on "in .. changes with gertrude stein's concept they brought to life here at this bookstore in miami.

the cafe and courtyards, magnificent. thank you for having me. this is an absolute pleasure to be here in this wonderful place. this will not shock you because you don't know me but i started out as a poet and the idea of writing about crime is the farthest thing that has ever been from my mind. i have never pictured myself in any way interested in guns, dead bodies, i have tried to stay away from them for as long as i can and as far as i can. and usually even when we are watching tv at home and someone draws out a gun i am the first person to reach for the remote and change the channel. service won't surprise you but

the fact that ended up writing about an assassination was a complete shocker to me. the way this fell into my lap so to speak was as was mentioned earlier in the introduction, this political assassination that i wrote about in summer of the 1992 in berlin, germany at a restaurant and two gunmen, one with a machine gun and the other with a handgun walked into the restaurant and started shooting at the guests who had gathered over a dinner parties at night and shot them all four times -- four died instantly and the other four survived. of the four survivors one ended up being my house guest for a week. i knew very little about him. he was a friend of a friend who

was coming to town in new haven, connecticut where i lived and as i was trying to cook dinner in the evening and keeping him company, trying to be a good host, chopping onions and he would be sitting across from me trying to help and making conversation and i made the mistake of asking so, what happened to you in 1992? arrest was history. he would tell me a new installment of what had happened. not simply the night of the murder of which to many minds might seem the most interesting or most intriguing part of the story. but actually what i found most fabulous and most engrossing was the way in which the

investigation and everything else unraveled. so i would be making my dinner and going about my own thing and the kitchen and he would be giving me the next day of the investigation, the next day and big -- by the time he reached the trial which was a year into his storytelling i thought that i should take a trip to berlin, germany and visit other people. so i sent all of this up to say that when you have a writer who started out as a poet and is generally very squeamish around anything having to do with blood, then you get a crime story told in a way that few crime stories are told which is that against everybody's advice, rather than talking about

delaying the crimes of the readers would be interested in reading the story so they get to the gruesome crime half way through the book or two surge down in the book, being as squeamish as i am are get rid of it in the first five minutes of the book and say let's move on now. and i hope if and when you decide to read the book you agree that in a way this was not wholly a pilot's look into a crime but also women's look at a very male-dominated, oh story and the reason i call it a male-dominated oh story is the killers were men, the people who died were men. all the people who get involved are men. so i guess it was for me to try to look at this intriguing story and say how would i look at this? what would i find interesting in

this? what is it that would make such a gruesome story really intriguing for all readers from a perfectly new perspective or completely revolutionary perspective and you will tell me if i have achieved that, creating that perspective. that is how it goes. i get rid of the crime and what i follow-through with pretty diligently because after i took my trip to berlin the subsequent characters that i've met, one seemed to be more intriguing than the other. that wasn't because any one of these heroes or survivors investigators, where in any way perfect people.

but rather that in there imperfection, in their fallibility, they all together contributed to bringing about a very historic trial and verdict which by the accounts that i received from several legal historians happens to be one of the most important trials in the history of europe in the 20th century. you are probably just as surprised as i am why none of us heard about it. that is precisely why i decided to write about it. because it seemed like a very important story that has gone untold. so you know there are eight people sitting, two people walk-in. one person stands guard. four people get shot and died

immediately. and four others survive. the first person who was in my kitchen talking to me was one of these four survivors. his name was tryviz. the first question asked was what did you do when you first got home? it may not seem a very smart question to many of you but it was very curious to me. what if one of us survived such an atrocious crime and the police come, we go to the headquarters of the police, get interrogated or whatever they do, fingerprint and it is all over and several hours later, in

his case 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. and you are alone and have to go back to your life as usual, you have to go back to your own apartment. what is that like? what -- that was one of the first questions. what happened to you the next morning? what happened to you when you were done? you can now go home? so are will read a very short passage from the moment he arrived home and what are his thoughts and follow through with some of the other characters. these microphones are wilting. it is ok?

call. sorry about that. i broke the microphone. thank you. all he wanted to do was to make calls. he paced the perimeter of the apartment from his living room couch across the television set revenues was on the balcony for air to the telephone on his bedroom desk to the stove in the kitchen where he was boiling water for t over and over again. is morning routine had vanished. the thought of eating or going to bed did not enter his mind. he dials his secretary. i won't be in today he told her and when asked why he broke into an endless saab. were you rob? is your mother dead? is your daughter missing? came the secretary's frantic questions. all he would say to her was turn on the news. he took a shower.

