written where the north becomes the republican virtues and the south is the evil empire. my book changes that equation to say there were both at fault and both around to precipitate the bloodiest war what happened? 620,000 died and the men who came home were maimed not to mention those who mourn the loss of the people who lost their lives. . .

maybe this was an overstatement 25 years after the emancipation proclamation, but as he looked around and saw the status of african-americans particularly in the south picking the same cotton they had picked under slavery and living similar live said they had lived under slavery, he wondered what was gained by the emancipation proclamation and what was gained by the bloody war. we are commemorating the 150th

anniversary of the civil war this year and for the next four years. it's important that we honor those who gave their lives for their respective causes, but it would have been a greater tribute to our nation, and they lived. >> for more information on book tv's 2011 city tour, visit c-span.org/localcontent. milledge but to the coverage of the 11th annual national book festival when washington, d.c. from earlier today. first we spoke to jennifer glavin project manager for the national book festival. then we headed to the history and biography tent for the presentation by eugene robinson. he's the author of disintegration followed by an interview. he took your calls, tuitele and e-mails. sarah vowell was next talking about her book on family officious and answered your questions. next, presented his book in the history and biography tent then

headed to the book tv said where he took your tweets e-mails and phone calls. former arrived fbi interrogators ali soufan was interviewed next and talked about his book the black banners and answered questions. then from the history and biography tent candice miller discussed her book the destiny of the republic with festival attendees. now joining us on the booktv said is jennifer gavankar of the project manager of the national

book festival. if you could come start by giving us the facts and figures about the national book festival, how many authors, how many people, what kind of events. >> thank you very much for having me, peter. we expect to have 111 authors on the ground over the next two days. yes, that today's and we are excited about going to two days. people have been asking us to do this for years and we feel we can respond. we are pleased to be doing this. we hope to have as many people as we have as last year which was 150,000 visitors, and we will have our usual six pavilions, the familiar ones everybody knows, plus we've added three new pavilions on day to which will be graphic novels, state poet laureate and the pavilion we call the cutting edge, which is people who are involved in something kind of sg in the publishing industry today. the other thing that we love this year is we have the largest

offering for children and families we have ever had in the history of the book festival. we have our children's tent which everyone is familiar with, the team napa valley in which some of the rock star authors everyone is familiar with but we also have the family story aimed at younger kids and that is carrying the banner for the fema of the year which is subject to chollet of reading aloud. >> now you are with the library of congress. >> degette them involved in these activities and also have to begin rolling out the planning on the ground for civilians and everything. so that starts very early in the year. it's kind of built along for many months. >> president and mrs. obama rf sponsors of the festivals, correct?

>> they are honoring shares and they've sent a lovely letter this year read from the podium in just a few minutes by dr. billington and the library of congress, and we feel that there has been a great deal of officials and corporate support to this. we would like to say a big thank you to many sponsors because they make this possible. this is not financed through tax payer money. this is privately funded. >> who are some of the sponsors? >> target is our major sponsor this year. we also have the "washington post" which has been with us from the beginning. this year wells fargo came in and will be present on the ground for doing some literary things and also many smaller sponsors and publishers, penguin, scholastic, the pbs folks are involved and of course of their characters and others mentioned. >> jennifer gavin, which pavilion will library and billington be opening the festival from?

>> fiction and mystery today, where he will be giving our creative award to toni morrison. >> weld ms. morrison be speaking as well? >> she will be with michael from the washington post. she told us last night at the event at the library that she's been sitting and watching you on tv all these years and enjoying this with. >> is there a cost to come down here? >> i'm sorry, a cost to come down? >> an admission cost? >> note this is free and open to the public. we think it is the kind of things folks should come down and bring all their kids and bring all their kids' friends and enjoy a free day on the mall. >> now if people were to come down, what is the best way to get down here? >> the subway is the best way to get down in the metro system and all of the -- the smithsonian is the closest one you can also use the federal triangle and archived which are closely within walking distance. >> jennifer gavin, thank you for

hosting us of the national book festival. jennifer gavin, project manager of the book festival with the library of congress. and not the history and biography tent just beginning markets, executive editor of "the washington post," we will be introducing eugene robinson. after he stunned talking he will be here for a call-in show. >> be mindful as you watch the presentation please don't sit on the camera risers in the back. we don't want a camera toppling on anybody. and please if you could silence yourself loans. i am markets, executive editor of the washington post. we are proud to be a chart responsible the lead co-sponsor of the festival as we have been for 11 years as it has been going. as you all know who are here, the festival is one of the cities in the nation's great literary festival is a place where books and writing, speaking and the people who will of those things are celebrated. it's my great privilege today to open this opening eugene

robinson. the act of introducing him to an audience in washington is probably an exercise in redundancy. he's a big figure in this town coming in for many good reasons. he's a long term reporter and editor of the post. he now writes and op-ed column for the paper in the website and a syndicated nationally. as you know, if you read him, he writes thoughtful and compassionately and he's written on just about any subject and every subject you or anybody else might find interesting. he's also held just about every dollar the post. he started as a reporter covering city hall, covered as of america, he was the london bureau chief, foreign editor, assistant managing editor overseeing the style section before he began writing opinion columns in 2005. he's one of the pulitzer prize for the commentary for his columns on the 2008 presidential campaign. today he is here because he's also an author. his latest book, disintegration, is a fascinating exploration of the ever shifting stands and understanding as of race in america.

he's covered this powerful before. in his book james was a south carolina native and start himself as an african-american who once was black, once was a negro, once was a colored boy. in that but there's a telling sentence that sets up the idea in his new book. he writes i'm a chronic integrator sometimes by accident, sometimes by. since high school has either been a black student in white schools or a black employee at white institutions. contrast that with the title of the first chapter of his new book, black america doesn't live here anymore. you get the idea of the journey that he's taking. it's an extraordinary one and 1i hope you'll join in reading the book. [applause] >> thinks so much thank you everyone for coming and thank

you, marcus, for that wonderful introduction. marcus is a great journalist who has what i think has to be one of the toughest jobs in america, editing a great daily newspaper in the era of the internet and not been kind to the kind to great daily newspapers and yet maintaining the quality of the journalism and the ambition and the accomplishment of the "washington post" and marcus does it elegantly, and he's been giving it for several years now, and he's not why isn't and bent over as most of us would be or crushed by the pressure. so let me first applaud him and thank him. [applause]

>> i'm going to talk a bit about the disintegration, which is just out in paperback and how that book came about, and what it's about, and then open up to questions and we can have more of a conversation for the second half of this time we have together. disintegration by the way is just out in paperback coming out right now for anyone who is interested i think the nice folks at a barnes and noble would be happy to sell you a copy. disintegration is a book debt who grew out of a nagging feeling. it was to the extent that there

was a conversation at all about black america, i felt it was an unreel conversation. it seemed to be -- it seemed to have very little connection with the reality that i was seeing every day. so this kind of thought worked on me for really a couple of years in 2005, at 2006, and i was thinking that maybe there's some sort of book here. my thought was that black america was really much more diverse economically, socially and culturally than we meted out to be. when we talk about black america, we talked about it as

if we were still 1967 on 1968, and you could make certain generalizations that just were not valid any more i thought. and so what kind of -- i didn't know where this led, and then in 2007 actually three things happened that made me think this is definitely a book. the first was that the p research center, which does all sorts of interesting surveys about anything under the sun did a survey of african-americans, and buried sort of toward the end of the survey findings was the following question and response. 37% to black americans

interviewed said they no longer believed them to be thought of as a single race, and i said that is a really weird finding. there was no kind of back up to what exactly that meant but it seems to fit into what i've been thinking of a thing it means something but i don't know exactly what it means. second thing that happens is a group of black publishing executives from the press around the country from washington for meetings and they were invited here, invited to the "washington post" for a reception and i was asked to deliver a few remarks, kind of a drive by greeting, five minutes, hello, how are you, welcome to washington, i

will see you later, and so i went downstairs to the auditorium and i spoke with this group for a while, and i started getting into this question of diversity in the black community, and whether when you talk about black america we are talking about the reality, and it was incredible this five minutes to drive by turned into an hour which was more than talking to me than me talking to them and people said it's really true. there is this group in the middle class but also this group that's not doing well and what about the immigrants, black immigrants coming into was just a really energizing and somewhat validating dialogue and a made

me think there is something here i started doing research, started looking at census data at marketing studies, academic papers, journalism i can get my hands on that kind of address this question of what is black america today as opposed to black america 40 years ago, and then i work up the proposal for disintegration and signed up with a double date to do the book and then the third thing happened in 2007 which is that the presidential campaign of barack obama caught fire, this junior senator from illinois who

had eight name off the guantanamo detainees list. all this item was not just a viable candidate for the democratic nomination but looked like he might get it, so i talked to my editors, my book editors, who were by then patiently waiting for me to get started and explain that i didn't really think i could do this book so i knew how that story came out, so why did wait for that story to come out and i will tell just a brief story of what interjects. i grew up in orange park south carolina in the late 1950's, 1960's for the end of jim crow for the segregated schools lived

in a black neighborhood on the black side of town that's where one lived. i was too young to remember dr. king did visit my church and spoke, the two black colleges in orangeburg in 1968 there was an incident that became known as the orangeburg massacre. students from south carolina state university began a demonstration over a segregated a bowling alley at the heart of orangeburg it's called the all live star claims but it's a whites only bowling alley but it grew into something larger over the course of three nights. after the second night that

demonstration was about 500 yards from my house so we had a direct line of sight. after the second night of getting it in the morning schools were all closed, and looking out the window to see what was going on and my father who was an extremely gentle ben yelled at me in a voice that he had never used before and set it down out of that window right now and so i got down and then he let me peak over the window sill and right across the street from the house there was a line of 1200 patrol cars, the state troopers behind the open doors of the cars with their rifles pointed at the house and two doors down from our house, and they were looking for the

organizer for the coordinating committee, the man named cleveland sellers who they correctly suspected was the outside agitator who was stirring the ball but colorful and orangeburg to come and get him. they had better intelligence he was long gone so there was no gunfire that morning. however that might the highway patrol claimed to have been fired from the campus gunfire was never demonstrated were never proved anybody on campus had any weapons but once the state troopers did fire at the crowd and when the smoke cleared three young black men had been killed while in the back for the souls of their feet a couple of dozen other people injured that was in orangeburg massacre and you kind of fast forward over to the election night in 2008 when

we are about to see how the obama story was coming out i was at the rockefeller center with my very interesting this somewhat dysfunctional msnbc family on the anchor desk and was that per cofids dysfunctional because it keith olberman and chris matthews and rachel mazel and fiber they're trying to figure out what the deal was with keith and chris, and at 10:45 that evening we heard from the earlier pieces the network was going to call the election for obama at 11:00 and so i got to live one of the moments in my life i will never forget. i got the next break to take out my cell phone and called my father and mother.

my father was 92-years-old and died right before the inauguration, but i called my mother and my father, who was 87, and tell them that they had lived to see the election of the first african-american president in the u.s. history. it's a moment i will never forget, a moment none of us will ever forget, and certainly a moment and that kind of round about the art of the story that i had decided i wanted to tell in disintegration, which was essentially that there isn't one black america anymore. i somewhat arbitrarily because i think such decisions are almost

always arbitrary came out with not one black america but for and they are as follows: from all the research i did, all the interviewing i did, it seemed to me that number one, there was a majority of african-americans, not a huge majority but a majority that had managed to enter the middle class such as there is a middle class in this country anymore and if you discuss that we could also discuss the impact of the recession lasts, but that if you look not only get in, but if you look at education and other sources of social indicators and you try to make a realistic assessment of not only where people are but with their prospects are i see a majority

that entered the middle class, and i call that group the mainstream. it was clear to me too that there is, however, that there is also a very large minority of african-americans. 35% perhaps, 30, 35%, may be that much, that did not make that climbed from poverty to the middle class and for whom that claim is more difficult and becoming more and a probable than it has been in decades because so many rungs of the latter are missing. those blue-collar jobs that used to exist that a person's who perhaps didn't have a college education but wanted to work and

do better for his or her family could get a job, have job security, good salary, good benefits, a pension when they retire, could have a house, could send their kids to college, so the kids would have a better life. millions of african-americans, many of whom participated with the great migration from this house to the north took advantage of this great sort of an escalator that the auto industry in detroit provided and that other industries in chicago or baltimore or wherever provided. one example is michelle obama's family. the way -- and her father is

sort of the person i think of when i think a lot this striving, achieving group of african-americans. where are those jobs? they are in china. a lot of them are in china. they are going to be moving from china i guess at some point soon to places where you can pay even lower wages, but they are not here, and they are not going to be here. so, there's this huge group of african-americans that to my mind has become abandoned practically so that local that group, the abandoned. then i saw something that struck me as new. a group of african-americans who have achieved attained wealth,

power or influence on a scale far beyond anything we have seen before, not just relative to other african-americans but relative to anybody in the world. and so, you know, the number one on this example would be president obama, president of the united states, but also oprah winfrey or bob johnson, the founder of black entertainment television. i think the first black billionaire. richard parsons who was the chairman and ceo of the world's biggest entertainment media company, time-warner was asked, leave his vineyard in tuscany and, back to help write at citigroup after the collapse, so

