maybe you're approaching a union. maybe a bully to you as sick or being able to say management, we need some changes here. but i don't get is possible although. i love that old union word, solidarity. sometimes we do have to band together to make change. ..

completely oblivious, but now i see it in a different way. benign for nexium will go to the food mart or gas station isasi the woman behind the counter now i'm thinking how long has she been on her feet today? what is she going home to? is she going home to feed children at the end of the day and what will that be, will that be a trailer, with the p.a. motel, crammed into a house with other people? so i think, i see things differently and it means seeing the pain but we all have to see that pain if we are going to bring about change. thank you. [applause]

>> there is a book sitting on my desk that came out several weeks ago so i want to read about it and then there's a book called reckless what went on in terms of the financial crisis in the country and what led up to it and what involves local businesses freddie mac and fannie mae. i know lots of the plague years and i am curious to read and find out what happened there. and then there are some things i want to go back and read. there was recently a controversy

about huckleberry finn and don't use of the n word and there was a professor that took it out of the text and this marked the controversy about sanitizing american history and in the context of my own book sort of politically correct speech code and how inappropriate it was given the fact mark twain who samuel clemens wrote with the power of the work pending. so i want to just take a look at what the sanitized text looks like so that is sitting on my desk. and then there are two books, i'm trying to remember their names and it's an opportunity to help out authors that i'm reading and one is about lawrence block who is a mystery writer and i think it is called a drop of the hard stuff.

it's a mystery novel and lawrence block is to me a terrific mystery writer. that is the top of my list. if i wasn't here tonight i would read lawrence block. i think that he is terrific. and then george is a mystery writer that writes about mystery set in washington, d.c. and has a new book coming out his wife told me about because she exercises at the same gym i go to and so i'm looking forward to that because he set the scene on the travel to the constraints i travel every day so i want to see what he's done. >> tell us what you are reading every summer. send us a message at book tv. >> erik larsen recounts the american ambassador to hitler's germany william dhaka. ambassador daughter arrived in germany in 1933 and became friendly with many members of hitler's's ss and began to see berlin change and become aware

of jewish persecution. this is about 50 minutes. >> it's terrific to be back in chicago. especially on an actual nice day. i was here last weekend was 45 degrees, strange. so i have to tell you that this makes me tremendously nostalgic for the days when nobody came to my talks. [laughter] and i always like to tell this story about my very first book event which took place when i was living in baltimore. it was just after i published a book called the naked consumer. [laughter] exactly. it's a book that nobody bought. well, one guy read it and review

the book and he did it because he was the target of the book. the book was by the way about how corporations spy on individual consumers. so i did get a call when i was living in baltimore to go to lancaster pennsylvania to do a talk, not to do a talk with actually signing. i since learned that sunday afternoon talks are dead and especially when you do talk in lancaster pennsylvania on the first warm day after six months of hard winter. it's one of those things you are stuck in the back of the bookstore you have seen these people at the table about 40 books on the table, and there you are. somebody at this bookstore had made a plate of chocolate chip cookies and put them next to me. so i sat there for about three hours i sat there for the first hour and a half with nobody coming to talk to me.

they were looking at the books around me but nobody was coming to talk to me, nobody made on contact and of course nobody bought the book. and about the airport and a half point i looked up and this woman was coming towards me with a big smile on her face. she looks like she is taking the greatest delight in this event. i see her coming and i take my hand out and now i know that my career is on its way. she comes up to the table and she says hell much as a cookie. laughter echoes of the writing life is not what he would imagine it to be. let me first say since i am here in this lovely thing you i am a huge fan and i'm not just sucking up when i say that. i like to think of myself as the indiana jones of libraries on the do the decimal system looking for interesting books.

