give us a one branson's. what is your favorite chapter in the book? >> my chapter turned out to be the eleanor roosevelt and franklin roosevelt chapter. it was complicated. he and his girlfriend living in a bedroom next to him and she had her girlfriend lorena hickok living next to her in in the white house together. the american public obviously didn't know any of this, but the thing about the story is that messy left-hand, franklin's girlfriend and lorena hickok, elinor is, turned out to be essential to helping these two figures become the great heroes of american history who let us do the great depression in the second world war. it is a central piece of their story these extramarital throw relationships and it is an important piece which has been long and they -- ignored by historians. ..

in human rights activist and co-founder of the artemus project became a big brother for mr. mattocks when he was a homeless seven-year-old in washington, d.c.. this is just under an hour.

>> caps >> welcome to mcnally jackson. i'm the coordinator. just want to let you know that today this book is 20% off, unlikely brothers by john prendergast and michael mattocks. >> [inaudible] laughter echoes a price. we have them up salote to register and you can get the book signed over the table the authors will be signing and i encourage you to buy the book. so today we are incredibly honored to have john prendergast and michael mattocks in conversation with ann curry. john is an activist and author and is the co-founder of the enough project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. working for the clinton administration he was involved in a number of peace process season africa and helped create the satellite sentinel project with george clooney, books with john keogh and developed a documentary films on the congo.

he's appeared in four episodes of 60 minutes and was featured in a "new york times" profile titled attention for the cause. he's been a youth counselor, basketball coach and big brother for over 25 years. michael mattocks lived in homeless shelters as a child and began dealing drugs as a teenager and is now a husband and father of five boys working two jobs at once to support his family. he helped coach his son's on their football teams and ann curry as many of you know is the co-anchor of nbc's news today, america's number one morning news program and the anchor of dateline nbc, the networks award winning news magazine. she was the news anchor from 1997 until june, 2011. in may 2005 she was named co-anchor of dateline nbc. she regularly substitutes on nbc nightly news akaka. she is distinguished herself and global humanitarian reporting traveling to remote areas the world's underreported stories.

they've been interacting on african issues particularly darfur since 2004. they traveled together with george clooney to southern sudan in october, 2010. let's welcome them. [applause] >> good afternoon, everyone. it's a pleasure to be among you and it's such a pleasure to be here with john and michael to talk about this book, unlikely brothers. we are glad for you to be here and we want to tell you this is being broadcast, so no four-letter words although there are some in this book, john. this is a very honest book that you and michael have written. fact, it is so honest that wondered what your motivation was until as i got into it it attempts to do good for you and to do good for others.

first, tell us about those initial chapters you had to write about your own background and what brought you to michael. >> first thought this was going to be great, it would be easy because i would just tell a story of this good guy that helped this cade and hopefully made his life better. but, you know, as soon as i took up the microscope and started looking at motivations and why i did what i did dows was probably anyone there's a hugely complex reasons and coming out of a somewhat abusive household upbringing and having to sort of peel the onion layer by layer very painfully revealing to myself and then ultimately getting it on paper the reasons why it's very different than the sort of noble knight riding into the situation. it was definitely greatly out of self-interest in my own life and

trying to figure out my own past. when i first met mike clay was 20. >> you had been in the family where you felt no closeness with your father. >> the opposite was -- we were very strange. ferry explosive upbringing and about 25, 30 years i didn't look at so completely turned off the switch, the lights went out and i checked out of the relationship. >> on top of that in your life in high school and in the early years you just felt ugly, you felt you had acne like a lot of us did, you felt not connected to your father and this was devastating to you. >> i.t. just it's not really terribly unusual. i think a lot of young kids growing up feel a lot of alienation for many different reasons. i had my set of reasons and was a very sensitive kid, so just it

acutely affected me. the effect it had was say real anger against on the fairness. so early on i began to sort of go to the soup kitchens and homeless shelters and started volunteering at these places, listening to people's stories just getting deeper and deeper to the underside of our country and understanding what poverty and homelessness and social afflictions were all about somehow connecting the things in my own torment. >> michael, how old were you when you met john? >> seven. >> what was your life like when you met john? >> we were first living in a homeless shelter. >> with how many brothers and sisters? >> add that time i think it was i had two brothers and one sister at that time.

