there's no business, no industry more fascinating than the gun industry. the gun industry has its own amendment to the constitution. it has a place in american history that is unrivaled by the maker of any other product. cars are very american or fast food is very american, but there is the minute man and the symbol of the american revolution and guns are right there. a cowboy in the nineteenth century and the film noir detective and bruce willis and on and on. ..

>> everybody's interesting. everybody's got an interesting story. and the product is interesting. and i enjoyed learning about it. and i enjoyed doing it. i mean, you know, i don't run away from that fact. it's fun to go to the range, it's fun to do it, and i get a kick out of it i think the way a lot of people get a kick out of it. okay. i'm not going to be -- oh, i'm going to choose meredith. and the microphone man's going to defy me. >> thanks. is there any significant black market or known major theft of guns, or is the price point preventing that? >> no. there's a huge black market for guns. there are millions of guns that are owned illegally. >> [inaudible] >> the -- yeah. the glock is not distinctive as a crime gun as best we can tell

from the sparse statistics that are available. the statistics are very sparse because the nra and its allies in congress have bound the hands of the atf and made it very difficult for the atf to collect, um, so-called gun trace data and to disseminate that data. so it's actually been a number of years since that data has been readily available. when that data was available until a few years ago, glocks tended not to rank very high on the list of guns that were traced because they were found at crime scenes. now, part of that might be because the glocks are relatively new. smith and wessons have been around forever, guns are very durable and don't necessarily break. if you've been making them for 75 years, there are going to be her of them around, more of them will have ended up in the black market.

but the short answer is there is no evidence that in real life as opposed to the movies and television where every gangster is holding a glock -- that's a glock, by the way, if they're doing this, that's almost certainly a glock. [laughter] there's no evidence in the real world that the people shooting it out over turf concerns, over who can sell drugs on this corner or holding up a 7-eleven prefer glocks. i mean, i'm sure they might prefer them just as much as the next civilian, but they're not found disproportionately associated with crime. so our hosts say that's it. i want to thank you very, very much for coming. [applause] >> for more information about paul barrett and his recent book, visit glockthebook.com. >> each yearbook tv brings you several events from across the country. here's a look at some of the upcoming fairs and festivals we plan on covering this year.

booktv's first stop will be the fifth annual savannah book festival in savannah, georgia, over presidents' day weekend. live all-day coverage on saturday, february 18th will feature pulitzer prize finalist s.c. given. on march 10th and 11th, booktv will be live on the campus of the university of arizona. our festival coverage includes numerous author talks and poets ranging from the great depression to forensic science. then in late march booktv visits char lotsville, virginia, for the virginia festival of the book. for a complete list of upcoming book fairs and festivals, visit booktv.org and click on the book fairs tab at the top of the page. also, please, let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area, and we'll add them to our list. e-mail us at booktv at c-span.org.

>> and now charles shields recounts the life of author and satirist kurt vonnegut. mr. shields reports on the prolific writer's time in indiana, his time as a prisoner of war in dresden during world war ii, his efforts to break into the publishing world and his struggles with alcoholism and his mother's and his own attempted suicide. it's about 45 minutes. [applause] >> well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming out. um, let me preface my talk about kurt vonnegut by reading you just the first page of the prologue, and that'll serve as kind of a spring board for what i have to say to you about his life and his works and the relationship that i had with him, our friendship. this is from the prologue out of print and scared to death. and it starts like this: kurt vonnegut planned to give this new teaching job at the

university of iowa his best shot. as he zoomed across the midwest in early september 1965 in his son's new volkswagen beetle, his six-foot frame pressing his head against the roof liner, it was as if failure were clattering behind him like tin cans tie today the bumper. the ashtray was stuffed with crush butts, and the windshield was tawny with nicotine from his chain smoking. he had a lot to think about, and the 1200-mile cross-country drive between his home on cape cod and iowa city, iowa, gave him all the time he needed. he was bored by his 20-year marriage to his first love, the former jane cox, whom he'd married barely five months after his release from a prisoner of war camp at the end of world war ii. this past summer he'd been trying to start an affair with a woman in new york 20 years his junior who in turn was waiting for the writer william price fox to divorce his wife so they could marry. if this writer in residence job

in the respected iowa writers' workshop didn't suit him, he was going to leave it and compensate himself for his trouble by coming on strong with sarah. on the other hand, he would remind her that he was just an old boozehound on the hunt for affection, and she was just a girl, and he was old enough to be her father. she needed him like a case of shingles. now, why start a book in media arrest like that, in the middle of the man's life? it's because kurt vonnegut wasn't famous, wasn't popular until he was almost 50 years old. for the first part of his writing life, the majority of it, in fact, kurt vonnegut was a freelance writer who was writing fiction for popular magazines like colliers and "ladies home journal", the saturday evening post and just barely making it. he had a large family of six children. they lived in a big, ramshackle house on cape cod, and kurt was living paycheck to paycheck to try and put food on the table.