we have a tableau that we never could have in the history of african-american president of gravelling with the worst financial economic crisis since the great depression sees the steady hand is needed at this giant world of important financial institution citigroup as is able to call on an african-american seasoned ceo to come and why did the ship. that couldn't have happened before. so i called this tiny group the transcendent and actually opened the book with a scene from the party at vernon jordan's house that was quite interesting. and finally, i saw something new

that on a cold emergent black america, and this is a merchant group wife further subdivided into the kind of two categories. one is the record number of black immigrants from the caribbean but especially from africa who have come to this country in the last two or three decades and especially the last two or three years who arrive from ethiopia or nigeria or without a lot of money but a tremendous education. it's the best group of immigrants coming to the country today. and whose children are doing spectacularly well. a few years ago skip gates at harvard did an informal survey that has been since replicated

with more rigor. what they did is they took a list of the black freshman at harvard and checked how many were africans, and was a little more than half i believe. my wife for several years ran a college access scholarship program that she founded for african-american students from the washington area. we found the same thing. we found that at least i would say 35 to 40% and at times more of the - achieving black students in this area had clearly obviously ethiopian or nigerian, and this sort of

nascent record of achievement tells me that this is going to be very important group in the future. the other emergence group that i saw is the increasing number of by racial black and white americans who sells identify as african-american but his relationship with white america is somewhat different in a nuanced way but different from - president obama has talked about, remember during his recent speech in philadelphia when he essentially said before he threw reverend wright under the bus, she said i could no more for reverend wright under the bus then i cut my own grandmother who, my white granddaughter who live heard say racial and substantive things and it seems to me that this was

a nuanced and perhaps different but it's a distinction and will be interesting to see how what evolves. so, those are the four groups that i saw, mainstream abandoned, transcendent, a merchant, and disintegration really is about how we got where we are and where we are headed and where i really come out of that is that whenever is left of affirmative action, whatever attention we have we can summon for the promotion of equality and justice in this country. we need to focus on this abandoned and if it means the rest of us have to fend for ourselves that is fine but we are really in danger of losing millions and millions of people

who are just kind of dropping off the mat in terms of the society. i'm going to stop talking and also to do a few minutes of questions. thank you. thank you. [applause] there are a couple of microphones appear. >> and wanted to ask a question regarding -- >> could you pull the microphone down? >> on your primary thesis that you had these three groups so to speak, don't you think the same situation applies to many ethnic

and racial groups that you have what you might call and the merchant group, transcendent group and those that might be left out? that might apply to other ethnic and racial groups. >> the question is whether this applies to other ethnic and racial groups. you know, in i would say in a general sense you could certainly will get other groups in a similar fashion. i'm not sure with the same way of kind of digging out of the distinctions for example of you're talking about latinos you might put some emphasis on national origin for example which is still an important factor in some people's lives

but yes, you could use the same method i think for looking at other groups, too. >> you've made your distinction among the race lines, but as you were speaking it seems as though addressing the problems of the abandoned would be as much a class and economic solutions as racial. can you address that? >> are we talking of race or are we talking class. i think the inevitable answer is both, and what i -- i tried to go into the book with an open mind, and try to prepare myself to be led to a conclusion that really we didn't need to talk about race anymore we just needed to talk about class i didn't come to that conclusion naturally come and i found it -- i understand.

i found it impossible to kind of tease the two apart, but yes, certainly the economic, the economic situation of the abandoned will be addressed shoes and i.t. when we talk about poverty and ways to alleviate poverty and when we actually pay more than lip service to the notion that everybody deserves a chance in this society. yes. >> i very much admire your work, and i look forward to reading your book. i have not had the opportunity yet, but it strikes me in your

comment about jobs doing away in the china and elsewhere in the world that they are not coming back and i feel that's true the companies are very invested outside of the united states but i think also they can make more of an investment here in the united states if they were motivated to do so, for the simple, just what the training of the abandoned regardless of the class or the ethnicity, but the retraining aspect, building more schools, not secondary schools with the two-year schools where they are focused on that so i just wonder do you address solutions in your book and do you think that might be a way to accept companies, manufacturing companies and other wise to, you know, focus

on that. >> i do try to address solutions and the book, and i kind of decided not to, not to confine myself to what i thought could get 60 votes in the senate because otherwise i could just call, you know, susan collins and olympia snowe and ask them what you would do because there would be the votes, but where i cannot is coming you know, the one thing i have seen that really works is very expensive because it is a realistic approach. you've got to work on education. education is complicated. i use an example in the book of a program of my former colleague william raspberry, to the surprise when and columnist of the post who have retired and started a nonprofit called baby

steps in his home town in mississippi, a tiny little town of mostly black and poor. he wanted to do something and so he decided -- he did some reported and decided early childhood education as where he could have the biggest impact. so he sets up this program for the early childhood education and he quickly discovers that he can't just do that. you have to -- he learned that you couldn't just instruct her parents on how to read to their children if there was nobody in the household who was capable of doing that in a way that really helped the children so he needed a center for those kids to come to and do some very thorough assessment work before the families came into the program and the center for the kids to come to end the found that the need to be with nutritional and

health issues because there were a lot of chronic diabetes, obesity, and questions about, you know, kids eating a lot of empty calories but not good calories, so we had to deal with the health aspect and it just kind of mushroom. the program is still going strong and it's having a real impact. but he's a famous newspaper columnist whose name is recognized who was -- who is phone calls were returned when he called the kellogg foundation and other big foundations, and he managed to raise a lot of money. it's very expensive though, and we need 30 million bill rose various. >> coming from the point of view of working in the schools and arlington, and there i saw the

african-american historically african-american kids verses the african historical the african kids saw themselves as too complete and not necessarily friendly groups and what are discovering is things got better by college-age but how do you see this? >> i do think that in my fairly limited experience, you know, we haven't had a chance to do the kind of longitudinal study of that but it strikes me that the friction which you see in the schools and the elementary and secondary schools with and the culture clash seems to attenuate, seems to diminish over time and see a lot less of that in college and of course as this large sort of group of the

foreign-born were the first generation of kids moves out into the work place i think you will see it even less. and as they kind of increasingly identify as african-american rather of an ethiopian or nigerians were as african-americans expand their definition of african-americans. spec from the fragmentation of blacks to get the sense that the election of barack obama will go the way the election of carroll washington a moment in time not to be repeated anytime soon or has the country gotten in the turning point can you deride that from what you've looked at? >> i don't know. i know that if i knew i would be in tremendous demand.

from what we have seen since is we can make a good argument that the stars aligned in an unusual way for the election of president obama they could align again. you can't -- it wasn't an accident, and it does reflect i think obviously real change in the country because it couldn't possibly have happened 20 years ago or 40 years ago to but i don't know if it happens again next year or not. i don't know, and does it happen anytime soon? i think she was the man for that specific moment if the man or woman from another specific moment emerges but you just

don't know. you don't know. >> good morning. i enjoyed watching you on cnn and on the last word. my question i'm going to piggyback off the previous comment but a different perspective of the comment and i am paraphrasing his about the abandoned class and classism and all of that and i wanted your take on okay, the abandoned class, the issue has to be addressed but often times when you address the abandoned class has received as health care or classism or socialism but then on the other hand i'm not trying to make this political, and asking you now the question, the corporate welfare, bailouts and what not but it's not perceived in the same way and they are both almost the same. so why do you think that okay, if you help the underclass, you know, there's the perception of it socialism, but it's not viewed in the same if you bailout a larger company that you know, the corporate welfare is almost the same.

>> welcome that's an excellent question. i've asked myself, but i don't have an answer as to why we don't see corporate welfare as we don't recognize corporate welfare but we do recognize we don't even have welfare anymore, but we certainly determined to get rid of social welfare. so i don't know. i don't know. the similarity seems clear to me i can't hear you. >> what part of the opposition to president obama do you feel those racial, and at first this might seem obvious, but clinton had such an ugly opposition as well. think that's just part of the system now or is that hard to determine?

>> the question, what part of the opposition to president obama do i think is racial. i don't know. 48.3%? [laughter] 52.9, you know, i think it's a lot. and some of it i think is consciously racial, and some of it probably is not explicit or conscious, but for some people waiting to hear is race and it militates against legitimacy in some ways, and it is striking to me the extent to which people feel they have permission to

consider the duly elected in a landslide president of the united states as somehow illegitimate, and the illegitimate holder of the office, not just the bursar's some. [applause] and if you think i'm overstating that i can show you my e-mail because i get it. and it's sometimes very ugly. >> thank you. i special and educator in montgomery county schools, and even though i think it's not a special-education perspective, the problem i feel in education today is that the vocational programs in high schools have been shut down and you can be a very intelligent person but not interested in the academic

program, and they're seems to be no addressing this in the race to the top program and everything. >> i agree that we have not been creative enough in the thinking of education and in offering viable alternatives to people particularly in the vocations, and we are going to have to find some way to do that and maybe through community colleges, but why not start at the secondary level and, you know, it's an excellent question. we persist with a kind of one-size-fits-all when we know one size doesn't fit all and we know that, you know, we are not giving people the kind of education that they need to to

be at a high level without necessarily having the classic liberal arts college education. >> hello, mr. robinson. i really enjoyed watching you on msnbc. >> thank you. >> if you had the opportunity to speak with president obama, what would you tell him about the abandoned class to make him take notice, he and his senior advisers, to try to help the class you so well identified in the book? thank you. >> well, i would say read the book -- [laughter] and i would -- i would throw out numbers and statistics and he would already know that, and he would say and responded that what she has tried to do and what he would like to do is pursue policies that would lift

all people who were similarly situated but policies that would necessarily have a greater impact among african-americans simply because the problems of, you know, in terms of poverty and dysfunction are so much greater. i'm told i'm out of time so i will take one more question and that's it. >> one more comment on the republican field for the presidential nomination. [laughter] >> a quick comment on the field. well, it says a lot that after, you know, we have had several weeks of when will rick perry get in if he would only get and that is the guy come and now it's, you know, where is chris christi, please get in the race. they still, to my mind, haven't found -- and i think this is

clear to the republican establishment they haven't found a candidate yet that they are confident can beat president obama next year, and, you know, i thought the toughest candidate for him to face last time renault would be romney and i think it is true again this time but i don't know if the republicans' primary would choose mitt romney. because of the romneycare. thank you so much. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> that was eugene robinson, "washington post" columnist and author of disintegration of the splintering of black america. mr. robinson will be joining this year the national book

festival life to take your calls, e-mails and tweets. the numbers are on the screen. independent phone co. 202-0002 for those in the mountain and pacific time zone. our twitter address, tauter.com/book tv, or e-mail book tv@c-span.org. you can contact mr. robinson and ask your question that way. it will be just a minute. after mr. robinson we will be talking with sarah, best-selling author of the history of why and she will also be taking your calls. but not only is this the national book festival weekend on book tv library of congress sponsors the national book festival on the mall in washington, d.c.. but it is also a book tv's look at the literary life of charlotte north carolina. recently our local content of

vehicles were down in charlotte looking at different aspects of the literary life of charlotte. we want to show you this from charlotte and then we will be back live with eugene robinson. >> you said you have online sales? >> what we've been doing is on stock we go on that river and make a notice you can buy it signed a stock that way they know where to get them to the estimate is this the stuff of what pain when did so it is by e-book only and that koza will take them to park road books to buy it. >> you are wonderful. that is the smartest thing that pain -- penguin did. >> i wanted something so people could pick it up but i wanted to go through parkroad because you

guys are awesome. >> what i will do is put this by your book and i will put the front and the back. i was a sales representative for random house so i've been in the book business my entire life, just the different and. in the beginning i was selling at independent bookstores and loved it. i had savanna as my territory and was great because what people are meeting in raleigh is different than this columbia south carolina. it was exciting. the and i was just so into the large chains and it wasn't fun. i could have been selling anything. and i really like placing the book in somebody's hand and seeing that immediate and i felt like i was another call on the wheel instead of spreading the word about books. >> so what you say about the relationship between publishers and independent booksellers? is a strong relationship? >> with some of them it's a very strong relationship. i know editors and publicists and marketing people. they send us manuscript, they

ask our opinions. i have a sales representative on the phone before you came asking about availability of books for young girls dealing with their body and what kind of market was there for each chapter book in that. so i think we stay in constant communication, phone calls, e-mails, we see each other and the institute bookexpo, the southern book alliance, very strong relationship. >> how would that compare to the relationship between the publisher and larger bookstore? >> the larger bookstore especially if you are a chain, the probability of people, clerks staying at the store for a while and developing a relationship is really sometimes it is possible, but on the most part they are people that are just looking for a job they are not looking for a career as doing it. eddy that works at the store has been giving it a long time, they have like over 120 years of combined experience in

bookselling. there's not that chance for relationships to evolve in a chain bookstore. there's always exceptions to the rules but it's also at the chain bookstore is when random house goes to sell barnes and noble they are not talking to the front line booksellers, they are not talking with the people who actually place the book in somebody's hand. spinnaker was very cute. finnegan i guess? [laughter] >> so with the big box bookstores closing such as borders what does that mean for the smaller independent? >> it is a huge opportunity to reestablish ourselves as the front-runner of what is going to be new and upcoming in literature and in the book world. and they just -- we don't think the box store can survive with that amount of square footage. this i think is opening up for small stores. we have seen the increase through the american booksellers

association. we see that booksellers schools, we see a lot of people now interested. they don't want to be everything to everybody. they just want that little book store that caters to their needs ..

