by the system or because they were a regulator and they

didn't want to rock the boat too violently. so then the summer of 2007 happened and our worst concerns about the accessibility in the financial system that came only too true. in subsequent months, in the maelstrom of trying to cover what was happening in this world set apart, many of you were scurrying around like chickens trying to work out what had happened and what was going to happen and why it had happened, i was very keen to try to find some kind of vehicle to do a story about how financial system has done so badly out of control and perhaps making pointers about what could be done to try to avoid that in the future. so i returned to the original morgan mafia idea that had been with me until i had gone to the regional conference. the reason i decided to focus on

them was partly because they did indeed play a critical role in developing the credit world and also because i felt very strongly that i wanted to tell the story of real-life human beings. because as the financial system had imploded over the last couple years it had been far too easy for politicians, consumers and journalists to simply resort to cliches and stereotypes, to put everything in black and white terms, to try to make very stark judgments. and sometimes you had the impression that the financial implosion happened because a team of evil marcion's had invaded the world and taken over the system with some dastardly plot to bring down the financial system and this idea that there were actually human beings inside the financial system and were making decisions, good and bad and like any human beings had contemplated ledgers, wasn't

really about. i picked up on the j. p. morgan group and essentially the book divides into three pars. the first part is called innovation because i tried to tell a story about how this group developed a set of ideas starting in the early 1990s which proved absolutely crucial in terms of taking credit risks which were traditionally treated as something which stuck to the balance sheet of banks and slicing and dicing it in a way that it could be felt across the system and parceled out to investors around the world. they initially did that with corporate credit risk. it was fraught with corporate credit risk. they did that partly through a derivative. as they develop these ideas it came out to a larger stream of intellectual development occurring in finance in the 1970s, which was all about

trying to find ways to transfer risks between banks and between banks and investors that made the financial system more efficient and effectively, they hope, less risky. that was the theory. so there was a body of experimentation and development that took place in the 1990s which was pioneered by the j. p. morgan team. but this part of the decade divided in the mortgage arena. this was the slicing and dicing of mortgage debt and mortgages to create structures -- the middle part of the book, tracing those ideas by the j. p. morgan group, the credit world collided with the mortgage ideas. in essence, what happened was

you had these initiative concepts in an era where credit was -- in a sense, there was a few regulations in the system, these two themes, i did to terrible effect, spawning essentially a crazy credit bubble. in the last third of the book, we basically tell the story of how that began to fall apart and in a sense, consequences of the overreach. but within this structure i followed the story of the j. p. morgan group. a terrible bit of irony from that because although the j. p. morgan group developed many of these ideas, they spotted in the early stage, the risks attached to that. when we developed -- they were not doing that because they were not hoping to blow the system

up. regulators generally thought it would be much safer. the regulator says he saw a presentation, the characters in the book had put together on this in 1995/1996, he called her up and said he was going to transform the face of banking. there was a sense of having discovered this amazing technology. that could only be good. the guys who split the atom or medical, genetic or whatever, you sit on the technology and of course these were bankers, they knew about bonuses. they were not charity workers but the j. p. morgan group were not in any way driven by this

sense -- let's try to to do what we can. they were excited by their ideas. it was a very heady period. they were caught up by being pioneers. so the initial impetus behind these ideas was not bad. in a sense there were a series of choices to be made not just by bankers but by regulators. and the j. p. morgan group actually spotted some of the dangers inherent of putting mortgages into these structures. they experimented a couple times and backed away because they felt the date wasn't good. 5 minutes later the credit bubble became crazier. similar experiments took a different decision. similarly, j. p. morgan group

rebecca were putting the balance sheet, trying to get rid of it. citigroup and merrill lynch, the decision was taken. j. p. morgan basically cut its credit lines in 2002/2003 because the structure didn't make sense. a very different decision was made by other banks. i say that not because j. p. morgan was superior and had wonderful insight and geniuses, nothing could be farther from the truth, they made plenty of mistakes but it was far too easy, all bankers are risky and what happened was inevitable. that was not the case. one of the things that became very clear to me is just how different a different banks were in terms of the treatment and the risk analysis, which brings me to my third crucial point.