he not only wrote stories, but he tried teaching special education for a semester, and that didn't go all that well. then he received an inheritance from his father and decided that he should go into selling saab automobiles on the cape because he thought it was an ideal job for a writer. you just put the new cars in the showroom, people come in and buy them, and you can sit in the back and write all day. lost his shirt. so kurt was not doing well in 1965 when he went out to iowa for the iowa writers' workshop. now, jump ahead just a few years to when he sort of swims into my view and into the view of a generation. it's 1969, and i'm a college student at the university of illinois, draft-eligible, facing the war in vietnam. and like so many of the young men my age, our fathers had fought in world war ii, so we were facing truly a moral dilemma. would we serve, where did our duty lay? would we fight? what if we didn't -- what if we

felt that we couldn't? what would we do instead? and then suddenly breaking like a storm over us is "slaughterhouse five" in 1969, and we embraced it. here we were feeling disoriented, not knowing what we would do, and in "slaughterhouse five" is billy pilgrim who doesn't know what's happening and worse than that, is suffering from this strange phenomenon where he ricochets around in time. looking back now, we know that it was probably a manifestation of post traumatic stress disorder which was undiagnosed at that time. but billy pilgrim finds himself talking to rotary, and then somebody will say something, and suddenly he's back in the battle of the bulge lying in the snow. and then he's back in front of rotary, and then he's in his office, and then he's somewhere on a far-flung planet at the far

end of the universe where he's safe, and there's someone who loves him, and time has no meaning. and then he's back again. and this book with its, with its nonchronology, with its flashbacks, with its control humor and moments of terror really seemed to capture what a lot of us were feeling. so when i finished mockingbird, a portrait of harper lee, and i was looking around for another summit for a biography, first of all, i wanted to know who hasn't had a biography written about him or her, and who had a big impact on people my age. well, kurt vonnegut came to mind right away, and i was surprised that he had, in fact, never had a biography written about him. and it turned out he was a little bit miffed that nobody had ever taken the time. half a century of writing, 14 books in print, and nobody had ever written a biography of him. so i wanted to find out who was kurt vonnegut, the author of these weeks that became -- books

that became so popular so suddenly. he was out of print, as i say in the prologue, in the mid '60s and by the 1970s had a body of work that had been resuscitated like god bless you, mr. rosewater and sirens of titan, mother knight, cat's cradle. he had a corpus of work suddenly where before he had been just somebody who wrote paperback books that ended up in drugstores and bus stations next to mr. lucky and conan the barbarian. now suddenly he's the next great literary thing. so who was kurt vonnegut behind these novels? was he the man we thought he was? if you can remember vonnegut back in the '70s, he comes across as kind of an avuncular, joshing character with tousled hair and a chevron of a moustache upside down like george harrison. was he, in fact, that man? did he embody some of the virtues that were in his novels

about humanity and being kind to each other? and then finally i want today try and figure out where, if any place, does his, do his novels belong in the canon of american literature because the jury's still kind of out on that. although kurt vonnegut is an iconic, cultural figure, there are still some people today who really don't -- are not agreed upon his worth as a post-world war ii american author. in fact, one of the last days i was with him we were walking down the street together, and i said, you know, i have to be honest, kurt, that my editor when i told him about doing a book with you said, well, kurt vonnegut, isn't he kind of a cult author? and this was 2006. and he shrugged, and he said, boy, i still get a lot of that. so he never felt that he quite broke out of the science fiction ghetto he'd been consigned to in the '50s and '60s, that the

eggheads and critics in new york never gave him his due. so there was some things about his literary legacy that i wanted to explore and, as i say, i wanted to figure out whether he belonged in the pantheon of american writers. let me tell you how i approached him. it was 2006, and i had finished the mockingbird book. and what i did was i wrote vonnegut a letter, and i just told him i wanted to do a biography of him. it was as simple as that. i said i was surprised that none had ever been done yet, and, um, i thought i could deliver a good one for him. well, instead of a reply to my letter, what i received was, well, the form of reply, but it wasn't a letter per se. it was a 20x17 piece of paper like artists use torn out of a sketch pad, and on it was a big sketch that kurt had done of himself smoking and sort of looking up bemused. and underneath it said this is a por tritt of me demuring on the author of charles j. shields to be my biographer. and i thought, what kind of