>> home to historical a two black colleges so it was an odd place to grow up my mother was a librarian when most of the adults that i knew where associate with one of the two colleges and one that i knew was a college town and the other was said there and agricultural community so it was an odd take on the south. >> host: in your book book, disintegration the splintering of black america and it is called the mainstream a double life that you talk about bill

o'reilly would you rate? >> guy read about his visit to sofia is in harlem that is the famous dole food mr. -- restaurant and he was taken there i believe with reverend al sharpton and after that he went on the area was just like any other restaurant with white tablecloths and table manners and nobody was cursing. and at his astonishment there was such a thing of a restaurant where middle-class eight in a civilized manner. he could not believe such a thing existed. it said something that you

really ought to get out more. [laughter] >> host: why is it is subtitled the double life? cahal. >> we have talked about this over the years so much it is almost a cliche but it is true. african-americans who have done well in this society 10 to to feel that they belong to two worlds to the african-american world and also those of mostly white to world in which they have their work lives and they are examples of success. go to work monday through friday then now weekend

you're at home with your family may be on sunday you go two church surely of a black church and it is the back and forth between world's. >> host: pulitzer prize-winning columnist eugene robinson author of this book just out in paperback "disintegration" is our guest. pittsburg please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: here is the thing. people understand that it is not just the black class but the white class with wages being stagnant, it almost seems as though there is no middle class. then there is no hope. what it is do you think can be done to help this? i will hang up and take your answer off the air.

>> guest: an excellent question. when i talk about a group of black americans called mainstream who have been to the middle class, i always qualified to say to the extent we still have the middle class in the country. education it is vitally important. the reality is a lot of the blue-collar jobs that provided the latter four people to sustain the middle class for so long, a lot of those are gone and could not come back. the challenge will be adapting to the new global economy to have economic management with clean energy that's is part of the whole solution with these other

industries to cultivate and to develop and education and training and retraining of those who find skills that are outdated and no longer in use. we're constantly told we don't have money. the biggest hurdle is to convince ourselves there is something we can do then duet rather than wait for the market to take care of it then drop by the wayside. >> host: mobile alabama, please go ahead. >> caller: good morning. i enjoyed seeing you when you were a guest when you word show in the morning. there are two things i would like to talk about. one has to do the loss of

the industrial education in high school and the other is the corporate welfare as opposed to social welfare. when i started school, i started teachers college in the late '60s. they were telling us we should the be educating our children to the workers that is when they took up the industrial education output to have a liberal education in high school. i think the problem of the liberals in conservatives conservatives-- conservative is that we are not fair when we look at problems reseal what appeals to us but then ignore the other parts of the situation in the part

about not making our children be workers was a liberal idea more or less. and the conservative idea is make them available to get a job. >> guest: i am not sure that was a liberal/conservative divide but i do take the point* that there is knoll vocational educational to speak of in the high school any more. but you have to take into account that education cannot be in a vacuum will look at changes in the economy. what i was in high school, we had shop class, a circular saw that we had to be careful and we were doing things that really don't

typify what you have to do it and that sort of manufacturing jobs now or even the construction. so it is a more sophisticated education this is the information age. one things this country does as computer software and that is a market to be expanding rather than contracting. we need to meet that challenge him part of the answer is what we call vocational education we will call something different. >> host: the next call for pulitzer prize-winning columnist from silver spring maryland live from the national book festival.

>> caller: i am glad to be able to speak to you and i want to talk to you about, i am a retired black federal retiree and i attended the black caucus convention in washington d.c. yesterday and the question that keeps coming of is between white and black families in the united states. if the federal government caught causes the disparity between whites and blacks families shouldn't they be a part of fixing the problem? >> in a perfect world, yes they should. but i don't know what contribution the federal government will make to

alleviating that disparity but if you look at it and come compared to the black middle class to the white middle-class it is very close but when you look at wealth meaning that worth worth, there is enormous disparity and it has essentially wiped out black wealth in this country. for many, many families who were under water with their houses even if they were beginning to accumulate the wealth the poor it has evaporated. it is a huge problem going forward. we were starting to address it but now we go straight

back words per could do i think the federal government will help all lot? know i don't. >> this week has come in for you. what was your reaction to the video of a gay soldier that got a nasty reception at the g.o.p. debate? >> guest: that was totally unacceptable and i think that most if not all of the candidates on that stage would agree with that and i wish one of them had spoken out but that was disgraceful. would ever you think of gays in the military but the soldier who was risking his life in defense of this country overseas to be boo'd in that way was disgraceful. >> host: in your book

"disintegration" we know who we are but who will be but now that one black america is in 24 will we still nod to each other when we pass on the street? what does that mean? >> guest: in many ways if you walk down the street in an unfamiliar place and the mostly white situation and do pass another black person, you'd just nod. it is the acknowledgement of what not kinship but but it is close the a acknowledgement that bad is it. i wonder as we become an economically, socially more diverse in my view the

distance between the impoverished african americans and the rest of

to an individual you are talking about black people a lawyer that context of course, african-americans are a minority florida it ever go to black americans are ever would. what i am trying to say is this relationship between corporate welfare and social welfare by many politicians and with the campaign contributors but as long as

five pic jabil n is of the role money plays and the political system that to run for office you have to raise huge amounts of money and therefore you are beholden and what did the solution? that could go a long way. but it you have to overcome the hurdles and so far that has not happened. >> host: the next call comes from rhode island. you are on the air. >> caller: pat buchanan i

thought by now he would be giving a showing but what your impressions and your relationship with him and if you do get along as well as you seem? >> guest: one of the great disappointments when i started to do television was to see pat buchanan and with the interpersonal since he is a very nice guy. easy to get along with, and nice that if he does not have to be so i went to a prepared i found it the political and social views objectionable i was hoping he would be tough to sit next to so i could let him have it but but the

political and social views and the closest i ever came to losing it on the air, a couple times with him but both times i came close it was with that but really when talking he had managed to work himself about hispanic immigration that he was arguing that sarah palin educational credentials were sonya sotomayor and have this ridiculous viewpoint that is the closest i ever came to actually exploding on the air. >> host: why was that a great disappointment. >> guest: i wanted to hate the guy personally. but i couldn't but that does not stop me to find

objectionable his political views and his social views. he believes white christian america is under assault not so much by the black folks but the mexicans and the latinos and said different cultural ease those but and racism is totally objectionable and my fight him on that but i do listen to him very carefully when he is the ballet waiting the content and the effectiveness of a presidential speech because he is-- she's right presidential speeches and does that it down the middle

and upper obama gave a good speech he will say it was a and here is why. >> host: how can district groups coalesce around is issues of race and class raised by the troy davis execution? >> guest: that is a good question. i found the troy davis execution very troubling. i find the death penalty troubling but i think it is time of what we should coalesce around it is time to end the death penalty. that will be long plots because 64% support it and 29% against it.

and now by this case looking at others where maybe not in the of the goal cents to you kill somebody if there is still some doubt? i think not. i hope that some day we don't. >> host: and this tweet your reaction to being a pulitzer prize winner is there pressure to maintain a search 10 standard? what did you win the pulitzer? >> guest: columns that i did of presidential campaign 2008. hi was absolutely stunned i did not know i was a

finalist even. we do not know the final list. so i wonder four days of days that they gave it to me and they cannot have a back. it was thrilling, and honestly i can say that to now i don't feel pressure to try to win another one simply because at the moment i am not eligible in was asked to become a member of the board. if you are a member you cannot win a pulitzer sell i cannot relax has you never relax but to to worry about that i have to talk that. >> host: we will just keep be nice to you.

eugene robinson has been our guest here is his book "disintegration" the splintering of black america" thing keogh. now coming and we have just begun our coverage so columbia university professor of will be talking about his books the fiery trial and after his presentation the doctor will be here to take your calls and weeds but coming up next sell latest book unfamiliar fishes is day history of the all-white also sarah will be at year we will talk about the book you can call in your questions but our current -- colleague is out and about at the national

book festival let's check in with him. >> here at the poetry pavilion we're talking with the author of second reading. how do you come up with that title? >> eight years during the first decade of this century by a road to column called second reading that i reconsider older books and planted to see how they held up over the years. >> some of the books that you review include tom jones, "the great gatsby" in "catcher in the rye" better notable but wire they neglected? >> it is in/or but with tom jones i wanted to see how this wonderful 18th century novel held up after

it was a bridge and of the publish. an sec case of "the great gatsby" going back to my absolutely faber book and the "catcher in the rye" is due fired-- be more popular than it should be. >> it is badly britain and infantile and takes an attitude toward adolescence that i find very indulgence and superficial all. >> talk about the lesser known books. >> i don't think many people know about the long season in which is about 1960 baseball season, a relief pitcher it is a diary of the season is the first nonfiction and baseball book. the death of a heart is

highly regarded in literary circles but not very well known for the general readership but should be. it is a masterpiece. still widely taught in high schools but i first read it when i was young i did not really connect with it. that is what happens with every reading, very often in school you are assigned books fettered toots difficult for the 17 your 18 year-old you need some life experience and that was the case. . .

should meet the people who read you. i have been a journalist for half a century and most of that time writing pieces that express opinion and to meet the greatest satisfaction of the job particularly in the age of e-mail is the exchange of interchange i have with my readers. it's a wonderful job from a wonderful newspaper and i've been happy to be the post, "washington post" for 30 years but it's that exchange with readers to me that's the most enjoyable part of my job and here they are all around the national mall on a day that

turned out to be better weather than we thought it would and they are wandering around listening to authors, bodying books just strolling the mall. it's great. >> there's a famous saying everyone's a critic. why are you a critic worth reading? >> that's a nasty question. i'm careful, a jack of all trades. i am the book critic of "the washington post" and the title carries a lot of responsibility so viewing rediker as the spectrum fiction, non-fiction, and i bring i think a reasonably well-informed mind i'm a fair to books, i don't go into them with a biased for or against the author or the subject for the book itself, i make a point of quoting because i want to give the reader of the reviews of with the book feels like, and

the critic, the sort of first line of defense between the reader and this huge world of books 50, 60,000 new trade books are published every year. how do you find the book you would like to read that would connect with you? a 3g were you come to trust could be the first stage of filtration that gets you towards books you might find to your liking. >> we have been talking with jonathan, the author of second reading notable and neglected books revisited here at the poetry pavilion. if you want more information you can find it on our web site, booktv.org. thank you, rob out and about here of the national book festival. by the way this is what the 11th annual national book festival held in washington, d.c.. it's gotten so big and you can see the crowds out on the national mall that its expanded

to two days and book tv on c-span2 will be life for both days and we've just begun our coverage about eight hours' worth of live coverage today. so if you were in the area we are about halfway between the mall and the capitol in washington, d.c.. book tv is all set up here and we are now joined by the author of this book, unfamiliar fishes, sarah vowell is our guest. this is about hawaii in a generic sense. how did you get interested in the history of hawaii? >> am i audible? >> yeah. >> it's about the history of america's relationship to hawaii, so the first time i went i went to see pearl harbor, just as a tourist. i always wanted to see that, and then while i was there i went to see the old palace of the hawaiian markey and realized that the two sides aren't related because the japanese

never would have attacked honolulu harbor for being part of the united states if the united states and descendants of american missionaries had been overthrown the hawaiian queen who lived in the palace and handed over the islands to the u.s.. so i guess that was the sort of start of buying interest in the relationship between the two countries. >> take us back there. when did the missionaries first go to hawaii? >> they left boston harbor -- they were new england calvinist. they left boston harbor in 1918 and arrived in hawaii in 1820 and also in 1819 the first new england whalers also from the boston harbor area arrived because hawaii was a great stopping off point between the whaling grounds so the two groups of new englanders arrived in the hawaiian islands within about six months of each other and these two groups had such an enormous impact on the island.

