the other thing that seemed to appeal to him was the fact he could have five wives and he liked the idea and he was very much a ladies man and people joked he liked the five weeks under islam. >> doesn't islam only allow four. >> i'm not really sure. but that's how hussein -- he then took the name hussein when he converted to islam. and he ended up having five wives and he actually all -- all wives except the paternal grabbed mother was islam born muslims. the president's paternal grandmother was actually born a christian but she had to -- had to convert once she married the grandfather. that's how islam got into the family. barack obama, sr., the father was brought up a muslim.

but once he left home in his early 20s he didn't -- he renounced any religion, whether it would be christian, islam. by the time he got to hawaii, he was a confirmed atheist and as far as he was concerned religion was nothing but mumbo jumbo. as you rightly say the president's mother ann was also an atheist. there wasn't really any significant religious influence in the president's life until he went to chicago. as a community worker and then he then realized that the way into the communities actually was through the black churches. that the churches themselves were a fantastic political organization as they saw from all around the world. and that is when i think he started to go to church, to claim that he was a christian. it was actually hand-in-hand with his political workout --

>> i think this is quite right and in dreams of my father where he's talking about -- or maybe it's the audacity of hope where he would go from church to church organizing and the pastors and the priests say, hey, obama where did you go to church and he didn't go and he would hem and haw, one of his buddies said go check you the out the infinity church with reverend wright and so obama's christianity comes late and it's very much fused with the sort of political sense of social justice, the involvement of the churches and the kind of issues that obama cared about. let me say in closing that this is a fascinating book. it's -- it covers -- i think that in america the coverage of obama tends to be very sanitized. and what i mean by that, it's not that it intends to be too positive. i think that it is. more that it doesn't dig deep in the dimensions of obama's life, his ideas, his heritage. and you have covered in this book a sort of side of obama's

family history and i believe one very influential on obama that i think really completes our understanding of the man who happens to be, as you say, the most powerful man in the world. so peter firstbrook, thank you very much. the book is the obamas the untold story of an african family. it's a fascinating reed. -- read. >> thank you very much indeed. thank you. >> that was "after words" booktv's signature programs where authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers, and legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 pm on saturday. 12:00 and 3:00 pm on sundays. you can watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the book series and topics list on the upper right side of the page.

>> now, on booktv, kay says that new details their 20s and 30s prefer to put off adulthood while women partially driven by their biological clocks are driven as ever. this phenomenon has negative implications for our society. this event was hosted by the manhattan institute in new york city. it's about 40 minutes. >> many of you have seen the movies i'm going to be discussing before and those who haven't might want to get out a little bit more. >> [laughter] >> this is a shot from "sex and the city." "sex and the city" as most of you was a television series as

well as the subject of two movies. there have been many spoken on the foursome but i want to draw one topic that has been less topic. this is the highest educated group to appear on television, right. we have a harvard-educated corporate lawyer. we have a art detail -- gallery, a journalist, well, a sex columnist. [laughter] >> they represent what i call the new girl order. now, let's go to the next image. [laughter] >> more of the same. and more of the same.

could this be the new boy order? i call them a child man. admittedly these characters are on the order of caricature but their persona has gained attraction in contemporary culture. this per sonia says i'm not a man, i'm not a boy. i'm something in between. you're not necessarily slackers. sometimes people make that mistake and say they are. some of them want to go on law school or work on wall street or may have no clue what to do. but they are partial, we know, to movies and television shows with car chases, hobbits. they are partials to viewer to games, to frat house pranks and jokes. we'll come back to the child man in just a bit. now, girls of the new girl order and child men are demographic first cousins. so one thing there are something

in between adolescents and full sense of adults. some sociologists and psychologists refer to this as emerges adults for reasons that will become clear i prefer the term preadults. so what is a preadult? preadults are single young middle class people in their 20s and early 30s. they're in graduate school or moving between jobs or tutoring high schoolers for the s.a.t.'s while writing screen places in their have-hour or after the wednesday 12-hour -- after the 12 hour days. they live in cities, texas, portland, chicago, d.c. and, of course, new york where they get to enjoy the sushi and indian restaurants, crowd bars, gyms, nail salons, cafes and the like. now, ordinary as it seems to us today, there's something actually very new.