response is that? so i propped it up on the mantelpiece. my wife looked at it for a few days, wife and i looked at it, and she was the one that pointed out that demurring is not a very strong word. it's not like absolutely not or don't do it or, you know, i'll have the law on you, it's demuring, the way somebody might say at thanksgiving when you offer them a second piece of pie and they go, no, i couldn't possibly. but maybe. so i wrote back to him again. and this is a sort of a technique i picked up from reading an interview with truman capotety one time. he said if you're going to get to know somebody, and if you're going to interview them especially, you have to reciprocate. you can't just ask is them questions and ask to take away things from them. so what was your childhood like, how did your parents get along, what's the first memory you can recall, things like that. you have to ante up. you've got to throw down, in a sense, you have got to show the

other person about you as well. so this second letter was really a small biography of me. i told kurt that i wanted a chance to do it all over again, and i said, look, you grew up in indianapolis, i grew up in chicago. you were a public relations person for general electric, my father worked in public registrations for -- relations for ford motor company. your son, mark, is about my age. you were a former -- you were a journalist for a while. i was a journalist for a while. so i found all these commonalities between us and then kind of immodestly, i guess, i ended up at the end of the letter saying i guess somebody could cobble together a biography of you by trolling the internet and finding some salient facts and, you know, triya, they could use a lot of secondary sources in the library. i know you've given hundreds of interviews over the years. somebody could fabricate a biography of you using this sort of received information. but you know what? i'm a good writer and a good researcher, and i'm the person

for the job. so i sent it off. and about a week later i received a postcard, and i flipped it over, and on the back was a little drawing of vonnegut looking up -- [laughter] and above his head was one word. okay. and that was the beginning of our relationship. and from then on kurt and i got to know each other more and more to the point where i really considered him a friend. um, kurt at the point that he was at in his life was, i first of all discovered, was a rather lonely man. the phone would ring at 9:00 at night, and i'd pick it up, and on the other end would be a gravelly voice saying this is kurt vonnegut, how's my biography coming? and he just wanted to talk. the fact that i was writing a biography of him was really just an excuse to reminisce, and he loved to talk about his boyhood. he talked about growing up in indianapolis in the 1920s when there were 17 vonneguts in the phonebook, in the indianapolis phonebook.

he was part of, as he put it, sort of a german-american air stock ri si. his family owned a hardware store, a candy factory, they owned a factory that made overalls for working men, even a factory that made coffins. from birth to death, you somehow encountered a vonnegut in indianapolis. crown hill cemetery in if indianapolis is, it's replete with vonneguts and their relatives. and his mother was from that same german-american aristocracy. she was an heiress. she inherited a fortune from her father who was the managing director of one of the largest breweries in the midwest, indianapolis brewery company, that won a gold medal in france for their beer and the secret ingredient was a pinch of coffee. that's what made it a little bit different from everybody else's. so kurt was an upper middle class person whose father was an architect. and these facts combined to give me kind of an idea about who he

was in sit due, so to speak, so what i could see of him easily, how his outline perceived, how i perceived his outline. but when i really got to know him was when i met him personally. because after these phone calls periodically, you know, late at night this is kurt vonnegut, i finally diseased that i -- decided that i needed to go to new york, and i needed to talk to him personally because it was nice to chat on the phone, but i wanted to sit down with him and have my little list of questions a la james lipton in the actors' studio, you know, and just work through all these things. so i went to new york, and you have to picture this, the situation. um, i took a cab from where i was staying down to east 48th street where he lived, and it was raining, it was december 2006, and i thought i should stop and get some flowers for his wife. so i stopped, got out of the cab, went over to a flower vendor, picked up a bouquet, got

back in the car. arrived at his house, and you have to picture or this scene. i'm getting out of the cab and at a top of a flight of steps the door opens, and out steps kurt vonnegut, somebody i'd read about for 35 years, and here he is. and his hair is grayish, you know, wind -- sort of blown looking. he has on chinos and a shirt, a sweatshirt, and he's stepping out of the door, and i'm stepping out of the cab with a bouquet of flowers, and for all the world it looked like we were going on our first date together. [laughter] i was coming to pick up my prom date. i come up the stairs, and he invites me in, and this was really a clue to how pleased he was n a sense, to have a new friend. because kurt was an extrovert. you know, some writers are inward-turned. they spend a lot of time alone, a lot of time thinking and writing, but kurt really enjoyed