no, actually three brothers and one sister at that time and kiss my mom kept having a more. >> how would you describe your emotions? john talked about his emotions and struggle with his father and the alienations. what can you remember at age seven in a homeless shelter? >> well, i knew what was wrong, shelter to shelter, it was bad, really small carrying our bags. it was sad when i wrote the book just thinking about the stuff to reduce the mchugh talked in the book about how would you remember the garbage bag. is that how you carry around in your whole life? >> we carry around our home the

bag to the bus. no book bags, it was trash bags. >> so how was it that you would meet? because it is unlikely to but how did you meet, john? >> a friend of mine continues to remind, my dad was a prison to a salesman's we would move around as a kid and i would to five different colleges, just for winstone to read the first place i went was georgetown and a friend of mine that there was overseeing when i dropped out of georgetown he stayed but he was overseeing a homeless shelter so i went to visit him one day down in d.c., 13 blocks from the white house and there's a shelter and i went up in the afternoon in the midst of the reagan revolution talking about all the intellectual sides of poverty, the cuts were doing and the ideological differences and

then michael and his brother, james, one year younger than michael comes rolling into the room just pleading and joking and laughing and horsing around and eventually we go to the library and repeat it and eventually just become brothers in a way informally that ended up cementing itself as a big brother, little brother relationship. >> big age difference. people wonder why your mother let you hang out with this guy. [laughter] >> she did, she really did. a lot of my aunts had a problem with it. they always used to say you need to stop letting that white man come around. my mom was like they are okay. she knew we were in good hands with john and if something was wrong we would have told her but

it wasn't. it was fun. the first time we went to the library we were looking at the book light and this is boring. but he told us if we don't know something, let him know. that's what we did and she started doing more and more with us and it was fun. we need this strange guy and -- for real, we met this strange guy and it was crazy. >> she asked you in those early years if you knew how to read. islamic and i really didn't, we really didn't know how to read because bouncing from shelter to shelter sometimes we would get at the shelter at 12 or 1:00 at night and still have to go to school. and when we get out from school we never know where we are going

to be. it was crazy because things were not getting done the way they were supposed to, couldn't do home work my mom was so worried where we would stay at night. we stayed in terrible places. >> so he helped you understand the value of reading. did he teach you how to read some? >> a few times he might have told us this and this fall and we started doing different stuff, walking around, basketball. >> [inaudible] >> this, he did. he really did petraeus get you sounded like you needed that food. >> i did. my mom was younker himself and some nights we wouldn't have food to eat. sometimes we wouldn't have food

to eat and she would try to scrape up what she could to feed us. >> it's hard to imagine a twentysomething-year-old man going back over and over again to hang out with these young boys and even though you didn't have a tremendous amount of money in your pocket to were springing for them to eat, to hang out with them you could have been with your friends. thinking about all of us when we were in our 20s, what were we doing? what kept bringing you back? >> it goes back to the issue of on a fairness of the kids and the hefty bag running around place to place on a daily basis like you described and i was just furious the world would allow this and so sure i rather be on the basketball court but i felt very committed early on and

had been studying urban poverty and wanted to make the policies to change that and then here are two manifestations of the unfair economic history our country continues to harbor and i feel at the very least we can make the commitment for these guys and see if i can help me difference there. >> interesting when you think about going close of adjust to these to you thought it was still in other words -- you decided at some point this is going to be just these two what is it about michael and the brother that made you -- you said we became brothers, you need to explain what that is. what is the connection that made you say okay i can't do them all, these are the two. >> i think now that you are asking it that way i don't think

i decided, i think i wanted to stabilize it and study the problems and to give up the policies that these guys emotionally connected in what was a fairly big waste land, and as a lonely kid turned adult who's still but lonely kid i connected with those guys and we became chellie the term to describe it was family and we reach out to them probably just like they were reaching out to be trying to figure out to have an anchor somewhere and in a stormy sea. they love you like your father didn't. >> like my father didn't know how, you know, the unconditional love. i think all of us in this room

