i said you know the world of sports. other people in this world you believe are great teachers? he wrote back that absolutely give me those two names. and then in finding out other things about them, that was confirmed. in some cases i got an idea and then pursued the person. so for example, i thought, i like l.a. but somebody's got to be a great ballet teacher. as i started looking at dance magazines and dance articles in places like "new york times" and the name suki shor kept coming up over and over again, so that's how i contacted her. ..

then what i did was, i just contacted the people usually by e-mail, sometimes by letter and i was expecting to get turned down a certain amount of the time special as i got to people who were very busy or were well-known. i got turned down by virtually no one. and then some more people who turn down a lot of interviews, so i later realized that the reason was these were people who

were so dedicated to teaching that the fact that they were going to be interviewed about teaching as opposed to get know what it is like to be rich and famous or powerful or something of the sort made them incredibly generous with their time, and so i virtually got no, no answers. you know, they all agreed. we are about out of time. i would like to thank you all for coming. i have enjoyed talking to you and i hope you have enjoyed listening. thank you. [applause] >> for more about author bill smoot and his work visit bill smoot.com.

jay kirk recounts the life of taxidermist and conservationist carl akeley. the author says at the end of the 19th century there was a growing concerned about many in the scientific committee about the depletion of several species due to overhunting. still years from proper photographs and equipment akeley and his ill champions taxidermy in the hopes of preserving animals for future study. mr. kirk recalls carl akeley's money hunting expeditions in africa with the likes of eudora roosevelt and pt barnum and his decisions later in life to stop hunting and create sanctuaries for animals to live in the study. jay kirk discusses his book at the academy of natural sciences in philadelphia. this pro-graham is just over 45 minutes. >> hello and good evening. thank you so much for being here. i thank you for that wonderful

and tradition. i can't tell you how grateful i am to be here tonight at the academy of natural sciences. and to see so many friendly faces. thank you so much for coming out tonight. i just can't believe it. i also want to assure any of you who might still be wondering, no there will not be an actual taxidermy demonstration that tonight program. apologies to any of you who were expecting or came for anything like that. but, i do however want to begin by telling you all a story that took place 100 years ago at the top of mount kenya are. it was here in june, 1910 that

my friend, carl akeley, found himself trucking a creature that would forever change his life. he was with a small party of guides 1000 or so feet below the glacier. the elevation was high enough that his hands were numb and he could barely hold his rifle. by this point i should say carl akeley, the explorer and taxidermist, had argued cheap a certain level of fame for having stuffed pt barnum's jumbo elephants, with his life like this that the general public purged on sorcery. akeley was even more famous in the natural history museum circles for already having revolutionized the art of taxidermy, using it too with an air of sorcery. and a habitat diorama of those

great illusions of nature frozen in a box. by now though, he had entered it been in africa going on the here and he was having a hard time finding a male elephant large enough. he authority collected a couple of females and a young calf shot at his friend, teddy roosevelt, who had come to africa at carl's urging. but carl had yet to find the really big bowl he sought. he scoured half of africa by this point, trying to find his perfect specimen and he had failed over and over and over again. he had grown so frustrated, some might say obsessed, now let's go all the way and say obsessed that his hunt had begun to resemble a have's pursuit of moby dick. finally he decided to go up mount kenya the second highest peak in africa where he heard

legends of -- so old that -- and were in fact his wife and partner in crimecrime, nick e., had previously bagged the biggest elephant all ever recorded only five years earlier and which is now on display in the lobby of the chicago field museum. but by now carla nikki's marriage was somewhat strained and carl had gone on the front alone leaving nicky behind it a scam with the rest of the safari party. this is making having a kind of classic safari style breakfast. that is her in the back, and that little critter on her lap is jp junior. jt junior being her pet monkey devil, who would eventually confirm, at least for me, lord byron's great statement about truth being stranger than

fiction. more on that later. anyway, back on mount kenya. carl had found spore higher than ever would have guessed about the timberline of 14,000 feet and a little higher in the marshes where the air was thin as plasma and sulfur coal. but right now in the upper bamboo forest as you is creaking along on an ancient and claustrophobic elephant trail, he realized he was now tracking what was very well the biggest bull elephant he had ever come across. but he had also begun to realize to his trembling consternation at the same time, he himself had been hunted by the bowl. the trail itself is a kind of maze, series of interconnected passageways over time to traverse the elephants feeding grounds high in the mountain forest.