under the rushing water he said his eyes were wide open. if he closed them the image of an extended arm in a black leather sleeves would invade his mind. was not the streaming bader struck his body that he felt a king in his right cheek and campbell and remembered the blow to his right side when he fell off his chair at the restaurant. the age of real-time news had not done and the reporters were not yet looking for him. on an ordinary morning he would have wrestled in peace but against the uproar within him this quiet was the antithesis to peace. he returned to his desk and made another call. was to a friend on the editorial board of a leading daily. hello there. this is tryviz. hey, there, tryviz, the voice replied, softly modifying the last syllable of the name as

tryviz had told him to. think of paris he told germans who had trouble remembering his name. you have me. a slight mispronunciation, he figured was a small sacrifice for the sake of good monarchs. he crafted a single sentence to forestall the ordeal to the busy journalist. i was there at the restaurant where the four men died last night. i heard. let's have coffee one of these days to talk over. tryviz, taken aback by the lukewarm reply was forming his next sentence when the reporter excused himself and rushed off. the reporter's quick dismissal caused a wave of panic in him. for years he had collected journalists the way others collect stamps.

in their company that captive audience spinning tale with skills he had been perfecting since childhood when he and his friends who could not afford to go to the movies pull their allowances together to buy a single ticket for an emissary to c and recount in 90 minutes over a span of ours so elaborately that the real film if he ever got to see it invariably fell short of the description. journalists have always been tryviz's most formidable ally. years ago after his visa had expired the same editorial writer had saved him from deportation by writing a scathing piece on germany after repressive immigration policy. by now to whom could he turn now? has he brooded the telephone rang. the same voice in the receiver once more. i am sorry, parter. it took me a bit to register

what you said. did you say you yourself were at the restaurant last night? that is what i said. then we must talk consistently. so they get together and he interviews tryviz and rights of an editorial that run the same day in the paper. what becomes the thrust of this murder in the beginning in september, october, november of 1992 when it happened was whodunit? on the one hand the exiled iranians who had their own opinions, there were politicians and journalists who were circulating other possibilities and a slew of ideas that were

circulating around. that was the dominant theme of the first three months. very quickly thereafter a very wonderful and one of the most important and intriguing characters in this book got assigned to the case, a prosecutor discovered that the truth -- i don't want to kill the plot line for you but he sides with one possibility within the slew of theories swirling around that this is a governmental sponsored series of terrorist acts and assassinations. so after his assignment to the case the story shifts from being kind of a whodunit to will they do the right thing? will the people who have power

or the people who can and have the ability to bring justice to these victims do what is expected of them and act nobly? and do what really the law clearly mandated them to do. so that leads to a trial which opens with a year after the assassination and nearly four year proceedings be personal very dramatic four year courtroom proceedings finally leads to historic verdict in april of 1997. it was mentioned during the introduction that there are a confluence of characters in this

book and that was part of the challenge of putting this book together. if i had fictionalized it i would have eliminated at least 20 of them and easily stuck to by leading man who would have been the prosecutor and the investigator and done away with everyone else and endow him with all the great qualities and ability to save the day which eventually he does but not by himself. however, it was a piece of nonfiction and i believe again despite the advice i was receiving, raptors and simplifying the story or fictionalizing the story, readers are very sophisticated nowadays. they have read so much that they can actually manage a multi character story and keep track

of numerous character is going in and out and don't need a singular hero. certainly not in the twenty-first century. we have given up a lot of our old myths and whatever dreams we once had about singular heroes saving the day and we understand that a confluence of characters and personalities and events need to come together in order for a great, great triumph to take place. the great, i suppose, character in this book in a way becomes its own plot line and the narrative itself. and what i hope you will find is the unraveling of events take a life of their own and that becomes the through line which we follow. when i took my first trip to

berlin to assess and see whether it's the angle of this were as appealing as the one i had discovered in my own kitchen, i ran into the widow of one of the four men had died in the restaurant at night and immediately after she opened her door to me and i entered the apartment she asked where in the united states i lived and i said at the time i lived in new york and eyes that i was coming from new york and she said that this was practically the surge sentence out of her mouth. she wished she had been here on 9/11 and i said why? she said because she too have lost a loved one, her husband, in september, on september 17th,

about ten years earlier and she knew in search the web with those who have lost her husband's and she also had a daughter, and the children who have lost their fathers were going through. and she wished she had been here after 9/11. she had been in new york after 9/11 because she thought that all the widows, all the people like her, women, should come together and creating a network of widows who had suffered through an act of terrorism because it knew no national boundaries, that this was a global problem. that had afflicted her and any american woman in the states. and it was in listening to her that i really decided that the story, the value of the story

was beyond the perimeters in which i was thinking about it initially. that there was something to what she was saying, something about these acts of crime which had been sponsored by radical ideologies, in this case the government of iran, bonded all of the victims regardless of where they came from and i found an extremely moving and it was the moment that really gave me the incentive, made me resolute about wanting to write this book. last but not least i want to introduce her to you and have you listened to her frustrations and experience because we are just coming out of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and i think

