frontier. obviously in our area we will cover the midwestern states. >> linda manning of northern illinois university press. >> here is a look at some of the upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months. on labor day weekend the decatur but festival welcomes harold evans. .. taking your phone calls

to. we'll be back. >> i wish i could say i got up early and came to my computer and put myself to work and i worked for several hours and had a full day's work but i get up and i have some tea and i sit in front of the window maybe i'll look at "the new york times" and i think about what i am going to do, go down to the treadmill, have some

breakfast, and i will meander over to the computer. then i picked up steam as as the day goes by so i started slowly by afternoon i am really rolling and then in the evening i have to tear myself away because i m of falling asleep or not working very productively. i would not recommend my way of working to others. by the fed if i am writing something short like aa hundred work letter to my colleagues or hassan today's historians i will start with a few key idea is an open a document on my computers and stage those ideas and pull them together perhaps if i

have messages from people who have ideas they want me to include i will go back to e-mails and pull those back so i can play with their right here on the computer. with something longer like the book i am writing on and i am at three different stages which is driving me a little crazy, i have books year which i bring back from new jersey. i have taken a lot of books out of the library up the road from here. and i will sit in the other room usually if it is a time in front of the big window where the view it is a beautiful and also a nice little space heater or in the evening i will make a fire and a stretch out. so i will make a personal

index on another sheet of paper or i will write it in the back of the book. and it makes a big pile of those books, perhaps photocopying but certainly looking back at my own index and then putting together idea is to fit into what i am trying to do. what i am doing here is not that kind of work for their this is a revision of debris vicious and so it is almost a word by word to make sure i have the right word comment to make sure that narrative flows from one paragraph to the other. it is logos centric not spreading out with research but working paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence part i am a very academic writer, a historian

so everything i say needs to come out of the archives or somebody's scholarship so i cannot walk in the woods and make up the stock that i want to write but i can walk in the woods and ask myself questions and ask questions of my sources and that's what makes my book, my book and makes it sound like me and not all of the other people i drop on. a lot of the work goes on in this house especially here in the winter because you do not want to spend a lot of time outside when it is cold. but in other parts of the year i can work on the screened porch or go down by the river. sometimes kayaking helps so it

is a different way of word different methodology. >> the scenery is beautiful not very many houses, why are you hear? >> we are here because even though we have an internet and facts and xerox and modern conveniences it is still a distance from our home in new jersey so it feels as though we have more concentration when we are here. autumn of that is really the case but it is the way that it feels. i have always composed on the keyboard of always from the time i even wrote my dissertation even from the library at radcliffe high had an electric typewriter i compose on that typewriter then i would cut the pages of.

i would first right on the yellow pad then i would make changes and almost literally cut and paste with tape and then as i got more polished i would move to why paper and then there would be strips of yellow and white and more and more white and scratching out of that. i have always done a lot of revising. with the computer, my first computer book was standing at armageddon in new york city in the late 80's were about i thought that was wonderful because then i could revise infinitely and at first i thought i will never do this because retyping was a way to improvise and i new-line would not have to do that retyping but it turned out to be much much better. so i still do revising on the

keyboard but now i make a new document every day. the so each day i will entitle the document what it is called, chapter three and put the date on it so when it is in my computer justin my list of documents i can see which one is the new one and which one is the old one. these are the pages of was working on and the handwriting is my editor from a wonderful gentlemen editor who knows what he is doing. i am looking at material but i have struggled over when we were in in germany and 2001 and some of this research i did and german and it is not great by discovered a man who i had never heard of named christoph minors so i put in about a page and a half on him and my editor says "the

reader" may well get lost in this academic struggle. and he suggests that it go. soil wasn't ready to throw the whole thing now it may come to that later on the right now i took out several of these sentences and saved others maybe i should put the rest of it in the notes then throughout the notes later but it is hard to throw away material. and over here, this is actually the chapter i am working on. this is moved elsewhere been a chapter three, it is material on a man named to banks that was very important but as my