the duodecimal system created by the way by melville dewey, who was a rabid anti-semite. in fact i love it so much that give me a choice between a night with cade blanch at or a night locked away in the library of congress and i would take the night with blanchett in a heartbeat but i do love libraries. [laughter] i do love libraries. i thought i would talk a little bit about this book of mine, in the garden of beasts, and what came about. i'm a little alarmed that within the publishing company, crounse, a publishing company, within the company people -- i guess they are inherently lazy. they call the book almost now exclusively by its acronym which is itbog which sounds a little bit to me like something a cat coughed up. i realize if you say itgob you

sound just like the girl possessed in the exorcist. [laughter] at first glance this may not seem like my kind of book necessarily. here it is. this book is set in 1933, 34 in nazi germany, hitler, the whole deal. but here's the thing. this is exactly my kind of thing. because it is about eight per a per code that people think they know an awful lot about. but i would argue they really don't. i certainly did not. there's a tendency to view the period 1943 to 1945 as one block of horror when there were distinct phases. this idea came to me first of

all the idea for me as some of the past is a very hard time. my publicist and friend refers to read as our country of new ideas. when i'm in the dark country of new ideas i get very moody and i so i want to be productive and i don't feel productive when i'm just sitting around sucking my time thinking about what i feel i'm going to do next so i was in the country of new ideas about five or six years ago wondering what i was going to do next when i thought i'm going to go to the bookstore, browse the history section to kind of get a sense for myself what books look interesting, what resonates with me, but covers turn me off and on and so forth and to start my mind thinking about stuff. i saw a book that had always been out in my must reading list but i never read it because it

was just too intimidating a prospect. 1200 pages typed no photographs. some of your thinking it's the bible. but in fact it was the rise and fall of the third reich. terrific book. i bought it, brought it home, start reading and fell in love with this book. it was wonderful. it really was a terrific book. i must be a little bit slow about things because it was only when i was about a third of the way through the book i realized we the net effect lead in their 1933, 34, actually in 34. he had come to berlin in 1934 and pretty much stayed as a correspondent until kicked out when the u.s. entered the war. and so i started to think what would that have been like? >> these people face-to-face. he met hitler and all these

people we know today to be monsters. only he met them at a time and nobody knew what the ending was going to be. he met them at a time when nobody had an inkling that the holocaust was coming out of the second world war was in the relatively near future. so i started thinking wouldn't it be interesting to try to capture a sense of that time? through the eyes of a couple of characters who were new to berlin outside, ideally outsiders and americans because they are from the american audience. so, i very deliberately began to read. i went to my library, my favorite library in the university of washington campus and i just began to read. i took out as many terrific histories as i could come the grand histories in the series of

books by evans and the history of the biography of hitler and so forth, but also i found a lot in the 900 levels i found a lot of memoirs and diaries and so forth from that period and also before and after. eventually i came across the diary of the chicago man named william odd and about his daughter, martha. let me try to set the scene. imagine that you are william odd , you are 63-years-old, you are a mild-mannered professor at the university of chicago, you have a good national reputation but for jackson turner your the professor of history struggling with financial shortfalls because this is the era of the great depression, and you're tired of the engulfing demand of

the graduate students and all you really want to do is finish a book you've been working on that is actually a multivolume series of books about the old south which in fact kind of ironic you have titled the rise and fall of the old south. you're sitting at your desk at noon precisely the phone rings. the guy the other end of the line as franklin delano roosevelt, the new president of the united states. and one little note he was president at that point since his inauguration in march. the 1933 inauguration day was still in march, it was substantively changed to january because the feeling was you didn't want to have a president be a lame duck for any longer than he actually had to be.

so, roosevelt is on the line, and he asks you would you be the next ambassador to germany, america's first ambassador to nazi germany, the post ambassador to germany has been vacant at this point for about six months. here's the kicker he gives you two hours to decide, two hours to decide and what he does not tell you is that one reason he has called you apart from the fact that a confidant of his recommended you apart from the fact that you know german one reason he has called you is because nobody else wanted the job. three weeks later you find yourself on a ship to germany leading new york for homburg, you've got your family with you,

your wife, grown son and 24-year-old daughter, martha and more fun is one heck of a daughter. she's smart, sexy, of lurch, and she has of this thing she's got it, she has a way about her that in flames the passion of men both young and not so young. at 24 she's already had an affair with the poet and the author carl sandburg and one of the delights of the research which is why i always do my own research is when i was going through the papers in the library of congress in one file i came across two locks of his hair in the archival envelope tied with the old thread that looked like a broom head and his hair really was as white as it

