that's how times have changed. even though my korean students, for example, are all listening to japanese music and watching japanese dramas. so this dislike of japan has increased. and north korea of course, they have always been sort of the race in the number two. to the united states. >> there is a question about robert park, the christian activist who was released recently why the north koreans. what are your thoughts on his comments and that episode? >> the poor guy, i read about him crossing the border think i'm an american. and the last thing you want to do, as an ethnic korean in north korea is say i'm an american. that to them is just baffling, and the reports i heard was he had been severely beaten while in north korean custody. . . perfectly

happy to let him go in response for something. >> coming close to lining up a question here that asks about kim jong il, i always turn those

around. can you give us an understanding about the name? >> it can be translated as becoming the sun and kim jong il can be translated as the true sun. these names are not particularly symbolic for the north korean people because they stopped using chinese characters in their ridings on wouldn't read too much into those names. you can look at the etymology of certain words but we are not really conscious of them in daily life. in korean families the names of the suns will often be quite similar so the first chinese character of the children's first name will all be the same one which is why the pictures i showed you are all quite similar. >> what about the daughter's? >> their names are different. >> do they take the mother's

name? >> they can take any name. we don't know anything about these kids. i don't understand the obsession with which one of those kids it is going to be. we knew that kim jong il would take over for 15 years and yet we were taken by surprise by him. in the 1990s we thought he was a semi retarded playboy. they talked about him as if he was retarded. they raised the possibility and no one expected north korea to keep going. that is why we signed a framework in 1994. we didn't expect the country to survive long enough for it to be a problem. instead of focusing on who is going to be and speculating we should focus on the ideology which all of those kids probably have in common. >> we are out of time but allow me to say thank you to the asia

society of northern california and mr. myers for his expansive talk about this part of the world that has many of us mystified. i encourage you to take advantage of the book signing table next to this table up here and have a pleasant evening. [applause] >> a contributing editor at the atlantic monthly teacher's north korean literature in south korea. he is the author of the reader's manifesto, an attack on the growing pretentiousness in american literary prose. visit and h pbooks.com. >> this weekend on booktv from the virginia festival of the book, rebecca on the best selling immortal life of henry and not wax. on afterwards president reagan's

ambassador to the ussr and mchale gorbachev's role in bringing down the soviet empire. his book is superpower in the visions and nell irvin painter on inventing the idea of a white race in the history of white people. find the entire weekend schedule that booktv.org and follow us on twitter. >> from the 2010 festival of books lynne olsen discusses her book citizens of london. the americans who stood with britain in its darkest, finest hour. the professor of journalism at the university of arizona is the moderator of the event. >> my name is lord rosenblum. welcome to the second annual tucson festival of books on this fabulous day. it is only march and it is not

yet 130 degrees. i grew up here. i love it. i want to say something about -- i want to thank the judge for making this possible and the want to add my appreciation for all the work behind this amazing festival. if anyone thinks books are dying just look at the mobs outside. any cellphone that rings will be fed to the scavengers outside. this is the point where the presenter says it gives me great pleasure but in this case, man! you may not be able to judge a book by its cover but you can by ane author. se have not only learned to make our sources's lives miserable but we also join the noble tribe of where animals, reporters for

the associated press as a former professor out here, joined the hot squad features in new york and worked in the moscow bureau during the evil empire days. she went to the baltimore sun and in 1981 she went straight to ncer free lancer and unlike most freelancers she may agree life out of it. the secret is among other things her reporter's year for the right word. i am going to read a couple lines from the end which will explain the title of the book. she's talking about eric who was 27 at the time of the last broadcast and talking about the days and says paris died like a

beautiful woman, in a coma, without struggle or asking why. one left paris with a feeling almost of relief. you leave of all but a great series of europe london alone behaves with pride and stubborn dignity. when this is allover in years to come men will speak of this war and say i was a soldier or a sailor or a pilot. others will say with equal pride i was a citizen of london. beautiful stuff. i won't read it on. lynn has a lot more to say than i do but she is the ultimate anti twitter. able to take a subject we didn't know we were interested in and keep us riveted for i didn't count the pages. tell us about this book in 140 characters. text us.