indeed in the maze though as carl tried to follow the tracks, he ended by circling back around the same place from which he had started, almost -- finally deciding to try to find the answer to the maze carl was going long the bamboo perimeter when he found a massive pile of dung, still steaming in the freezing gin mist. i'm going to read to you from a passage from my book. i realize i left it in my attache here so let me pull it out. it was then he began to have a distinct sense about this elephants. it came over him gradually. the feeling was he had finally found a bull worthy of bringing back to new york. the one he had been chasing after for the last year.

as if it'd only been one individual bull all along that had evaded him and set up this contest but by now he felt it, that this was the one. even stranger as carl and the trappers kept walking through the maze he started getting the sense that the elephants really was waiting for him. the feeling was strong. that he was being hunted as well and is now engaged in immoral contest with this bull. in fact he felt that right up until the moment when it came to a small clearing in the green bamboo and heard a loud crash in the woods 50 yards straight ahead. the trackers were already 20 yards forward on the pass and now braced against the unknown. supporters behind him at runoff shedding their bundles. carl took his 475 double rifle while his gun bearer went to the patient ritual of taking out and holding up for carl's inspection every single bullet from the

band a layer. the last thing he needed that the critical moment like this was to loathe the wrong caliber. meanwhile the unwrapped the handkerchief from his hands, trying to rub feelings back into his numbed fingers. and waiting for the trackers to give him a sightlines went with no more fanfare than it does mode entering victorian drawing room on a ray of midafternoon sunlight, the bull was suddenly upon him. out of nowhere at tusk was in his chest. as if the elephant had only been standing there hidden behind advance defensive curtain waiting for its queue to enter. when he remembered now was that the safety of his rifle had caught. later his porters would remember that he got off one shot. he did not remember that the explosion of weeds, whether he got a shot off or not. what he did remember was the overwhelming sensation of homesickness, struggling for a moment with the safety and then

he had done the unimaginable. he had thrown the rifle aside and actually reached out to grab a hold of the task as it lands past him with the force of a sharpened swinging log. a completely bad thing to do. charging the elephant as if it were speeding boxcar. at it been almost automatic, something he rehearsed in his mind 1000 times before. he lurch skyward, somehow in the next split-second managing to get himself between the two tasks grabbing the other as well so they had a grip on both like a handlebar of the gargantuan bicycle. here he was now writing the face of this giant bull, a massive tempo overlord of the forest, pressed against the fixed bridge of his chunk close enough to see his own terrified jiggling reflection in the piggish gelatin of his cornea.

he knew to expect no mercy. attempting to scrape the gymnast office space, the elephant thrust its tusks into the air of it plowed him into the ground thanks to affording stubborn under soil, a route, iraq. carl was not killed in simply that remained between the tusks holding on for a better life. as the elephant changed its footing, carl felt the chill breeze of its next ayers and took one last breath at the animals creosote most, the smell of hot coal tar and then a shuddering blackness. 10 hours later his runners would alive -- arrive at base camp to bring mickie the bad news. when his wife, mickie, found him after leaving a terrifying and

at times hard to believe midnight rescue herself, she just found his leading mangled heap covered in bloody hands and she feared that her husband was dead for sure. the elephant had crushed his chest, broken several ribs, more or less crudely scaled him and ripped open his right cheek so that it dangled gruesomely, exposing his teeth in this horrible grimace. amazingly he survived. even more surprising perhaps was the fact instead of calling it quits and going back to america to a nice cozy hospital bed with queen bed sheets and running water, he would spend the next three months in his tent while mckeon ministered to him, changing his bandages, helping him to eat and all the while continuing to manage the safari at some 150 porters, gun bearers, cooks, skinner's all on