up until very recently the central fact about a woman in her 20s and early 30s was that she was a wife and mother. whether she was a 23-year-old from china or a 26 year in mad men america. in fact, most people in their 20s were not single and if they were, they were not living as room mates in brooklyn or dupont circle and drinking spots or mimosas with other preadults in the weekends. they are married and they had children. and they often had lawns to mow and cars whose oil needed changing. now, look at the numbers. notice in 1970, the average age of marriage for men was 23. and for women, a little less than 21. today, it's 26 and 28 but that's a little bit misleading, actually. because the numbers for

college-educated and -- and even those with graduate school creation considerably higher. for women with a b.a., the average age is about 27. for women with a master's or professional degree, professional degree is about 30. now, this means that we have a historically high percentage of single people in their 20s and early 30s. this gives you a little bit of an idea. now unlike almost any other decade we're looking at here, the majority of 25 years old are single. i wasn't able to get a chart on 30 years old but the trends are the same. an ever increasing number of people who are single at 30. and the numbers among

college-educated is consider apply higher. -- considerably higher. what does this mean? well, a lot of people say it's good to get to wait to get married and in many ways it is and we can talk about that. but it has significant social impact. tens of millions more young men and women happily free of mortgages, spouses and child care bills. and the stage of life have been bourne. sociologists love to call it the new demographic. hollywood also loves new demographics and by the 1990s television moved its situation comedies out of the suburban kitchen and into the city. and the main characters were no longer mom, dad and stepdad and the kids. they were preadults with names every essentially knows chandler, rachel, jerry, elaine, george and let's not forget carrie, samantha, charlotte and miranda.

so this was the change as hollywood was observing it. that was happening by the early '90s. so whence cometh preadulthood? what's coming it. i see the cross as mostly economics. in the new knowledge economy you have to think, compute, analyze and you need to go to college and graduate school. in 1960, barely 8% americans had a bachelor degree. today, close to 30% of americans have a college degree. even more significant between 1985 and 2007 graduate school enrollments jumped a remarkable 37%. everyone will tell you education leads to the sorts of jobs that give you more money, more benefits, more stability and more prestige. these are good reasons to spend years library and lab and put

off a steady project to 22 or if grad school are in the cards in 27 plus but there's another crucial reason. . that the knowledge economy has created this new stage of life. this economy is incredibly complex. it takes a long time to figure it out. in 1970 when i was graduating from a private liberal college, brandeis, my friends considered five or six sorts of careers that would be consistent with their lifestyle or status expectations. just about all of them became doctors, lawyers, professors, psychologists or journalists. here i'm going to give you a list of some of the jobs that today's college frad can consider. jobs that did not exist when her parents were her age. here we go, web designer, video game developer, diversity administrator, video producer, systems analyst, software

engineering, data communications analyst, biotech researcher, jagenet jageneticist, i could go on and on. then you could also bring into the mix the tens of thousands of technical and strategic jobs as companies like google, yahoo! sirius radio, microsoft, apple, starbucks, amazon, hbo, comedy central, networks entertaining us anytime of the day. even in the great recession americans spend considerably more on entertainment than they did years ago. that means more jobs for artists, actors, comedian, directors, documentary filmmakers, video game creators and apps developers. and just to give you an example, this -- you may not know what this is.

this is an app -- one of the most popular apps for the iphone. it's called ibeer. and if you install this into your iphone you can make it look like you're drinking a beer. if you hold it up and down you get -- now notice how it looks like you're chugging when you turn towards your mouth. it is one of the most popular iphone applications as i said on the market. it has the virtue of demonstrating two things, the variety and stranges inness. this has made its inventor a very wealthy man. what did he tell his parents what he wanted to be when he grew up. it's hard to imagine. [laughter] >> it's the second thing it demonstrates is that the knowledge economy and its associated influence tends to re-enforce the youth culture in this case the culture dedicated to young men.