-- have incredible is it when you have someone who doesn't have a set of conditions or judgments or footnotes and all the love they have for you and i think that is the hallmark of our relationship is unconditional love. >> but instead of finding a man older than you to be a father figure, you became the essentially a father figure to michael and his brother. >> one of the sort of motifs that continued back then and to this day to resonate with me is the old icon xm bowl, battled police in nebraska that is home to kids and you have that picture of the big kid holding little kid on his shoulder and she's sleeping and just taking care of him. he's my brother. and i felt like a little kid growing up wishing i had that big brother and eventually saying i can be that guy and i

tried. i gave my best shot. >> michael, as much as jay p. did for you it wasn't enough to keep you from hardship. there was too much hardship including the teasing that you are endorsing at school. >> we got teased a lot at school >> what did they say? >> the things we had because my mom didn't have the money and we always got i don't want to say second-hand stuff and it was crazy because i remember this incident when it began i was the oldest boy a of the seven kids and my mom didn't have a lot of money to buy all of us close so

she bought me three sweatsuits i had to wear the whole school year the same trees what suits and that was torture for me as a kid. they would tease me all year around and i got in fights and that is one of the reasons that caused me to want to stop selling drugs. >> you mean you started selling drugs because retired is getting teased. what were you trying to do? you're trying to raise money? >> i wanted to buy clothes at that time. >> he wanted to stop being teased. >> we had people bullying us and just teasing us. the hirsh being a little kid, so these other kids like to this day go through the same thing teased because the things they've got and when we have three such suits for the whole

school year it was torture. >> how old were you when you started selling drugs? >> i was 11-years-old, started selling fake drugs and led to the real drugs and i was 11-years-old. >> were you able to buy some of these close? >> knott during that little time, but as it went on it went along right after. my teacher would see that change in me. like she knew what i was doing outside on the playground during school time high on the corner selling drugs. she would come off the corner personally and get me off the corner. why are you selling these drugs? she tried but, you know, that's something i started getting at up to.

>> you were traveling at this point or and college? >> just a year and a half after we met i made my first trip to africa and i get my whole new career path, wanted to work on human rights, sought these abuses and the war, blah, blah, a young twenties feeling like that is the real on the fairness so i went and what suffered as course is what few investments i made and one of them the biggest thing that suffered was the relationship with michael. >> how did you find out about his drug selling? >> i would come back from my trips to buy lived and worked in africa and for the first two or three years when we first met each other i was in their lives very deeply and then started going off more and more and so i would come back, find them and get the guy is a and fewer times michael would come and the younger brothers james and david

and tyrell and andre. and his mom would come out every time i would visit she would be like michael, do you have any idea what's going on? she's selling drugs, wants to drop out of school. with tears and i like i've got to do something about this. and i would result myself to get people involved in his life and all of the complexities the would be involved in trying to get him going in the right direction and i would start to plan my next trip to africa and my result would crumble at the degree of difficulty and i would literally let him down. it's easier to work with the younger kids whose younger brothers and it's a little bit like my dad she was great with us until a certain age and then it all just went to hell in a handbasket and the same thing i was replicating the pattern of my own life. >> were you angry? >> yes we had this guy come into our life and he gives -- comes

back, sea and for a while, come back. we would just wish he wouldn't go any more, wouldn't see him for four months. we would be so sad but every time we show back up like everything is gone out the window because we know that we are going to have some fun a wood and leaves again and when we hit a certain age, when he would leave it's amazing when you can do in the six months to come back around like i'm not doing nothing and i still might go with them and then he would be gone again and by that time i've liked deep in to it. if he was constantly a around even though that wasn't his job

we made a bond with him. it could have been good but he was more a around with us it would have been all right. i feel that it has been a different person if he were constantly around. >> how old were you when the light bulb went off that you had to stop selling drugs and that you could now turn your life around? and what caused that led to go on? >> well, i had gotten into trouble in the boot camps and we headed the army and the marines working with us and they showed us how things that i never experienced on the street. you know, a big drug dealer had to go to this boot camp and we got these guys yelling and i like yelling at me you don't even know who i am. [laughter] like you don't know who i am. i'm going to yell at you. [laughter] but they didn't know who i was.