hold while akeley laid on his, delirious, hallucinating and on the brink of death. at this point i am sure some of you must be asking yourselves, he sort of had that coming to him, didn't he? i mean there he is in africa shooting these marvelous creatures and they fought that. i should say the first mention i ever heard a big way in the first thing that made me think i might have a book idea was while i was in the middle of another story about extinct cats and did my research i've passed this kind of factoid in passing about the famous taxidermist who had once strangled at leopard with his bare hands and i thought that was amazing, and indeed it is. [laughter]

i always thought this would be a cool ad for the gap. [laughter] anyway, later on, by the time carl got asked by the elephant it was getting hard for me not to think, well maybe there is such a thing as karma. i also have to admit when i started writing the book that is pretty much how i felt. after all one of my all-time favorite quotes comes from john muir. it if a war should occur between the wild beast and man, i would be tempted to sympathize with the bears. but let me take a moment to try to seriously explain some of his motives and how he came to love them all the more for his paradoxical nature. after all, is hard to spend six years working on a book mse find the characters sympathetic and as brutal as akeley could sometimes be, i do add an enormous amount of affection for

the brooding taxidermist. but at first i did not clearly understand the larger rationale for his work even if i felt like i understood what drove him as an individual artist. rather than judge them for my enlightens 21st century purge, it seemed necessary to write as closely as possible from his point of view. just as it was important for me to write about all of my characters as closely as possible from their points of view, complete with limitations of their own thinking and the limitations set on them by the ideas and given knowledge of their -- trying to figure out my characters motivation and by extension trying to understand the motivations of the era, would end up being one of the most exciting and difficult struggles of writing the book. i was first drawn to akeley as the excessive artist who not only risked his life over and

over but went to such amazing and preposterous adventure is links for his art. not only that but here was a man who is literary killed for his art, and i must admit it was somewhat sinister quality that is partly to blame for my initial interest in the story. but, beyond all that great dart full messick intrigue, there soon emerged this much larger and ultimately more important question. why, if science news these animals were on the verge of extension, which they did, did they think it was a good idea to go out and shoot a few more input inside of the museum? indeed, akeley believed with great certainty that many of these animals were an imminent threat of extinction and in fact this was why they thought it was

a good idea, and imperative mission to go kill a few for the dioramas before it was too late. at first blush it is one of those, what were they thinking, kinds of questions. how exactly did the fine art of embalming equal conservation? part of the answer was quite simply, as it turns out, a matter of available technology. in terms of capturing lifelike images of wild animals in their natural habitat, the state of photography could not yet even begin to compete with the art of taxidermy which, until akeley came along, and revolutionize the craft from this, lovely. to this. it was not all that useful either, except for the most rudimentary needs of tax on them as to collect and catalog a

known species. quote, feel photography was in its infancy. it was frederick lucas a contemporary of vaguely's and director of the american museum of natural history put it, in this stage as lucas put it, when it was not so difficult to photograph a bird in the open as it was to find the that bird in the photograph, at one meeting of of the american ornithologist union around this time one member pointed with pride to a photograph of a seagull stating that it was his one success in 150 negatives. akeley himself had experienced more frustration after he too router motion picture camera to africa, not for the sake of making movies per se but as a tool to help him them make better taxidermy. but the technology was simply not up to par. repeatedly when he tried to film lions are anything more fleet footed than a hippopotamus he

lost his focus. the camera he used was about as nimble as a wooden suitcase mounted to a tripod. filming a gazelle was like trying to shoot a -- film a shooting star. regardless of the technology and i will return to that in a moment, how was it possibly justifiable to murder species that ferraro be thought to be teetering on the brink of extinction? i mean how was this just cause for a silver institution like the american museum of natural history or the field museum or the academy of national -- natural sciences or any of the others? the first reason was that they believed many of these species were already doomed due to the ongoing colonization in the settlement of africa. the habitat lost encroachment of the european civilization the sheer orgiastic killing of