now, the jobs that are available in the knowledge economy are -- it's not just a paycheck. they can be gratifying, fun, exciting and even glamorous. young people, men and women are now in a position to ask a question that human beings had never been able to consider realistically. what should i do with my life? it's a hard question and it can take a long time to answer. in simpler economies young people simply follow the clearly marked pathways that led them to a trade or craft or wage labor or if they were very lucky to professional jobs. a preadult just graduating college on the other hand is a hero in a hitchcock movie. he or she is pushed off the bus in the middle of desert. which way to go. today's careers are mitearious. how do you become a documentary filmmaker? a grant officer for an international aid financial an

entrepreneur? now i mentioned a little while ago one of the major reasons people are taking longer to agree up these days and to marry is the reason for the existence of preadulthood, for joey, monica, ross and rachel is that so many more individuals are going to college and graduate school to make it in the knowledge economy. now, that statement was actually a little misleading. to be more accurate, more women are going to college and graduate school. the growth in both college and graduate degrees has come almost entirely from the female house of the population. after 1970, the fraction of men with four-year college degrees in the united states stalled. the percentage of women with those degrees meanwhile exploded. i've got this slide to show you, give you a sense of this. notice the projection -- i don't know how seriously we should take these projections but that's kind of a scary-looking

scissors right there. not surprising -- oh, on the graduate level i should mention women are also out-doing men. there was an increase of a full-time graduate student among men about 32% of 1997 and 2007 compared to a 63% increase for female graduate students. now, not surprisingly given these numbers preadult women, single childless women now earn more than men in a great majority of mid and larger size cities. now, that's just an extraordinary statement right there. never been -- never been sued before. so what is proven success. how do we explain of the new girl order? most people will define the answer as feminism. and obviously that is a big

piece of it but i don't think it's the whole story. interestingly enough, countries like south korea and japan never had an influential feminist movement are seeing similar success among women in school. i went add two other factors. the first is what is called the girl project. by the 1990s -- and that seems to be a real dividing point in my research in the change of the culture that i'm describing here. by the 1990s and actually starting even in the '80s, parents were engaging in a new kind of child or a rather girl-rearing. they were intent on creating a new breed of girls. self-confidence, ambitious -- that's the wrong one. okay. we'll go to the next. there we go. girl power. they were intent on creating a new breed of girl.

self-confident, ambitious even as some people put it kick ass. girls had their own little league teams, their own television and movie shows, their own scholarships. the insistent message to girls, go forth and achieve. the other reason for women's success, i believe, is changes in the economy that i talked about earlier. these changes were very friendly to women. for the most part, up until the 1970s, women looked for employment for the simple reason that they and their families needed the money. before that time, this is what work meant for women. [laughter] >> this is not to say that there weren't women who wanted to become scientists, doctors, lawyers, and the like and that discrimination didn't keep them from doing so. but most middle class women who began scanning the help wanted ads after the feminist revolution were doing so at precisely the moment that the knowledge economy was coming spoke being. -- into being.

the preindustrial economy relied on physical strength and endurance. perhaps there were women who could be men's equal in the steel mills, on the auto line, building bridges or the like but there weren't many. by the 1980s, machines became more productive, communications and transportation cheaper and more efficient. american manufacturing jobs began their storied decline. this was in many respects bad news as most of you know for the working class, particularly to working class money but it was somewhat good news for women. manufacturing jobs may have diminished but consumer goods were becoming cheaper. they needed to be declined, planned, packaged, analyzed and sold as well as to be capitalized, regulated and legalized. in manning up there's a startling expansion for careers in the design field. that's especially the case with the internet where we've come to

expect information to be presented in visual form. but there's also communication. the publishing business is now largely a female occupation. so is journalism. women held the large majority of degrees in journalism. they are over half of news anchors and a percentage of news reporters. they are two-thirds of television producers including over half executive producers. in fact, women now account for over half for all workers in management and professional occupations. so there we have design, journalism, public relations, marketing, event planning, managing. these are jobs for people who can communicate, persuade, charm and multitask, who score high on empathy, intuition, communication skills, planning and relationship building. in older economies, this made them what promised women but in the knowledge economy we have this.