>> what happened? >> the missionaries they set up shop and settled down and set up christianizing and westernizing of the hawaiians and teaching more or less the entire population to read after the had invented the hawaiian language and translated the bible and so they were well-established and well acquainted with the hawaiian monarchies. the whalers, they were sailors on leave basically every time they came to hawaii because they would stop off between the wailing and grounds off peru and japan and so hawaii became their spot and the whalers and the missionaries though they were all basically from within about 100 miles of boston they frequently clashed because they had differing goals. the missionaries were trying

like hell to get them on our key to do things like outlaw prostitution and to regulate liquor and when sailors on leave came to the hawaiian islands, liquor and the company of the women were kind of high priorities for them. so at this time they get sort of the worst of america. they get the, you know, they get our puritans and sailors on leave. >> sarah vowell is our guest. this is her most recent book, and familiar fishes. she's written several other books, the shipmates about the puritans, again, and what -- we are going to put the numbers on the screen. 737-0001 if you live in the east and central time zone and would like to talk with historian, sarah vowell. 737-0002 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zone. journal@c-span.org is our e-mail

address and twitter.com slash macbooktv is our twitter handle. sarah vowell, would you call yourself a historian? >> i would not. i am a writer that writes about history. i like to tell stories about history but story is being the operative word. these are narrative and i mean they are non-fiction, so they are factual or i hope they are, but my goal is to have personal interactions with historic sites but a journalist still so a lot of what i do is hanging out and talking to locals play also will do things like rent an apartment in the building where jack stands on top of the opening credits of hawaii 5. go and talk about that but also talked about how that building relates to the history of americans in hawaii, so a lot of what i do is kind of

place in history within the context of the present and go to a lot of sights and talk to people on the ground. >> when did you find that conagra's first became interested in the hawaiian island? there's a reference in your book to president john tyler in 1842. >> well it's interesting or relationship with hawaii and was discovered by europeans officially in 1778 by captain cook and this is right around the time george washington is held up at valley forge. so immediately -- he's the one who put hawaii on the map and anyone who takes a look at that map and see is where these islands are they are halfway between the west coast of the united states and the great market that is china and the rest of asia it's obvious that these islands could be very important stopping off points and important in terms of trade

with asia, so once they are on the map, any man with cash register rings in his years kind of cut its them and the united states seized the islands as being obviously important in terms of strategic location and commercialism. i mean, like in terms of the new england shipping industry and commercial wailing it's just obvious from the get go that these islands are going to be very valuable and very crucial, and the tyler administration, they recognize the hawaiian islands as a mom markey and a kingdom, and but it's interesting at that time because americans were there so early. 1820 we haven't even sold our own west yet, and later on in

the 1840's as we start pushing westward and start selling oregon and california and then the gold rush happens, with the new england missionaries accomplish in hawaii which was to christianize them, to build churches and schools and to try to turn hawaii into these little new england communities, a lot of people on the east coast of the united states, senators and government officials as well as businessmen see the example for the missionaries have accomplished in hawaii as perhaps being inspirational as to what we could do on the west coast of the united states. the missionaries brought their wives and there's something they saw the example love what happened in hawaii as these creatures and their wives exert it this western influence on the island is that people hope could happen on though west coast of the united states. >> sarah vowell is our guest and the first call for her comes

from michigan. good morning you are on book tv on c-span2. >> caller: hello. thank you very much. i'd like to ask ms. vowell if she thinks that this western as -- westernization ms. moore religious and cultural what they called the white man's beard or was it just commercial people basically to make money, commercialization. >> it's the united states, you don't have to choose. because you have these missionaries and you have these commercial sailors, you have both been going on at once. those missionaries, especially the early ones, they weren't quite idealistic and the accomplished a lot just in terms of literacy, so culturally -- ayman the interesting thing about what the did sites teaching more or less the entire

population to read within a generation and 19th century hawaii was maybe the most literate country on earth because of their efforts, and as a consequence those missionaries taught the first generation of hawaii and writers and historians to write and so that the same time they are trying to dismantle the traditional hawaiian culture in terms of religion and moray and dressed, the missionaries had quite a problem with the hawaii inslee of dress or lack thereof. so there's that but because they taught the first generation of the writers and historians to write, we have quite impressive records of the old culture, so a lot of -- and because of their invention of the written language, a lot of the old hawaiian of language was preserved, so that is a kind of interesting paradox but then because you have the whalers

arrive and the kind of coincide with the wailing in the middle of the 19th century they completely change over the islands and things like agriculture, hawaii and farmers started growing products that american sailors wanted to eat, potatoes, cattle, things like that, the commercial development of the waterfront especially in honolulu and on mali and there's this reciprocal relationship going on with for instance the west coast of the united states. the honolulu waterfront was built using the timber from the pacific northwest. so the change in terms of the culture, both commercially and in terms of religion was a radical and it had to do with both the christians and the sailors. >> sarah vowell, why was the year 1898 seóul important?

>> that is the year of the spanish-american war mike and the year that the united states annexes hawaii and takes over the philippines, invade cuba and the philippines takeover guam and puerto rico. it's the year we became an empire and the year we became who we are now and hawaii is part of that. it's -- there was a huge debate at that time because, you know, americans, we love to bicker and a lot of the people who objected to becoming an empire to acquiring the colony's saw this as a betrayal of our original ideals, and the ideal of the government based on the consent of the government, the majority of the hawaiian population didn't want to become an american territory. the philippines who had been our allies fighting against spain in the spanish-american war when we acquired the philippines as

spoilers of bup war our old allies were starting to plan their guns at us and who could blame them? so, you know, we took over those islands and colonized them and they became our property and the same thing with hawaii. so that is really the corner that we turned in this country than it there is no turning back from that. and it was kind of this -- i see it as a question people deciding does this country want to be good or does it want to be great and you have people like theodore roosevelt and henry cabot lodge and the men in the government and the military who saw the greatness as an empire who wanted to build up the navy and acquire these islands, specifically to use as naval stations to support a navy to become an old style of european-style empire, and they saw that as greatness and they won and we live in their country, and so whenever you

think about that on one side or the other the the there are plans for our position and that's the moment it happens when we are still dealing with the ramifications of that. >> next call from sarah vowell comes from washington d.c.. you are on book tv. please, go ahead. >> caller: ha, sarah. i'm just wondering, i heard all your books, and i'm wondering if you are working on anything at the moment or what we can expect from you in the coming months or years. >> i don't know if i want to give anything away just yet. i'm kind of thinking about architecture but i'm not ready to talk about that yet. >> give if you would a synopsis of what shipmates was about. >> that was my book about the founding of the massachusetts bay colony of 1930 and the founding of roy land after one

of the colonists forge williams gets booted out of massachusetts by his spirit and a brother and for being kind of a rabble rousing loudmouth and he goes on to found rhode island, so it's sort of about -- it deals with the two things i admire most about the american puritans were sort of hinted at it in that title because i love them as thinkers and writers and my favorite, one of my favorite pieces of writing is john's sermon the christian charity the one where he imagines new england as a city upon the hill. so i love them as thinkers and writers. i think one reason of wanted to write about them and their writing is when someone says brereton, people think of them as stupid and these were some of the most educated intelligent abstract thinkers of all time

they just happened to be born before the age of reason. the other thing i love about them that is at the heart of his sermon as their communalism and love one another and the idea of community and his the sermon is a kind of poem of community where he says we must be as members of the same body to rejoice together and suffer together as members of the same body and there is something so idealistic about that but it's also the source of his dark side it, the whole dark side of that community is anyone who stuck out or spoke out or, you know, anyone who didn't conform to their narrow ideas and ideals, these people were kicked out and banished. one guy had his ears cut off so the dark side of that community is a refusal to tolerate the

ideas and ideals of others, so i think it's a fairly evenhanded portrait of them but there are things about the myett meijer. >> where did you grow up? >> i was born in oklahoma and why was 11 and the rest of the time i grew up in montana. >> next call from sarah vowell comes from boon north carolina. good morning. >> caller: hey, sarah. i like everything you write. >> guest: thank you. let's just and right there. [laughter] >> caller: played in the overthrow of the queen and hawaii. >> guest: the tool corporation, you are talking about the dole pineapple. that came later. the vowell who founded the pineapple plantations, he was a distant relative of stanford dole who helped overthrow the queen and he became the president of the republic of hawaii, the short-lived sort of government in between the

hawaiian kingdom becoming american territory so there is no relationship other than they were distant cousins i think but sanford dole is an interesting figure and his father was a missionary and was the first teacher at the school which was the school founded by the missionaries to educate missionary children in honolulu and that is of course the, modern of our president and so it was interesting to me at the inauguration of president obama wary he has his marching band played in his inaugural parade and there are -- from this school founded by samford bull's father and he ended up overthrowing the queen and taking her place as the figurehead of government, and when they were marching in his inaugural parade the band was

playing a song written by the queen being played by the high school marching band of a school attended by the missionary descendants who overthrew her. so i love irony. [laughter] >> was this the school? >> isn't this where president obama attended? >> of course. spinning and a that was founded by the missionaries. >> any since the enjoyed waikiki beach or had a choice or a picnic? >> the thing i love about the early missionaries, you know, they are not like ones to have a good time, not really, but the good work very hard and i especially became enamored of the wives because the had to do all the wife and mother 19th centuries, raise the mother, make food, but on the picture, but the journals are remarkable just for the amount of complaints and they have reason

to complain. the had hard lives. so if you want a picnic memoir i would say the hawaii and missionaries are not your go to source furious them but they are interesting. secure on with a journalist and author serra vowell. >> my name is mike, and i was intrigued with the story that you told about powell and something that i didn't understand is that as i recall in your book they found his school in a box in the national archives or some repository i was wondering how did it happen that a school ended up in a box and for 150 years nobody thought there is little, what is this? >> paul was one of the conspirators in the lincoln assassination, and what happens is if you are one of the people who plot to kill the president

and other high a government officials and you are execute. their lucey you see with what happens here. lewis powell for his part in that conspiracy fire member correctly, he is the one that stabbed secretary of state sioux word, powell was hanged along with other conspirators and somehow his school in that in the smithsonian among all of the american indian remains, and when the law was passed to start repatriating those american indian remains back to their tribes. the researcher was going through all these bones in the smithsonian and had worked at ford's theater museum and recognize his name said evin chollet that skulls made it back to florida and was buried near

powell's mother said that's one of those strange things. if you want to work remains to be in tact and placed in the burial choice of your want to not plot against the american government. those are just words to live by. >> sarah vowell is the national book festival. live coverage from book tv on c-span2. last call for her comes from salt lake city >> i wondered being in to the hawaiian islands, european history by of course details, because with the real facts and the updates and everything like that in the second of all, would

you care to comment about how the mormon missionaries have been effective and they have a college there and all that stuff. >> thanks for calling. for the facts i write nonfiction, so that's kind of the hand tight been dealt with the mormon history, one of my favorite people to write about was this guy named walter murray gibson who wasn't really a con man, but he, a brigham young for instance in a sending him to hawaii as a mormon representative and he kind of beacon for a while the head of the church in hawaii and the mormon since settled on the island of lanai which even now is probably the sleepiest of the major hawaiian islands and walter murray gibson his dream was to build an empire in the

pacific that he would lead so his journals and diaries are so fascinated just where he is on this sheep meadow in hot line and thinks that he's going to rule the pacific ocean and it's just a very floury and, you know, she sees this crater where he and these poor mormons that he is in charge of live as this creature filled with babies and old leal and memories of me eventually the higher ups in salt lake got wind of him and what he was doing. he had a lot of self absorbed ideas of what they should be accomplishing and they sent representatives from salt lake to hawaii to excommunicate him that he went on to become the premier of the government and he's the man who built the palace. he actually commissioned the statue that we all know in

honolulu, so he ended up having a big impact on hawaiian history, the mormons themselves recovered from his leadership and went on to become a very strong religious presence in the island, and the brigham young campus is one of the maine colleges there and they also run the polynesian cultural center which i believe might be the main tourist attraction and the islands so they ended up doing quite well for themselves in hawaii, the mormons. >> host: for those of you that didn't get a chance to get through for sarah vowell, we will invite her back on booktv. >> thank you very much. i love c-span. >> here is her most recent book, and familiar fishes. then next book is thinking about architecture in some different way, and we will look forward to that one. >> quite a sales pitch. >> sarah vowell has been our guest the last half hour as we continue our live coverage from the book festival on the mall in

washington, d.c.. now, in just a second in the tent will be dr. eric foner, professor and to the surprise winner for 2011 and history, the fiery trial is his latest book on abraham lincoln and slavery. shall be in the history and biography tent down here and then he will be joining -- [applause] >> okay, well, thank you very much for that introduction. i'm delighted to be here. it's a wonderful thing for a writer to see so many people coming because of their love of books and thanks to the library of congress and everybody that organized this wonderful festival. i'm going to talk for a while and then, like my predecessor may be ten minutes at the end for questions. that's probably not enough but at least we can take a few. everybody knows that abraham lincoln is sort of the most iconic figure in american history.

there are thousands. nobody knows, 8,000, 10,000 books on abraham lincoln of one kind or another. there are three hollywood movies that be fair, actually for, either were just made or are in the works of the lincoln, the conspirators rican out about the assassination. steven spielberg is doing a biography take about lincoln. lincoln the vampire hunter is on the way. [laughter] so, you can't escapes from lincoln and in fact there's an old adage in the business there is no product on earth whose sales can't be increased by associating it with abraham lincoln. ghanem i'm glad to see james billington the head of the library of conkers appreciate this because as you know he's on the front page of the program for this festival but actually i think it is a legitimate use of lincoln because one of the things that is so remarkable

about him is that he was completely selfless educated by reading. that is how he learned. she had one year of the foremost schooling in his entire life and it makes you wonder if my job is really even necessary.