i have a question. you focus on the guidance on the edknown. u.s. ambassador to britain, the most crucial. and joe kennedy. what do you think the world would look like today if that pack of american london managed to convince people back home much earlier that hitler was an batremely bad guy who had to be stopped and u.s. armed forces had joined britain at the outset? queshat is a great what if question. i am not sure. it just wasn't in the cards that that was going to happen. th te book is a behind-the-scenes look at the partnership between the u.s. and great britain during world war ii with these three americans as the main characters. re reason i am writing about them is they were really keep

players in the debate in 1940-1941 whether britain should be saved. britain at that time was the last country in europe holding out against hitler. desperately in need of american aid and close to the seat. was hanging on by the skin of their teeth at that time. they needed american aid but rlerican aid was incredibly skimpy. that was true until pearl harbor and 1942. these three americans and there were others based in london did everything they could not only to get american aid but american public opinion changed. rie great cbs correspondent in london tried to sway and did sway american public opinion to a great degree. and this hard charging elbows

out multimillionaire businessman sent over by franklin roosevelt to be in charge of britain and joseph kennedy, as ambassador, not a hard act to follow. they thought that britain was going to be defeated. he was a businessman first and foremost and really thought business in the u.s. and everywhere also would suffer unless some accommodation was made with hitler. e tried hard to get fdr and the american government not to give anything to britain. he really thought britain was going to be defeated. he basically poisoned these two countries, the relationship

between roosevelt and churchill. he couldn't stand -- kennedy would tell roosevelt, he was an imperialists, and so things were pretty dark not least of which biguse of joe kennedy. he had a very difficult job to fill when he came over. >> what was going on in the rest of the country. as we always say it was a big ocean and it was so clear what had to be done. >> it was clear to some people but not most americans. there were two potions on the other side of the country that

played a big role. many people didn't see the urgency, the urgency to go to the brink of war to help the british or to go to war. there was a lot of isolationism and anti british feeling in the country. i went to school here. have been an anglophile all my the. ody ve the literature, everything. so i thought everybody was and i found out that was not true. i really found out doing ntsearch for this book how deep the anti british feeling was in this country. american industry didn't want to produce wartime goods at that point. they were not forced to buy roosevelt because we weren't in the war. so they finally started making

money after the depression and nhey wanted to keep making money. there was no great push within the country. roosevelt clearly wanted to help england. no question. but he was very low of to get ahead of public opinion. he wanted very much not to get rito the war if he could help it. so while britain was being bombed and german submarines were strangling the supply lines , erica wasn't descending over much stuff. warthose 60 ships they sent over hole world war ii where rat infested with holes in the halls and we could only use a couple of them and they're making the brits pay for them. how do they get away with that? >> there's a great sense that the british tricked us into world war i and we were not

going to let that happen again. if we were going to help england, it wasn't going to be strict and altruistic aid. we were going to make them pay for it. we were talking 1940 or early 1941 of the british had to pay for it. derld war i aged destroyers which the british couldn't use, they got them in exchange for ittish bases in british territories. it was a much better deal for the u.s. than for britain which winston churchill knew and was furious about but that is the only way that reservoir thought he could sell this aid to the userican people, that we were getting something for it. it wasn't just helping the

british. >> beneath this exterior the book is pretty gracie. tell us about pamela harriman and churchill's daughter? >> i have to back up. it is not just for own in. [l but it is in there. it remains in the story. >> winston churchill was brilliant at wooing people he needed. he knew that these three men for a crucial to the survival of his country. they were very important to americans that he needed on his side. so he brought them not into his official family, is boar was open for ed murrow who would drop in at 10 downing street.

church away for him in and say time for several whiskey's so they would sit and have whiskey's and talk. he included wine in and aaron and even more because they recovered and officials. he made himself available to dhem in ways that had never happened before. he made himself available and smbers of his government wnailable but the interesting thing was part of his own personal family as well, they sally were the facto members of the churchill family. they spent many if not most weekends at the various country houses they would go to. relationship was so close that all three of them did have wartime affairs with members of

churchill's family. senator churchill, churchill's favorite daughter, with pamela churchill, the prime minister's daughter in law who was married to obviously winston's son, i should add these affairs were airlyt the same time. london was a fairly romantic city but not quite that much. they were sequential. it goes to the oro of london during that time. anything went in london. it was incredibly exciting, vibrant city. probably the most exciting city in the war during the war in the world. it wasn't just them. it was going on all over the

fore. f torrow you may die. most did not die but they looked for the dead. pamela churchill actually after ine war's came out with a quote ehat i love especially at the beginning of the book. she was talking to one of her biographies and said it was a terrible war. ad was spectacular. for many people who have serious important jobs, this other life they have outside the deadly serious work, incredibly emotion charged time and place. >> they turned up the hrsonification of france behind