when i was going to work for women in the workplace i got lots of very smiling women looking at their offices and at their desks they must know something i don't know. [laughter] >> and among knowledge economy preadults women are the first sex and this is something as i said before that is new to human civilization. i know it sounds like an exaggeration, it is not. let us return, therefore, to the child man, the young single dude not child but not adult either. i see him as the result of four huge shifts. first is preadulthood. a decade or more of single life devoted to life and self-exploration. women also spend years in preadulthood the single years of the 20s and 30s but here's the difference. women have the advantage,

miserable as it sometimes makes them but knowing about biological limits. the large majority of women and men say they want children. that's what the surveys consistently say. but for women whose fertility begins to decline by the time they are 30, that means that they will not be able to play or work without serious distraction for very long. even though to run shore whether they will have children know that the decision alone imposes boundaries on their pre adulthood. men don't have these pressing limits. they can take their time and they do. the second shift shaking the child man is a highly segmented and uncensored media environment. in the past young men had never paid much television to television and magazines. -- paid much attention to television and magazines. by the mid-'90s, they found each other and fell in love.

we got maxim magazine, cable news networks, hollywood movies, also discovered the formula for attracting young male. car crashes and cyborgs and enbearsing bodily fluids and exposed female body parts. one of the successful channel is spike. it came on in 2003 with reruns of "star trek" and the original show called babe hunt. in which contestants try to detect differences into almost identical pictures of nearly naked women. trying to find an image to show you but i would have gotten kicked out of the happy birthday club. -- harvard club. so the third reason for the man child and i've got the two so far and the third reason is female independence. the young man reaches the age where any other period of history he would be defining himself as a potential husband and father. with the understanding that he

had a clear and important social role. today, provider husbands and fathers are optional. with reproductive technology, women so choose, they can simply buy sperm and forget about the man who delivered it. meanwhile, young men have seen fathers and uncles discarded by wives, cast out of their homes and separated from their children. no wonder they look as a culture shrug and do their own thing. and here's my final reason for the appearance of the child man. we've seen a general cultural ambivalence and that's at best about men. by the 1990s, entire culture as we just saw became a you go girl cheering section. it would be nice to say that americans love both their boys and girls equally but there was reason for men to suspect otherwise. you may notice -- some of you may have heard this girls rule

boys drool. this is a very popular little phrase that went on girls backpacks and lunch packs and so forth. the other one not all men are annoying, some are dead. not even funny. so advertisers and screen writers at the same time were giving us is long line of low i.q. television dads. we had homer simpson and ray romano, tim allen and the drumbeat from the popular culture said men are dumb. their unfeeling, they're incompetent and really don't really need them. at the same time, the qualities of character that men had needed to be -- needed to play their traditional roles, fortitude, courage, confidence, fidelity will be becoming obsolete and even a little embarrassing. there's a new term out that gained some traction. the term is man-splaning.

it's a combination of man and explaining. according to the urban dictionary a popular source of trendy terms. it's to dominate the conversation and to make statements that are not based on facts assuming people will believe and agree with them because he is a male. so, you know, and once again this attack on the idea of these a aua authoritative male. male adopted youthful playfulness and hesitancy. me, they seem to say i'm not that man and i'm a guy. an ironic slow to commit uncertain guy. just the other day i stumbled across this post from a popular female blogger. she called the post ask me out on a damn date. and she continued in this vein. don't ask me to hang out with you. don't ask me if i'm free

sometime on friday night and say you'll be in touch that night to see what's up. don't ask me if i'm interested in getting a coffee sometime. ask me out on a damn freaking date so you get that a lot from a lot of young women today. on the one hand they want this kind of equality that they've gotten from the schools and with their teachers, with their parents, but they want something a little bit different when it comes to dating. the child man then is the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes. the democratic shift i call preadulthood, feminism, the wild west of our new media and the shrugging iffyness on the subject of husbands and fathers as well as a general cultural ambivalence about men. now, this finally leaves us with a question that might have occurred to some of you in this room.

