and people are -- especially grown-ups, especially middle-aged grown-ups. this book if it is skewed in one direction it's probably more male than female but it's also fairly old. the youngest person is probably now 40. so there's not a young people because it starts in 1965 and i wanted these characters all the way through. but by the time people are 50 they are full of all kind of disappointments and contradictions and, you know, interesting stuff to write about which is not as a people your age are not full of interesting complications. what i am saying is you start asking people really intimate questions, really get down you start on the easy stuff and then start getting down, great stuff comes up, great stuff.

it's like throwing dynamite in a pond. this is really fun work. i feel privileged to do it and to come and talk to you about it. thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> dan baum formerly staff writer for the new yorker and reporter for "the wall street journal" is the author of citizen corporation and american dynasty and smoking mirrors, the war on drugs and politics of failure. for more about mr. speed and his work, it is it danbaum.com. next a portion of book tv bus monthly and that program. historian taylor branch describes his unique method for organizing his research material

>> host: one of the things we do during this program is learn about authors and writing and in each of these programs asked to visit the locations where the authors work. next you will be taken to mr. brandt family home outside of baltimore and we will learn more how he constructs his books. one of the reviewers called it a panoptic style which looks across all sorts of he will tell how he does that in this clip next. >> a typical day on the project has to begin at 5 a.m. over habit of many years which means i get up at five, go down, make

a cup of coffee, put it in the machine, take the dogs out and by the time the dogs get back in the coffee is made, i pick up the coffee and i might hear about 5:03, 5:04 so i have a short commute. i start early. i find writers have all kind of habits, but i found that because i'm trying to draw material from so many different sources that if i don't get that early start i am concentrating trying to bring things together. i tend not to have a productive day. if i come up after breakfast at 8:00 by the time i get things together and fight through intervening phone calls or something like that it's lunchtime and i start to lose hope for a productive day but if i do start early at five, which i did virtually 90% of the time over all the 20 years, i tend at

least to start and get a little momentum before 7:00 when i go down to say goodbye to my wife or whatever and have a little breakfast so that when i come back i've already got some momentum for the day. >> in the old days sometimes i could go on into the night and occasionally when i was never out because i find there is a rhythm in a chapter, a chapter starts slowly, more slowly when i'm trying to organize and get started on an approach into a subject and their tends to be a rush when i feel that i have got it going and got some narrative momentum towards whatever kind of conclusion there is for the chapter, and sometimes in the old days i would write all night, go around the clock. but now for the last at least this volume i have not been able to do that.

i write on till breakfast, take a short break, right on till lunch, still take a short break and i give out and around 4:00 in the afternoon. that is still pretty long by writing standards but it's not what i used to be able to do. >> for all these different sources because in the files there would be fbi documents, the documents from the king library, documents from the presidential libraries, documents from a host of specialized libraries like the peace collection that is at the library on the imam era, those would be intermingled in the files, and the only way that i could correlate them with things that were and books or tapes or that sort of thing is i had a note card system on the computer. >> this is microsoft access which has it on there. there are several files i use for the book. giglio is the bibliography, which basically keeps track of the books that were used.

i have a coded system to keep track of them. you will see the code is over here. so book number one, which i entered back in the early 80's was white over black, jordan's kind of history of race in america. and so this code goes all the way down to i guess the last book i entered was booked number 1,088, our times, the illustrated history of the 20th century, race law, king came preaching, tend -- tet! but basically this is just kind of the list of the books i consulted or referred to in the book. but anyway, that's one file is

the bibliography file. but the main one is the research file which is right here, and it automatically put -- each one of these going this way is a note card and this is pretty odd because it is the year month and day and it puts it in chronological order and it starts with 960 solomon completes the first temple. that comes from book number 438. i don't know why it's page 99 but this is some material on the hebrew profits. but of course as the movement -- as we get -- as the movement itself rises in to public attention leader in the 1950's it's more common you would get more than one note on the same day.

for example october 29, 1956 there is a universal newsreel which came from the national archives in fact i guess three of them are from their and the u.k. is boston university, box ten folder 13 basically the dexter echo which is the church newsletter reports that the core of the king was presented at the baptist church in chicago which is the church of dr. king's plater nemesis, joseph jackson. so things like that. it begins to get much much more concentrated as the movement rises into the national attention but there's something from almost every day and when you get back i think that's record number. i'm not sure what it is. i went backwards.

there's 17,079 records in here, and most of them are post 1960, and generally speaking, it gets more and more concentrated through the 60's. here is february 21st and there is records that they of course that is the day malcolm x is shot so there would be a lot but there are some here that don't have anything to do with malcolm x on that same day. here's five days later and goes down to the bottom of the screen. the computer note card file was kind of an intersection to help manage the material because what i'm trying to do is pick a narrative course that will deliver the most -- the best

picture to the reader of what was going on at the time not segregating but a bringing together the different fields of civil rights and vietnam and the white house and fbi and others >> "in depth" errors life eastern the first each month. lashawn to booktv.org for upcoming guests. at the 2009 bookexpo american booksellers convention in new york city here with johnny temple publisher of

akashik books. tell us what you have coming out this fall. >> this fall on of the books we are the most excited about is a graphic novel by the great black filmmaker melvin van peebles. he has a film that is going to be premiering this year simultaneous with our publication of the book, and he is the sort of call the father of the black exploitation movement, and we are very proud to be working with him. and currently, right about now we are publishing a new book by the actor and activist mike farrel best known for the lbj coming cut on the tv show, m.a.s.h., greatest tv show of all time. and this is a sort of road memoir, and we are putting him back on the road and we are

keeping him busy. >> what is akashic books and how long have you been publishing? >> we've been publishing since 1997. we publish literary fiction is the heart and soul of the company. we have a sort of outsider sensibility, though some of our books are quite popular and -- but our books are often sort of provocative than one way or another and we do a little bit of nonfiction as well, political nonfiction. writers we publish in the non-fiction will include mike farrell, robert scheer, ron kovacic and other sort of cultural heros of the left. >> you are not only the publisher of the founder of akashic books. how did you get into books and when did you decide to start a publishing house? >> i sort of stumbled into book publishing. it was never anything i intended to do. in my previous life i was a rock-and-roll musician and spent most of the mightiest war in the world with my band putting out albums doing all of the thing rock and rollers do and when i

finally arrived at the f-ing rock and rollers do best, making money after i made some money i published a book basically as an experiment, and i found that i really enjoyed publishing the book. it was quite successful. i published the second book, and was a hobby, and after publishing three or four books i had the publishing dog and i started transitioning away from rock and roll and into book publishing and there was no looking back. >> the publisher is based in brooklyn brooklyn book festival. t want to tell about that? >> dad, the brooklyn book festival is held by -- new york city has one major but it has five burrows and each has an elected president and brooklyn's very popular burrows president is markowitz, and when he came into office five, six years ago or maybe seven years ago he always wanted to start a big

book festival because brooklyn is the home of creators and it has a literary tradition dating back to walt whitman, richard wright, and these days we have many best sellers living in brooklyn so it was a very natural place for a big book festival, and i contacted them and was able to help them realize this vision of the big book festival and it has quickly become the city's best book festival. this year, sunday september 13th will be the fourth annual brooklyn the book festival. we will have over 150 authors participating in programs, 150 exhibitors, publishers, literary magazines, literacy organizations. it is a very community-based book festival. it's an international book festival with a strong brooklyn flavor. >> johnny temple, founder and publisher of akashic books and the brooklyn book festival. thank you very much. ..