so we didn't have noeth to place but to adapt to what they were doing to us or go to jail and jail is just -- the stuff that kind of taught us how to be a man because you had to have your room this way or they would destroy it. you know, the army, in the marines they are tough guys and it was just teaching me more and we would do hiking trips and exercise. came home i had muscles. i never had muscles. stuff like that when i came home and i might my brain was sharp but i was still selling drugs. but it all ended. >> why? >> because i made a choice i was either going to go to jail, get

killed, or stay alive. i wanted to stay alive and those were might resist. >> do you think if you never met john you would have made the right choice? >> actually to be honest with you if i wouldn't have met john my life would have been worse than it was. it would have. it would have been way worse than it ever was. it would have been away worse. >> do you remember the moment when you discovered that michael had stopped and had made this decision? >> it was the thing that we never acknowledged, the huge elephant swinging and at the tail never acknowledged because he would look me in the eye, his mom is crying so i just sort of wanted to believe that because -- or i chose not to make the investment so fast forward in a few years when he's deep in the life and i've sort of in the

civil war and war zone and africa and one night i get a call and he wants me to come over and he tells me sit down in his little living room table about this time he has got a new wife and his boy is and we sit across the table and he basically tells me the whole story like this is what's been going on and i just need a little help right now because i'm quitting, cold turkey, so it was very mind blowing to me the extent to which he was an. like for me to read these tractors now and to see what he was involved and i feel like a tremendous failure for not having been there for him during that time. >> why would you feel guilty given what he said? >> because the flip side of what he just said, had i actually

been there more we could have actually been done -- he could have gone a different direction but it was those times i was gone for long periods and when i came back he just sort of went off in a different direction. >> he said he was going off to get a massage. you were going off to africa to save the world. >> for all intensive purposes to him i was gone, forgotten. >> so, then fast forward as we are here now how did you stay connected? how did you stay brothers? what was the glue? michael? >> how we stayed brothers was like even though he was gone we would talk to him here and there and i think from when i got older and i came to him and i needed that help from him he was there to help me. he had gotten me a little job and even though that didn't work

he was around more. i would call him and he was like there. it was unbelievable. but he would be like a statue to africa for a little while and this and that but we would still stay in his life. our relationship even got, like tighter, you know what i'm saying? and i focused on him like a man, i want to be around him more. i didn't know this was going on. i'm there. >> you said that you have replicated what you're father did in terms of not always been there for michael but then something happened she taught you about how to be there for somebody else. >> i would go to his house a lot and was sort of reinvested in his life and played the role of brother i should have played all those years and i got to see him

as a father and a husband and he's good at both of them i can attest. and i had written it off for myself. i lost the idea that such a thing could ever be the case for me to be able to have that kind of family has a lot to do with self esteem and my own self view at the time but watching michael and the maturity and wisdom that he had accrued for all of the things that he had gone through and applied to these incredible kids i at least felt if i don't have that i have his family and i can always be part of that. the first draft of the book we wrote that was the ending, like i will never have that, but at least it is indirectly through the connection and the second draft is weird light the second draft was all about now i see

what he does maybe i can envision that you get so i'm like me be more progress here. third, some house the -- [applause] >> did you get married, john? >> nine days ago. [applause] i had to make my point. [laughter] >> michael comegys bouck at johns wedding, and do you know that you taught this to him, that as much as you say she changed your life that you had changed his? >> i didn't realize that. i knew he was impressed with what i was doing with my boys. i always promised my kids that i would never leave them. i'm more dedicated to them. i took some of the things he

used to do with us, that's exactly what i do with them. all five of my boys love to fish, and we fish good. we really are, you have to see us. my seven year old, we fish. i taught a lot of things that he taught us when we were smaller fishing and stuff and i do it and they enjoy it. >> john, what he's saying is that you taught him things that made him a better father and then by seeing that he was such a good father, he found the opportunity in yourself. >> now i get my chance. [laughter] some parenting books. [laughter] >> before that happens, you have also found interesting outlet. this book is out not so long and you were invited by a book club as i understand it in a prison.

>> that was the most. i never experienced anything like that in my life teenagers, 16, 17, i was nervous going in there. i didn't know what to expect. i knew there was murders, carjackers, 70% were not coming home at all. that was the quietest people say they ever heard the kids ever since they've been there they sat there and listened to everything that i've said and ask questions afterwards. they were so inspired by the story asia could devotees hands and said if i'm not kidding out of 2066 the story as fired me. i want to change this exactly the way that you did and that touched me so much because these teenagers not coming home say that i aspire to them by the story of a vital to come and say