why are we spending our lunch hour at the harvard club discussing babe hunt and ibeer? in case you've gotten. we are after all here under the auspices of the manhattan institute, the influential public policy think tank that attends to subjects like fiscal and policy, tax reform, education and policing not the dating frustrations of single career women. as it happens, i have an answer to that question. the trends i'm describing bode ill for the family. i think we are looking at more family breakdowns, which in turn increasing government spending and dependency which in turn leads to new jersey and california as well as more general decline in skills and innovation in future citizens. this has not been a big issue before now as many of of you hopefully because you've read my previous book, college-educated

women they talk they live in the post-marital future like they can really take and leave marriage and children but compared to their low-incomed counterparts they live as my friend amy wax live like 1950. they generally stay marriage and divorce rates among the college educated has declined substantially since 1980. the large majority of children growing up with college educated mothers are living in leave it to beaver land and living quite well that's not the case for less educated. 40% of children are born to unmarried mothers. almost all of those mothers are low-incomed and lacking a college degree. they are not members of the new girl order. ..

graduates are women. it is not a promising ratio if you are hoping to marry and have children, as most women do. gal niels bohr once said once that prediction is difficult especially about the future. but i'm going to end today by making for predictions. first, i predict we will see some more women marrying down. i use that word was like quotation marks. but not much. for reasons that are deeply rooted in our biology and culture. women want to marry higher or at least very equal status bales. hats that is why marriage is between more educated women and

less educated men tend to break up at fairly high rates. second, i predict more educated women remaining single and childless. third, predict significantly more educated mothers giving up the finding a marriageable husband in deciding to go to the bank. forth, as men look around and see lower expectations from the culture around them, we will see more child men. finally, and feel free to argue with me here, i predict more sales for i.d. or. thank you very much. [applause] >> thanks. thanks kay. we have time for some questions and we do have the microphone i think, so if you could wait for the microphone to be delivered and present by yourself that would be great. we will start over here on the left side.

>> kay this is your friend amy. i wanted to ask you about a phenomenon that i've i have actually recently looked into, which is that men still overwhelmingly dominate in certain precincts of power and influence, so take for example what i call journals of opinion. if you look at the new republic, although sorts of publications on the right in the left, "the weekly standard," the people who are writing for them are overwhelmingly male and that is true of the 20-something to 30-something generation. there is a whole body of social science that suggests that even among college graduates, men are far more informed. they know more about a range of

topics. they are more curious. i would just ask you to comment on that and if you think that will continue? >> i do actually. a couple of things come to mind. one is that i have talked a little bit about how women are doing so well and so much better actually than their male piers and that they are earning more than men when they are in the pre-adult years. however i should say that by the time they get to the age where they have children, their earnings begin to decline relative to men. that explains why we always hear about the wage gap although those numbers tend to be very very dubious in terms of what is being compared to what. so keep that in mind and talking about this. i don't think we solve or i don't know that we can solve the

conflict for women between having a family and getting ahead in the workplace. there is always going to be some conflict there but to get more precisely to your question, amy, i think that women, we get into these essentialist arguments which i'm fairly comfortable with but in general i see women as less aggressive in terms of debate. you know i have never looked actually at the numbers of debaters. i know that in the schools these days they are pushing to pay quite a bit and i have never really looked to see how those numbers break out. but i wouldn't be surprised to find the champion debaters were male. mail. why that is, you know, it has something to do with the kind of aggression and focus on facts

