from the beginning. great. i want to say thanks for having me here. [applause] >> for more information on arthur michael luongo and his work, visit his website, michael luongo.com. douglas brinkley looked at the first green president, teddy roosevelt, from his new book, the wilderness lawyer, hours, starting at 6:00 p.m. eastern today on c-span2's book tv. book tv visited with eva brann to talk about her life and work. she has been a tutor at st. john's college, talks about her interest in the classics and the philosophers her students be. this is just over 30 minutes.

>> in 1957 when you first started at st. john's college, what did you think of it? >> i thought i had come to sheer heaven. i never had to change my mind about that. it was heaven. it was everything that i had hoped for. learning is as much a part of being a teacher here as teaching is.

the relation to our students has that kind of closeness which depends on a certain kind of formality. we don't intrude on their lives, we don't pretend to be friends with them, we have important business between us, amongst us, and so, teaching is a pleasure and agrees too. it can be an enormous irritation. by and large it is wonderful. one of the most remarkable things about the college is the relation of the faculty to each other. we are colleagues, we help each other. we have many study groups, some of them are funded, some of them are voluntary. every week, everyone who teaches a certain kind of class meets

with everyone else who is teaching it to talk about problems. we know each other, we irritate each other, on occasion, we know our eccentricities but when push comes to shove, people are reasonable hand is is a great community to flourish. that is how it looked in the beginning and that is how it looks now. we have one campus here in an atlas and another one in santa fe. it is a college like no other college. all colleges say that of themselves but it really is like no other college. we have and are required program, 4 years. the teachers have to do the whole program, whatever their specialty was when they came.

they have to do everything and that includes mathematics, laboratory science, music, language. at the center of the program, great books seminars. all the students know what each one of them is doing every morning and every evening, and they all talk to each other about it and we talked to them. >> i took a look at the reading list. there is a reading list for each year. the top of the list, homer. why homer? >> reporter: that is really interesting question. i will change a little, why homer first? it has got to be homer because a principle i never understood, i often talk to my colleagues, why

what comes first in tradition is so superlative, visiting things -- i don't know why that should be. we expect things to go backward, and they do in mathematics and science, but in the arts, in literature, particularly, it doesn't work that way. anyone who has actually read homer thinks that it is unsurpassed double. why do it first? you may have noticed that the reading list is partly chronological, but that is pure -- that is a kind of know hypophysis, least intrusive way of arranging books. is not meant to show that things develop, to have some

arrangements, homer is the first written documents, written poem that we have. we don't even know it was written at the time. so we do it first. that is part of it. the others thing is that we want to protect our students into something strange and wonderful and new, get rid of all the prejudices of all these phrases, all the formulas, say something that says to them, very human, doesn't -- truth to tell, american heroes don't look any stranger than a football halfback. they dress funny too. >> homer's odyssey, what is it about? >> it is about a man who is an

inspired flyer, of the most interesting human beings, absolutely irresistible man, beginning -- who is at heart the same kind of poet that homer himself is. the odyssey is largely recital of his did ventures. those adventures are not things that actually happened, they are interpretations of things that actually happened. he is a pirate, use a trader, he goes to many strange ports, meets strange people, he sees them in the way appellates sees them, so homer actually turns the odyssey over to odysseus,

who makes it up and tells it. >> you said before that some people say is insert passable, something that was written -- when was it written and how could it be -- >> no really knows, the eighth century bc is what people agree on. >> how is someone in the eighth century able to achieve an insert passable at that time? >> that is an interesting question to which there are two very divergent answers. one is that he had a great tradition and that much of the two epics is traditional and inherited, and put together from old stories and tales and songs, with a lot of formula vocabulary, and the other answer is that this is the kind of

thing no one can explain, which seems to me the better answer. >> as i came into your house and noticed you have books in almost every room. >> i used to spend the first week of every summer vacation building bookcases. partly, it is what they call historical which means accumulated mass. but there is a rough organization. these are philosophy books. these are the mathematics books, there's science. on the left is american history, then the classics books. >> what about the physical way that you read, the time of day and how you do it and how you sit. is that important to you? how do you do that?