hemisphere. and it is possible for weather conditions to be reversed. so you can have some pretty wicked winter weather. in this case this was an

incredible storm. he looked around at his fellow sailors to many of whom were very seasoned. panic in their eyes. this should really might sink. the wholesale. what this meant was for him to become completely uncontrollable. whipping this way and that. acting as a detriment. he and his fellow crewmen went below deck. for three days and three nights they pitched on the sea, almost completely on hand, completely uncontrolled. he thought that at any moment they might crack open, the paste into the ocean and to certain death. fortunately that did not happen. continued on to china. delivered its american goods. it picked up a load of chinese tea and started heading back to the united states. along the way he's. stock kinds of privation. he did not get enough food, he did not get enough water.

he did not get enough sleep. he wanted his fellow sailors or representative for even the tiniest of infractions. when the ship docked in april of 1844 and when olmsted disembarked on dry land he swore to never ever go to sea again. he needed to find a new profession. so now the idea of becoming a farmer. once again this made farming a profession. this area that was available to someone with pretty limited formal schooling. the profession in the united states practiced by 70 percent of the population. identified a man. received a commendation for running a model scientific form. arrange to work with this man as an apprenticeships. also having the very first pang of wanting to be a social reformer. very much like the idea of being

a scientific farmer as a way to accomplish that, and the reason why is all instead did not have much formal schooling. very well read, and so he thought that he could read the latest arab cultural journal, learn the latest best practices in farming. he could disseminate this information to his fellow farmers to many of whom were illiterate. this way he could act as a social reformer. completed his apprenticeships and started off on his own for life as a farmer. true to his word he really was very talented. true to his word he wanted to be a social reformer. the agricultural journals. the best practices, the latest getting his practice. he disseminated disinformation to is fellow farmers. but then he learned that his and her brother was planning to take a walking tour across england.

it became almost pathologically jealous. he could not believe that his little brother was getting ready to take this traded venture while he was stuck on the farm. he started writing a series of letters to his father which he pleaded to be allowed to leave the farm and join his brother on this trip. the only wonder why man now in his mid-20s would need to beg his father's permission. his father held the mortgage to the farm. his father was also a very kind, very generous man, particularly by 19th century standards. so he agreed to let him go. furthermore he stake in the some money for the tour that he took across england. now, when he returned he was the beneficiary of the relief fortunes coincidence. one of his neighbors on s.i. was a man named george putnam. george putnam was a hobby farmer. on s.i., and s.i. was not yet

part of new york city. it was simply an island off the tip of manhattan. george putnam is in name that might have resonance for many of the people here in the audience today. a publishing magnate, and the publishing company he founded parises name and is still in existence today an innovator who had been working on something called paperbacks' which is a brand new to the world in this era. publishing all kinds of different paperbacks. publishing treatises on philosophy, collections of poetry, selections of short fiction and was selling the but $0.25 a pop. approached his neighbor, is a neighboring farmer on s.i. and if he would be interested in producing an account to be published in paperback and his recent walking tour across englan

a brand new newspaper. this was the early 1850's. a brand new newspaper called the new york daily times. became the new york times, and as the paper was in a competitive fight for its life. this is the era when most big cities had about a dozen dailies. and so the editor of the new paper, trying to figure out how to separate it from this large field of competition. he came to the conclusion that the best way to do this was by focusing on veracity.

this is the era of yellow journalism, so a dozen or so competitors were in the habit of just stretching the truth mightily are making things of. some of the topics of the day. at this point in the early 1850's once again their rising tensions between the northern and southern regions in the united states. the issue of slavery. they appear to be one of their periodic flashpoints. many people thought there might be violence or even civil war. and so also applied for this job. he had a five minute interview, and he was handed this

absolutely assignment. you might think how he got this. pretty underqualified. he did have a book to his credits. maybe more importantly he was a farmer. the south in this era was nothing if not an agrarian society. from the autumn of 1862 after the harvest is over, still a farmer by trade. set off for the south. the only way to describe it is nothing could have prepared henry raymond, the editor of the times, nothing could have prepared anyone for what and able reporter he proved to be. he went everywhere, talks to everyone. he talks the plantation owners, slaves, poor white farmers, and produced a series of spectacular dispatchers that literally put a brand-new new york times on the map. in 1861 dispatchers were compiled into a book they read

all i can tell you is here it is. a hundred and 50 years later, 8061, and the condom kingdom is still in print. if you want a window into the south on the eve of the civil war was the movie gone with the wind which is fictional but simply has some great and accurate observations about the south and the antebellum or you can read olmstead, absolutely stellar reporting. now, a member of what he calls the literary public a competitor of another brand new magazine. an amazing stable of writers. publishing emerson, thoreau, longfellow. while working as an editor, olmstead taught the editor a couple of short stories.

while working he also decided that he wanted to become much more deeply involved in abolitionism. given the fact that he traveled through the south on assignment for the new york times, this was a cause that he certainly wanted to become involved in. and so 1855 demean @booktv man named james abbott travel east from kansas. the head of the militia. the melissa was devoted to making sure that if they enter the union as a state it would enter as a free state, rather than a slave state. he was headed east to give money to raise money to purchase weapons for his melissa. first he went to connecticut and rhode island committee raise enough money to buy about 100, what were nicknamed sharp rivals. they went down to new york, and naturally the person he wanted to connect with was olmstead, involved in abolitionism, deep well of contacts in the literary

community. readily agrees. stuttered reaching out to the various people he knew around the york city. one of the people he restocks to was horace greeley who has been the editor of the new york tribune and was the very person who coined the term leading cancer. minister raise about $300. an energetic friend. kept him apprised of the activity but writing to purchase a howitzer. captain apprised of his activities by writing him letters that employed a ridiculously credible code. he referred to the howitzer as an h. now, it was the code that was real difficult for anyone to figure out. at the same time it reflects that he was so very aware that they were involved in these very dangerous endeavors and wanted

to avoid detection with these letters. also arranged to break it up into several different pieces and to send it to kansas broken up into component parts. mccain and arrived in kansas it was once again assembled, reassembled, placed in front of the hotel, and does comport itself very admirably. ..

>> he decided to take a job that was down compared to rubbing shoulders. he took a job in which he started clearing a really unattractive piece of land, clearing swamps on a very ugly piece of land that was named for its position of being in the middle of new york city. it's called central park. he was cleaning this land for someone else's design. calvin was an english trained architect, and he looked at the plans and was disgusted. he couldn't believe how it was. he designed approaching the board saying, tiers of all, this is a terrible design for the park. i suggest that you get rid of

it. secondly he said where i'm from, if you want the best design, hold a public competition. the board listened, they tabled the existing design, and they announced there would be a public competition for a new design. at this point, he sought out frederick olmstead to see if they wanted to be partners. he could have gived a wit that he was part of the literary public, but he was rubbing shoulders with all these luminaries. the reason voxmented to partner because frederick olmstead was draining swamps, and if they partnered up, they would have a leg up on the competition. they partnered up for the competition, and the only way to describe it is parallel to the

southern reporting. in this case, nothing could have prepared vox or anyone for what incredible ideas frederick olmstead brought to the design. when they turned to the design, it was the clear winner. there were 33 different people who entered the design competition. 32 of them produced something -- produced designs that would rate somewhere between a b-minus and a flat f. olmstead and vox were an a-plus and they got permission to proceed with it. one of the design elements that set their plan far apart from the other designs that were turned in by other contestants. the board of the park spelled out all the contestants had to follow certain elements, and one was there had to be four roads crossing central park. central park is an unattractive shape for a park, it's very

narrow. the other contestants complied with that requirement. they produced park plans that had -- that were crossed in four places with roads that resulted in crimped plans and it was it was not possible to have a meadow or vista. they came up with a brilliant innovation and agreed to do the mandatory elements, the four roads crossing central park, but they had an idea called sunken transverses. they were channels that would travel across the park in four points. in certain places, they designed land bridges that would cross the channels, and this opened up the park plan making it possible to have an expansive meadow and have a long view or vista. what's more, it meant the traffic of not traveling at eye level throughout the park. your view would not be interrupted by clattering

carts. well, vox's plans continue to pay dividends to this day. there can be traffic traveling nearby, busses or taxis, just traveling through so you don't see it or hear it either because it is muffled because the traffic is traveling beneath ground. they proceeded with the plan for central park and did most of what they wanted to do, and what they had not done, they had in preparation ready to go when in 1861 the civil war broke out. now, olmstead wanted to be involved in the union cause. what he did at this point was come down here to washington, headed up an outfit called the united states cemetery commission. it was a release outfit providing immeasurable relief to

battlefield wounded during the civil war. after the war, there were a whole series of convolutions and it morphed into the american red cross. come the battle of gettysberg, they were restless again. it was clear after that battle that the north was going to emerge victorious, the south would be defeated, and it was just a matter of time and temples. from oldstead's standpoint, it was just a malter of time before the commission ended, and he would have to have a job. he looked around and didn't consider landscape architecture, the profession he pioneered. central park was a masterpiece, but they didn't think there were that many cities who wanted

parks designed. he headed to california and became the supervisor of a gold mine. while he was there, he started visiting a place that was about 30 miles away from the gold mine, and it's yosemite valley. he was enhasn'ted. by some accounts, he was one the first 500 non-native americans to even enter yosemite. that's how remote this valley was in this era and how distant it was from civilization. he loved walking amped there. he started to make a human cry to preserve this place. he recognized that america's population was going to expand, and at some point, yosemite would be in danger of being diminished by having so many people visit it. olmstead suggested no private interest should be looked to to

preserve this natural wander and suggested a farseeing government should step in and take care of this beautiful place. this was unbelievely before the national parks system, but civil war ended, and all the sudden in the north, at least, there started to be an economic boom. all the sudden, all of these cities were clammoring to have parks designed. they teamed up again, a a bunch of different designs. they never got along well, always at each other's throats, and they broke apart. olmstead continued solo and did a lot of designs. the reason why people respond to them like they do today, why they are so set apart today, is very much because of how he drew

on all the various dead ends he traveled down and career eddies he traveled over before finding landscape architecture. he brought those varied experiences into play. what i'm going to do now is describe just three of his greatest works in the context of his earlier experiences coming into play. the first of the designs is up that way, the ground of the u.s. capitol. he was called upon to design the capitol ground in 1874, and the very first thing he did was he became extremely fix sated on finding a circulation system, a logical way for people to travel over the capitol grounds. in this era, there were 41 points where the person could enter the capitol grounds, and people were in the habit of entering the ground at any one of the 41 points and making a b-line for the strains of the capitol producing grid work with

people just walking in straight lines criss crossing one another. he came up with the idea of having the best way to describe is it like tributaries feeding the larger tributaries feeding into a river. frederick olmstead decided that what made since was it didn't matter what point they entered into to, they were fed into a tributary to be fed into a larger tributary path that fed them into a couple very broad singular curving paths to deliver the person to the entrance of the capitol. congress was a client on this project and they were puzzled. they hired him to create a striking design for the capitol grounds, and here he was fixated over a circulation system, but this had everything to do, completely rooted in olmstead's earlier career as a farmer. working as a farmer, he

experienced many times conducting his goods to market and having a wagon get stuck in a road. that meant disaster. that meant the produce was going to go bad, he was not going to get money, and so when he became a landscape architect, he kept that lesson with him. often clients were puzzled as congress, the client in this particular case, was. they thought we hired you to do the incredible project, and here you are with a road fix asian. it doesn't matter the beautiful design, if there's not a rational way for people to be conducted over the grounds, it'll be confined to failure. that was from his time as a farmer. the second project in the context of frederick olmstead's earlier experience coming to bear was his absolutely visionary design for the world fair in chicago in 1893.

it was called the columbian exposition. he cited the fair, picked where the fairgrounds would be and decided it would make sense to put them on the shore of lake michigan because it was a really striking backdrop. he then came up with a really out there idea. he decided he wanted to cut channels that would travel from lake michigan, through the fairgrounds, and so there would be water. there would be waterways traveling over the fairgrounds, and it would be possible for people to go from a traction to a traction at the world fair by boat. now, he had a vivid, almost hallucinating vision of how he wanted the boats to be. he wanted them to be small to seat a maximum of four people. he wanted them to be brightly colored, and he modeled this idea in his mind on the chinese that he had seen during his sea

voyage to china 15 years before. now, daniel burnam, the administer of the fair, thought it was a ridiculous idea. having people travel through the fair by boat was a stroke of genius, but limits -- little boats four at a time made no sense. he went behind frederick olmstead's back and signed with a steamship company. when he learned about this, he was furious. he wrote burnam a series of memos that are obsessive, demented, but logical. he made the argument in these memos that first of all that ultimately the world fair would be confined to memory. it was going to open in the spring of 1893, close in the autumn of 1893, and that would be it.