much of what she told me in her grieving process reminded me of the stuff that i was hearing being played on radio and television in the past few weeks. her name shohreh is. we simplified -- she and her husband had a daughter together named sarah. and referred to sarah and the daughter of tryviz who appeared in the previous section and her name is stalin may. you'll hear about two girls almost the same age, imam and

tryviz to you already met. something very interesting that happened, while tryviz is trying to gather documents, try to get the courts to see the truth about the case, try to feed the proper information to journalists here and there. in the midst of all this and god knows recovering from the trauma he experienced, his 10-year-old daughter is having fainting spells. and nobody seems to be -- at least the first few weeks -- be able to diagnose why she is having these. so he takes her to the doctor and we opened up in the waiting

room. amid the glare of lights in the exam room, tryviz waited, sometimes kissing and sometimes stroking the hand of his daughter. she looked even more frail in the hospital gown. he felt restless on behalf of his aspiring 12-year-old dancer who had been told to remain still until the doctor returns. for two findings sells for confounding several pediatricians had forced the father and daughter to see a cardiologi cardiologist. two fainting spells on her part and build on the father's part. ever since the morning after the murders, tryviz had tried to keep her from the fallout. his first phone call had been through his ex-wife to shield salome from the news. before picking her up on

tuesday, he comes through the apartment to hide all signs of the case from view. photos and letters and phone messages and newspaper clippings. the more he hid the more she wanted to know. how did it happen? how many were there? did anyone hit you? they came, they left, nothing happened at all. he would say. wishing to move on. but her questions continued. did you have blood on you? did you scream or cry? did you cry out? are you scared? the depth of her curiosity astounded him. once he yelled enough! and she stopped asking. but he knew she had not stopped thinking. the dream of becoming a dancer had turned her into a reluctant leader. so he designed intricate plans

for her meals. instead of an elaborate dinner he lined up an epicure a ray of tiny appetizers which he paraded before his ballerina at intervals. in these small tidy apartment brimming with music father surrendering to the daughter's winds had agreed to be a dance student in the tutelage of his diminutive coach the tone deaf and hopelessly and coordinated. his performances were memorable. what he lacked in talent he compensated for in which. when he failed to remember his steps he limped across side across the floor. as he dragged a foot he greeted an imaginary audience not with good day but with his own person german concoction, farce on your day. nothing like a bit of vulgarity to bond a part-time father with

his three adolescent children. what he could not fathom was the joy, however abundant, was no substitute for safety which he no longer felt. nor could he imagine her days in school among classmates who treated her like a sensation. only some of the questions she asked where her own. the rest were once the children blocking her father at the supreme hero on the nightly news incessantly badgered her with while she steered into their faces and fought back tears. when the first fainting spell came over salome, he thought she had starved herself. when she fainted on a full stomach he blamed himself and his complicated life for his daughter's malady. the -- cardiologists said he should observe her closely. he tried hard to keep her out of

his own gloomy world blessed the killers or the mere idea of them robbed her of happy childhood. now it seemed that the vacuum he had surrounded her with was robbing her of breath. unlike salome, sarah wanted to know nothing. the difference is salome's father had survived and sarah's father died. in november she asked shohreh where her father was now and if he was in pain. in december she had asked if she could buy in christmas gifts and leave them under the tree until he returned. in february she had asked if her mother intended to marry another man and if so, if he was going to move in with them. by march she no longer asked. if she heard the name of the restaurant on the radio she rushed to turn it off. if she recognized the faces of

family or friends on television she walked out of the living room. to helped sarah and her mother cope with the husband's loss shohreh's parents had moved in with the two of them for a few weeks. their presence strengthen the two of them their shohreh could not tell them that it did. sentences failed her. what she had an abundance was tears. her parents third at her over breakfast and waited in vain for her to form a sentence as simple as how did you sleep? her senses failed her. she rarely felt hunger. she barely tasted a perfunctory bites she took in front of them to assure them of her appetite. her parents, a government clerk and house wife, had led predictable lives. it was the security of their lives that had given shohreh the

courage to rebel against them and go to europe. and mary rebellious man like herself. wondered would sarah not have been better off with a pair of ordinary parents for life? that a pair of extraordinary ones for only a time? all day she turned these stocks over in her mind, blazing with anger. to help with his extraordinary this she would mumble to herself. husband and rage turn now. stick with me and you will be famous like you deserve to be, he had promised her on the first night they had met. had death been his path to fame she shouted in her head. he had abandoned them. all her -- for pregnancy she had been alone. remembering his absence she would grow more and you're

furious each day. she wondered if it had been a warning to prepare to raise their child alone. reason had abandoned her. she no longer thought of him or his absence as involuntary. he had left them yet again. the thought came to her when she played their old family movies. c-span one night watching reels of film to find him only once and only for a few seconds walking with her along the race track where sarah ran her first competition. the footage so keenly resemble their life now as if through them her husband had sketched in their future. everyone smiled, following instructions but he, there director, with invisible. his vision filled the screen yet he would not be seen. just like now. thank you for listening. [applause]