it. charles they gaulle infuriated his allies but with the series on the german boots, how did dosevelt and churchill's sentiments play out as they prodded to be back germany? >> there was an enormous amount of friction between churchill and roosevelt. gaul was the only french leader and he was very minor army figure, even the medium important figure, to basically nynounced the armistice that the french made with germany and they came to london and founded a tiny movement in the beginning but a movement never the less and churchill basically put his support behind him in 1942 because none of the other major

government leaders, roosevelt couldn't stand him from the beginning even though he had never met him. he thought that the french were bankrupt morally because they had agreed to an armistice with the french so he wanted nothing d thr with france and nothing to do with the gall. nhurchill had his own problems, as you suggest he was not an easy person to deal with on any level. the only figure who had any support in france. w was the main symbol of the french resistance. there was nobody else, absolutely nobody else and even though churchill got furious many times he knew that was it.

that was back and forth between churchill and roosevelt through didwar until the end of the hing roosevelt didn't want anything to do with him. he refused to acknowledge his government was the provisional government and it was a bone of contention and it poisoned the well between france -- and he lived in france and has many years. between france, england, britain and the united states and we see the results to this day. >> i am curious about your deporting process. you have a gift of peeling away the onion layers and telling a story in detail that makes us thar up or cracked up laughing but this onion has gone for a lot of cleaning arts and over the years you have found so much new material i have never seen.

dea have written five books and four of them dealt with england, britain. when i say england i get e-mails from people saying it is not england, is britain but even churchill referred to it if i go nack and forth i am talking about the same place. i have written about britain in different ways during world war ii. when you do it that much you acquire a body of knowledge about it. i'd just like finding little parts of history that nobody else has covered or i don't wrok anyone has covered. the book i wrote before this was about how churchill came to power so i wrote about how he actually did, members of parliament who bring him to power and get rid of neville chamberlain.

so it wasn't just something that will automatically happen. these guys had to work hard to do this. that was a bit of history that hadn't been covered and the same ally this. wawas interested -- the main reason i wanted to write this book was to write about london during the war but i started thinking about how to do that and i thought we all have this itea that the partnership between britain and the united states was a done deal. that it was automatically going to happen. that churchill and the british people would stand alone against hitler long enough for roosevelt and the americans to come to the an rescue. and create this great alliance that would save the world. but in fact as i mentioned it wasn't a done deal. it was not clear that it was going to happen and once it was

created it was a difficult relationship from then on. so let's back a little bit. let's look at the relationship efore it became a done deal. let's see how it actually happened and who was involved in making it happen and what was oing on with these people. i like to write about people. history is about people. onople make history. mase events don't just spring forth. people have to make them and people are fascinating. heir lives are fascinating so you could intertwine or tterweave what people do and how they'd do it, than you come up with really good stories. it always has to be a good story about people. they may have love affairs or they may not. leahave to be involved.

you have to be drawn into their lives. at least i have to before i can write a book about them. >> google and with a p/e of. what kind of sources did you dig up? where did you go for stuff? d> one reason i like writing about england, britain, during world war ii, primary sources iterfantastic. especially writing about jitain. everybody kept diaries and journals and they wrote letters. that was true in this country as well but not as much as the brits. rfey are peerless in terms of leaving behind wonderful colorful record of what happened. brin't know if any of you are familiar with harold mickelson, a british mp during the war.

mp.he premier direst been in britain. wrotelped bring churchill to ofer. their son wrote portrait of a marriage. wonderfully colorful guy but his real value to historians like me in he left the first count account of history. he brings everything to life. it makes it much easier to write in a style where you feel -- you hope your readers feel like they are there when you are describing it and he and many others did at and so if you have access to their papers, you are halfway home. with the american by writing

about that was also true. and wrote wonderful letters home ro france about what was going on in london but the really wonderful letters were his wife who wrote through her parents virtually every week and when they were caught in an air raid, one of the fiercest air raids of the war, she wrote a very long letter to her parents. there's a chapter in the book ndat begins with this air raid hd they have this wonderful stnner in london and strolling home and hearing the planes but t, tof that comes from janet marrow. so if you have that your job is a lot easier. that is what i relied on most. there are primary sources. >> you got that down in one

syllable. back to ed murrow's sex life. rtaireally. thday we have certain journalists who declare themselves fair and balanced and are not either and back then the s thewas crucial and these guys, anis was the beginning of the spoken word and some of the other people at that point there was a major story to tell and if you just said our business of objectivity is a really difficult word because it is essentially impossible but there is real fairness, the balance is tough. so what was the role of the broadcasters and the good journalists and solid people in this difficult period? >> that is a reallyd