people. so when i come into the foyer, he closes the door behind me, and then in a time-honored style of one boy meeting another, he says want to see my room? [laughter] sure. so we go up the stairs, and we go up to where he does all of his writing, and up there is a big bed that he had, a queen-sized bed he has for taking naps, and he has a low coffee table on which he has his computer. he was careful to point out he only uses it for writing, he does not use the internet. he was a bit of a luddite in that regard. his books that he uses lined up on the wall, and his window overlooks east 48th street. so i walk around making appreciative noises, and he sat there and nodded and was really pleased that i was there to do nothing expect find out about him. and we broke for lunch and went down the street to one of his favorite places, sat down and

ordered, and then i found out something else about kurt vonnegut that i did not expect. first of all, i found out he seemed to be a lonely man. then the second thing i found out was that he was a man with grievances. you know, we tend to think of people who are elderly as coming to some kind of accommodation with the past. with, you know, forgiving those who have done us harm, forgive us our trespasses in a sense. and yet when i began to talk to kurt vonnegut across the table, he launched into a list of accusations against people who had done him harm as a child. that his mother was distant, his father never taught him to do anything, that his elder brother, bernard, who became a famous scientist was, in fact, the much-loved child, the preferred child and that his brother had actually told him when he was small, he said, you know, you were an accident. and he never forgot that. here we are decades later, and he still is recalling that.

and he blamed his brother for pushing him into college and going into a major that he didn't really enjoy. and, you know, for all the world if i had closed my eyes, i would have thought that i was listening to a 19-year-old who was angry, who was just coming to, coming to realize that his life had not been ideal, and here he was facing adulthood and wanted some kind of accounting for the things that had happened to him. and later as i worked on the book, i really think that part of the reason for vonnegut's appeal to younger people is that he was always on the verge of adulthood. he was never a fully realized, mature adult. he was instead somebody who still had a lot of unsolved or unresolved issues from his past. and i think that voice that you hear in a vonnegut novel when you open it up, that voice that appeals particularly to young people is the voice of somebody they can relate to because he's till there in a lot of ways.

he's still there emotionally. so how did this happen? how did this come about? why would this older man still have these, you know, problems with the past? well, for one thing, as i said, as i alluded to, kurt felt that he was not the favorite child, that his elder brother bernard was. also, he witnessed a great falling off in his family, and he felt bad for his father and mother, but as a child there was nothing he could do about it. understand that kurt was raised as an upper middle class child. his father was an architect. they had servants. kurt never picked up a dirty sock from the floor. they had a yard man and a cook. as he told me, mother didn't cook. and then during the great depression his father lost all of his commissions, and because of prohibition his mother's legacy from her father who, you know with, was the beer baron of the midwest, that legacy dried up, and the vonneguts found themselves strapped for cash, selling off china, selling off

silverware all in an effort to stay afloat financially. and he felt his parents' humiliation, and he felt their sort of vague, free-floating disquiet and embarrassment about this. but that's not unique to vonnegut. what was unique to vonnegut, though, was a couple of things that happened to him directly for which he never understood why these things happened and how he should adjust to them. for one thing, when he was about to go to college, he had done well in high school being a high school journalist. that made him popular. he found his niche working for the high school newspaper. and right when he was about to go to college, his elder brother who was at mit studying physics intervened and said, listen -- talking to their parents -- he can't go into english, he can't go into journalism. the liberal arts are ornamental. that's no way to earn a living. the way of the future is technology and science. that's where the new frontier is, and that's what he should go

into as well. kurt was very bright, and he did have an aptitude for science. i saw his high school report card. he had a high iq, and he got an a+ in physics, but he didn't want to go into science, so when his parents forced him to go to cornell and forced him to declare a science major, he did everything he could to pull against the traces. instead of going to classes, he went to the college newspaper and wrote, became known as a mischief maker and a satirist kind of columnist. meanwhile, his grades went south. when he realized he was going to be kicked out of cornell, he dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1944 as a private. parents were heart broken. they couldn't believe that the boy who used to belong to a country club, you know, through their family, the boy who used to take dancing lessons on wednesday nights, the boy who had gone to an ivy league college was now a buck private in the army carrying his pack