one of them, they were smart boys, they just made a wrong decision and they write poems, so lovely. so touching. i was touched by what they were doing, and what advice you give me i'm trying to keep writing. i'm like continue writing. don't give up. i know you say never give up, never say never. and probably do in that coming home. and they asked me, they want me to come back over there. i'm like wow this is amazing. they want me to be a part of them and i motivated them and they are loving me so much i was like a man how can i make a change for these kids? they are inspired by the story that is my goal to talk to the young teenagers to try to help, you know, to better their life

for my experience and in what we can do for the opposite to make things better for you. that could take 30 kids and i'm doing a good job. islamic just like john saved one. >> yes, she did. >> d.c. that so that you're talking about what he did for you, doing it for them? >> yeah. he did. he saved me. john, man, she didn't realize like the wonderful things he did for me. you know what i'm saying? like i think a lot of my life and writing this book that was just a little bit of what i went through. it's amazing that i'm still here to tell my story. and i think god kept me here to tell this story.

i lost my brothers and that was the most painful things in my life. i lost one of my best friends, so many friends and family that i loved, and i lost my dad, too. it's crazy because i lost all these people but i'm still here, like sitting looking at the tv thinking about all of them white man i wish my brother james was still here to experience this moment with me. i lost my other -- my brother james and lost a brother, tyrell and another brother with my father's son, brother is ten years and it hurts. it does. >> it's hard to always express to someone else what they have done for you.

is their anything that comes to mind if you had to say one sentence or two to john, what would those two sentences be about what you would say to john about what she has done for que and as best you can? however you do it is fine and. >> the love for what he did for me and being there for me and, you know, he helped me out. he really did. you just don't know man. i oh my life to him for the things he's done. >> and what would you say to michael? >> we started out as me being the big brother and you being a little brother but i think the coolest thing now about to the last five years is we are just brothers, we are family coming and we know that we have each other and we have each other's backs the rest of our lives and that is a hell of a feeling to have.

>> the book is beautifully written, it is honest and it is interesting how much in reading it will only do we learn about you but we also learn about what is possible in us. who has a question? and there are no stupid questions. there might be some stupid answers. [laughter] >> when you work and oversee like you do it's easy to become cynical about the human species. in your own trajectory consolidating these recent years and the kind of consolidation period where you are going back how do you look at the future with regard to what you've done in the past because what you see in the international work for yourself? >> i did just the sort of lessons that i've drawn from all of this and the things i learned

can be boiled down pretty easily and that is individuals, any of us can make a difference and i feel like i have these two tracks i've lived on not by choice but which all evil for me, though one of track being of working with younger people. michael was one of the brothers, i had nine and now working directly with the big brothers and big sisters organization over the years, and to see that again by investing time like you're going to be doing with those guys and the prison that interesting time and energy often can make a difference in people's lives so there's the professional and the big picture huntingdon partner of the anti-apartheid efforts in the south africa where they ended up working with nelson mandela on the peace process and when i worked for president clinton and

him telling me it's because the people of the united states and around the world that partnering with him and all the south africans who were struggling against apartheid during those years that he was in the island in prison, that is why the situation changed in south africa was free from the suppressive recessed political system so it was because of actions of people all over the country and around the world in the fungibles taking action, and then being part of the blood dimond campaign. everybody's heard of the blood diamonds. individuals say it's not right to buy this jewelry if it is going to lead to terrible abuses of human rights and once we decided to do it the situation changed. in the sierra leone these are peaceful countries because people -- the individuals, when they work together in groups to change things what doesn't always work with kim and i feel

like that is the thing that i now just want to work on is like how do you get the message out to people that they can make a difference in this world, the you actually can by investing in something you believe and actually helped change. >> anybody else with a question raise your hand because we have a microphone we would like to bring you. okay, good. >> i guess my question is the time that you were your lowest is there a memory or personal belief system u-turn to? what is it that brought you hope to kind of start again? >> in other words, when you get your deepest what was the thing it could be whatever it was, what kept you hanging on and thinking back to each other at your lowest?