the point he made was what would people rather remember, a steamship, people waving their hats, steam whistle going off, or remember brightly colored boats gliding along the waterways. he argued this would provide the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. if you had a handful of boats carrying four people at a time, not everybody got to take a boat trip, but he made the point that everybody would enjoy the sight of having the lovely quiet boats traveling over the waterways. now, burnam was a man of indome will. when the fair opened in 1873, what was available was brightly colored boats with four people just as frederick olmstead had

seen in his trip to china. the white city as the world fair is known, has a place in the american memory. one of the things that contributed to the sight, to the am bee yawns were the waterways with the small boats. the final landscapes i want to describe are the park systems, and this is an incredible idea. frederick olmstead and vox were thee pioneers of the park system building the very first one in the world in buffalo in 1868, and once their partnership broke up, frederick olmstead cometted on and perfected the concept designing a park system in milwaukee, wisconsin, one in louisville, kentucky, one in rochester, new york, and also a park system in boston. now, one of the things that made the park system a really great

idea is -- what it was was a series. you could have two or three or more parks that were attached or connected by parkways, and it meant you were no longer tied to a single piece of land for a park, and you wouldn't have to have something like central park which was -- until it was designed, a really unattractive piece of land. instead there were several parcels of land with different attributes. for instance, one might be hilly, another has a nice natural lake. far more important to frederick olmstead than this variety of landscapes, was the fact it was in the center of the city, middle of the city, and you could have a variety of different parks, all of them serving different neighborhoods, and in those different neighborhoods, there's all kinds of different people who from all backgrounds could mix and mingle in the parks. now, this was completely drawn, so very drawn, the idea of the

park system on frederick olmstead's earlier travels into the south. making that trip, one of frederick olmstead's most enduring observations was the south in this time was in the grip of a kind of cultural poverty, and frederick olmstead ascribed the poverty to the fact that people lived at such great remove one from another that no kind of cultural commerce was possible. plantation owners lived far apart, and frederick olmstead noticed they just didn't get together and share ideas and share information, and so the park system, what this was meant to do was to allow people to come together from all different backgrounds and all different neighborhoods within a city and mix in a democratic experiment. i'll close by saying it's wonderful to be here in washington where an example of frederick olmstead's landscape is so very true to how he originally designed it, and the

wonderful thing is here in the 21st century, you can find his work still in tact and find his vivid democratic spirit so very alive. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> peaceful abolition of slavery affecting frederick olmstead in his persuasion of england of joining the south in the civil war? >> let's see, the basis of abolitionism is greasing. he was a gradualist, another qualification of getting the times job. they wanted someone objective or

sort of objective to go there, and gradualists believed slavery was wrong, but thought you couldn't impose -- one region of a country couldn't impose on another region. it was a complicated institution that needed to be unwound. because he was not a rabid abolitionist, he was a good person to travel to the south. the fact is as he traveled and you read his 48 dispatches, he makes an amazing transformation from being a gradualist to being someone who becomes an abolitionist because of what he witnessed, and one of the most annealing things he witnessed was seeing a slave -- one thing that happened while travels, people jealously guarded from him, the various people he meant was, was the punishment of slaves. that was a very guilty thing for the south. he travels around plantations and no one punished slaves in front of him, but if an overseer

was comfortable with him, proceeded to whip a slave, and it was horrifying for him. he felt come police sit because he didn't stop the overseer, but also he's on horse back in a gully, and the horse flaired its nostrils and rushed out of the gully, and he took that as a natural symbol, a horse's reaction that this was a deeply morally wrong thing, slavery. that was one of the real events that caused him to deepen his abolitionist sentiment. yes? >> i'm sorry -- >> thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you're watchingbooktv on

c-span2, and this is live coverage of the 2011 national book festival on the mall in washington, d.c.. that was justin martin you success saw talking about the life of frederick olmstead. now, mr. barton will be here in a minute to take your calls about frederick olmstead. the numbers are on the screen, 202-737-0002 in the mountain time zones. 23 you want to e-mail or tweet, you can do that. e-mail booktv@c-span.org or tweet tweet @booktv at twitter.com/book tv. we'll continue live coverage today. coming up sylvia smith, the

author of a beautiful mind and grand pursuit about economics and economists. she'll be up later for a call in, and pulitzer prize winner talking about the 2011 pulitzer prize winning book, "the warmth of other sons." we'll join her in the tent for your calls, tweets, e-mail, and audience questions, so that's the coverage for the rest of the day. we'll be live again tomorrow, and by the way, just a reminder, we will be concluding our live coverage tomorrow afternoon with author and historian, david mccullough. it's also charlotte weekend on booktv. recently, our local content vehicles went to charlotte to look at the history of char lot, the literary life of charlotte

and political life since it's the host city of the 2012 democratic convention. we'll show you the literary highlights, and here's more from charlotte. >> online, you have online sales? >> yes. >> okay. >> we have the website. >> okay. we go on twitter and then make a notice that you can buy signed stock. >> absolutely, absolutely. >> that way they know where to get them. >> i made these off of what pen penguit did. >> you are wonderful. >> i have a bunch of those if i can leave them? >> yeah, that was a smart thing. >> yeah, i love ited. as soon as i saw it, i was like i'm going home. i want people to pick it up, but i want it through park road because you guys are awesome. >> if you have more, and if you

do, i'll put them by your book, the front and book. i'm a sales rep for random house. i've been in the book business my entire adult life. i was selling independent bookstores and loved it. i had north carolina, south carolina, and savannah as my territory, and it was great because everybody was reading something different. it was exciting. at the end, i was just selling two large chaining, and it was not fun. i could have sold anything. i really like placing a book in somebody's hand and seeing that immediate, and i felt like i was another cog in the wheel rather than spreading the words about books. >> what do you say about the relationship between publishers and independent book sellers? is it a strong relationship? >> with some, it's a very strong relationship. i know editors, publicists, marketing people. they send us scripts, ask our opinions. i just had a sales rep on the phone before you came asking

about the availability of books for young girls dealing with their body, and what kind of market was there for a chapter book in that, so i think we're, you know, we stay in constant communication. phone calls, e-mails -- we see each other at winner institute, book expo, independent book sellers alliance, a very strong relationship. >> how does that compare to the relationship between a publisher and a larger bookstore? >> well, the larger bookstore, especially if you are a chain, the probability of people, clerks staying and at the store for awhile and developing a relationship is really, sometimes it's possible, but for the most part, they are people just looking for a job. they are not looking as a career for doing it. everybody that works here at the store has been doing it a very long time. we have over like 120 years of combined experience in book selling of the there's not that chance for relationships to

evolve in a chain bookstore for the most part. there's always exceptions to the rule. with a chain bookstore when random house goes into sell barnes & noble, they are not talking to the front line book sellers or the people who places the book in the people's hands. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> we have two. >> so with the big box bookstores closing like borders, what's that mean for the smaller independent? >> it's a huge opportunity for us to reestablish ourselves as the front runner of what's going to be new and upcoming in literature and in the book world, and we don't think the box store really can survive with that amount of square footage. this is an opening up for small stores. we have seen increases in bookstores and american book sellers association. we see it at book seller school

and people now being interested. they don't want to be everything to everybody. they just want that little niche bookstore that caters to their needs. >> we are back live at the narnl book fest -- national book festival in washington, d.c.. on your screen is a picture of the u.s. capitol, and just down the street on the mall is where the book festival is being held. now, the capitol is significant for our next segment because the grounds of the capitol were driened by this man on the cover of this book, genius of place, the life of frederick law olmstead, and if you've been watching, you saw justin martin talking about frederick olmstead. mr. martin, how well known was mr. frederick olmstead during his lifetime in >> by the end of his life, he was quite a celebrated figure, but the

middle of his life, he's celebrated as a journalist. as an architect, he had a measure of fame for central park, but at the same time, it was a different era. people were not the celebrities they are today, and he was a known and notable figure, but he wasn't, you know, he didn't cut that giant of a figure until sort of postture and people realized the incredible work he'd done. >> at what point in his career was he in charge of the capitol grounds? >> he started that project in 1874, and because congress was the client, it took him 15 years to get everything he wanted done. it was a hard fought battle. he won most of the battles. it's pretty true to his vision. >> what was his personality like? >> it's interesting. he's often been longly described as a calm man, but he was very much an artist, hard driving, a creative person, but also very

hard driving in the pursuit of his vision. >> now, paul monday tweets in what park is considered his most brilliant and enduring? >> there's all kinds of debate about that. myself, as a new yorker, there's debates between prospect park or central. others say it's emerald necklace or the biltmoore state. he did enough true masterpieces there's a good lively debate on that. >> justin martin the guest, frederick olmstead is the topic. california, you're on booktv on c-span2. please go ahead. >> caller: i'm -- >> we'll move on next to california -- are you with us? >> caller: josh -- >> we are having trouble with our phone system at the moment,

but mr. martin, where did frederick olmstead go to school? what was his schooling trajectory? >> it was scatter shot, and he dropped out of school at the age of 14. he was then pretty much schooled in the school of life except for a stint at yale, three months was all. >> that was it? >> yep, three months as a kind of special student. >> how is it central park became his baby? >> it's really a pretty complicated story that basically he was doing a really -- doing a job in clearing a piece of land, and he was called upon vox was the partner on the project, emplaned about the excision -- complained about the existing structure of the park, there was a competition, they teamed up for the ex competition, and they won and he went from being a journalist to being an architect. central park is a landmark fist

design to be involved in. >> back to the phones, see if they are working, and we'll try new haven, connecticut. you're on booktv. >> caller: he low. >> hi. >> caller: can you hear me? great. frederick olmstead is just an amazing character. >> i agree. >> caller: and he is a visionary. i think he proves that you don't have to be a president or a politician or anything like that to transform america. i think his ideas made a big difference. he invented the red cross. i think he realized that journalism was a short sided goal and really the way to transform america was to bring everybody together which is what his park systems did. >> uh-huh. >> caller: he acquainted with his work by the fact that my

parents got engaged in prospect park in brook listen, and -- brooklyn, and i went to school off the boston gardens in boston, and then i discovered fenway and all of that, and i finally understood the national capitol was his, and i still haven't made it to central park. i want to see strawberry fields. >> thank you. >> i'll comment briefly on what you said and wonderful points you made, and what i say is you're so right. he was somebody who literally was shaping the physical landscape, shaping it in a way that had deep moral undercurrent. part of it was creating democratic landscapes, and the fact he was doing something physical, something in the way of writing or being a political leader, this makes his legacy so enduring. >> delaware, you are on with author justin martin talking

about frederick olmstead. hi. >> caller: i kind of -- we had trouble with the cameras, and i didn't get the beginning of the history of him, but listening to the past caller, it occurred to me this man must have had adhd in a big way, and that's some of the best characteristics an adhd person can have that brings me to the point that a good person for adhd person can learn about that you can be different and jump on the boat and be something big. they are so intelligent that they are so creative, they -- >> caller, we got the point. justin martin. >> sure. it's a good point and a valid point, of course. the 19th century there's so many fewer psychological conditions diagnosed. i often say olmstead was a

beneficiary having many psychological conditions and today he would have been therapied or medicated out of him, but he found his way through the world. he was a scatter shot person who part of his scatter shotness was he didn't have patience, had his vision, had a muse, and he found his way, and that's a wonderful tribute to his psychology. >> who was mcclain and why did he end his life there? >> all the torment he had, mcclain was a psychiatric hospital he designed the grounds for, but the condition he was suffering from, undiagnosed in that era was some form of senile demen sma, could have been alzheimer's disease and he was shipped off to a mental

institution because he was suffering from dementia. as i said, he designed mcclain's grounds earlier in his life when he was packed off to mcclan, among the last things he said were confound them, they didn't follow my plan. >> didn't one of his daughters get institutionalized? >> his daughter. >> do you know why? >> these were so vague. charlotte was described as hysterical, worked up often, and we have gist that to go on. maybe she was not treated well as a woman in the 19th century, hard to say. >> youngstown, ohio, good afternoon, you're on with justin martin author of genius of place. >> caller: hello? >> hi. >> caller: how are you doing, sir. >> very well, thanks. >> i u.s. jury -- just wanted to talk to you -- >> okay. you got to turn down the volume on your tv.