>> i have been told by the wonderful people running this establishment that you ought to wait for the microphone to reach you before you ask your question. >> what is the significance of the turquoise palace? are haven't read the book yet. >> what is the significance of the turquoise palace? there is a moment, i would like to think it is an exciting moment with in the trial where a key witness, somebody no one knew existed, shows up and he becomes the smoking gun for the attorneys in the trial. it is during a dialogue that is being conducted on the stand that you will know the answer to

your mystery. [laughter] >> given your background as a poet, i wonder if you have ever written non-fiction prior to this, and if not, did you have any thought about fictionalizing it and telling a slightly different story in that manner? >> this is a work of nonfiction. my previous work in english was a memoir. after eyepiece this together a decided that this is really what i want to do at least for the foreseeable future.

that what i love doing is going out and finding these stories that are immensely significant but have either fallen by the wayside, never made it to the headlines or were dismissed or shoved under the rug. i might sound paranoid but perhaps conspiratorial reasons. who knows? but i found that i loved the notion of finding these stories. and some of them at least in this case are so fabulous that you could hardly come up with fiction that cannot do this. we will find out if i did it justice but if i have done it justice, than you agree with me that it is so beautiful, it is so astounding, just in the way that it unfolded that to have

fictionalized it would have been malicious. i also found that in some great ways, there were several dozen of these political assassinations that had taken place and i only write about one. that is because this one happened quite in a magical way in a way at the end of the five years. >> did you receive significant cooperation from the survivors's families? and from families of those that did not survive? >> a friend of mine who is also a writer and a journalist herself read the earlier version of the manuscript and said that she was really touched and deeply moved by the quality of the interviews and information that i gathered and i could have

fooled her and said i am a fantastic interviewer and if they would only open up to me. in truth, precisely because this story had not been covered -- the story had been covered but from certain angles. from the deeply political angle, and in pieces because it was a five year span. one days there was a very exciting day at the trial and one day a big article in the newspaper and two weeks later there would be something else but never in one big kind of tapestry of the bold story and all its glory. and because it had not happen, all these people, the survivors, the windows and the people who lost loved ones were waiting for someone to show up.

i don't think i exercised any fantastic skill to get them to talk. they were waiting for years for someone to show up and talk. the rest of it was just on record because the trial had already concluded and all the material was there and there was an archive that i simply went to and they were all fortunately cataloged on shelves. otherwise it would have been impossible to put together. >> i am a little bit unsure of one thing. the part of the german cooperation from the authorities. am i to understand that there was a hesitancy for lack of cooperation from the authorities for a crime like this committed in their own country? i find that to be unusual

considering the western european country and the general attitude that this type of thing taking place on their own soil. i can imagine german business interests involved with iran that are very strong interests but for something like this that is that dramatic that sounds to me to be something unexpected. not an expert on it but from common knowledge. >> you are right. one would think based on what one knows about germany and europe, about the standards that this should have been unusual. this should have been treated as a completely unacceptable and crimes like this which happened in austria, france, sweden, switzerland, italy, "21" --

greece, united states. [inaudible] >> argentina later run. they were happening. and oftentimes what would happen was eager -- if the perpetrators were arrested, in some cases they would not be arrested. even if they were really good and got away or sometimes because of precisely business interests that you referred to, the authority's would be a little slower than usual in apprehending them. and they would slip away. there were a couple cases where they slipped away and in the case of another assassination in 1989, in vienna, austria, one of the perpetrators was apprehended and two weeks later was put on a plane and deported to tehran and

the authorities cited national interests and said because of our national interests we will not prosecute this man. it is because of that -- in my view eventually even though from 1980 when the first case occurred until 1997 when the verdict on this case was issued, there is the 17 year lapse. there is a burgeoning or gathering of momentum of these assassinations precisely because they seem to be able to get away with it. because of trade interests or business interests and also because given that the united states no longer had an embassy in tehran because of the crisis of 1979 and the united states was no longer present, at a

political or other interests in iran, it had become sort of a beacon of hope to tehran or iran in general as a place for europe to slip into and for this balance of power finally between europe and the united states to happen within the middle east via this foothold in iran. so they were diplomatic interests as well as trade and business interests. by 1992 when it happened, trade relations between iran and germany are at a peak. the iranians are absolutely certain that there is no way the germans would jeopardize those trade relations over a silly trial. and fro what makes this story really fabulous is the germans precisely wanted to do what iran