and rifle. his mother wept, and his father said bitterly, well, at least i hope they teach you to be neat. but he went off to the army, and in 1944 he was about to ship overseas when he came home on mother's day to surprise his mother. he had a three-day pass, and he walked in the door all spit and polish, you know, the young soldier doing his duty. and this resulted in one of the episodes in his life that he never to his satisfaction understood or could resolve. on mother's day morning, he went in to wake up his mother, and she had committed suicide with no note, no explanation. and for the rest of his life he wondered what was she trying to say, what am i supposed to make from this macabre eloquence of killing yourself on mother's day when i'm home on leave? is it that i failed as a son, or you can't bear to have me go

fight? what am i supposed to learn from this? and as he said laettner his writing, the sons of suicide always find something lacking in life. and there was that stain, that stain on his young adulthood. well, he goes overseas, he's moved up to the front, he's captured at the battle of the bulge, put on boxcars and take on the an internment camp with thousands of other gis who had been captured at the bulge. and then through a fluke he's told to line up one day for roll call, and a german soldier comes down the line and says, you, you, you, step out. so they stepped out, and it turned out that he was going to be part of a 150-man work team that was going to be sent to dresden to work for, in noncombatant-type duty. the geneva convention allowed for soldiers to do noncombatant-type work. sure beats standing around a camp in germany caging smokes.

now he at least got to go to a city, and what a city it was. when they got off the train in dresden and walked through the downtown, this was an untouched, 800-year-old city, an above ground museum of baroque architecture. the war had not yet touched dresden at all, and as they walked down these cobble streets with the trams running past and people having breakfast at outdoor cafés, they couldn't believe their good luck. all those other poor guys are standing back in camp, you know, living on k rations and stuff, and they're in this marvelous city. they were taken to a converted slaughterhouse. it was a place that was used to house animals, but it had been cleaned up and converted into p.o.w. camp, and for about a month or so vonnegut worked in a malt factory, a factory that boiled down grain and turned it into a high-protein syrup for pregnant women. it was a good job, and now and then you could steal a glob of that hot honey that they were

making from the grain, and it was so nourishing, and it warmed his stomach. but then one night in february 1945 he was rousted out of his bunk. his german captors took all the men across the yard, and 60 feet down into a basement area there was a giant cellar where there were carcasses of beef hanging on hooks. it was so far down below that it was naturally cold down there, and they were using it as an underground refrigerator. the men were told to sit down and wait, and suddenly the ceiling began to shake. one bulb swung back and forth, dust sprinkled down on their heads, and they were there for eight hours while kurt said it sounded like giants were walking overhead. and when they came up eight hours later, dresden was gone. the city was in flames. 35,000 people possibly, maybe more, had been killed overnight. the firestorms were so intense from the raf and the air force bombing that people running on

the streets were caught up in the vortex of the conflagration and thrown skyward. the zoo was blown apart, and the animals escaped into the streets. people who were down in their basements hiding thinking they were in cellars and places where they could get away from the bombing, instead the air was sucked out by the firestorm, and they were instantly suffocated where they sat. so for the next couple of months, kurt's occupation changed from working in a malt factory for pregnant women to being a body miner. and he and the other 150 p.o.w.s would go down into these darkened cellars, some of which were flooded, and retrieve floating bodies and bodies that were still leaning where they had died up against the wall, throw them over their shoulders, carry them up into the street and pile them in an enormous heap where ss people from the concentration camps who had worked with situations like this, um, doused the bodies with lime and set them afire.

after about a month, though, it became clear they could no longer bring up the bodies, so instead men were called in with flame flowers, and the flames were shot down into the basements, and those bodies down there were with incinerated, and is entranceways were closed. if ever there was a vision of hell, you know, if ever there was a glimpse into the apocalypse, that was it, and kurt was, as i said, a kid from indianapolis, 21, 22 years old when he saw this. and i think it left him haunted. i had the impression when i was talking to vonnegut that there was always something going on in his mind, something that he was rehearsing or going over again. and his children and his nephews told me, too, that kurt seemed like a haunted person. and it's often said of depressives that they go over the same episodes in their minds again and again hoping for a different outcome, hoping for maybe they might have done something differently. and as i talked to kurt

sometimes, it seemed that he was only listening with one ear, but inside of his mind he was thinking about something that completely preoccupied him. and he had a kind of a melancholy air about him. he knew that he had a great book to write about this. he still wanted to be a writer, and he had seen something really monumental, something disastrous in civilization, and he felt he could write about it. maybe it could be his naked in the dead. maybe it could be his the thin red line or from here to eternity or the young lions. but there was a problem with what he did not see at dresden. kurt saw the first act and the third act. he didn't see the second act. he was missing a middle to his narrative. he came to dresden when it was intact, he was hustled down into a basement room. he came back out, and there was no dresden. it was as if he was a greek, and he'd gotten off the ships at troy, and he saw the towers of troy, the towers of ilian, and then he fell asleep.