>> i just knew if i would have called he was going to be there. i knew it. i didn't want to, but i did and i was scared to call but i did it. i knew he was going to be there. >> when you say scared to call him you mean when you got off drugs? >> from selling i was like man i know he won't be, but i called him. i need to talk to you. and he knew something was wrong but i never called him like that. >> would you say that knowing she had your back is what kept you? >> yes. he never judged me no matter what i did. john never said anything to me.

actually he is the exact same way as when we met him as little boys. i've never seen him mad. >> you are describing unconditional, unconditional love earlier. now you are saying it is kind of an unconditional report. anybody else? going ahead and raise your hand. what is your question? >> is your dad still alive and have you reconciled with him? >> he passed away three years ago but before probably five years before he died she had a bout with cancer, beat the first, didn't beat the second, she and i began this process of

coming back together and it was great. a lot of forgiveness and complexity but i don't know if you can move on to the person no matter what happens to do if there isn't some form of reconciling with your past that may not involved the person or the people who cause the problems or were a part of the problem. i was lucky enough to have it. there was one situation where i was -- it was the first cancer about he was in the hospital and had one of these complex surgery is, 50% chance of survival, he survived and is regaining his strength and sort of has a semi flashbacks, she had become much more docile over the years went by. he wanted to tear the wires and

the ivy lines out. he was screaming at me and i went back to being a seven-year-old kid being terrorized by this giant, first of all my hero first and then mr. hyde has appeared again. so for a moment by heart leaps into my throat like i'm seven again and then was like cool and actually not. i had to hold him down because he was literally trying to get out and would tear this stuff out of his arms. i had gone to a workshop where we did this session and the session was then you would actually go back in time to be a little kid and one of the moments when you felt unprotected and then you would imagine yourself as an adult and go back into the moment as a child and protect yourself as a child, a psychological trick i guess and should it was

happening like i'm actually here and i talk to him through the whole time while he's screaming, spitting fire and it was strangely peaceful efforts like he forgot about 40 minutes later beginning to have his first stage of alzheimer's he very quickly forgot but i was like wow that's really cool. i actually -- he doesn't know what he's doing. he never did, he had no tools. my uncle told me his father did some of the same things. he didn't know. so i began to reconcile and once that happened once he recovered from that first bout we spent so much time together and i was grateful to have that last moment with him of reconciliation. >> anybody else on the microphone? go ahead >> do use, please to this gimmick by a arrived late so if this question was answered i

apologize, but -- i know the commitment you lead with what you do into enough project and the other causes that you have espoused how did you manage to make the time to make a personal commitment to be there for him and given all else that you're doing how do you find the time to do something like that? >> i do have a way of answering this. it's very important to me and that is again, conducted the moment we were going to write this book, his idea by the way, not mine, and i'm like, you know, again this image of myself, first image is goodbye will present myself as a good guy and will be over and most of it will be about him. and as we got into it more deeply started to see the complexity of it all and then we

basically open things up in this book that don't put us in a flattering light the and i felt that would be better if you had a reason for writing this book which is exactly what you did with the guys in the prison, show them an example. hopefully i could help inspire people to become mentors and tutors, big brothers and big sisters to do this and does the writing went on and my own sort of self-revelations' deepened i was like this is going to be a much better way of recruiting than if i were the perfect guy that did everything right because that's just like i will never do that and that is like the entire recruitment strategy to think they can live up to it but here's this guy that does it for selfish reasons and has all kind of complicated things, let him down repeatedly and still has some kind of an impact that's lifelong kenya. like crazy. - didn't i poster child for big

brothers and big sisters because liked you actually don't always have to be perfect, you don't have to show a full-time, you don't have to be the one that has all the answers and you can somehow still make a difference in another person's life. i hope that is what we take out of it and we are able to inspire people to invest the time and energy in these kind of things. estimate does anybody have another question or statement come here as someone in the front. >> estimate what do you feel he taught through your relationship? because you are older and mentored him of their but when for so many years another individual, to kind of have to see the other side of the clean and so i am curious to see what you felt he taught you. >> i want to say again because

it is so dominant is the steadiness and commitment that he makes to his kids and his wife every day. that level -- that is me or you or one of us. but that is really what i learned, just watching him have infinite patience. hand it to somebody else, watching him have infinite patience for his kids and his wife and seeing the kind of investment on a day-to-day basis you make in your family it just became possible in my mind. the light switch didn't come on all but once it's like the dinner that gets a little brighter and then as a sort of got a little brighter i said maybe, maybe. and having that intimacy of the brotherhood of relationship that of mario and real brother, luke,