had hoped the german administration politicians involved did want to make the trial go away. they wanted to make the case go away but it just wouldn't. and so the process of how it wouldn't go away, our it is the two powers come together to cover this up and yet it seems to go on and take on a life of its own makes a really wonderful. >> how has it changed you to write this? you said it changed the course of your career that you were a poet and you wrote a memoir and now you would like to do more books of those genres. it must have had an impact on your writing. >> i was thinking about what i

want to write next. i have a couple of ideas. i have planned one that is very exciting to me. the only thing it has changed within me is i once thought that i would like to try my hand at fiction, but after this i think there are so many great stories that have gone untold that if they are discovered and properly told by people who can have proper access, proper knowledge, because i was in a privileged position with this story. being iranian or having been born and raised in iran, i clearly had access to a whole slew of things that a non iranian would have a hard time getting at. so i think there are

individuals, individual writers who are particularly position to do certain stories and i think we owe it to not just to the public but to history to -- to literature, to rediscovered these stories and show what it is about them that they grieving. i keep talking about this as a great story, but in addition to the fact that it is a great story, is also a very essential story for all of us today who want to understand what in the world is going on with iran. it seems like the more we spend time -- i say we -- the we i am using includes the white house

to ordinary americans who are just well informed. the more we spend time learning about it and reading about it the less we understand it. it seems like a terribly enigmatic place. and i think part of the reason -- i don't find it enigmatic. i find it in part tragic, but not so enigmatic. i think it is because there are fundamental narrative's we don't know about each other. there are certain fundamental stories that we need to know about each other. i believe that this is one of them. during each presidency in the united states we hear iran is cast in a new light somehow. it always a dark light but rather the angles change and all

at and we hear one take on the country and yet it doesn't need to the greater comprehension, greater understanding or anything. i think perhaps part of it has to do with the fact that there are really important narrative that we aren't telling the outsiders. there are insider stories that we pass on to each other within the community, within the community of iranians and we don't manage to pass it on. and then there are stories that somehow in addition to being translated but also need to be interpreted and passed on and i think those are the kind of stories that we even as human beings when we start to fall in love or become friends that are among the first things we exchange with each other. where did you grow up? what school did you go to?

is their basic information? not simply about the facts or the data of the location and population of the country but also the fundamental emotions that -- fundamental events that really changed the nation or shape the nation and i think it is for writers like me who probably live in that overlapping space between the two cultures and countries to figure them out and tell them. >> we shouldn't wait for a book poetry about murders? >> a book of poetry about murder. there is an idea. but i hope when you read it you find some passages are pretty poetic. thank you.

thank you for coming. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction offer or boat you like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweak as at twitter.com/booktv. >> on your screen is the tower in the center of the university of texas at austin campus. booktv has been on location here at the university of texas conducting interviews with some of their professors who are also authors. every sunday during the month of november we will bring you those interviews and 1:00 p.m. eastern time as part of our university series. >> wednesday on booktv on line, watch live streaming coverage of the national book awards from new york city, red carpet interviews with not fiction finalists and the award ceremony started get 6:00 p.m. eastern.

>> that is the story that on the surface does sound very intriguing to me. for me to go forward with that, she would have to have a personal inquiry. i am not one of those journalists who will show up and knock on doors. i have to have the story. and it would have to have the element that i am looking for. when it is already in the paper that in the other journalists are running around it. i am also not a gun for higher. i have to want to go in and write it as my book. but it is intriguing. i would love to see an e-mail from her. if it is something you have a handle on and aiken talked to everybody and they want to tell their story, i did write a book about oil but it was more in the new york and dubai, it is intriguing. i get dozens of these and looking to them and it is not really right for me or it is going to take too much time or be too dangerous.

i don't like to put myself into real danger. i would not write a story where i would have to go somewhere dangerous or get involved with mob people. i have gone those e-mails too from people who have done horrible things. everybody e-mails me. when elliot spitzer went down the madam was he mailing me. i explained i'm going to hang out for a madam for a year. i got e-mail from charlie sheen people. that i would love to write but i don't think my wife would let me. everyone contact me at some point. i like the stories being tracked because no one has heard of them. >> "sex on the moon". he got arrested in orlando. big trial. >> helicopters, closed a major highway. headlines in tampa yet they covered it up. i'm not going to say -- i don't know how nasa covered it up but they were very embarrassed by this guy. one of there and who robbed them.