appeared it was thick course here and it's a magical moment for me. [laughter] unjust that way. but at 24 she's had an affair and has broken the engagements and is married and she is in the midst of a divorce to escape a did marriage. now personally i think any marriage to a new york banker would be dead, but i don't want to cast aspersions in the late financial crisis in america but she is also very close friends with wilder says she has a very interesting kind of circle. she comes along and immediately falls in love, falls in love with the so-called mossy revolution, she calls it the nazi revolution. she finds it intoxicating at first and here's the thing she is not alone it's a very common

viewpoint in 1933 the argument was you could quarrel with his methods that on the other hand he was restoring the nation's pride helping to get its act together, promising to drastically reduce unemployment and seeming by the year's end to be delivering on that promise. in fact the night before they left new york they all gathered there in order to catch the ship, they went to a dinner party out of a swank apartment charles crane of the crane plumbing dynasty. you may not realize what i'm sure you have seen the logo standing up at you from your goals are of the country. [laughter] i can't speak for the ladies. so he has this party and mind you this is back in 1933 no reflection today but charles

crane as the party is winding down he takes the new ambassador aside and says to him let hitler had his way. he also advises him very directly not to have any social interaction with the jews while he is in berlin. let's look at it through lamarca. she finds herself in a vibrant charismatic city. we always think of that world war i certainly did as drab black-and-white shaded in gray because that is the kind of imagery we come across we see black and white photographs and newsreels. there are some color images that part it seems like a black-and-white world. it seems like there wasn't a bright sunny day in germany until 1965 when the color chroma became the film of choice. she saw something very different in the black-and-white world.

she saw color everywhere, brightly colored tram's the torian on all the main streets just as perfect best ways. every balcony had a box of red geraniums or seemed to at least. at christmas the city went wild. there were christmas lights everywhere, christmas trees of every square, every street corner so much so he was moved to write you would almost think the nazis believed in jesus. there were glorious cafes that sat hundreds of people lack the time with dancing every night at the fabulous night clubs like the roof hotel and in this very interesting establishment called the house land in berlin it was a structure that have five restaurants and night club in use one of which was an american wild west a bar this was nazi

germany by the way and we're germans in huge cowboy hats would serve you and some of them were members of the nazi party so it was a nice thought that these cowboys, the nazi cowboys were serving the drink. so here we have an ambassador, ambassador dhaka arriving in germany as a professor of history he arrives with certain expectations. he's a steady statesman and they do crazy things but in the and they act out a certain rationality even the craziest people. he also arrives bearing a certain amount of pleasant baggage. back in the 1890's since like many students traveled to deutsch and germany to work on his phd thesis which i don't even want to think about the logistical nightmare which was about thomas jefferson.

and he has a wonderful time they are marvelous, warm, sweet people. every morning a young woman places violets on the pillows in his room so he has a fond recollection. of the world he encounters when he arrives is like nothing that he expected where he expected a certain amount of rationality he finds now only pathology not just pathology but i am talking about organic pathology as the council's general rates in the dispatch at this time the leading three in germany and any of your culture would be a place of asylum and here's his daughter who falls in love with the pathology. i realize the two stories provided an ideal vehicle for traveling through that period.

i wouldn't want to write about him alone. i am not a fan of the histories. i wouldn't want to read only about martha. i'm not sure i could sustain an entire book but to get to the capture something much bigger i think and they provide divergent windows on the whole period and with actually undergoing a very satisfying transformation in the course of that first year of theirs in berlin which is when most of the action in the book takes place in the summer of 33 to summer of 34 when something quite terrific occurs that the united states and the world should have paid more attention to but failed to do so. so i realize the story is really shed light if you are looking for a more fundamental reason for doing this story to shed

light why it took so long to recognize the injured and why appeasement became the first half of dealing with these people. some of the things the surprise me, and this may not come as a surprise to certain people in the room but to me it was a shock. the extent and intensity of anti-semitism in the united states and also the upper ranks of the state department itself into the lower level of the sector record tel i was really startled by it. if you try to imagine the perfect guy to be secretary of state at this time it would be cornell. his passion was croquet and he had a speech impediment that

people around him likened to the cartoon character elmer fudd which led roosevelt who had a lively sense of fun when whole wasn't around he would quietly blocked the speech impediment. if he was referring to his trade treaty he would refer to them as paul's twade tweeties. but the top three guys in the state department all had a healthy if not outright hatred for jews. one referred to them openly and readily as tykes. that itself expressed a certain level of anti-semitism and one really kind of startling dispatch back to the state of redmon after he had been in berlin for a while he complained he had to many jews which was impairing his ability to deal