you'll get an echo ears. ask your question, okay. all right, go ahead. we're going to go ahead and losedownstown, ohio. philadelphia, are you with us? >> caller: yes, i am. >> go ahead. >> good morning, gentleman. >> hi. >> hi. >> caller: do you think the projects today being to profit oriented and also did he ever did work in philadelphia? >> two questions. first of all, sadly, i don't believe he did -- he did so much work, but he didn't do major work in philadelphia. he might have done the ground of a private estate or something, which was a big part of his type of work. as for, you know, there's still wonderful parks being designed all over the country, but i guess one thing you can say is olmstead was fortunate to be in the 19th century when the inner

parts of the cities whether it be milwaukee or new york or buffalo or on and on, the center of the cities was still available to create parks and cities grew up around the parks. that's a wonderful circumstance that had that opportunity that was seized in the 19th century, otherwise those areas would have been paveed in. he, himself, you know, having battled the great parks being made, he had all political bat 8s to fight at every turn to get the parks made. it wouldn't be much different today. the main thing i say, is, boy, had there not been the impressions to set the land apart, you would not have the beautiful places today. they would be out in the middle of nowhere not serving the same purpose. >> anyone you say is his contemporary, now anybody to

compare to frederick olmstead? >> i spoke to a bunch of different landscape architects as i was working on the project. i wanted an idea of how he's viewed today, and the best way to describe is not one person influenced by olmstead. there's peter walker with officers in burkley. those people are very surely influenced by olmstead, but any landscape architect you find takes a page from olmstead. >> l.a. tweets into you, was he a good administrator of the projects? >> superb administrator. he reminded me of an earlier figure, 5 previous subjects ralph nader, was you get a park design okayed, you're not done. you better keep fighting to be sure these are changeable public

spaces that someone could sell a tract away for development. central park, where he wanted to win the design competition, got the design the way he wanted it, and he fought the rest of his life to be sure it was not undone. >> genius of places is the name of the book. justin author is the author, polk county florida, you're on tv. go ahead. >> caller: i'm working with people with dementia, and it doesn't mean they lack any innovation or a lot of people with dementia have nice ideas just as this man did as a young man. we have the luxury of vision right now having -- [inaudible] at the time he was -- do you think at the time he just really was just enjoying the thing that

he created and was vision in his mind at the time, did he think it could be enduring, and i'll hang up and let you comment. >> i think to speak to that question he in the moment fought hard for his various visions and knew it would take everything he had to see them through. in his case, the on set of dementia was very, very rapid. at one point, there was one morning he wrote the same letter, identical verbatim letter to one of his clients, wrote it three times completely alike. he forgot various details about the plans, and in his case sadly, it was so rapid and part of that because there were no therapies or medications at that point that he really was very, very soon within a matter of two years, he was income pass at a timed. two years after he designed the,

finished an estate in nashville, north carolina, two years later he was starring watching duck splash in a pond. that's how rapid his decline was. >> mr. martin, what was his relationship with the vander bilt family? >> he had a wonderful relationship. he was working with george vapider bilt. he was an elder statesman, and so george vander bilt was really listening to the counsel provided. the best parallel to him was the bill gates of his day, richest man in america and in the world, and yet as a man in his 20s, he hired someone to bring the best landscaped ideas possible, and rather than interfering like some clients like stanford, another cline who he worked with to design stanford university,

george vapider bilt was very, very, very willing to give olmstead free reign, and olmstead was very appreciative of that. >> next call from new york city which frederick olmstead had a lot of influence in. go ahead, new york city. >> caller: yeah, hi, i just wondered if you're planning an unabridged audio book version of the biography because i'll sure buy it. >> yeah, i would like that very much. you're saying an audio version in hopefully that's something the publisher will do because i'd like to hear someone narrate it. thank you. >> well, mr. martin, lots of tweets and e-mails. an e-mail next for you from somebody who says i read devil in the white city and was so impressed by olmstead's involvement. i live in detroit and wonder what you know about olmstead in his design of bell isle? >> i wrote a story for the "new york times" about a month ago

called "ole's jewels of the west." i guess the best way to put it it is bell isle is a vivid vision olmstead had for it, but that's an example in which his original design not so much got enacted and over the years bell isle, the best way to put it is it's a beloved park and beautiful park, but it's also a real -- it's a user friendly park, all things from sprung up within the park that are not really true to olmstead's original vision, and that's okay. i mean, different parks have different needs or requirements. there are original touches, but there's also a lot of different stuff in the park now that have to do with the fact this is a city park that over time had been changing tastes and things that had to be done. >> all right. he's the cover of the book, genius of place, the life of frederick olmstead, a photograph of mr. olmstead on the cover. inside, there's lots of pictures in case people are interested in

buying the book, a lot of designs as well. in new york, though, another e-mail and another tweet, and 24 is a tweet from vermeer417. what is olmstead's contribution to vox's bridge design in central park? >> pretty much none. vox deserves credit for the bridges he designed all over central park. those are tribute to vox's supreme skill as an architect. lack of a better term, he's a structural architect. olmstead was a landscape architect and vox made beautiful bridges. the influence on vox was the fact he traveled in the circles of the hudson river school painters. vox loved to design bridges so that as you walk under them, the bridge, the arch of the bridge frames your view like a hudson river school painting.

>> and here is another e-mail. can you ask the author about the names of the gates at central park. i walk by them often, but have never heard any description of how they came to be or their significance to the park's development, and that's from ellen in new york city. >> a real good question you know because that wasn't something that either olmstead or vox designed, central park, like any other park, there are lots of, you know, there's a lot of collaborators, people coming in after wards putting in carousel, this, that, or the other, and the gates, the meaning of the gates -- there were entries suggested at different points, but the naming of the gates, i think there's different trades the farmers and artists gave and so dport. because it was outside olmstead and vox's, i don't know exactly who came up with that or whether it was a collaboration between other people, but that's a great

story i'd like to know. i'll look into that. >> texas, thank you for holding, go ahead with your question. >> caller: years ago, i read a book called "a walk through texas," and it was a compilation olmstead wrote for harper's, but all i remember from it was in east texas, he saw a lot of english people he thought was trashy, and in the hill country he meant germans and thought very highly of them. i don't think there's discussion of architects, but he was more of a cosh ologist. anything suggestions of that? >> the second of those trips in the south was to texas. he thought what he wanted to do is the first trip was in the deep south in alabama and

louisiana, those were the old slavery states. he wanted new dispatches about slavely in a frontier society. that's texas then, frontier versus the old society, and one of the types of people he encountered were germans and they were free soilers, did not believe in slave labor. he wrote about them for the "new york times" and how they had well ordered farms they ran, very economically efficient farms running on their own while olmstead's argument was the surrounding cotton farms run with slave labor were inefficient because of the economic inefficiency of slavery. that's a very interesting book full of very fine closely absorbed articles from the new york olmstead had done. >> did olmstead leave permanent impacts on the fib rick of chicago in outlining areas? >> one not only influencing chicago, but the nation and

maybe the world which is the community of riverside nine miles outside of downtown chicago, now an inner suburb of chicago. he designed that suburb with all kinds of innovations at the time, streets that curve not to avoid impediment, but just to create a sense of restfulness and peace. lots of ample community space. the best way to put it is there's not a single suburb designed since 1868 that's well designed that doesn't take a page from riverside in chicago. >> don phos, michigan, e-mail. nothing mentioned in the book to olmstead's visit to our park here in market, michigan. he said leave it alone, it's a beautiful park the way it is. can you provide further information on his visit there? >> i sure can. it was my great pleasure to take a trip through the midwest recently for a story i wrote

called olmstead's jewels of the midwest. i spoke of it earlier to another caller, but i visited beautiful outside marquette. he wore two hats, onefuls a park maker. to make parks, you used gun powder to blow things up, and another hat was an early environmentalist being instrumental in the preservation of yosemite and other places. when he came here, it was with the thought maybe he would design a park there, but he put on the other hat, environmental hat saying i shouldn't design a park here. this is such a beautiful spot that you should just leave it. you know, just leave it natural, untouched for pos tearty, and

that's what happened. it's in beautiful shape, 100 years on. >> arizona, good afternoon, you are on book tv. >> caller: yes, i enjoyed the presentation. >> thank you. >> caller: i once visited riverside, california and was told then the park in river side was also designed with the same one who designed central park. did olmstead get to river side, california? >> i don't believe so. i know that olmstead -- olmstead did not design that park, now, olmstead, jr., his son, is conceivable he had something to do with that. he worked the 20th century. he was involved in promises all over the country and with the west ward migration of the american population, olmstead jr. did work on the west coast with the seattle park system. perhaps he was involved with that 6789 he was involved in so

many projects it's hard to keep track. he had a large professional firm wok working all over the country. perhaps junior did the park in riverside. >> the one thing not addressed 1 the issue of abolitionism in the subtitle. very quickly, tell us about his activities. >> sure, well, olmstead, he was called upon to travel across the south for the "new york times" to report on the conditions of slavery. the reason he got the gig as it were was because he was a gradualist, what somebody like thomas jefferson was, believed slavery was wrong and should end in good time. they were happy to have someone with that stance go down to the south, but while olmstead was reporting, read his dispatches and you can watch him make a transition from being a gradualist, the more he saw in the south, the more he was morally outraged and hardened

into an abolitionist. >> you wrote books about ralph nader, alan greenspan, an olmstead. is there a common thread? >> there is. funny you ask. they are all diverse people. alan greenspan was a professional jazz musician becoming a member of ayn rand, presidential adviser and a chairman. ralph nader was a lawyer, a writer, and he invented for himself the job that did not exist of consumer advocate and then became a fly in the ointment of an annoying presidential candidate. you also have olmstead being an abolitionist, a journalist, a park maker, urban planner, and several other things beyond that, so -- >> justin martin has been our guest, here's the latest book, "genius of place, the life of frederick olmstead." thank you very much for being on

booktv. >> thank you very much. enjoyed it. >> a couple hours left of the book festival coming up. now, we'll finish the live program with wilkerson, the warmth of other suns. she'll talk about her book, and booktv will join her and take your phone calls, tweets, talk to the audience. that's the conclusion, but coming up next, you know her as the author of a beautiful mind, her most recent book is grand pursuit, silva nasar is up next. >> we're here in the book signing area of the national book festival on the mall in washington, d.c., and i'm talking with rasnesh. what book did you pick up?

>> jane swanson's copy of bloody crimes. >> why did you come this weekend? >> two authors this weekend, one today and another tomorrow, and i wanted books autographed. >> have you seen the authors speak? who made the biggest impression? >> i just came, so i went straight to the swanson presentation before, and, you know, he's ever bit as interesting in person as in the book. >> what's about his books that keeps you coming back? >> i think more that they read like novels. man hunt reads like a thriller, and this one as well, so i think he's got the knack of captioning history into a readable format. >> do you have any game plan for going to the other tents and perhaps hearing from various authors? >> yes. i looked over the program and the book signing took all of one hour, so i'll make the most of what i have left.

>> thank you very much. >> thank you. >> now we have someone else joining us. >> hi. >> your name and where are you from sphr >> linda jones and north carolina. >> is this part of your plans? >> we met up with the children, and all of us are here as a family. >> what do you like most about this festival? >> this is an exciting place to be. we have gone to other places, but this is a beautiful setting, friendly people, and we have a wonderful time with wonderful authors, and it's exciting to meet them and get their autographs that makes a special gift. >> who did you get today? >> i have been buying, i got michael cunningham, the beautiful mind, and i'm going to hit lauren long, i dream of trying. >> you have a game plan. >> my daughter who is a librarian has the game plan for us. >> what will you do the rest of the afternoon? listen to authors speak? >> as we can in between the

activities we will, and then we'll call it a night and be back tomorrow. >> anybody in particular you're looking forward to seeing tomorrow? oh, yes. let me tell you -- oh, i don't have the list, but the author of guess how much i love you. >> you're just coming for the signings or listen to the author speak? >> we sit in as we can, but have a tight schedule. we have to make sure and it's a long wait, and we're first in line. >> thank you very much. >> thanks it was fun. >> i'm from college park. >> okay. college park, maryland? >> yeah, yeah, i go to the university of maryland. >> what brought you here? >> david eggers, my absolute favorite author and like i read everything by him. he's here speaking, too good to pass up. >> what is his latest book and what is it about him you find appealing as an author. >> i'm probably mispronouncing the title, but it's about a

person who stayed to contribute to help in new orleans to help out after the hurricane, but what i like about him as an author is he plays with reality, and so certain characters like will be talking and they talk directly to the audience. it's really like clever, and i don't know, i just love him. >> how many books has he wrote? >> five or six, most are nonfiction, and he has like a website he started called mixedweeds and it's fun le. >> do you have a game plan or free styling it? >> bouncing around. i like sureman, but he's tomorrow so i don't know if i'll come back to see him or not. >> what is it about sherman that you like? >> prose is just so poetic. that's the only way to say it, such a beautiful writer. >> your first time here? >> yeah, first time here, i'm really excited. >> did you bring anyone with you?

>> no, but i'm meeting my parents who live in northern virginia. they are somewhere around here, somewhere, yeah. >> it's like a family affair? >> yeah. i mean, my mom's the one who got me into reading, i guess. she's a big, big, reader, reads everything. i guess like when she heard about it, sthefs excited, so i figured we'd meet up, so e,, yeah. >> if you say i'm going to the book festival and say, i don't want to go, why would you tell them to come? >> i don't know -- just -- to promote literature, i guess. i don't know how to say it, but the vibe here is just all about books, just like heaven. >> what are you majoring in? >> english and marketing. i love books. i always read my entire life. >> thank you very much for talking with us. that's it from the book signing area of the national book festival. if you want measure information -- >> live at the national book

festival, 2011 national book festival in the mall at washington, d.c.. we've been live all day. a couple more hours of coverage, and now joining us is the author of this book, sylvia nasar. she's a long time "new york times" economic correspondent. ms. nasar, why start with jane austen and charles dickens? >> it's not an exik textbook or a series of pore -- portraits, but a story of an idea that is so new that jane austen never entertained it. >> what does that mean?