we are not faced with a tremendous choice, clearly the financial system has imploded, many of the ideologies and principles on which financings have been based in the last three decades stand to be discredited. right now we are in a kind of catching, amending phase where the government is desperately trying to keep the bank alive, keep some kind of functioning credit system going and to ensure that we defend the class. further ahead we have hard choices to make. we, meaning all of us. how are we going to shake financial system? it is tempting to say let's try to shut all innovation out, like people say when one drug goes

wrong, let's try an entire product. if we are going to do that, we will face a world where the banking system operates on a much lower capacity, credit is much more rationed. the question i will leave you with is an this story that j. p. morgan wrote, of credit innovation, which innovations can we actually preserve and which parts do we throw out? is there a way that we can actually take the original ideas about financial innovation that we developed in the 1990s and keep them for good? or is it a case for all complex financing, looking back at the story of real life human beings and how they tried to develop those human beings, away of showing it doesn't have to be like this, so i hope for the future it will provide a pointer of not just a terrible mistake

that the banking industry made but perhaps some way is to control the effect going forward. thank you. i will take any questions. >> there has been a new complacency in the credit market. it will become more transparent. do you think, are there rules that you think should be adopted? >> in terms of credit derivatives -- >> other elements in the market that still trouble you? >> i don't think the clearing house is an easy, perfect solution. i think there are good cases for

extending a caring platform. it has been discussed in the u.s. but having clearinghouse, leaving other derivatives off of the clearing house creating problems. there needs to be more transparency, how they had been used and the degree -- it is changing the way the company goes into bankruptcy. a largely untested manner. there needs to be more discussion about how that is changing. how they're behaving ford's troubled companies. but to think that we can take the end of the story is not true at all. >> you have a character in your book -- >> she is sitting behind you.

maybe you should turn -- >> from j. p. morgan. you worked very hard to prevent it from being regulated. do you think that was right? >> i will say what i would like to say. the dominant intellectual framework that drove the derivatives industry was basically the state would stifle innovation, at excess of regulation would stifle innovation and if you let the industry go through natural market mechanisms, the ebb and flow of the market and competition would provide a self correcting mechanism, and you

might have success that would correct itself naturally and the markets would be in line with them. the problem with that was 2fold. when the world is a small part of the overall financial system, perhaps you could afford to have a few arabs and flows. initially when it was developing in the 1990s you were talking about numbers which were beat. the problem came when the expansion became so explosive that it stopped being a small part of the financial system, it would percolate throughout the system. that could be destabilizing. the other problem was you never really had a free market in a sense of having true information flow, he will access to

information, equal competition. you had big banks distorting methods. you had very murky information flows. you never really had proper free-market in this supposedly free market system. the vast majority of complex products are never really traded. they were basically a figment of accounting imagination. >> to you think it should be? >> it should be regulated. >> why? >> i would say -- you're definitely putting me on the spot. when we set out to design the framework, you shift risk easily from a place where it shouldn't be in the mind of the older

reflecting the risk preference of the taker of the risk, allowing him to shift to someplace else, someone else who would rather hold that risk. we wanted to set up a framework where discipline would be a guide to good behavior. you can look at the financial difficulties that we have around the globe today and ascribe them to a particular product. i am not sure that gillian has done that in her book. utah about the collateral debt obligations which are securities. there have unregulated as part of the security framework. both of those things are involved in some ways here. i would test the hypothesis that there was a special role to play by doing this thought experiment. ask yourself if we would have this problem if every american was current on his mortgage

payments. i think cn sir is clearly no. ask yourself if we would have these problems and financial system if credit default swaps had been outlawed on the day they invented and never came into existence, the answer is definitely yes. the problem we have is a housing finance problem, it is not a credit default swap program. if there macarena credit default swaps we would still have this housing finance crisis, it would just be harder to manage because it would be harder to move the risks from one place to another. so doesn't seem to me that there is a clear case to make that lack of regulation of credit default swaps and to the problem if they had been outlawed. we would still have this problem today. >> actually i think the credit defaults what was exactly the problem for three reasons.