wildlife justice that have been in the american west was enormous. akeley thought the elephant salon had a couple of months, had a couple of decades left at most but here is the thing. america itself was only just waking up to with the horrible truth. america which had always been some ominous with infinite resources, given the vastness of our own wilderness, was beginning to realize that maybe it was not so infinite after all or at least some were just now waking up to this reality. most notably that creates american socialist president teddy roosevelt who set aside race swath of wilderness under gray protection. t.r. was doing a very radical thing but also a very practical thing. is not designating national park spirit out of a love for nature

which he had in great abundance, but he could see it had seen the writing on the wall. america's natural resources were drinking. not everyone saw that. most people didn't really see that. likewise a lot of people thought it was perfectly fine to shoot 80 lions or 14 mountain gorillas. the devil of -- double paradox here for t.r. of course was that he was sadly one of those men. but this awareness really only was daunting and the idea of conservation itself, what a great idea, brand spanking new. but still in the face of losing all of these amazing bees, wondering the african land, the best chance they had to preserve the knowledge of their first wild existence was to preserve the images of these doomed wonders. enter carl akeley, world's greatest taxidermist.

by now, henry farrell ferrets osborne was considering -- comparing him a talent equal only to phidias the great screed screed -- maghreb sculpture who preserved images of the gods in the parthenon. as such, his job in a nutshell was to take a snapshot of the dawn's creation in all its splendor before it was snuffed out. was this a somewhat fatalistic philosophy? cs. was he a charge method with charging time capsules in the vanishing world? yes. did he love the animals he was killing? i truly think he did, yes. i know he did. but the full scale conception of this ultimate time capsule would only come to akeley after he had taken that beating by the elephant back on mount kenya. it was while he was confined to

his tent, healing from his ones, that he first began to have these feverish visions of what would become after several more harrowing expeditions and three decades. the grandiose akeley hall of african mammals. while he lay there on his cot, listening to camp sounds around him during the long days, and the jungle sounds at night he began to envision this monumental made like space. engulfed his imagination. the space was dimly lit, dark, whitehall eliminated a series of panes of glass, each the size curiously enough, of a movie screen. over those three months the overall layout revealed itself gradually until he had imagined every last detail carefully estimating the dimension in his mind, picturing where he would place each charmed beasts inside its lair.

imagine it all down to the smallest most exquisite blade of grass. in the center of the hall would be a frozen herd of elephants, the bronze statues. in a way he really had to be grateful to the elephant who had nearly squash him like a grape. i mean without all that extra time recuperating, he very well never would have had this vision there we go. he also of course had to be immensely grateful to his wife, mickie who had not only saved his life in a rescue effort that matches on encounter with the elephant for sheer terrifying adventure but stood by him when he was back on his feet and suffering from a disabling crisis of courage. after all once he recovered he had to resume the elephant hunt, especially now if he was going

to fulfill the dream of his epic vision. but it was at this point where he would begin to suffer lapses of morale and the gentle euphemism of the time. that is, the wind to back to face the elephants he went back to suffer the -- at likely diagnosis of pvs -- ptsd. are likely less like took away from working on this book was this sort of life is not good for one's mental well-being. both carl and mickie were subtleties of the lifestyle. the center of the book in the thing that drew me the most deeply into this character was the struggle with so-called lapses of morale which he suffered repeatedly after his clash with the elephant. the whole big important issue of conservation aside, much of the underlying story for me was about fear, how it defines us

and how much of our lives are spent trying to escape it. that common thread between fear and of session. this is where i think i identified with akeley the most. it is when he loses his nerve and he starts to lose his religion. it is at his most human heart of his story at this most vulnerable where i feel like i hammered in my first piton as a writer. i also felt like it fit into the larger historical story, given how much fear justifies his work, fear of the national world dwindling, closing in and in that sense the close box is that the dioramas, these finite compartments, these cramps time capsules, seems like a metaphor. but what was just as confining then and what continues to confine us today is this illusion of separation which we