that i think are required for that kind of, that kind of debate. so i do believe it is probably an essentialist reason. >> okay, over here. >> ed thompson with the ayn rand institute. your theme seems to be based on economics and cultural influences and so forth. but you haven't mentioned anything about early education and i'm interested in progressive education. i used i used the term is a catchall, multiculturalism, john dewey. from the reading i've done on the subject and i am not an educator, development in young children is afforded by the education system, which by the way happens to be dominated by

women ironically. what is your take on progressive education? i mean what i'm trying to say io were children once start somewhere and it grows up with pseudo-self-esteem and so forth so could you address that please? >> well, i think christina has written about primary education and the way that it is unfriendly to boys. for one thing we have seen a big decline in, or a big transformation in the kinds of looks that students, young students are being asked to read. you won't find the adventure adventure books anymore, or not very much. different kinds of books that might have appealed to boys. i remember reviewing a book some time ago about the change in textbooks, history textbooks.

and the writer there said that if you were to look at the updated textbooks, the post-feminist textbooks about the settling of the american continent, it would sound like it was entirely colonized by women. [laughter] actually, girls. girls and their parents. so there is no question that there is that going on. there has been this feminization i think of earlier education. as for the progressive part, you know i have seen girls who don't do very well in progressive education either. it is possibly true that boys need more structure than girls because they are simply more physically restless. and because they also seem to like more competitive game like education. so i have heard from a number of teachers that if you can arrange

things so your child, for boys, he knows if he reads a certain number of books he gets a certain kind of reward, they like that kind of thing a lot. so, i suppose insofar as progressive education really discourages any kind of competition, that is probably somewhat to the disadvantage of boys. 's be right in the middle there. >> bob rice berg. i am going to change the focus a little bit and look at physiology here. i saw a poll from japan that said something like 35% of young japanese males have no longer any interest in and they are have no interest. interest. it is a remarkable statistic. the other thing i've heard. >> i really would like to know what question they asked those men.

[laughter] >> it is a interesting, many of these men are extreme versions of what you are talking about. i understand many of them never leave the house and they play videogames all the time. and i cannot track this down but declining testosterone levels in the american public. could this be something that is going on that we are just losing that masculine drive and desire? george gilder's argument always was that many men got married because they were tired of hunting and gathering. they want to become farmers. [laughter] i mean it is true. a lot of men, that is the impetus, regularity and i was wondering whether or not you have explored this business about men, these creatures, simply loosing interest in sex or getting pornography off the web or some other way.

that physical aspect may be a critical element to add to your list. >> i haven't heard about the loss of interest in sex among boys. what i have read about and i think is worth taking very seriously is the proud dominance dominance -- predominance of in their lives. this has become a profound new way of spending your time for young men, and you know we published an excerpt of my book and "the wall street journal" about 10 days ago, and i got a number of letters from young man who said i have got. i do want to bother with the real women. and certainly you hear of more than that, you hear women complaining of guys who have some very strange ideas about how their sexual encounters should go, ideas that they have

learned from watching so much. so i do think that is a factor in what i'm explaining. >> right here. >> lionel tiger. an observation about the issue of wide girls do better than boys in college and uniting that with your notion of reproduction both men and women but certainly women more clearly articulate a sense of wanting children. my impression, and i think it is borne out by the data, is that when women are doing well in school, they are studying for two. any sensible young woman knows that if she is planning on prince charming to swoop her up, care for her forever in a gilded

carriage, she is likely to be proved naïve beyond telling so these young women understand that if they have got an education, they can take care of themselves and there are so many of them dead end up taking care of a child or two children. so it seems to me that the biological part of what is constituted male or female have to be given the rather technicolor salience here because otherwise it becomes too much of a question of girls and boys. it is an issue that is quite profound as you have indicated. >> absolutely. i can add one little anecdote to that. there is a study that i saw that shows that low income women who are single mothers often go to community college after their children are born, and they almost always say it is because