a big trial and yet whether public or not i don't know how public it was. it was a federal trial. there were reporters there. it was written about so little and didn't really -- it never exploded. there was a wonderful l.a. times article about it at the time, four page article and that was it. that was years ago. >> host: did nasa cooperate? >> guest: they were not thrilled and told everyone not to speak to me which makes people want to talk to me. i got back -- the mineral collector, never -- he collects rocks. his wife's name is crystal. he meets every monday night with a bunch of 56-year-old guys in an abandoned rec hall and trade rocks and he get any mail of the blue, do you want to buy a moonrock? immediately excited. then he starts to think something is fishy here and he decides something is going on so

he e-mails the fbi and says you might be interested in this and the fbi creates this whole case using axle as their main source and he became vice force. he reached out to me. wonderful guy. spend a lot of time talking to him and nasa people were feeding him things they wanted me to know. i decided i want to go to nasa and see what it is like. no one would talk to me. i went to their web site and sign up for level 924 which is an internal high-security tour. daily that ten people do it today. i figured they would cross check my name. is a government bureaucracy and we know how that works. i show up at nasa and they give me a security badge and i am inside nasa and then roberts starts texting me. there's a door in the back of the cafeteria. i was walking around being the ultimate guided tour by the guy who had robbed nasa. i got a lot of great information and i was able to get the court

documents. had a little group who helped me. i have a lawyer who kind of one of those guys who can do anything and has privatized who can go to tampa and get me the court records. >> host: this should be public anyway. >> guest: i filed under the freedom of information act and that the fbi files. took a year to send them to me. i was amazed to send the ball. i knew everything he was saying was true. i could pack everything up. i even had what was in his pockets when he was arrested. the fbi -- you see how hard they work when you get one of those files. they really going to. they had research on the rocks for 200 pages just to know what a moonrock is. you do get all the information that way. >> host: this is booktv's index. 202-737-0001 in the east and

central time zone. 0002 mountain and pacific time zones. you can send an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweak twitter.com/booktv. patrick in new london, connecticut. you are on booktv. >> question for you. when you are an author and become a screenwriter too what is the difference aside from the obvious having yet consolidated into a two hour movie format and does it get frustrating? seems to me whenever you watch a movie after you read a book 99% of the time you can always say there was something left out. i just saw a movie in theaters and read the book, not yours, but i was amazed important things get left out of a screenplay that were in the book. i understand you can't fit it all in but can you talk about that? >> i'm not a successful screenwriter. i have done one or two

screenplays. i did one adaptation of "ugly americans" that didn't get made. when i sell my books they bring in somebody else who does it. it is a process. screenplays are different from a book. all of the interior dialogue and all of the motivation that all that gets left out and they have to write it very succinctly, very action driven usually and often movies are not as good as the book. i have been very lucky. "the social network" was a phenomenal movie. they have to pick and choose. you can put everything in the book on the screen. it is a shorter format and it is not always relevant. i have seen movies before where they left something out and i have seen movies where they put too much in. is all the strength of the screenwriter and i think the hard thing is cutting things. most writers make the mistake of putting too much in. you want the screenplay to run

quickly and be fast and exciting and not spend a lot of time sitting around talking. in books you can get away with that but my books are very written like screenplays. i get attacked for that as well. i am always thinking of the movie when i write. i visualize every scene. i imagine justin timberlake doing it all. that is how i sit down and write. when i write it is that if i am writing a movie and book form. they are different. people who write screenplays didn't usually write books. >> host: michael tweets and what are your upcoming project storylines? >> guest: good question. michael is in boston. i think i know him. he is an incredible fashion designer. he works in boston. he wants me to tell secrets. i'm working on a big new project but i am not at liberty to say what it is about. it might be a female main

character which would be new for me. i have never written a female main character before. if i write that book next that will be it but i am not sure. i haven't decided yet what my next book is but i have projects and working on a couple television shows. i have scripted show i am working on and i have a show, reality type documentary show where i go inside stories every week which i have been working on. there are always macho guys on tv. i am the opposite of that. all those managers as wild, i am the one who doesn't succeed. i go inside these stories every week. all the stuff that people pitch to me essentially and i become a part of it and you can see the story but i get right out. so that is another show i am working on but i don't know yet what my next book is. i have an idea what it might be but haven't fully decided yet.

>> host: "ugly americans". are you familiar with carson block, muddy waters and the china media express' fraud? >> guest: no. sounds intriguing. i am not. i pitched a bunch of china stories. the tricky -- so much corruption. is dangerous spending time -- there are people making fortunes in china doing crazy things but it is a little dangerous for me to do one of those stories. i don't know specifically what story he is talking about but there are some good ones. >> host: robert says are you familiar with richard hoagland's working relationship to the moon? >> guest: it is familiar to me but i don't know. if you gave me more i might know what you are talking about. >> host: mario in miami. good afternoon. you are on booktv.