editor points out it may not be important for my book. so i have put him over on the side. that is part of what i was doing. another thing that i was doing was working with a thesaurus. i am not too proud to use the thesaurus which i do and here it is. sometimes that can be very, very useful to find another word but very often the the thesaurus and the word the software is two rudimentary to get to the nuances that i need so i was fiddling with the word for submissive or submission and objection and i ended up with a word that i forget but i think it was this objection that i found and

rose j. -- roget's but as a lot of doors to choose from. that is the great thing about roget's and you can work around the pages where you were looking for and find other meetings and other nuances. even parts of speech that can help clarify your thoughts. that is why i use that thesaurus in addition to the thesaurus on my computer. >> host: of your editor is working this closely with you how does the editor get what you are working on? what form? >> guest: my editor debts it -- gets it, earlier i sent a cd because i send 13 chapters but right now i am working on a three chapters i will probably just e-mail to

him and he can print them out and new york and work on it and since the rights on he will send me back, how low. this is a row a very friendly cat. he speaks german actually an likes to write for crum . he will send me back that is hard copy and then if i have a lot of stuff or lot of images that take up a lot of space i will send act. this book is not nearly as in its heavy as a book that i published in 2005 the/2006 that had 150 images but all the -- although i may only have one or two or three but that many can make for a big

file in e-mail. so i have separated the images from the text so i cannot send him the text through e-mail and if the needs to see the images again then i can send act. >> host: do you keep your own library or do you go to a public library? >> guest: mostly i use the princeton university library which walks on water i could not do this book thank you princeton university library thank you think you think you. it is not just the books the princeton university library has a service in which i can send them a citation or an article and they will e mail it to me and that has been a lifesaver that is the reason i can work here. i should say also that the world wide web is very helpful

one of my editors concerns is i would identify figures and this is a very figure centered story so readers do not get bogged down in the academic so there are little biographies and i was focused on getting all of the information that i could and knowing all that was important about these figures in my editor would say sometimes you just need a phrase to give "the reader" who this person is when they first appear. so one of my editorial jobs is to go back and very often and go to the world wide web and find the identification for a figure that i write about rolf -- ralph waldo emerson is a prominent person in my book

i know about him but my reader will want to know that he was the most important 19th century writer in the united states. >> host: your desk has one picture on its and it is freud. >> guest: and this is a piece by helen gallagher. the picture is a freud sketching and as far as i know he did not sketch. but the woman in the picture is the actual artist but she is wearing the outfit of the white slave figure that was so important in the 19th and 20th century western art and particularly for my piece. she is putting herself in a

situation and then having prorated sketch herbert it is a wonderful and. i am actually an art student. so this reminds me that i do have another life and it can be academic and art can be academic and also rewarding and interesting. on the wall is the cover from "the new yorker". i admire her work very much she is a brilliant technical our test i would not like to live in her head but i think she understands a lot of what was going on and 19th century american history so that is there to remind me about history and art. >> host: there is another one. >> guest: ms pastel is from a friend of mine that lives in

paris and who reminds me that we are going to bring together. her piece it is a nudes in a classical way of a western painting but around the edges are parts of the life and work of a german jewish poet and engine that has actually translated her poetry. so these are some images related to the holocaust around the edges. >> host: you have gone to art school? could you explain to us?

>> guest: i cannot explain it all because we would be here forever but i am a bachelor of fine arts student from rutgers and i am trying to balance two or three different lives at the same time and since my main work now is finishing the history of white people the books that i am working on now, i have to keep my art within the tiny little corners so this fall i actually snuck up to plattsburgh state and i took one class a printmaking glass. i did several pieces they're all assignments people ask what kind of work to why do? i do assignments and i will be doing assignments for a little longer braff actually i feel like a grandchild sometimes