build up around ourselves, the partitions that separate us from nature. it was having that partition momentarily lifted for carl akeley that gave him his own redemption, his great epiphany while hunting mountain gorillas. curiously he had brought along his new invention, his motion picture camera, an instrument that would revolutionize deal photography as much as his taxidermy methods that already already -- and i parley parlay attribute his new sensibility, sensibilities to this new contraption which he had looked with him all the way to the belgian congo. i feel like he must have realized he did not need to rely on his gun alone now. if akeley had not experienced this metaphoric for titian melts or shatter before his eyes, the mountain gorillas with without a shadow of a doubt gone extinct. is morton poison legacy without question this saving the

mountain guerilla. if akeley had then not created the first wildlife sanctuary in africa to protect the mountain gorillas diane fauci would not have had anything left to protect. sigourney weaver would never have been nominated for an academy award and gorillas in the mess, because there would only be missed. in the end, one of the bittersweet ironies of carl akeley's story is by the camera and making it capable of better preserving images he can ship two to the demise of his son art form. we should count ourselves lucky and the animal should count themselves lucky, that we really don't need dioramas today because we have incredible shows like the bbc's life series to put us closer today chair to see what we otherwise would not see. but i do also sincerely feel with a grain of salt that when

we go to see the dire ms in new york or chicago or here in philadelphia we cannot help but feel deeply affected. for me the experience of standing in front of one of the dioramas and looking in at these animals forever frozen in time each seem hermetically sealed for eternity. it always gives me a sense of what akeley himself must have felt when he had his own moment with the gorillas. when he was standing there, you are not at all aware of the glass. you feel as though he could walk right into the scenery. the effect is like nothing else and ultimately these are works of art. and they say that because these dioramas continue to do the job of what art is supposed to accomplish, which is to make us see the world more clearly and with compassion. thank you very much. [applause]

yes, i will take questions. >> i ask if you have a question please come down explicitly uses microphone for the c-span audience. thank you. >> thank you. [laughter] yes, sir. >> hi. i want to thank you with all my heart on behalf of the national association and every taxidermist in the world, thank you for writing this book.

[applause] >> thank you. thanks for teaching me about taxidermy. >> of all the fears that you recorded in the book that made the experience, what do you think was the most underlying fear while back in new york city? >> fear of failure. not getting it right but not getting the money to do what he wanted to do. but i mean this man was so driven by work and perfectionism that i think. >> that is a great answer and one more question. i understand the modern taxidermist being attracted to the life of carl h. wade. his sense of adventure and accomplishment that basically if you are not an outdoor guy, what

in your life actually attracted you to the persona of akeley himself? >> well, i think it was a morbid attraction at first. i like the idea that he was an artist who literally killed his own subjects. just to be quite honest, kind of grabbed my attention. he strangled in leopard with his bare hands. that caught my attention too. you know so the things that grabbed my attention at first were the very compelling maybe pegs of the story, the sort of hard to believe parts of this story but i quickly found that he embodied so many other things. i mean he embodied that time in the conservation movement in this great awakening, where they did not realize, oh maybe we

could spend more time trying to save the animals rather than kill them. and there was the solution that wilderness was infinite. >> thanks a lot, and jay, i appreciate it. [applause] >> jay that was a really great talk for gus. >> thank you or gus. >> i thought you did a great job of teasing out some of the contradictions they are and kind of exploring them. just a quick question. i'm wondering if you are familiar with donna haraway's work, the famous piece. that was the first to jump to mind when i saw your book come out. is called a think a patriarchy, right? she really takes up the question of some of the things you touch-tone of race, class, sex, the colonial aspects and you mentioned a few things about maybe a lot of prima colleges tend to be women or release the