>> actually i sit in this chair, i will commit an indiscretion and say very often i'm in the backslide. incidentally, it may look like an ordinary bathroom, that was all done by students, it was done 40 years ago when i moved in here had not a tile has ever come loose. we have alumni in sister alive visit. >> so you do a lot of reading and writing here. >> yes. >> how did that start? why do you do that? >> it is nice for the body to levitate. the mind gets to work more easily, you float, you lose your

weight. >> what about these -- here you are with president bush. what was that occasion? >> that was the national is humanity metal. here we are. big, fat, very ugly metal around my neck. >> what books you keep in the hallway? >> some of it is the overflow. mostly it is psychology, cognitive science, phenomenology, philosophy and after awhile they just accumulate. i got a new room full of them.

here they are. but i can find them. the day when i can't find many more is the day i will retire. >> this is your first book. >> that is my first book. that is, i guess, seventh century, early seventh century drinking cup. you see a little rabbit chasing the dog. of all the books i have ever written, the most beautifully bound, it was blue been in this bold letters. i never achieved that again. it was a report of a pottery of the second period the by the sign when i was a young archaeologist in the marketplace excavation from athens.

and that was a great experience. i was totally immersed in it. but when i had done it, i was finished. >> what year was this published? >> i don't know. what year was it published? 62. >> this is a stack of books you have written. could we just may be go down through the stack and have you just briefly give a little description? >> quotation taken from augustine, to my mind the greatest writer of all time. the question that began to preoccupy me was whether time -- there is such a thing as time as

an independent force, people tend to talk that way, times are such and such and we have to move with the time as if there was something called the times. so i began to read authors who wrote about time and came to the conclusion, again, that it isn't real. is the psychic phenomenon of memory that is involved. without memory there would be no time. there is movement. that was that book. this was a collection that some friends made of essays about everything. one of them is about what we were talking about, madison's memorial, that is one on the

declaration of independence. so it is a collection of various things. this one was the first book in what i thought of as a series, a description of life beginning with the imagination. this consists of two parts, reviews of what people think of the imagination and great battles, battle about the imagination, whether we actually have mental pictures, mental images, or whether these are other phenomena. it is really words. so i reviewed those investigations in cognitive science, but i began to think

about it on my own and have chapters on the importance of the imagination, how it helps us get through life. and i became interested in what it means to say no and to talk about nothing, and what does it mean to say x does not exist? what am i talking about when i say x does not exist? what is the x that does not exist and how can i talk about it? that is the great question here. oh, i forgot, i want to say something about the time book. [plane engine roars]

>> the blue angels. >> what got me going was a marvelous saying by yogi berra. he was asked what time is it? he said, you mean now? i got to think about the meaning of that. that inspired the time book, yeah the berra did. i have a book of sayings of his. so i was interested in what it means to talk about what is not, and what way there are of negating say no. why each question can easily be answered as yes or no. that was an earlier book on

american education, everything from jefferson to dewey. i was very proud of myself. i mentioned saint john's in one little footnote. that took discipline. this is about the odyssey, particularly about odysseus as the poets of that epoch. the main thought is that each of those fantastic adventures he tells about is really an imaginative poetic rendering of some very ordinarily experience. to give an example, they have a lotus eaters, obviously someone in africa, and his crew lands,

some of them are clearly given drugs of some sort and they don't want to go away, they just want to stay and indulge. and he makes up that story of the lotus eaters. so everything is put. that is a collection of essays. the central one of which is an interpretation of the republic. >> why read plato? why read the republican 2009? >> the republic turns out to be the mother of all books. psychology, politics, education, even sociology, anthropology. that is the reason why we read

it. great questions are broached. all of the questions of greatest interest occur. i would challenge someone to name an important question that one does not find the beginning consideration of in the republic. but one reason among the number of others, that it contains at its very center, a description of the mode of education that our students are themselves in gauged in. the whys and wherefores of it. they read it in more hours than any other book in the freshman year and discussions are usually very interesting. they are facing something they never thought of before but the moment they face it, they see they should have thought of it.