and when he woke up, troy had been sacked, and the trojan horse was already inside, and it was time to reboard the ships for home because kurt was liberated by the russian army not long after that. so he was missing a middle. and it was not until he arrived at the iowa writers' workshop in '65 that he finally broke through the structure of this novel, that he suddenly realized because of his interaction with other fiction writers that he could do something very different and exactly what he wanted to do. see, kurt was kind of marooned out on cape cod with his family as a freelance writer. he had very little interaction with other writers and professionals. ad men and a few other freelancers like himself, but nobody who was really on the cusp of anything new in american fiction. and when he goes to the iowa writers' workshop, he's with nelson algren and donald justice and vance and people who are making names for themselves in the writing of novels. and what they told him was you can do whatever you want.

you don't have to abide by the conventions of fiction. you can go in any direction you want. so kurt broke free of the chronological order that he'd been trying to tell this story in, and instead told it as a private would who had no idea what was going on, a private who was just trying to serve, a private who was a victim of circumstance in a way and who had been severely traumatized by what had happened to him. the book is alternately funny and macabre, it's at times grotesque, other times bizarre. it's really a high-wire act by an author who's taking a creative risk because kurt vonnegut powered his novels on ideas, not on plot, not on character, but he would just take a possibility, a what-if kind of thing and extrapolate it and stretch it and make it go as far as it possibly could. and i really think that "slaughterhouse five" is his crowning achievement.

well, he became famous, and, um, since he'd been denied the fame that he wanted for so, so long, he could not resist the pull of celebrity. and in 1970 left his family, went to new york and joined -- [inaudible] in new york. took up with a woman 20 years his junior, could be found at elaine's, was hobnobbing with all kinds of people who who were part of the celebrity set, and he was loving it but alternately feeling guilty about what he'd done and what he owed his family and his children. and his children were, in fact, very angry at him for this. and i think that kurt's career after that follows kind of an arc was he left his wife jane behind, his first love, jane. and jane, as i began to explore her personality and her interactions with kurt, i think, was really his in-house editor, critic, advocate. she had majored in english with a phi beta kappa, and she knew

literature, and kurt had an incomplete education, and here was his wife who could really hip him and did -- help him and did. and after he left, i think it's no coincidence that his novels after 1970 become more and more autobiographical. he talks more and more about himself until you get to time quake in the 1990s when it's just a collection, really, of reminiscences. so i think the best books are before "slaughterhouse five" when he was under the gun to write fast and write what he had a visceral instinct for and to take a risk. and after he became famous and lionized, i think it actually sort of cramped his style. i think the bell jar of celebrity and persona dropped over him and made him into an expectation on people's parts. i mean, somebody that he couldn't, he couldn't do much with after that point because that character, that persona of kurt vonnegut was so successful,

he could hardly walk away from it. let me tell you about the last time i saw him. i came back to see him in march 2007. we'd been communicating a lot. he had sent me letters and postcards, and i'd been sending him all the quotes from his former students that i could find, and he seemed to be enjoying that. when i came to see him in march, it was obvious that he'd had a very rough winter. he'd had some congest ty problems. kurt, you know, was a chain smoker. he lit one pall mall after another, and here he was a man, almost 84 years old, and when i walked into his living room, he was seated on the couch, and his hands were back against the cushion like this, and he was playing with a breath mint between his teeth just looking up at the sofa, and he just presented a portrait of a man who was exhausted. and kurt had begun saying in the interviews a few years before that he really didn't expect to live this long, that he was tired. he said, look, joe namath is no longer throwing 'em in the stands, right?