>> the idea that the bottom nine-tenths of humanity could ever have lives weren't just on earth to drudge their way through life in poverty and misery. .. >> had many one set of clothes, no education, potatoes were too much of a luxury, and you had no hope, no one thought, no one --

even someone like jane austen who was liberal, sophisticated, compassionate, observant, no one thought that your children or children's children would ever live any differently. and no authority, including the great political economists, said anything different. so what does charles dickens have to do with modern or contemporary political thought? >> guest: okay. well, only a generation later when charles dickens comes on the scene, he has the imagination to think, yes, it is, it may be possible for humans to overcome scarcity and to take their own fate, shape their own lives, um, and be --

not simply have to repeat the bleak and miserable past. and that's what "the christmas carol" is about. "the christmas carol" is an attack on the early economic consensus that said the nation could become richer, you know, the industrial revolution trade could make the country richer, but the bottom nine-tenths were not really going to benefit. >> host: from what did friedrich engels and karl marx, where did they come from? from what tradition, what issues? >> guest: well, they came from germany. they'd wound up in england where they felt, as many other people did, that they were witnessing the, um, the modern age in the

most, in the capital of the world. the creation of a commercial, free market, democratic society that completely, um, overturned the traditions of the past. and their feeling was -- remember, they were germans who came from a much poorer, um, much more authoritarian country. and they came with the notion that this wasn't going to work, that this commercial society that england had developed was going to self-destruct. and their reasoning was that the nation was getting richer but that the people who worked could never, could never benefit. >> host: one of the things that struck me in your book was at one point in industrial england the average life span of a male

in manchester, england, was 17 years. >> guest: well, cities were, i mean, this is interesting because cities were very unhealthy places, and there was a lot of discussion about whether -- it wasn't that people were poorer, but they were a lot closer together. so they got a lot more illnesses that killed especially infants which is how you got that, that kind of, um, 17-year life span. so there was a lot of discussion just as there was about is this free market system, can that possibly work? there's a lot of discussion whether cities were each viable. and lots of people thought that they were cesspools not only of disease, but of all kinds of corruption, sin, etc. of course, it turned out that,

of course, it turned out that, um, that cities became very livable, right? and were exactly where everyone wanted to be. and they did, you know, and they also became a lot healthier over time. >> host: sylvia nasar is our guest. here is her latest book, "grand pursuit: the story of economic jeep yus." if you want to talk with our author, 202-737-2002 in the mountain and pacific time zone. you can also send her a tweet or an e-mail, booktv@cspan.org. sylvia nasar, who was alfred marshall? >> guest: alfred marshall was the person who turned economics

from the dismal science into the cheerful science because he discovered that, that there was a, that there was a mechanism that was going to drive the average living standard up, and that was productivity. that was, that was all these businesses, all these, um, these firms that were being driven by competition to become more efficient, to be able to produce more with the same resources. and that -- but his real contribution was to say that that is going to push up real wages. the same competition that makes businesses constantly look for ways to do more with less is also necessarily going to push up the average living standards.

so for the first time, so the victorian economic miracle was for the first time in history the average living standards went up. why? because of this increase in productivity. and that was, and it's the same reason that now our incomes -- even after the current economic crisis -- are five times higher than in 1930, ten times higher than in jane austen's day. and the kind of destitution that was the norm is now the exception. be. >> host: how did, how did we get there? finish. >> guest: well -- >> host: what changed? >> guest: okay. some people would say that it was technology.

but, but the fact is that, um, those 2,000 years, you know, between, between the roman empire and queen victoria when nothing changed in the way that people lived was full of advances in invention, hot of invention -- lots of invention. i think the medieval chinese invented everything that was -- [laughter] but none, none of those inventions ever were applied to the ordinary business of life and, therefore, they never affected the way people lived. okay? so what changed? it was ideas. ideas changed. and, first, the idea of the early, the people who came before my book -- adam smith, the early political

economists -- who argued that the wealth of a nation wasn't the gold in the king's coffers, but the income that you could generate and that, um, in other words, what you could do with the resources that you, that you had. and who argued for breaking up these royal monopolies and letting people move from their towns, all these -- creating competition, okay? so that was, that was the first thing, and that did, that unleashed this tremendous explosion of, you know, people were all of a sudden applying all this accumulated knowledge, but to produce things that people wanted, okay? so that was, that was the first breakthrough. and, but then the question was, then the question was, you know, would -- first of all, would it

benefit most people? because most people were still, you know, impoverished. so that was the debate, that was the debate, could it. and marshall really, um, you know, before marshall economics was about what you couldn't do, you know, and the message to most people was resign yourself to the station in life to which you were born and hope for a better one in heaven. after marshall it said that you, you know, that you can look forward to a better future, and you could even influence your children's future because if it's productivity then, then education will matter. then, you know, getting job training will matter. moving from one industry to another, there are all kinds of ways that ordinary people could affect their future. >> host: sylvia nasar, are we

living in a john maynard keynesian world? >> guest: well, yes, in the sense that, in the sense that the problems we're facing right now aren't, our problem is not that we have slow productivity growth. i mean, i think that, um, if the u.s., for example, just continues to repeat its track record of the last 20 years, in another, in another generation our incomes will have doubled again, okay? so that's not the problem. the problem that keynes addressed was these temporary but very acute economic breakdowns that resulted either in extreme insulation or extreme unemployment. extreme inflation or extreme

unemployment. and those breakdowns came from disruptions in the flow of money which determine the level of economic activity in the short run. and right now we have had a big financial shock, right? from the collapse of, of housing prices that very much damaged our financial sector. we have big debt problems just as keynes faced at the end of world war i and which caused a tremendous amount of economic instability. so he was looking at, not at problems of -- he wasn't worried that, you know, about europe not getting richer in the long run. he was worried about the political fallout if you don't do something about the acute suffering that these crises create. and that's, that's kind of the

issue now, that we have, had more than 9% unemployment for more than two years, and obviously, it's not creating the kind of suffering that 25% unemployment created in the be '30s because our incomes are five times as high. unemployment is half as much, and we have more, we have more savings, we have more resources. so it's not -- but, but it's not, you know, it's causing a lot of, you know, it's still causing a lot of suffering. and the question is should you, should you let nature take its course, or should you intervene? and then the question is, well, do we know how to intervene? and keynes would have said, yes, that we knew, we knew what to do

after world war i, we knew even better what to do at the beginning of the great depression, and we didn't do it then, but we did do it after world war ii when, finally, as a result of those earlier experiences his advice was taken. and, by the way, endorsed by none other than his ideological opponent, friedrich hayek, who also agreed, no, you know, high unemployment, extreme unemployment and extreme inflation are not compatible with democracy and free markets. be okay? >> host: sylvia nasar is our guest, "grand pursuit" is her newest book. she's also the author of "a beautiful mind." the first call up for her comes from bridgewater, new jersey. new jersey, you're on booktv. please, go ahead.

>> caller: hi, i, as a european-trained physician with the emphasis on social medicine, i can assure you that i will read your book. so, but i wonder if i could ask you a sort of philosophical question. um, there was a time when humans lived in the countryside with their animals, and they had the natural enemy and bacteria who would cut down the population a lot. and there was a sort of pyramid or production did help us, and urbanization did help us from separate ourselves from the infections. but now we have a reverse pyramid where the entrepreneurs and the producer and the consumer expend so much of the garbage accumulation, that we are now being poisoned as our ancestors were being poisoned by the bacterias in the countryside by our own waste and our own garbage. and do you think the capitalist notion has to undergo, now, some

sort of restraint on how much junk a human being can accumulate? >> host: sylvia nasar. >> guest: well, i'm surprised by your assertion that we're poisoning ourselves because it looks as if, it looks as if longevity is increasing and that even though we have some new health problems like obesity that come from being rich, that generally people are also better nourished and healthier. am i wrong? >> host: caller is gone. >> guest: oh. >> host: do you have any more that you want to add to your question? >> guest: no. >> host: all right, we'll move on to philadelphia. you're on with sylvia nasar. >> caller: hi. thank you so much for taking my call. i read "a beautiful mind," it's a remarkable book. it's so beautifully written,

it's so, so well done. i want to tell you that identify recommended -- i've recommended it to others, i even did a number of courses on writing for auditors and accountants, and i talk about books when i talk about writing to try to get people more interested in reading. and i did recommend this book and told them how much it really impressed me. so i just wanted to tell you for thank you for the book, it was beautifully, beautifully done. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: you're quite welcome. have a good day. [laughter] >> host: first of all, you're a former economics correspondent for "the new york times", correct? is. >> guest: yes. >> host: how did you find, "a beautiful mind"? >> guest: well, i was going to add that i was also a literature major before i encountered economics. but i found the story of john nash, i was an economics reporter at the times, and i was covering some economic story, and i heard a rumor that this

crazy mathematician who hung around the math building at princeton might win a nobel prize. so i asked the person who told me, what is his name? and he said, nash. and i said, oh, you don't mean the nash of the nash equilibrium? and the nash equilibrium is something that's so old and so basic that you learn it in the first week of graduate school, and you would never imagine that the person, that the nash would be alive because it's such an old result, and it's so basic. so that intrigued me, and long story short, ultimately, a year and a half later i wrote when nash did win the nobel, and i realized right away that when i first heard the story that, you're a journalist, it was the most amazing story that i'd ever come across as a journalist.

it was like a fairy tale. there's so few real-life stories that have a third act, and when he won the prize, i wrote a story for the sunday business section of the new york times. yeah. [laughter] >> host: well, i will tell the caller that "grand pursuit" does not read like a textbook. you find out quite a bit about the people behind economic ideas; the friedmans, karl marx, etc. and this is her newest book. fairfax, iowa, you're on with sylvia nasar. please, go ahead. >> caller: hello. and thank you so much for taking my call, and i certainly look forward to reading this book. my question is, over the past few years i have had this feeling that we are moving towards a dix sewn yang kind of life lifestyle here in the united states, not quite as extreme, perhaps, but in attitude and spirit.

it seem like it's going to happen. i also feel we have many of our dukes and duchesses and kings and queens, economic kings and queens and so on in this country we just don't call on that. our ancestors left the old country to come here for a better economic opportunity, and so many people now, i think, are just feeling helpless. what do you suggest over your span, of the span of time that you have included in your book, what was the most effective thing the people did in order to rise above the almost oppressive economic situations that we have now in this country and in the world? thank you. >> guest: thank you. that's, i think that's a question that is on a lot of people's minds, and i would say that the person in the book who, whose attitude was the most helpful in economic emergencies

was john maynard keynes because even when everything looked dark and it was midnight, he knew that morning was going to come, and he was able to communicate that. he was able to put things in perspective and remind people how far we've come and how we've overcome crises that are just as bad and, in fact, were much more devastating than the one we're facing now. i think it really, i think it's a sort of general truism that, that when you're facing a big challenge, it really -- it doesn't help to throw up one's hands and to say, oh, my god, things are so bad. it really helps to remind one's self how many right things that we've done and that this, that this challenge doesn't mean

that, you know, that we don't know anything or that we have been doing everything wrong by any means. because, because just think about this one thing which is that right now even after a nasty recession and this very lackluster recovery and all these problems that are still sitting out there, the average income, the average standard of living in the united states is higher than it was in the middle of the 2000s. that is six years ago. so that shouldn't make us feel that we don't need to be energetic about facing our problems now, but it should also make us feel like we don't have to panic. we can, you know, we can

confidently address this. >> sylvia nasar, you have a picture here of john maynard keynes with harry white, the so-called father of the bretton woods agreement. first of all, do you think harry white was a spy, have you come down on one side or the other as far as his spiness? >> guest: well, i think there's no question because the evidence is, the evidence is overwhelming that harry dereker the white was -- dexter white was an agent of the kgb, and, but he also, he also was keynes' partner in laying the groundwork for postwar recovery. so, you know, one doesn't, one -- he was disloyal, that's for sure. he was deluded, that's for sure. but he did something that was,

that was very fine. >> host: bismarck, north dakota, please go ahead with your question or comment for sylvia nasar. >> caller: hello, thank you very much for publishing this. why didn't communism work? >> guest: why didn't communism, central planning work? well, the person who had the most insight about this was someone named friedrich hayek who in the 1920s he and his colleagues in austria realized that our market economy is, in a sense, is a, an amazing generator and aggregator of information. and that you can't have, that

can't be reproduced by any group of people no matter how smart they are or any, any planners. and, and they, they argued that no modern economy could be run centrally because, because you could never generate the information that markets do. because markets set prices, and prices are based on our signals that we then with our own private information be respond to. ask that's the wonderful thing about -- and that's the wonderful thing about our economy be, that in pursuing, in be acting on what we know, we bring forth what we need and want. >> host: well, unfortunately, we are out of time. we didn't get a chance to talk about joan robinson, irving

fisher, the friedmans in general, but this is the most recent book by sylvia nasar, "grand pursuit: the story of economic genius." are you working on a new book? >> guest: oh, please. i am going to spend a lot of -- i'm going to cultivate my garden and think, and think thoughts. [laughter] >> host: several ya nasar, thank you for joining us at the national book festival here on booktv. well, we've got one more author coming up, and in just a minute isabel wilkerson will be in the history and biography tent. here is her book. she is a pulitzer prize winner. this book is a winner of the national book critics circle award. it's "the warmth of other suns," and thest the story -- it's the story of african-american immigration to the north. ms. wilkerson will be talking about her book in just a minute, and then booktv is going to joiner in the history and biography tent.

we're going to be taking your calls, your e-mails, your tweets, talk to the audience. so join us here for the last of the coverage here at the book festival today, and all day tomorrow we will be live again. you can find all that schedule on booktv.org. now we're going to take you over to the history and

>> eighty miles to the next gas station. it is a forbidding area. these states are countries in themselves. so i was veering off the road and my parents said, you need to stop the car. if you won't stop the car let us out.