with the nazi regime particularly he complained about the receptionist who absolutely low-fat the nazis and pictured this woman sitting at the entry as the officials came through and i think it is just made for a miniseries. so you have him complaining about there being too many jews and there's also one strange conversation he has with hitler. two meetings he had in the time per go into the second one dhaka actually tries to find common ground with hitler, the so-called jewish problem. the nazis have hijacked the the date by framing it as a jewish problem. words matter. once you scream something as a jewish problem what else you think about how wells will use of the problem? sitters the jewish problem he said we have our own and jewish

problem in america but we have chosen to solve it in a more humane fashion by which he is referring to things like the university and so forth. this, by the way, doesn't mollify hitler surprise, surprise. he gets all steamed up again and he just loses it completely and he says if they don't stop this, i will put an end to all of them. this is 1934. this is long before the holocaust. 1934 you get the first whiff of what was coming down the pike. i was also struck by how knew everything was. all the things today we know of as absolute truths of the nazi era were not familiar back then. for example the step that when dodd first saw it was ridiculous

there was the swastika which was so new at this point that wasn't referred to as the swastika it was referred to as the broken cross which is the literal translation the germans used. the hitler salute i'm not going to do because it still has a jarring effect. i would be concerned if i actually did it that would be the moment somebody would take a digital photograph, put it on the web, it would go fire will come and suddenly i would have a necessarily want. [laughter] the salute was so awful hot and the general in berlin named george mr. messersmith not to be confused with the designer he was an american through and

through and he to the nazis and happily messersmith treated the third reich the way an anthropologist would treat an aboriginal tribes and that is to say he was in detail and at length about all kinds of things because this was brand-new. and i owned a collection of the works of kipling published in the 1890's and every book on its finding has a swastika it is the indian good looks fine and as a political symbol a modern age witches random back to the hitler salute. so messersmith who by the way so and long on some and subjects was named 40 pages george. he wrote an analysis of observations about hitler salute because this was such a novel

thing. a salute he would have no modern precedents for the salute of soldiers in the presence of the superior officers. that made a practice unique is that a review is expected to salute even in the most mundane encounters. shopkeepers sold to customers, children were required to salute their teachers several times a day and at the close of the theatrical performances a newly established custom demanded audiences stand and salute as they sing the first german national anthem and second, the storm trooper and thumb, the so-called horse vessels long. especially in the public a buildings where everybody from the lower passengers to the loftiest officials to be titled one other turning it into an exhausting a fair.

i hope to catch the sense of the gradual darkening to have this vision of them suddenly as the two characters in a nonfiction grim brothers retail and things get darker and darker and darker or q. the wizard of oz song lions and tigers and bears as you are moving into the darkness of the third reich. so i talked about for the sample how dodd was given secret drafts of the future nazi laws. these were not laws yet they were things coming and one that shot in the literal translation of the document be in the law for the killing of the unhittable and another for shuttering of what was. i also talk about the many loves

including the affair with a very interesting character who i think encapsulates the complexity of the nuance of the period. this was a very complex period. this guy was rudolph, the first chief of the thin brand new agency. the first chief of the gestapo. he held the job for all of one year when he was replaced by the awful characters and his violent playing high-pitched voice provision he already presided over this and had caused the and president of thousands of communists and social democrats in the party of the era who had presided over an agency that had

tortured hundreds of these people and a likely murdered even in the early phase scores and yet the diplomatic community, dhaka in particular, faulted him as a good guy. he had a lot of integrity as the third reich officials went. this was the guy that he went to if you wanted to get an american out he would go to rusafa and he would oblige he was a very interesting guy. he is the one who led, who agitated for the christmas amnesty of 1933 that led a lot of prisoners out and he later claimed that was one of the finest moments in his career when he got to choose to go so it's kind of an interesting character who martha it seemed clear at this point have a physical relationship with that