firstly, they made people confidence about spending more than they would have in the past. they thought they could shift the risk and the volume of lending expanded dramatically. secondly, the auction of credit default contract provides another mechanism for investors to place more bets on the housing market, some prime market. in 2005, when they actually started to run out of some prime loans, they were pumping up some prime loans as fast as they could, all over america. they actually ran out of some prime lenders, they ran out of enough loans, that was the point when the collision of these intellectuals streams happened and became so deadly because essentially they started breaking through contracts to c mimithe exposure of some prime mortgages which allow investors to keep rolling the dice more canned one province to brian

loans. thirdly, the capacity of the credit world, the scale of leverage building up went undetected for a long time. it wasn't just -- you had a situation where people -- in spring of 2007, everyone could feel that something was going very badly in the credit world. and regulators were regularly meeting to get together, what should we do? is there a way we can get a sense of how badly things are? quite apart from the fact that you had groups like the germans talking about hedge funds and nothing else which was not particularly helpful, one of the problems was it was very hard to pinpoint the scale of leverage and skills of risks being taken in the system because people were not looking in the right places. the scale that had built up on the balance sheets, which had

utterly disastrous implications in 2007, that was not merely being debated, it was not even on the agenda. there was no way to track that. this is really critical, something that the new york fed grappled with at great length in 2005/2006 and the talk about it in the book, in relation to the initiatives in the credit derivatives market. the theory that somehow in the market, all the actors have self-interest in be caving -- and competitive pressures will leave the system to be a fractionally, has not turned out to be true in the credit world. and you can see that in a tangible way in the issue of supplements. if you have a perfect, rational, free market, you have a situation where every bank would

say i'm going to make sure i don't have a huge backlog of papers in my back office because that is not rational. maybe we at losing papers. it is not rational to have an efficient market. and the buzz word was efficiency. the problem was, when innovation occurs in finance, you never know which products are going to be successful and which aren't and which ones are worth investing in infrastructure and which ones are not. , until after the product has been launched. if it took several years before it became clear which products are going to grow and which rose slowly, you could basically have each bank, and rationally building up infrastructure to deal with these products. the growth was so excessive in credit derivatives that no single bank had time once it realized it was going to be successful to actually look at the infrastructure. and the trading inside banks, in

sent to -- that was the guy in the bank. you have all these reasons why you were not behaving rationally, structural distortions and incentives. then you get in a situation where all the banks are competing to try to grab a slice of the market and none of them not only want to stop to build the infrastructure but nor do they actually want to spend any money because the bonuses -- nor do they want to lose the in festive. there is that situation. it is a false healing mecca movement to get everyone to invest collectively. wasn't until timothy geithner stepped in and said let's try to get everyone around a table and work out a solution that they began to do that. they could do that and they did it with a degree of success but it was pretty late in the day. they could do that in the case of credit derivatives or the

settlement problem because it was tangible. and was an issue where everyone agreed it was a problem but no one knew how to act. was clear that the free-market was not solving it. that he was getting the matter on the table. a terrible tragedy in 2007 was although it was in the settlement area and the backlog, it was clear there was a problem, it was identified and there were showing how big the problem was, how many backlogs' there were. the general question of how big is the leverage, you couldn't get the countries to get together and say the system has spun out of control, it is not self healing, free market forces alone are not fixing the problem. it was moving too fast and it was very hard to see how big they had to be, because of a capacity of the system. that is it. >> talk a little bit about how j. p. morgan reduced its

exposure to risk when it did. was there something about the institution, having to do with its culture or management? or was it simply the lucky clinton's? >> it was a lucky collision that happened at j. p. morgan. the old j. p. morgan was pretty conservative. partly because there are less commercial than their rivals, and they read less focused on short-term because they had a rather bizarre internal corporate culture where people stayed for a long time. they are not bouncing bank to bank, most who joined the organization's state for 10, 20, 30 years, that created a strong sense of team spirit, and the luxury of being able to share

ideas and take a broader attitude towards risk. it is interesting in terms of the way the internal corporate culture can actually change and affect the outcome. so the old j. p. morgan had a conservative attitude toward risk. but then, somewhat disastrously, that created disasters like enron. when diamond to arrive, he brought with him a set of attitudes toward risk that in a strange, lucky kind of way was time very well with a lot of existing risk-management cultures, so from 2005 onward, they appear to have taken, as far as i can tell, risks that were different from the investors, they were more systematic in terms of trying to

model it and analyze it, they were not relying on a few small models, they were looking at the senior products primarily with disastrous effect. and using a very 1-dimensional way of measuring risk. ironically, j. p. morgan had the benchmark. having invented it, it is useful, but only as part of the set of techniques for measuring risks. so that contributed to the risks they took. the key thing was jamie diamond was prepared to face up to the analysts and say no. that is critically important because from 2005 onward, there was a huge chorus of criticism from the analysts say why are you lagging behind, we thought he was going to come in and