i'm tired. i just can't seem to write anymore. so i came to him in march, i interviewed him one day, i interviewed him the next day, and things were going well. then as i was leaving the second day and we had an appointment to meet the next day, i said to him ap ro to nothing, i said, kurt, do you believe in god? because, you know, in his normals it's never quite clear whether he does. he sometimes seems angry with god and other times he says he's an atheist. but on the other hand, you really admire him for the attitudes. so i said, kurt, do you believe in god? and he said, well, i don't know, but who couldn't? and i left. [laughter] and that was his pronouncement. and i left. and about an hour after i left, he was taking his little dog out for a walk. and they made kind of an odd pairing when they walked down the street in new york. here's a 6-3 man, very attenuated, very tall with a tiny little lhasa ap sew which

looks like a must have on a leash, you know, tiny little dog. and he was walking down that steep flight of steps at his brownstone, and as he was walking on the steps, he tripped over the dog's leash, pitched forward and hit his head on the sidewalk and never regained consciousness. a month later he died. and, you know, it's very interesting, but two ironies about that, and, you know, no one, no one tries to bring in strange paradoxes and coincidences into their life, but i have to tell you this, that one of kurt von gut's characters in sirens of titan is out in space with his dog, and he gets caught in some kind of time warp. and about every seven years reappears on earth walking the dog for about 35 minutes. and you can talk to him, and he knows what will happen in the future, and then like ec to mass m, he begins to fade and disappear, and he's gone. and he exits again, you know, he exits leading his little dog.

and that's sort of what kurt did. but more than that, i came across hundreds of letters that kurt didn't know existed. he told me he didn't have any letters, that he had lost them at a fire in his studies and everything he had were at indiana university. those weren't personal letters. letters that i found were letters that he'd written to friends and friends had kept them for years because they were long, chatty letters. and i think kurt used to fall into his authorial voice by typing to friends, writing a letter to friends. my wife and i found letters that were written on the same day, two single-spaced pages of chat about how things were going at home and how difficult this book was and how broke he was, a common complaint. but in one of those letters in 1975 he says writing to jane, he says i have a recurring premonition, and it's that i'm going to be killed by a dog. so it was an odd end to a life, but strangely appropriate for a

post-modernist who inserted himself into the literature, who took chances with the narrative, who broke all the rules. and kurt exited this life leading his little dog like one of his characters in sirens of titan. that's really all i have to say about what his, what my relationship was like with him and, um, how i got to know him and sort of a synopsis of his writing. if you have any questions, though, i'd be happy to answer him. >> did he ever come to any kind of, i don't know, reconciliation or peace about his brother bernard? i mean, did he ever -- >> well, consider this. when i saw him in 2006, um, bernard had been gone for a number of years, and here he was complaining bitterly about him, about the influence that bernard had had on his life and, you know, forced him into this and that. and i said, kurt, did you ever tell him how angry you were? and he looked kind of sheepish, and he said, no. so the chance passed him by. he, apparently, never leveled

with his brother, you know, asked him why did you interview, why didn't you let me live my life the way i wanted to? other questions. >> after world war ii and throughout his life, did he ever go back to dresden? that was a constant presence with him. >> yeah, he did go back to dresden. he received a guggenheim grant to complete "slaughterhouse five," and he thought he needed to jump-start his imagination on the book. he had an idea about how to structure it, but he thought what he really needed to do was walk those streets, go back to that slaughterhouse, feel those feelings. well, he gets to dresden, and it's in east germany behind the iron curtain, and it had been sovietized. there's no such word, but, you know, here's these cement slab block buildings, and as i say in the book with all the overhanging electrical wires, it looked like the whole city ran on extension cords. and these little two-cylinder

cars built in soviet factories. this was not the dresden he recalled. but yet the trip was worth it in that he realized dresden was nowhere physically anymore. it was all going to have to come out of here. he didn't have to show a strict fidelity to the past. it could all take place up here. and so the trip was worth it in that regard. dresden has since undergone a wonderful rehabilitation, and i understand that today it's a beautiful city. but when kurt went there in the late '60s, it was in the throes of the, you know, the soviet plan. other questions? yes. >> i'm curious about the -- [inaudible] you're interested in. are you expressly interested in writers' biographies, or what is it about biography that attracts you? is there one book maybe that started you down that path? >> well, okay, a couple -- that's a couple of questions, all of them are good. when i was in college, i came up

with the random goal of reading 15 books every summer. i was working in steel mills and railroad car factories, and the books were my brief vacation at lunchtime or at night. so i just began reading whatever appealed to me, and i just found myself drawn to biographies because i wanted to know what was it in a person's life that had led them to become chiefs, alexander hamilton. so i liked finding out the clues in their childhood or adolescence. beyond that, though, the reason i really like to write about, write biographies about writers is i like to figure out what they're doing, their craft, decisions that they made. and, you know, biography is a genre that gives me an opportunity that i think no other writing does which is by really learning deeply about somebody else's life, i learn a lot about my own. by, by, you know, extending some