and in the collection of the library of congress when martha and the chief of the gestapo are sitting at table and in a lovely little outdoor country restaurant having the grandest ty i founded evil this magical character with the daughter of the ambassador, the american ambassador. and also just as hall was the perfect embodiment of secretary of state your to imagine what kind of villain would run something like the gestapo he would imagine route off to a point. thin, dark, lean with a horribly scarred face, the lower part of his face scarred by the practice a lot of students of his era engaged in which was bear bleated dillinger. a doctor sitting in would then

call it and it devotee kits stitched up and that is the end and they would bear the scars the rest of their lives but this was a sort of badge of strength. but the thing is he was considered to be a catch. he was handsome in a dark way. look at the photograph. i will tell you you might believe me. he was said to be sexually charismatic. he was a charmer, and it's funny i've shown this picture to a number of women in seattle most recently a book editor and photographer and every moodie looks at this guy and says yeah, not bad, not bad. i learned by the we taking a look of the gestapo one way that the sun and people they would do

it by postcard. coming to the gestapo headquarters on such and such a day and time we would like to talk to you. what are we going to do for the country? if they don't they would hunt you down. the reason they allow the coast guard's coming out is because the german populace would become so anxious to fall into line to become the term was coordinated, fall into line of the party of the third reich that they would denounce neighbors who wouldn't likewise seen fit to act in a coordinated fashion and they would also denounce the neighbors because to resolve the petty personal disputes. if you didn't like the way your neighbor was keeping up his or her house you did drop a dime on him or her with of the gestapo

and they would come and pay a visit because they followed up on just about everything. in fact, people were renting out their friends and neighbors so much that even hitler complained even hitler complained, and i quote, he said we are living at present in the sea of denunciations'. this is adolf hitler. [laughter] anyway, i'm happy to report the readers get it. i'm finding that there is a narrative tension that he will bring to the book. this idea that we all know here what is happening and you want to say don't go into the basement. you know what i mean? like from horror films. my favorite reaction is from a friend of mine who fretted just before going to sleep one night.

but before going to sleep one night weeping from a nightmare in which she was being pursued by nazis and all she had to protect was her little purple plastic water bottle. i have to say if i can give somebody nightmares come if i can give somebody nightmares consider that from a negative stand of point in victory and i'm going to stop there and take questions and i hope you have a lot of questions. if you don't, i have questions for you. [applause] >> thank you. >> questioned? >> by the way the point is you have to go down to the microphones of that is going to add the pressure you have to come down to these microphones and speak because we have got c-span folks regarding this.

>> people are either leaving or they are going to ask me question. >> my name is tracy. first i was curious of all of your writing has there ever been the idea that you started researching the riding for a book and all of a sudden decided this isn't going to work and if so, what was it about? >> yes, second question. what's your second question? >> that was it. what was it about. >> i'm not sure what it was about because you never know. but just recently having been and still am in that dark country of new ideas i had an idea that seemed to me to have all the right elements and i was looking into it and looking into it and the thing that took place in california and i was just wow why didn't do anything about this and all these great characters and stuff but there's just something missing, and i

worked on it for a long time and so i realized the best way to put it is it lacked heart but i'm not sorry. i'm glad it's dead. good question. thank you. >> i started reading the book yesterday evening. >> did you wake up crying? >> no. what struck you doing your research? the fact that there's 1% in germany because the impression is an overriding issue and also the fact that dog was not reporting the attacks on americans to had no idea that they were -- those surprise me but what surprised you if your research because you said we think we know this year but we really don't. >> you hit on a couple of those and they are there for anybody to know and i think it was

kershaw that made the .1% of the germans were jewish and it's probably not well known and certainly should be well known that most of the victims of the holocaust were not germans. they were from the eastern countries subsequently invaded by the nazis but only about 1% of germans were jews and at one point that kershaw makes is for most germans the whole anti-semitic thing was really kind of an abstract conflict because typically the average german have little or no contact with jews. jews were concentrated in the big cities. the typical rural german had either no contact with jews or limited and was almost invariably find. so, the whole anti-semitic thing was meant for the party members and so forth. anybody that wants to look into that more, check out some of the work.

it's fantastic. so i was impressed by that kind of thing as well. i think phil level of anti-semitism in the state department is what i found most startling. the effort to keep the attack on americans from making the press i found startling. the point was he was trying not to antagonize them in his nineties believe that he could actually use persuasion and freezing to help hitler and the government find a more moderate way to go which in the course of the first year he realized thankfully at the end was not going to happen. so that is why. thank you. yes? >> i'm curious about the obstacles you might have encountered in your research and do you speak german and have access to the archives? >> yes. i was concerned -- she was asking about obstacles.