famous ones but if you had a thought about her reading of this story, this character and then secondly, i don't know why it is come to my, since you were mentioning murder in in the course the fact that you are interested in crime writing, the famous line, we murder to dissect but this seems not quite that. seemed to be perhaps some people want to kill to reconstruct or to represent or in this case to maybe domesticate, where you take a living being and bring it into the interior of the museum or the house or something. anyway, it to quick thoughts. >> i can say right off the hand i am familiar with donna haraway and i've loved reading her work. she is a very high academic theorists and she kind of put her focus on the national history museum in looking at some the social theory aspects of it. all of which i found to be completely valid points of view

and i think the only thing i could say was probably by reading people like haraway made me keenly aware of these obvious measured discrepancies, the racial issues of carl akeley being the white safari hunter leading all these kind of invisible porters behind him. and i felt somewhat conflicted about that, how to acknowledge that. i feel that in the book i did try to acknowledge it in different ways and certainly my tendency is to write more about the scene, so i included a number of scenes, talking about the actual clashes that were taking place which akeley curiously enough was always just skirting, like the most kind of awful war between the european settlers and the african natives. there is a lot of food for

thought there. i hope i adequately answered your question. >> thanks for a great talk. i don't know if you have looked into this at all but i was wondering if he you could talk about without the parallels between the rise of modern taxidermy and what was going on with the development of zeus at that point in time as a way to keep, investigate wildlife animals? >> it goes hand-in-hand a little bit. many of the trustees of the american museum of natural history for instance including the other roosevelt, jpmorgan and some other friends were actually very involved in the establishment of the bronx zoo. at the same time they were trustees who are putting their money into these, you know, the dioramas so some of the same people who have the same interest at the time, i think they had a somewhat more bucolic

image of what this do mike d. and what it might provide to urban dwellers than it ultimately ended up doing but that might just be my revisionist looking back and thinking zero of code that sues are awful. not my thing so yes there were definite, definite carol wells. another parallel, some of the same people at the museum who again were trustees of the bronx zoo felt that it would serve the purpose to people living in new york and the cities that were suddenly so much bigger, you know and they thought they valued nature. they valued people having access to nature and wilderness and that would help put off or assuage some of the anxieties of

what they would call over civilization. >> i thought my question was stolen. your book is a 2010 book. is a modern book, i mean publish now. and i can't help but think about your own discussion and think about this do as it is conceived today as being these archives of dna and i was wondering if in any way you are shaping this book and thinking about it being a 2010 book, thinking even about sues and their presence mission to preserve and how that makes them -- may have formed your thinking about the past? speta i think i don't entirely understand the question. >> i'm thinking suits sues today are so much about preserving life. rescue. it sounds like so much what you are describing sounds so much --

the fatalism. >> the fatalism. >> the fatalism of today and i was wondering if any way in your writing that think me about sues today. >> enough said. i think it was all very fatalistic that obviously, our society reaches points where we feel completely fatalistic about things like now is global warming, but some people are totally fatalistic about it. a breakthrough will happen. often it happens. we can deal with this. i think the answer is thinking that akeley and the people at the museum at the time the great irony -- i mean this just answer somebody else's question to, what really drew my attention? yes at first it was the morbid artist thing that was cool. but just the paradoxical nature of the time and of the scientist it was just amazing to me.

here is a point where they felt like this is the best we can do. we know that these species are going to die. the best we can do is to preserve an example, an image, just a data point of knowledge for us to have for people of the future so we will see what we have lost. it is very fatalistic but then i think that is what makes akeley's story so wonderful is that he breakthrough that. i mean he has redemption. he sees it is possible like hey let's say the mountain gorillas. that is what makes this book ultimately his story. ultimately optimistic i think. >> hi dave. >> hello. >> part of your story is i found fascinating was the little bit you mentioned about his wife, mickie. how much do we know about mickie? she is ministering to her

husband and bringing him back from the brink of death. her story sounds fascinating and i have never heard her and i wonder how much fame does she have? is issue simply in a shadow? to jihad famous a taxidermist as well and how much of her stories in your books be that is a great question. i definitely sort of focused mainly on carlin my lecture tonight that the book is definitely about karlan nikki. i see it is a romance. her story was amazing. yes, it is phenomenal to me that it look as not been written about her before, like a full treatment. and not to go on too long or give a spoiler, but she ended up, after on her own, crossing africa. she was the first female explorer to cross africa on her home. working for the brooklyn museum in the late 20s but yeah she