solve all the problems and the revenues are not that great. there were other banks responding to the intense stock market pressure, saying we have got to try to chase after credit revenue as fast as we can. everyone wanted to be like goldman sachs. diamond actually said no, we are not going to go down that route and chase after the quick and easy answer. doesn't mean they didn't make mistakes. i don't want to say these guys are perfect angels because they made mistakes, but there bridge decisions taken which were instructive. in terms of what was going wrong -- when the bank started going hell for leather, taking chunks

of mortgage debt and slicing it down, i lived through the angelo -- tangible loans, tour the derivatives of those loans, there were a number of occasions where internally the j. p. morgan investment bank tried to work out why the other banks were making more money than them and there is a debate over whether they should do the same. they kept running numbers and could not work out how to make it pay unless you to crazy risks, so they said no. to say no was quite a decision at the time because everyone else was going down that grew very fast. other people were even in late 2006 when there was already evidence that the housing market was starting to turn. that is one of the astonishing things, so much of the crazy riskstaking and reaches of normal controls occurred even

when there was evidence that the some prime mortgage market was starting to turn sour and mortgage lenders were starting to go back and mortgage brokers, anyway. sorry. >> ic something developing in economics, those people who think that the problem was a poorly designed incentive, leading to excessive short-term, and another group in economics who thinks that the problem was failure to recognize the market doesn't have any magic, that there's hardly any way to put prices on these exotic assets, the future is highly uncertain, and if you can't do your own due diligence to figure out what the risk is in holding an asset, it

doesn't really make any sense from a social point of view that you can sell it to somebody else who is not easy enough to take on the risk because he won't know any better what the risks are than anybody else. there's a huge amount of ignorance in the impenetrable future dogging the markets without any awareness. sounds like your book is more toward the latter view than the first. >> yes. yes? >> what you are describing very well in the book, the way j. p. morgan, the people at j. p. morgan kept looking at what else was going on and through a combination, resisted going for it but is there something about

the financial sector, that competitive pressure when you have these publicly traded companies, inevitably leads, not to some optimal result, like using competition does in most markets, but when you have myopic investors and also people within the companies dealing with short-term investors, short-term incentives, what do you do, clearly there's one place where they were smart and resisted but it seems like the logic of these market places is to move to the point where everybody acts really stupid. and do we go back to tarnish its for these firms? can regulation do it? regulators get caught up in the crazy logic. >> i think when it comes to risktaking, partnership would be a good idea because you need to create incentives in banks or brokers to try to monitor the

other departments. they face, active scrutiny. one of the banks appears to have been better at ducking the bullet, goldman sachs. it is more a sense of one department looking over the shoulder of the other departments, they are not operating as silos in competition with each other. partly because of goldman sachs's partnership with history which has managed to india the corporate culture even today. unfortunately, although some people would disagree, i think regulators need to get more involved. and having a system whereby a group of bankers is essentially free to develop as fast as they went to the degree that they want with very little external oversight, journalists and

regulators and politicians and somehow hope that they will, through sheer goodness of spirit and collective rationality, will keep their activities in check and not go mad, is naive. baking is too important to be left to bankers alone. if the people who run nuclear power plants were paid kilowatt of energy they pump out, so you have to pump out as much as they can and the more they pump out, the more successful they look, it would be over by now. we need to look in banking to other kinds of activity and ask what lessons we can learn about risk control. one of the ironies that everyone talks about, financial engineering, if you are actually an engineer building bridges, you talk about things like safety margins, risk, your talk to debate with other engineers, you talk about the wider context

of what you're doing, you might be taught about things like essex. some of those lessons need to be brought into finance as well. >> what sort of regulation would be the most helpful going forward? >> i could talk for another hour about that. regulation is critical because when of the key reasons these problems developed his we live in a silo tight world. there is a great tendency for everyone to keep staring around the little special silos. we also need to see how they fit together, inside banks, between banks, see how banking fits into the rest of the economy. i'm in favor of moving towards more uniform and systems of regulation. we need to start moving -- in