germany as it happens was not an obstacle. i don't speak german. i did have a translator work with me for translating german documents including the deals of the autobiography called lucifer at the gates. he didn't mind being called lucifer by the way. he thought it was kind is added to his mystique so why did the translator for those things but i mostly wanted to concentrate on was the point of view of my innocence. my two americans entering this world and that led me to tremendous troves of documents of the archives and the wisconsin historical society and madison wisconsin of all places, so the main obstacle is the same obstacle i face in any book is finding material. we have to go the distance and find the material. i love going to berlin and a sort of seeing what we are now

getting a feel for berlin. little things for example if fish one thing i wouldn't have known is how close of the action in the book takes place around the central park in berlin which is called the garden the edge which is the garden of peace. so all the places that are important to the action are naturally around the eastern quarter of the park to a to the headquarters of the building. i don't know why that was important, but it was. it was just everything was so compact. and the guard in the first thing

that popped into my mind is this is corpus christi, just very flat and so anyway. >> hello. i am a very big fan of yours, i think all of us are and i know we all feel truly gifted to partake in the stories -- we'll give it to partake. >> [inaudible] [laughter] i'm sorry. >> i have a feeling that at the end of the 21st century the city will be considered one of the century's greatest books. i just started reading the new book, and i wanted to ask as a writer you have a very engaging manner i feel just listening to

you talk and i wondered as the storytelling come naturally to you and how difficult is it to be a really good writer such as yourself if you encounter discouragement along the way. you talked about selling the cookies at the table. we all know about that but what did you really feel like i know i can do this? i just know i've got it, in a great storyteller, and along the way you encounter doubt in your i'm curious because -- >> my middle name is -- >> your stories are so engaging and bring the readers in a. i feel like you are talking to me when i am reading the book and it is a wonderful feeling. i pick up that book and feel like you are my voice, you are talking to me. i love that. so i'm just curious if you

encourage, if you encounter discouragement along the way. >> i will address that in fact i am going to let my daughter address that. would you step up there and please tell the audience the reality. this is my daughter from the university of chicago. [applause] >> i live with him. [laughter] what he does is he works from four to eight in the morning and then he worries for the rest of the day. [laughter] >> thank you. that's enough. [applause] >> but it is true. it is in fact true that self doubt is something that is something i have to deal with all the time and i like to think of it shall that it drives me to hunt for stories that are the kind of thing that i am going to like and other people are going

to like but i sure as hell wish there was an elixir i could take that would give me one day were i wasn't afraid something was going to be a bomb. case in point and this will underscore this for you. i was convinced and you can check with anybody in my family i was convinced my career was over because this was a book that had to narratives' that never intercepted. it broke all the rules of marriage with one small point and so there you go, there you go. and i had similar fears for this one. so there you go. yes? >> you touched a little bit on anti-semitism, and i wasn't aware the ambassador was a professor of history, and i guess my question is does he have any kind of historical

inkling of anti-semitism in germany because you are back and read martin luther and he doesn't have nice things to say about jews, so does he kind of have any sense of the history of anti-semitism in germany? >> good question. here's the weird thing. yes, he did have a sense of the fact that anti-semitism had been prevalent. i get the sense of what of times that in terms of the anti-semitism the nazis kind of dropped them from mars or something, they did drop in from mars but it had nothing to do with anti-semitism. anti-semitism has been a theme as dodd points out in germany for a long time and in other cultures as well of course, but it's interesting of the same time a dog was somehow able to

ignore his own a tendency to be anti-semitic what we today would see as a blatant anti-semitism on his part was in his era and envy a lot of people express and saw no reason to be uncomfortable with because you see evidence in this in the fact some of these guys in the diary knowing they might one day become public are very clear and direct about their dislike of jews. another question. yes, you over there. >> think you for your time and presentation. i was just wondering do you think that ultimately dodd was the right person for the position and do you find yourself sympathizing with his otherwise action on confronting the nazis? >> good question.