of the child, for the child. so i think you are quite right. >> we just have time for one more question. why do we go way to the back. >> two related questions. the first is, how do you see this generation of 20-something aficionados evolving into their 30s, 40s and beyond? in the second is, is there any other country you are aware of that is more advanced than the united states in terms of this on on on? >> look, i think most young men will get into their 30s, look around and decide okay, it is time to settle down. maybe it won't be until they are 40 or maybe even a little older. i spoke to a young woman the other day who is in her late 30s and single and would very much like to settle down, and

she told me she is dating a 40 something guy who is now looking at himself in the mirror and going icy wrinkles, you know. she said there is a biological clock for men too. it is just a different clock, and that may be true. one question to ask is whether the men and women for that matter who have spent so much time on their own and taking care of themselves and no one else, whether they will adapt easily to marriage. i think that is an open question. as for other countries, the success of women in school as i mentioned is something we are seeing all over the place. that is why i call it the new girl order. all over the developed world, in asia, in japan, korea, china and

in eastern europe. everywhere where people garner universities girls are doing better. now how that is going to play out in those various countries, think it is really going to depend on individual cultures and how they deal with this. but i think that we will be seeing a collapse in fertility and a lot of those countries as we already have. >> thank you kay. thank you all for coming. this book is "manning up." [applause] >> c-span's local content vehicles are traveling the country visiting cities and towns as we explore a nation's history and some of the authors who have touched upon it through their work.

this weekend on book tv, we take you to downtown indianapolis for a look at the new kurt kurt vont zamora library. >> kurt vonnegut was perhaps the greatest american writer. he was a world war ii veteran. he was a hoosier. he was a satirist. he was a political activist. he was a husband. he was the father. he was a friend. he was a friend to his fans. he would write back to his fans. he wrote more than 30 pieces of work, including plays, novels, short stories. some of his more familiar books are slaughterhouse five, which is perhaps his most famous. breakfast of champions, cat's cradle and many other books. vonnegut always brought in his midwestern roots and often wrote about indiana and indianapolis

specifically and if i may read a quote. many people ask me why should this vonnegut library be here in indianapolis? i have many different answers but then i found this great quote that says all my jokes are indianapolis. all my attitudes are indianapolis. i add noise are indianapolis. if i ever separate myself from indianapolis, i would the arab business. what people like about me is indianapolis. so we took that as a great night to go ahead and establish the vonnegut library here in indianapolis. we have an art gallery, a museum world, a reading room, a gift shop and i would like to share details about these with you today. this is a vonnegut, kurt vonnegut timeline. if you would allow me i would like to read the quote at the top of this beautiful painting,

which was created by the artist chris king and buy a vonnegut scholar named rodney allen. both of these individuals live in louisiana. and the quote reed, all moments, past present and future always have existed, always will exist. the trust, dorian's can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the rocky mountains for instance. they can see how permanent all the moments are. it is just an illusion we have here on earth that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. and something that is unique about our timeline is we actually start on the right side and go to the left rather than the left side and moved to the right. one thing we wanted to mention about this quote, we hope that vonnegut would know that while he may think that, may have

thought that once a moment is gone is gone forever, we like to think that the moment of kurt vonnegut will live on forever here at the vonnegut library. he went to cornell university. he studied chemistry. he did not plan to go into architecture like his father, but he did think he would move into a science career and discover at cornell that he was not very much interested in doing that. so, he enlisted in the army during world war ii. i would like to point out a moment here on the timeline that is very important in the life of kurt vonnegut and that is 1944. vonnegut is dying from an overdose probably intestinal of alcohol and sleeping pills. vonnegut enters combat in europe. he is captured by germans during the battle of the bulge. soon he is riding in a boxcar with other american p.o.w.s to

dresden, a supposedly safe german city unlikely to be bombed. so dresden was this beautiful cultural city that was not a military target. as vonnegut rode in on a train he was able to view this beautiful city and then he was placed in a slaughterhouse where the rest of the prisoners of war were held. his slaughterhouse was slaughterhouse five. we have an exhibit that we called address in the exhibit is really his world war ii experience that became so important in his writings and his worldview later in his life. i will start with a photo that was taken right after he was released as a prisoner of war along with fellow prisoners. we also have his purple heart that was donated by his son,