>> what is that they are facing? >> just to give you an example, one question is, does the human soul, whatever it is that makes us conscious, have parts? and what are the relations of those parts? for instance, why is it that the passions and the recent struggle? what does it mean to have courage? where does that come from? if courage and pride, more on the side of reason or more on the side of passion? those are things that very directly raised in the republic. >> how do you approach writing your own books?

>> we are not required to publish. i have never thought to myself i really have to get a book done in order to achieve this or that increase in status. doesn't work. we don't have any ranks. it is never done for professional reasons. but sometimes there are questions or books that just occupy your mind and you begin to see something wonderful. when you see one wonderful thing you usually see two wonderful things, then three and four, then i begin to mull it over, start making notes, things like this, these are all notes of

things that might happen one day. and one fine day you live in the bathtub, and the table of contents presents itself and you are ready to go. i think the first book that -- the first book that i ever read for myself was robinson crusoe. european children are brought up on robinson crusoe, it is normal. and i remember i was 6 or 7, and my parents made me take a nap. i hated that. there was a couch and a drywall and i was -- i remember vividly reading robinson crusoe, lessons of self-help, trying to borrow hole into the dry wall so that i might eventually escape. it got about this deep before it

was discovered. i was born in berlin in 1929, and i had what i would describe as an idyllic childhood. we lived on the outskirts of berlin. the villa was full of nooks and crannies for children to hide in. my parents were wonderful with us. my mother shoe was, there, i loved her and she loved me. my father used to take me out in the woods. he was a medical man, he was a physician, he had a clinic for diseases of the leg. we would go for sunday morning walks. he was taking private lessons

from one of the great scholars of the time. >> who is that? >> emanual con, the warmest book in the library. see what it looks like? he wrote something called the critique of pure reason. the copernican revolution in philosophy. before, was thought of as being outside, now was thought to be our own construction by means of our thinking and our imagination, and he is probably the most influential of the

moderns. perhaps descartes is equally influential. he is a great discoverer, or perhaps inventor of modern ways of seeing things, particularly the way that insists that what we see and understand is largely a construction of our own mental apparatus. my father was a very good physician, a famous physician, a group of patients, he was fascinated by philosophical matters, we would go out sunday mornings and he would tell me what he learned. i didn't understand it all but it stuck with me.

>> your family had to leave germany. >> my father left first to go -- actually to brooklyn where he had an internship. he was an intern. we came two years later, as late as one could possibly leave. we were transported on single trains from berlin to lisbon, and the jewish joint committee had chartered boats that took us across and we landed in new york within sight of the statue of liberty, went to brooklyn and i went to grammar school, a high-school, and college, i went to brooklyn college for undergraduate work. >> we haven't talked about

aristotle. >> this great book on moralities, very central to the meetings, students reading in college. i have read it often, my colleague, eric salem, who is a, quote, translator, just finished a book on it too. that is a major influence. both in studies for our students, they are required to read it but an influence on life too. >> how can that book about ethics in forms somebody on how they should live today? >> something about aristotle makes him helpful to begin with. he is very sensible. there is nothing highfalutin about him. he is very sensible. yet it is a deep pherae of the

means of virtue, excellence being a means between extremes of courage. it is finding the right middle between the shrinking lee afraid and brashly rash, and somewhere in the middle, you are the way you are supposed to be which is courageous. it is helpful. it works. you think of it as a crucial moment. >> when you follow american politics and what is happening now or in the last ten or 20 years in this country do you find yourself thinking about greek politics or roman politics? >> very much. especially about the question of diversity. that is a central question which

is preoccupying this college like all other places, and what it means to live in a country in which not all people are of the same race or family or origin, so in a way, when one thinks about -- who tells of the great war that nearly destroyed athens, the question arises, what went wrong? it has something to to with not being inclusive enough for finding a way to deal with others. many detailed ways which i can't think of at the moment, in which referring to the age themselves. but i think from the point of

view of american politics, what helps us most are the american greetings which take place mostly in the last year. >> what kinds of things do you read? >> we read all of the documents, we read supreme court cases, and of course the declaration, the constitution, and we read huckleberry finn which is a great commentary not only on race relations but on what it means to be civilized or uncivilized. all those readings go into a kind of talk and stew and the moment it comes have something to refer to, something a review -- to give things background. ..