is just as much a part of the story as carl is. [inaudible] >> the movie footage that i'm using here is actually connected to the eight we's. it is zero sand martin johnson, and they were kind of this really glitzy, amazing moviemaker couple at the time. at first they were going off to borneo. they did a lot of savage movies, movies called wild savages of the south sea and stuff like that. but, they became friends with akeley. they were a bit younger than him and he convinced them to go to africa and film. they went over there and they moved there for nearly a decade. making these movies. they had kind of an interesting symbiotic relationship, where the movies that they were

making, and this movie is called simba, and some of the american museum of natural history gave its respectful perimeter, which gives them a little more respectability which i guess they felt they didn't have. they had the box office but they didn't have the scientific credibility, and so they form this relationship with akeley and the american museum of natural history to go families movies and they got some underwriting for it. the process, 50% of the process was supposed to go to fund a akeley's african hall. so he was actually -- some of the footage, some of the lion footage is his but they had a whole fleet of eight the's cameras. >> you jay i just wanted to say i really enjoyed reading the book and a great lecture tonight. my question is about working

with akeley's paper. he spent six years researching working with his memorabilia so what was flat like? what were we's letters and diaries i can also what he think about his wife's monkey? [laughter] >> i don't want to talk about the monkey. [laughter] that would be a spoiler. he is a weird monkey. it was very tiring. it was very tiring. i love that kind of research, you know. i spend many, i mean i practically moved into the archives, the club. been president for a few years in the american museum at natural history. the library there was incredibly

helpful and it is phenomenal how much they actually have, you know. you know they feel this card out and they have like 50 archive ox is that are just crammed full of correspondence, invitations. the photograph in the archives were phenomenal. in that way, it is like okay i was not there, but i could look at these photographs, thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures. they make movies. some were not as good as others but it was a great source to reconstruct scenes from it and see what it really looks like and i read their diaries. i probably had the one you you know different surplus of difference because i was able -- i didn't have to include everything if i didn't want to

so i just kind of kept things of interest. like france and take we have a couple of paddings for dentistry equipment. [laughter] but in reading the correspondence, and also in rochester because he grew up near rochester, at the university of rochester they are in town, a lot of personal correspondence that enabled me to just kind of get into his head, really. he comes across very humorless sometimes but other times he is just a. he is really funny. i wish mickie had written more. the two books that she wrote, jungle portraits and her second one was called jp junior, biography of an african monkey. [laughter] a really good book. i wish he had written more,

yeah. >> that story of choking the leopard -- you talked about trying to look at it from his point of view and looking at it from the time. to me that screams of moral ambiguity and that fascinates me. so, the question that i have here is kind of a three-part question. how important is objectivity and writing nonfiction x. have you ever come across somebody in your writing that you haven't really been able to not sympathize with because of their actions and with this guy, did he do anything that you personally, maybe as in the book, that you personally can't justify to yourself?

>> akeley did many things that i found reprehensible, absolutely. but again, the thing that i was drawn to and that i found most compelling in terms of him being a character was that he was very paradoxical, you know. so yes, he was engaged in this enterprise whose face value was very valuable. gil -- go kill these animals and bring them back and mt. them. i guess i can be morally reprehensible but at the same time my objective was to try to see it from their point of view and see what was going on. but, there were definitely characters in the book that i found through my research that

were morally ambivalent, past the point of ambivalence. i did not want to write about them. [applause] >> jay kirk is a creative writing teacher at the university of pennsylvania. for more information visit his web site, jay kirk.info. >> joining us is jonathan safrak animals. in the book jonathan you talk about farms where animals areng being produced for eating, anden you sayg that they are treatinge living animals like that once. a what did you mean by that?you m >> i sheaould say there are two >> t kinds ofh farms in america. there are the factory farmsfa ay