starting with the that was the kind of position nobody could have done anything terribly productive and nobody could have persuaded hitler to do otherwise i do have to say that given his mandate roosevelt sent him with the fundamental mission to serve as a standing example of american liberal values, and dodd did that. he never sought to the nazis, he never caved in to the nazis, she held true to that much to the absolute of millions of the third right. he really ticked off the germans just by refusing to give on this fundamental principles and ultimately a don't want to throw out any spoilers in terms of the book, so i do think that there is a tendency historians

overlook dodd as a failed ambassador. i don't think that that is all correct. i think if i had to give him a letter grade given the circumstances i would give him, given the curve of the era i would give him a b plus. yes? >> one more total? okay, you are it. this better be good. i loved your book and understand there's a film coming out so what is your level of involvement in making this and if you are concerned about often mimic the visa to become movies out of books they tend to hollywoodize them. >> it's leonardo dicaprio and there is no screenplay yet so it is going to take a while.

my involvement is going to be minimal because i espouse, and bring to paraphrase this badly but the thomas wolfe approach is to bring your book to defense, take the bag of money and run. [laughter] because -- because -- [applause] because hollywood if you are a writer that wants to have control hollywood will no question will break your heart is a really it comes down to sign over an option you make a decision at that point to one this to happen or not at this point i want to see what account the film makers will make up of this book and particularly interesting with the music is free to be that goes with and who plays the victim's i'm voting for scarlett drew hansen

and always cade blanchett. so anyway, that's where the screen to the movie and there is the involvement which is essentially not. so anyway, thank you all for coming. [applause] >> for more information visit the author's website, eriklarsenbooks.com. khalid sheikh mohammed is about 4-years-old at the time and his father dies and i search for the death records apparently his father died in 1969, and he simply didn't keep records of the resident foreigners, death, marriage, it just wasn't interesting to them so we have this account of his father's death that's very sparse and there's no official transcript to back it up. his father dies and there is no

welfare state. there is no organized charity for the foreigners of the times of his mother takes the job of washing the bodies of the dead, the female bodies of the dead and preparing them for burial. it's a low status and low-income job but it enables her to make a living. at that time she has nine children. khalid sheikh mohammed is the fourth male. years pass on and he is doing very well at school, he's a good student come somewhat bookish, and the family decides they don't have any money at all that they need to back one masson to get an education and that was the typical of arab families it was at the time support the rest of them and that was khalid sheikh. ultimately he applies to school in north carolina at the

university, the time it was college, the historically baptist school in murfreesboro north carolina. and even the family had saved some money or more likely the muslim brotherhood of kuwait had agreed to sponsor him. he joined the muslim brotherhood after his older brothers had a joint at age 16. so he arrives in america at roughly 18-years-old should and he is not prepared for what he sees. i interviewed the man who picked him up at the airport and drove him to murfreesboro and what he remembers years later is khalid sheikh being surprised by what he saw, surprised by the geography, the intense mccreary. when you see trees in kuwait they are usually behind walls and they are privately owned. here they were just trees everywhere but more surprising and more strange and offsetting

were the people and what they were doing. they were sitting in lawn chairs visible from the road growing out, playing with their kids, taking a host of the bushes outside the window but what surprised them is what so much of the american family life happening in public and this is not the kind of thing that what happened in the arab world and the more time we spent in north carolina, the more that it was persuaded. americans were really backward. they did things that should be private and public. they trust each other very quickly and they didn't go out at night. at night is when most sexual locations would happen but in the united states and in murfreesboro the time from 1983, 84, the head of one pizza parlor, no bars, the pizza

parlor closed at 9:00. the town was asleep so far from the light being alive and social and friendly, it was sound, it was the day the americans were busy. so he became more and more alienated because it wasn't an arab country and these are very small observations. these things by themselves do not make him a terrorist but it does set him at odds with the country. there's nothing that they did other than make the chapel service that made him part of this larger community. and in fact one of the things i learned writing master mind this is nothing the civilian colleges do to integrate foreign students to explain the country to them. we take for granted everyone knows these things should. when the fbi searched the car of the hijackers left behind the

airport they found a small notebook and in very careful arabic script there was a description explaining the difference between shampoo, conditioner and body wash. we think we are easily understood but from another culture and another time yeah, we are puzzling.