the u. s, it would be a good start to not have half a dozen feuding regulators who will select what is in the banking system. and a bunch of private sector structures, i'm talking like an anthropologist. you have complete lack of information disclosure and people competing seriously, and regulators reflecting this too. they want to know who will take a joint up picture of how the system fit together or the success overall. >> what do you think, given financial journalists didn't discover what was going on, do you think that is a problem from the journalistic side, lack of expertise or bad incentives or what? >> it is a combination. on the one hand, regulators

covering the last crisis, that saturated lot of the press in the early part of this decade. the second part of the market, the equity market, that was sexy at the start of the decade. and the debt was quite sleepy, with regard to the backwater, so you didn't have the high status label attached to that area of activity. that was one problem. another was not having lots of journalists all over the credit world. i am not saying there was a deliberate plot, let's tied we are doing, but you was one of those situations that suited everyone rather well. the bank became like the financial priests. the congregation just sat, quite

happy to let them speak in latin as long as they blast everyone else from time to time and the priest felt no need to talk about anything, this is all rather complicated, let's get on with it. and of course, politicians didn't have much incentive to rock the boat either because it was a fantastic credit boom's so everyone was enjoying the party. and there was the simple problem that almost anyone who knew what was going on in credit tended to work in the credit world because they got paid 10, 20, 50 pounds more than journalists, so the structures in tide that media reflected the bigger presence too. what bank is left?

>> i get the feeling that you are a little too easy on j. p. morgan. you highlight the mistakes they made with underlining the mistakes. maybe i am wrong but i'm trying to figure out. they sort of say the insurers are not good enough because they don't have enough capital. they're not there when we need them, but they get issued by aig. we found out that aig was no different. it could blow up as well. aig was not there. the big the fault had to happen that wasn't supposed to happen. what is the difference? or going to aig? >> j. p. morgan used a ig a bit, not much, partly because they had internal limits.

yes, in 1998, they cut the deal and discovered the joys, we have this supersenior, are you interested? he said yes, bring it on. because they can basically do whatever they want. so yes, j. p. morgan did deal with a ig quite a bit at the very beginning and yes, dealing with them throughout this decade but two or 3 years ago, far far less. >> they would never have lost a lot of money? >> not to that scale. if you look at the write-down of who they were exposed to it is pretty start. j. p. morgan was not in the top.

who benefited most from a rescued? j. p. morgan was somewhere around 10 or 11. i can get the statement to you if you want. >> but what about -- >> they thought the situation was crazy. in 1988/1999, one of the fascinating things about the story is so many of the mistakes and the terrible things that were done in 2005/2006 were discussed by the original j. p. morgan team in 1998/1999 and one of the things was to put as many as they could online because he thought they rested. in 2005/2006 when they were having a discussion, what should we do with supersenior. there was a discussion about shall we basically trade with

modern lines? they recognized that if you use that you could exploit the accounting rules and make it seem as if the risk had magically disappeared. but actually, the genuine risk hadn't disappeared because of there was ever a situation bad enough to blow up the supersenior it would have blown up the model lines too which meant it was stupid to use monoslines to track of this. >> what about the explosion to the bear stearns fund? in the concept of how the group -- talking about buying them from all kinds of banks including j. p. morgan, that is why j. p. morgan was one of the biggest hedge funds. it sort of came back to them because they had 90% of the

money. >> jamie winters would say over and over again, we made mistakes. it has been like japan. no one wants to talk about that because they get too much traction. in the course of my interview, we made mistakes too. i mention them all in the book. you can look at who made the big write-off in the last two or three years. the scale j. p. morgan made so far, plenty of things could go wrong in the future. they have credit card exposure, there are mistakes. but the scale of right offs are nowhere near the scale of investors that citigroup, ubs, morgan stanley. guess what? they are not on the radar.

you probably got more questions. thank you for coming along. [applause] >> gillian tett was named british journalist of the year for coverage of the market decline in 2008. shea was also awarded the prize for financial journalism in 2007. right now she runs the global market coverage for financial times newspaper. to find out more, go to ft.com. >> douglas brinkley looks at the first green president, teddy roosevelt, from his new book, the wilderness lawyer, two hours starting at 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2's booktv. >> join the conversation with civil-rights and race relations with one williams live on sunday at noon eastern on booktv's in depth on c-span2.