>> caller: these stories like a book and when the book is out. >> guest: a lot of people who tell me their story want money. i have two types of people telling me stories. people who want money or who have so much money that they don't want money but just want their story told which is often more fun. depends on the situation. i am not trying to write biographies of people. i really want to write my books that are about true stories but are a little different. i have in the past the main character bringing down the house. my first nonfiction book. i gave it 10% of pretty much everything and the movie was separate. they could become consultants on the film. it all depends on the move the

situation. some of the books they don't get anything. facebook book were all richer than i will ever be the rest of my life. it is different for every situation. my goal is to write the story and the problem when you are painting the characters is you can become beholden to them in a way. it is a weird partnership when you write a story about someone because they're not going to like everything you write in the book. something they will dislike. ..

>> guest: because it wants the story to be accurate, and it, you know, it must -- i believe that hollywood studios much prefer someone who, you know, gives themselves their life rights, gets involve today the point it's accurate but isn't running around the set trying to control everything. so the goal, of course s a partnership in which i can write the book however it needs to be. a good question, it's different for every project. you know, usually a main character if book becomes a success, they're going to get a lot out of it that has nothing to do with the payment i'm going to give them. they can become famous, first of all, they can use that in any way they want. the people from the facebook book, i believe, profited very well from it. i believe everyone involved did very well, including mark zuckerberg. i think "the social network" and

the accidental billionaires were very good for mark zuckerberg. i don't think the company would be worth $100 billion without the social network, and i really think it was a big part of making their image cool. and everyone knows him, and they know him in a way that they would never have known him, and i think that's a big positive. >> host: how is it that you were able to use a picture of mark zuckerberg on the front of your book? >> guest: you'd have to ask the publisher. i believe it's a photo of a public figure. i've seen a lot of books with obama on the coffer. there are different rules, and i'm not a lawyer, but as long as it's true, you can't -- you're not libeling anybody. as for photos, i think if it's a public figure, honestly, i have no idea how that works. i don't know anything about the law of it. i'm sure there are people who do. >> host: do you think you'll ever get the chance to chat with him? >> guest: yes, i think i will. when i met cheryl sand berg, she, you know, she came up to me

and said, you know, they did not like the book when it came out, they disagree with it, they say it's not true, however, now everyone's cool with me, and it would be kind of fun if i came to facebook and talked at some point. i think i was enemy number one for a good year, there's probably a ben mezrich carte -- dartboard in there, but everything's worked out. and she's done amazing stuff over there. i think she's really an incredible person. so i have no ill will towards them, and i don't think they have any ill will towards me. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> saturday and sunday, november 19th and 20th, booktv brings you live coverage there the miami book fair international in florida. we'll sit down with various authors who will be taking your phone calls live. on the 19th we'll have james

glek, john avlon and jim razzen berg, author of jfk, castro and america's doomed invasion of cuba's bay of pigs along with a few others. on the 20th, randall kennedy, author of racial politics and the obama presidency. brooke hauser, author of the new kids and several other authors will take your calls live from miami. visit booktv.org for more information on live coverage on the 2011 miami book fair international. >> here's a short author interview from c-span's campaign 2012 bus as it travels the country. >> karen beckwith, how did you decide which essays to include in this work? >> my co-editors and i organized with a grant from the aaron berg foundation, the project on american democracy, um, at the university of notre dame that we

would convene, um, by our estimation the best scholars on women in politics in the u.s., not only in the u.s., but, um, scholars who were working on u.s. women in politics. so we brought together a range of people, um, whose research we knew well and, um, convened for a two-day conference at notre dame, um, after which -- at that conference we discussedded all the manuscripts that constitute the chapters of these books, of this book and had some commentary about it and discussion and then put it together as an edited collection which cambridge university press published in 2008. >> describe the role of women described in this book. >> well, there are several emphases in the book, so let me tell you, first, what we're not doing in this book, we're not looking at public policy per se, we are not looking at women in the executive because even in 2008 there were so few women in the executive and not yet a major female candidate for the nomination for president of a

major political party in the united states. um, women at the executive level the research wasn't there yet to really support a good discussion, and finally, we didn't address women in the judiciary. so what did we address? we looked at the behavior of women as voters, the behavior of women as candidates for office, um, both state and national office, behavior of women within political parties, the behavior of women once elected to national office. we also have a few chapters look at the gendered nature of u.s. political institutions as well as u.s. politics for women in politics in the context of comparative politics. that is, what does the situation for women in politics look like in the u.s. compared to the rest of the world. the picture there is not so pleasant, actually. we have one of the least advantageous electoral systems at the national level with some modifications. at the state level for the electoral college, we also have

only two major political parties which are informal in their internal construction, have no clear formal instructions for becoming a candidate, um, offer very little, um, clear structural means by which women can work the party, so to speak, to increase women's candidacies. so there are lots of disadvantages that women have in the united states in terms of actually achieving elective office. >> so in relation to the political parties, um, as a woman voter what are the findings related to, you know, encouraging participation directly related to women. >> there's some interesting things about women in politics that make women, in fact, the politically relevant demographic category. first, there are more women than there are money in the u.s. citizenry in the voting registry. and women turn out at slightly higher percentages than do men, and the larger number, absolute number of women combined with women's heightened turnout makes