by the way, how you doing -- he also a kind of estranged a bit from that and then came back and he's a great father and a great husband to his wife so having those role models, my brother in the spirit and my brother biologically for people to give me the belief that the courage that i could actually do it myself. >> anybody else? yes? a question here in the front. >> what was the writing process like? did one of you start writing and then pass the manuscript back and forth? >> we got a lot of help at the beginning because we didn't know how to frame it. like we going to say the this and that, that takes away the individual story. so we got a great writer named

dan who used to work for the new yorker and we sat together and michael just, you know, told him story after story and we went around to all the places in the shelters. i told him stories and he took sort of and created -- he created the lump of clay that made the first draft possible. so he sort of created this idea that it would be in dual narrative, so the chapter would go back and forth and we would be talking about the same event but wildly different interpretations of what was happening like real life and we went back-and-forth like that and we were diverging i am often africa doing my thing is and that is when we deferred the support and i have a little what was going on in his life and he had no idea what was in my life so we came back together in that way so that he gave us -- he turned over to us and was our turn and he got a lot of the stories down but then we had to tell why, like if you can't

explain why, what's going on in your heart, then who really cares. so that was the hard part. 16 hours. it took awhile but i got done. it took a long time and i remember finding the pictures like at first i couldn't find any pictures of us shaking the brigety down we know from the old days and the start coming things and we leave them on the table so anyway the was cool too rediscovering -- >> cap during our own lives and i recognized what to a memoir scott flipse -- >> [inaudible]

>> yep. >> this sounds like it was terrific fit of pique to make the book happen. would you say that it's brought you closer? >> yes. >> like a lot closer? >> brother is a word but it has a lot of meaning. there can be a lot of layers to it. the brother we have now has to be wherever the deepest layer is because we just completely rely on each other text and each other like two little girls. [laughter] >> i'm still in the 19th century running around and he's like you've got to learn how to text. [laughter] >> you may be unlikely brothers but you are lucky brothers. thank you. we are lucky that you poured off your heart and all in this way and spoke to us today.

thank you. [applause] >> let me mention one book i just finished. it's an autobiography entitled infidel by aayn hirsi ali, a somalian woman brought up in the war-torn area, lived in several african and middle eastern countries and finally escaped to holland and got political asylum and became a member of

parliament. she was involved in a controversy based on a movie that she and a man named van gogh produce about to be harshness of islam and the way that it's being swept under and this is about to van gogh being assassinated in holland, and aayn hirsi ali being put under protective custody for some several weeks. the basic premise of the book is that number one, the countries that she observed in africa and the middle east are being held back by the religion of islam particularly because the harsh treatment of women didn't 50% of

the population to reach their full potential. and that western countries such as holland by accepting an extreme version of the multicultural was on are encouraging a radical fundamentalist islam to take cold in the western democracies with their mistreatment of women and their honor with their female mutilation and things of that nature and so she calls on the western democracies to work towards better assimilation of people who integrated from the country's.

jason berry looks into the financial practice of the catholic church which brings billions of dollars annually through the nation's and various business deals. this is about an hour. [applause] >> thank you. is the mic on her? okay. everybody can hear. it is always a pleasure to be at garden district books. i am the client as well as occasionally a stand-up performer, and i also want to see how wonderful it is to be backend new orleans after three weeks out on the whistle stop and foreign countries like new york, boston, chicago, cleveland and elsewhere to read this book

is called render unto rome the secret life of money in the catholic church, and it follows a line of transactions that largely deal with the closure of churches and the disposition of churches as property, as assets. and by focus on the four major parts of the country. new orleans, boston, the longest sections, cleveland and los angeles, and there are intervening chapters in rome where much to my surprise i got much more information than i ever imagined that we live of course in the age of miracle and wonder and the internet manages to get information to people with such speed that i felt myself literally up to my neck in material as i was finishing the book and my wife actually said -- i finished it in the

marchant at what point you could have pulled me off the floor but it's true in october, november, and excuse me, i finished books in november, anticipating eight march publishing date and the book was published in june because sometimes we are late. the mantra in our household in the fall, which i have vague memories of they did not bring the championship this year i do at test to that, a quota every morning at breakfast as i drink my coffee and tried to get centered on the times picayune are we out of cleveland get? i did get out of cleveland. it was a fascinating piece of this work. so the story of this book really begins in boston and i going to lay out several key sections of it in a sort of abbreviated