are to because people people say let me see my work and i say here is my work and they say that is so nice and i feel that i know it is to get work mrs. didn't work and of people or very generous about saying how nice. it is hardly does say i did this or i did this. this is from leonardo the assignment was before and after it and a causal relationship and it is a line no print on two different pieces. it is not very good. conceptually the teacher found

it unsettle but it is about bodily whole according to leonardo. trivia's thought about putting the figure out like that so leonardo made his man very familiar. so i adopted that and showed a person that had lost limbs with a lot of surgical intervention as part of the body of our time. this was earlier in the sinister. this one was a lot of four. -- work it was about a childhood memory so the memory i went back to was horseback riding with my father. my parents are still alive they are 90 years old and my

father is not well. so this is going back to a time when neither of us could foresee where we would be in half of the time that we reach. i asked my parents of they thought they would live a two be 90 and they were both kind of surprised. this is the last assignment which is a tarot card. i did it in two different color schemes and i brought them both out because i did so much work trying to get the callers rights. the plates on the best, the technique that it is soft and etching with felt little at drypoint. >> host: what is soft ground etching? >> guest: you treat your plate with a soft film and

then you cook it and a kid's very soft and malleable than you put something that has a texture on it like a piece of cloth and you run that through the press and you end up with a texture. so this is very fine it because it does not come out very well it is diprivan of the texture here. but for me, the great talent is not so much of the texture although i did have to work very hard on that, but the plate interacted with the ink and so the color scheme that i had set up in my head was nothing like the color scheme that came out when i printed so i ended up with two sets of colors and they are both considered parts of the same

edition and i don't know which one i like better but i do like the way they came out but were me, printmaking was so satisfactory because it was something i did not know how to do before. and i worked very hard at it and in my grandchild little way i came out with a few pieces i guess i don't mind showing you.

>> early on i was given a copy of this book is the women behind the new deal the life of francis perkins who was the first woman cabinet member and labor secretary back on end but depression and she was nominated by franklin delano roosevelt by the end of the same challenges but we see now with rocketing unemployment and dislocation of workers and need for reimbursement safety for children just to make sure we've uphold the labor laws and provide adequate help to the population the very interesting book someone who had great courage and every time i think about what she goes through i can relate to it and i see it as i go around

the country i still see poverty and the financial crisis affecting so many people and just how she helped to resolve to the administration and president to provide good leadership or basic wages and hours, received in the workplace, there were many people killed in a sweat shop she saw that first hand and greater laws and procedures to make sure there were safety outlets for people in the workplace. a second book is one that i have read and actually a good friend of mine caroline kennedy called profiles in courage four hour time and she has continue the legacy of the kennedy family and her father was the original author of the first book and she has since taken up the torch to really look at profiling different people that would make

decisions people that would fight the good fight on behalf of everyone she gives different examples of people that she showcases in the book and one that's was great interest to me was that mr. gonzalez a congress man from congress one of the first hispanic members and it really exciting reading and they have a chapter about me that is interesting. this book "the grapes of wrath" they historical book remember reading in the ninth grade and i felt so drawn to the tiny and that humidity of the people in the dust bowl era faced with hardship depression and saw a lot of mistreatment and abuses going on but just the tenacity behind these people to want

them any of these people came from the midwest and they came to california and it is a great story to reflect back on the plight of americans and how they laid the frontier for some of the changes that we see now that we are benefiting from because a lot of the changes that occurred in society laws and protections for workers. the theme is women, women of courage, the people of courage and people that have been able to go through great challenges in their life and her able to succeed and go beyond so they are good things to look at from where we are right now.

>> active it is in the movement against mountaintop removal mining they are fighting the destruction of the land and their way of life for the sake of the coal industry this event is about 40 minutes. >> i have to wear my sunglasses i am sorry i am not trying to be cool but i cannot see. i want to read about 10 minutes from my new new book -- from my new book "something's rising" with my co-author who will read after me and we have spent two and a half years working on this book and it was emotionally devastating we traveled all over the region, all of grapple they shut and met all kinds of people that are not in the book we finally focused