>> book expo america, yale university press book with john donatich. what do you have? >> number of great books starting with "the making of americans: democracy and our schools" by e. d. hirsch, jr.. e. d. hirsch, jr. wrote a best-selling novel called cultural literacy. he cares very much about what role education has in defining what it is to be american. this book is the capstone of his career. many bestsellers, many decades of activism and education to talk about the centrality of information and knowledge and what it means to have a shared base of knowledge and how important that is to the national identity and our is being threatened by the way education is limited across the country. it is a book that has a lot of arguments, advocacy, ways to look forward to what the new administration can do about

education. >> the other book, "elephants on the edge: what animals teach us about humanity". >> this is a marvelous book, very moving, very touching. what she does here, she has quite a platform in doing this. what she tries to do is understand how cuban behavior affect global population of animals in the wild and in captivity. is a touching subject. people who read about these issues will respond to this book because our actions have consequences, especially on those creatures that can't argue for themselves like elephants. says she talks about elephants having a nervous breakdown. that is what the title refers to. the emotional life of animals, and how our own empathy towards understanding how they behave teaches us what it means to be

human. is an interesting turn around. in our efforts to understand animals we begin to understand ourselves. >> two biographies of two artists. tell me about those. >> everyone thinks that we have learned everything we need to know about charles dickens but there hasn't been a biography in over 20 years, so this is the first cradle to grave biography about charles dickens in a couple decades and we are excited about this, there's new information, new research, and charles dickens is a christmas party. there will be some good books for sale with this book. >> and the andy warhol biography. >> a very distinguished historian who writes a column for the national magazine. and this is a wonderful biography, posthumous legacy that and the warhol left behind. lot of people think is more

interesting to think about anti-war all than to look at his paintings and his art. this book talks about what he did to the meaning of an american icon. how he has become one of the most significant american icons and such an unlikely one and he did it largely through working with certain subjects, the campbell's soup can or liz taylor. and this is a book that takes a look at how he redefined what is to be iconic. >> the director of the press, what decisions the make on a daily basis? >> in be easier to say with the decision that don't make. the department is run by me, editorially, marketing and financial. starting with the books, we have a staff of 14 editors. a press is only as good as the

books it publishedes. those of the most important decisions we made. we are the largest book base in the country and the only one with a significant london base as well. >> the university press celebrated its 100 anniversary last year. give me some history. >> instead in the left for a lawyer who graduated from yale, who worked on lower fifth avenue. over the decades, became more and more famous for its lists in humanities and art history. in the 1960's, was appropriated in to the university of tulsa we are now department of the university. in the 70s, a london office was built which is still there today. we do 400 books a year, mostly out of the social sciences. >> john donatich, thank you very much.

>> what are you reading? >> my name is emily. i write a column for the roll call newspaper. in addition to a big stack of trashy novels, i have a couple other books on my nightstand table. want to be a homemade life story from my kitchen table, the relief fantastic food blotter, she is a columnist. i love reading her column than 9 excited to read her book. next up is hand biscuits and other southern specialties, and entertaining life with recipes. by fantastic writer, a recollection of her southern upbringing. i love reading food books in the summer. and something a little more serious called plain, honest

men, the making of the american constitution, which chronicles the constitutional convention. also on my serious reading list is an american family. i'm interested in the topic. for a little break. if i didn't get to paris i like to read about it, i picked up a fantastic guidebook from a german press, they do fantastic designs and art books, i am reading passion's parrot. that is my summer reading list. check back with me and we will see how far i have gotten. >> to see other program information visit our web site at booktv.org.

>> history professor at new york university, recreating a factory town to produce rubber. the town, complete with movie theaters and model ts, was rejected by the indigenous population and abandoned in 1945. a bookstore in new york city hosted this event, it is an hour. >> thank you. in 1927, henry ford, a man who perfected the assembly line and put the world on wheels, obtained a land concession in the middle of the amazon,-1/2 million acres, the size of a small u.s. state, often described in comparison to delaware or connecticut but sometimes tennessee or n.c.. the state -- stated purpose was to grow rubber, this was the

late 1920s. henry ford was at the top of the industry, world capitalism, he was the richest man in the world, perhaps the richest man in history, he was celebrated for having human doesn't industrial capitalism, paying workers be enough to buy the products they made. a was around 1927 that his river rouge factory came on line just outside of detroit. ..