small family farms and the small farm is what most peopleey a think when they are imagining a farm , animals on grass and fence post and farmers walking around in sunshine and hay. in america 90% of the farms are animals are raised by concentration, hundreds of thousands, given antibiotic from birth until death, pieces of their body removed without anesthetic. our food system has become like our tennis manufacturing system. it doesn't matter how we treat these things. unfortunately, it also doesn't matter what the environmental effects are. we have the very disinstructive industry. >> where did you get the idea about writing "eating animals"? >> when our wife got pregnant with our first child, i thought

about feeding somebody else, that frightened me. i wanted to know more about the affects on our bodies and world. >> you talk about the affect our or bodies, what effect was the eating meat on the environment? >> well, the u.n., which is not exactly the humane society, said that animal agriculture is the number one cause of global warming. produces a lot of greenhouse gases, and top two or three causes in environmental problems, air pollution, loss of biodiversity. basically, knowing what we know, we can say that it's impossible to onesself an environmentalist. >> you talk about the economic, environmental, and social considerations. explain that. >> it takes 26 calories of food

to put into the animal, you get one back. we are basically ming south south america, taking advantage of south africa, it's not so great. but is the 50 cent mcdonalds hamburger is chicken nuggets. >> based on your book, is there any such thing as good meat? >> i'm not one to say. is there such a thing as a farm where animals are treated well? yes, i went to farms that farmers treated the animals better than i treat my dog. i also went to farms that are environmental sustainable. the question is can we have a farm system that's like that, want answer is no. there might be an analogy to child welfare, excuse me, labor. 6-year-old give them a job to

enable the family to stay together. we have a system like that. those in the mercy of those at power, and such strong incentive to abuse the power, it always gets abused. in americas we have always have really good farmers. really noble people, and appeal to the stewardship, but we will not have a farm system like here is a portion of one of our programs. >> i am a child of globalization i was born at the time when large numbers of african countries had just gotten their independence or were getting their independence, or were independence for a wild, and

that entailed in africa, in the context that i was born and later i found out places in asia that there were these crews that took over power very quickly, and i don't want to use the word class, but groups of people were either prosecuted or persecuted in numbers and those of us who felt persecuted rose in power started to move around our countries of origin and that was easy to do. and that means i had lived there was born into globalization without even realizing it that was the globalizing world. when i hear people use the word multicultural i think about my

secondary school in nairobi where we came, all of us came from different cultures and we were all searching for a better life and economic, but be moved from a to b, from country to country to language language to hemisphere to hemisphere. it seemed seems so much easier and more let's say we take it more for granted that in my grandmother's generation. than i, page in the information age so modernization that i think in regions like my mother and my grandmother, got a taste of it but didn't grow up in it. i am not just a child of globalization but i'm also a child that is intellectually came of age after 1999 after the fall of the soviet union. >> why was that the case?

how did that impact your life direct he? >> it impacted it directly if we accept some of huntington's cases that there is a clash of civilization and a clash between the west and islam and the sense that i was born into the muslim civilization. i was defined by huntington and lifted in brief did, was committed, believed in it and left it and came to the west and do the same thing, lifted, breathed brief did, make friends, and made my future here and was able as an individual to compare not just the geographical differences and not just a monday material differences but the differences in value and i came to really appreciate one of the other and they made a choice. and they think that makes it, if you are looking to what is it

that informs how i interpret events today, the offense if we are living in this everyday life, that affects of more than anything else the fact that i've been exposed to both worldsworlds, expose to the thinking of both worlds and i feel i am able to compare and buy opinions are you know one of many, one of 1000 opinions. this objective. is my opinion that is how i interpret facts and events that are living in history today. >> you would say that a number of the primary factors that influenced your thinking art derived from your being part abandoned being influence by globalization, you are being part of a tribe. you are also as a understand it, you are also your own background in terms of your education and being exposed to multicultural worcumstances.