for a big electoral impact. women also are disproportionately democratic. um, this is true across all age groups and it's also true across all, um, racial groups. so racial and ethnic groups, women still have a slight preference for the democratic party compared to men. so when we come into an election, things like turnout and the range of issues that might attract women are very important. women are more likely than men to vote for the democratic presidential candidate, that's been the case since 1992. um, that gap has been between two percentage points to five percentage points depending upon the polls that you look at. but nonetheless, there's a democratic advantage in the electorate, um, for the democratic party, um, in general because of women. the absolute numbers that turn out and the preference of the democratic party. now, the issues that seem to, um, mobilize women and attract, um, their vote have to do with social welfare issues, um, have

to do with foreign policy issues and also to a certain extent so-called morality issues. but on these women vary from men in different directions. so, for example, on issues like same-sex marriage, women are much less oppose today that than are men, for example. not by a huge margin, but nonetheless, there's a difference there. women are more concerned with foreign policy/security issues, and that can, um, have an impact on women's vote. and finally, women are more concerned about social welfare issues, health care, employment, the state of the economy, education. >> with a woman candidate for president coming in to the campaign, do you see those preferences changing, um n2012? or do you -- based on your research, do you think they'll largely remain the same? >> well, first of all, i see no female candidate coming into the presidential candidacy in 2012. there are only two on the list that i know of, sarah palin who has not yet declared, and michele bachmann who is doing

very poorly in early returns or early poll results in the republican party debates, um, and in the polling numbers for her. i don't see either of them being the ultimate candidate for the republican party. and on the democratic side all things being equal, um, the current president -- barack obama -- will be the party's candidate, and so that will foreclose any opportunity for a woman in that party to come forward. so i see no presence for women -- [laughter] as presidential candidates in 2012. um, let me do say, however, that, um, some polling data -- and the most recent i've seen has only been from 2008 coming in very early in the 2008, um, presidential primaries. um, about 87% of americans are willing to say that they would vote for a qualified woman, um, regardless of sex, that there would be -- they would be as willing to vote for a woman as to vote for a man. americans are more likely, more willing to vote for someone who's african-american or someone who's jewish, um, for president than they are for a

woman, and i think that number is slightly lower than had been the previous results because in 2008 there was a clear potential female candidate, and that was hillary clinton on the democratic side who ultimately failed to win the nomination. >> so what are some recommendations for women in that, um, that position in an electable position or running for office? does that matter come up in your book? is that something that you touch on? >> >> well, we don't turn to the presidential specifically, but we do look at women's candidacies, um, for lower-level office. so a couple of recommendations. and these aren't recommendations for women. so let me just make clear, we only need about 4,000 women nationwide to contest and win elections to have equitable representation in the senate and the house and in the statehouses. there aren't that many elective offices at the legislative level at least that requires that we need a million qualified women. i think we can find, say, 4,000,

4,500 qualified women to run. so that's not the issue. the problem is not with women, the problem is with political parties and the unavailability of access to candidacies both through the incumbency effect if we have, as we do, 83% of congress consisting of hen and most of those men are incumbents, it's going to be very, very difficult for new openings for candidates whether or not those candidates are women. so part of it has to do with political parties' willingness to persuade exigent members of congress, seated members of congress to step down, willing to support women challenging incumbents within their own parties, willingness to recruit women for office. right now the so-called big money people on the republican side are trying to recruit, um, governor christie from new jersey to enter the presidential nomination race on the republican side which he so far at least -- at least this morning -- still had refused to do, but there are women who

might be recruited. there are some very good republican governors on the republican side who might be recruited. so at this point my argument is, it's not the problem of women, it's the problem of the parties, specifically the republican party. women are represented in the republican party by a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 margin over men. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. >> to follow the bus' travels, visit www.c-span.org/bus. >> this weekend on booktv on c-span2 on "after words" the reactionary mind author corey robbins and columnist s.e. cupp discuss edmund burk to sarah palin. condoleezza rice recounts her years as national security adviser and secretary of state. and from back to work, former

president bill clinton's thoughts on the current state of the american economy and his plan for recovery. look for the complete booktv schedule at booktv.org and sign up for booktv alert weekend schedules in your inbox. >> and now from the 11th annual national book festival on the national mall here in washington, biographer justin martin presents his book, "genius of place: the life of there'd rick law olmsted. ". >> we'll start now. my name is kevin merida, i'm the national editor of ""the washington post,"" and we have been proud charter sponsors of this festival since the beginning 11 years ago. i'd like to say on behalf of the library of congress, welcome to the festival, and we hope that everyone's having a wonderful day celebrating the joy of reading here on the national mall. before we begin i want to say that the