>> someone gives a good example, and people start reading or someone makes a fine translati translation, and people start buying that. so it comes and goes. and i think, it packs a punch out of proportion to the number who do it. people who do it have some influence. not much, but it's not hopeless. >> all of eva brann's most recent books have been published by the philadelphia-based paul dry book. for more information visit pauldrybooks.com.

>> random house has published a lot of well-known titles, including barack obama's two books from my father and the audacity of hope. vice president bides promises to keep worth fighting for by john mccains, sandra day o'connor, clarence thomas is biography, among others. and they have a new book out. and marcy purcell of random house wants to tell us about it. what is this book about? >> this is called joker one, and the subtitle is a marine platoon storage of courage, leadership,

and brotherhood. i was very fortunate to hear donovan campbell speak on the very first day that the book came out, which was just last month. he was a guest speaker at the first year experience conference in orlando, florida. and that's a conference where administrators pick a book that would be suitable for an entire incoming freshman class to read. it's his story and his platoon in ramallah in the middle east, and it is his way of paying tribute to his men who worked on the patrol and trying to keep order, in an impossible situation. i am happy to say he speaks from his heart. the book got a full-page positive review in the sunday new york times. and the room of about 150 educators gave him a standing ovation at the end of his talk. and we are happy to say, it's

already been adopted in hardcover by one college already. so it's a book that we hope will have legs, as they say, in our business. and he is a wonderful author and the book that deserves the best. >> one of the new titles from random house, donovan campbells joker one. >> the publishing world annual tradeshow is happening in new york city, and one of the publishers that is here is chicago review press elizabeth malzahn is the publicity director. tell us about some of the books that you have coming up. >> we have a couple of fantastic books on the fall 2000 minus. first we have a wonderful book by ned sublette. he is the author of cuba and its music, as well as the world that made new orleans. and as he was working on the world that made new orleans he also began writing his memoir of writing it, and that is "the year before the flood" and it tells literally about as he was

living in new orleans in the first quarter the things that he discovered there, the people that he encountered. especially the musical history which is really his forte. it's a beautiful book and it will be coming out on august 29 which is the four-year anniversary of hurricane katrina. and that would also have a book which is a young adult narrative written by simeon wright, and he is the cousin of emmett till. he was there during the emmett till slaying. and this is his story as written for young adults so they understand the historical importance for the civil rights movement and justice and peace. >> when is that coming out? >> later on this fall. just in time for our january and february promotions for black history month. >> what is "boom town"? >> "boom town" is a real interesting case study in which the ways wal-mart changed bentonville, arkansas. the way the economic ex-gratian, how immigration, changes within

the class society have gone through with a large corporation and how it is actually brought a lot of diversity to the company. >> and finally i want to ask you about one more book over your shoulder, "absinthe and flamethrowers." >> "absinthe and flamethrowers," this is our best selling author. william gurstelle is his name and he writes for making magazine. is known really as macgyver. in fact, the founder of mciver says if you want to know where he lives now, he lives in minneapolis, minnesota. this book is how to live dangerously. really, it laid a wide variety of different projects that you can actually do that are very dangerous. making your own flamethrower, but also going through and how to use a lasso, how to use a bullwhip, things of that nature. he wrote backyard ballistics which is a fantastic diy book about how to build a catapult in your own backyard and things of that nature. is also talks about the philosophical reasons for why you should live on the edge and how it can bring joy and

excitement to your lack. >> tell us about chicago review press. >> chicago review press was founded in the early 70s. and it is prides itself on our wonderful independent publishing program. we do a wide variety of both fiction as well as nonfiction. our fiction is a classic reissues. we have a wide variety of books have gone out of print and that we are bringing back for the beloved fans. and did we do a wide variety of nonfiction popular science, we have lawrence hill books. this is our imprint focuses on feminism, peace, justice, african-american interest in latino interests. we do kids books. we have a fantastic for kids series which takes 25 projects and it looks at in particular largest oracle figures, mark twain, benjamin franklin. we do kids guide series that looks at historical pieces. all wonderful for educators, homeschoolers curricular. and then