mark vonnegut, to us. he received a purple heart for frostbite and kurt vonnegut was embarrassed to have received a purple heart for frostbite when so many of his friends had suffered from other types of physical problems and disease. we have a signed first edition of the book slaughterhouse five. this is important because slaughterhouse five is probably the most well-known book written by kurt vonnegut of the 30 some pieces of writing that he completed. this is possibly the most famous why was slaughterhouse five famous? let me give you a little bit of history about what happens to him and germany, and my impressions of why it affected people so much. vonnegut, as i read, he was taken to the slaughterhouse.

while he was in dresden, the allies bombed dresden and so his own countrymen as well as allies on this city. it was a horrible bombing. it was literally a firestorm, and tens of thousands of people were killed. these were noncombatants. these were women and children and old people. vonnegut one of his -- as of prisoner was to go out and removed the bodies from these burning buildings and he also was required to bury the dead bodies of women and children. that affected his life tremendously. he came back from his world war ii experience being completely against war. he was searching for a peaceful resolution to conflict and supported diplomacy and other approaches to solving problems.

i will also point out a photo that was taken after he came back from the war. he got married to jane cox vonnegut who is was from indianapolis as well. this photo was taken on their honeymoon and as you can see he is in uniform. vonnegut and jane had three children, marge, it eddie and nanette, nanny. and then many years later his sister alice died a day or two after her husband had died in a freak train accident. alice had four children and three of them came to live with the vonnegut family so they had quite a large household, seven children and vonnegut at that time was writing books that at that time were less familiar. but he had published several

books and articles for magazines as well as working a job as a car salesman for sob. the experience of writing about dresden and what happened to him was tremendously difficult for vonnegut. it took him about 20 years to be able to publish the book, slaughterhouse five. jane, his wife, had encouraged him to write it. she worked as his editor on the book. she asked questions and got clarity on issues to help them to retrieve a lot of those memories that he had repressed. because of the family situation with the addition of more children, and the success that was coming with the publishing of slaughterhouse five, his marriage with jane was rocky.

his daughter, ed, had mentioned about a month ago that experience and the publishing of the book and all the fame brought to vonnegut contributed to their marriage dissolving. and at that time, donna get -- the photographer joe cremins, he eventually married joe cremins and she was his second wife and was the only other person he was married to during his lifetime. i will move you over here to what we call the political at to the exhibit and vonnegut continued to talk about his interest in finding peaceful solutions to conflict. i think that is another thing

that made him very popular during the viet non-years and after. this photo, which was given to us by "the new york times" was taken during the first gulf war and there is vonnegut out there at columbia university. i am sure that it was a large crowd because even to his dying day, vonnegut would attract a large crowd. i have been told that he was like a rock star coming into his different speeches and large auditoriums, always filling the auditorium's. so here we are in the art gallery portion of our library. i would like to take you over here and show you a vonnegut quote that assigned that was given to us by his artistic collaborator, joe petro. it says i don't know what it is about hoosiers, but wherever you go there is always a hoosier

doing something very important there. this quote was in the book, cat's cradle and it is a very funny exchange that the main character has with a fellow traveler on a plane and that fellow traveler gives this quote so next we have possibly his most famous piece of artwork, the. vonnegut, in his humor, he associated the asterisk with this anatomical feature and we actually have used this asterisk and other pieces of our exhibits, including our timeline which you may have thought had stars in the sky that they are actually vonnegut's asterisk in the sky. we also have life is no way to treat an animal.

this is the tombstone for his famous character, kilgore trout, who appeared in many of his books. it is understood that kilgore trout is based on vonnegut himself. and interestingly, the character kilgore trout died at the age of 84 and vonnegut also happened to die at the age of 84. >> what did kurt vonnegut died from? >> he collapsed. he fell down the steps of his new york city home, and he went into a coma and never came out of that coma. he often joked that pall mall cigarettes would kill him and he would sue the makers of pall