compassion for people's mistakes or trying to understand why they took the wrong turn or why they loved this person and not that person. it makes me think about what my life has been like and how none of us come into this world with a blueprint knowing how to live a perfect existence, that we all are making it up as we go. and vonnegut was very much right, and i think in saying life is made up a series of accidents, and we are all involved in this random exercise of trying to get along in life. other questions? >> his mother's suicide, i mean, like his brother, did he try to place blame on him over that or make him feel like it was partially his fault that she -- >> no, he never, yeah, he never expressed any kind of connection between his brother and his mother's suicide. his theory was this, that as he put it, my mother was addicted to wealth, and she was addicted to status, and when she could no longer have that, her life was

so diminished that she just couldn't go on. but even that rationale doesn't explain the timing of it. mother's day, when he's home expressly to visit her. what was she trying to say? so he felt that, he felt sympathy for the woman, he described her as a very sad and confused woman at the end of her life who was taking bar bitch waits to control her moods. in fact, what she died from was an overdose, but nevertheless, he could never solve to his satisfaction the emotional ritual, the emotional riddle of why did you do that then? what did you want me to know? any other questions? well, thank you. you've been very attentive, i enjoyed it. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's web site,

charlesjshields.com. booktv is on twitter. follow us for regular updates on our programming and news on nonfiction books and authors. twitter.com/booktv. next, richard thompson ford argues that civil rights laws have been misappropriated by individuals, special interest groups and the political left and right for personal gain. it's about an hour. >> good evening, everyone. i'm dan atkinson, the director of arts, humanities and languages at the university of california san diego extension. and it's my pleasure to welcome you here for this opening event in many our 2011 -- in our 2011-2012 series at the revelle forum. as always, i want to begin by thanking the neurosciences

institute. they're our very gracious host for this series and provide the use of this beautiful hall to us and to other groups at no fee, so we thank them for that. also want to mention the print media sponsorship for the series. and as you've all noticed, tonight we have two film crews here to document the program. as is our custom, we have ucs-tv filming and they'll be web streaming, and then tonight we also are pleased to welcome a crew from c-span's booktv, and they'll be filming this for broadcast on c-span. our program tonight will be in interview format and will be followed by 15-20 minutes for questions from the audience, and we'll be take your questions in written form on those index cards that were passed out as you came in. our interviewer, dr. jennifer burton, will she can the questions -- will select the question and read them for

mr. ford's response. and then at the conclusion of the question and answer period, we'll have a book signing, and the book signing table is here at the foot of the stage to my left. and as you've probably noticed, mr. ford's book is available for purchase at the entrance of the auditorium. finally, please, note aside from the television crews that is no video recording, audio recording or photography is permitted during tonight's event. [laughter] and, please, also take a moment to turn off phones and other electronic devices. it's my pleasure now to introduce jennifer burton who will introduce tonight's speaker. dr. burton is a visiting scholar at the university of california san diego, and she's also taught at the university of san diego and at harvard university where she earned her ph.d. in english and american literature. she's active as an author and editor in a wide variety of genres and is also a producer of independent films. her latest book entitled "call

and response: key debates in african-american studies," was co-edited with henry louis gates jr. and was published in 2010. please, join me now in welcoming dr. burton. [applause] >> thank you. it's my pleasure to welcome richard thompson ford to the revelle forum. he is the george e.al corn professor of law at stanford law school and is a regular contribute tore slate and has written for numerous newspapers including "the new york times" and washington post. his first book, "racial culture," published in 2005 critiques racial identity politics including multiculturalism while also strongly arguing for racial justice. in his second book, "the race card," published in 2008 and selected as a new york times notable book, professor ford argues that ubiquitous claims of

discrimination or playing the race card are distracting attention away from serious racial injustice. he concludes that we need to, quote, begin by looking at racial injustice as a social problem to be solved collectively rather than as a series of discreet wrongs perpetuated by bad people. this year he has two books coming out. universal rights down to earth which analyzes human rights struggles around the world and argues for the need to shift from trying to observe universal principles and instead engage locally with local institutions, laws and social relationships in order to bring about meaningful change. and "rights gone wrong: how law corrupts the struggle for equality" that we'll be struggling on today and which is called a crisp analysis of the limits of our civil rights laws and a prescription for how to move beyond them. i work on african-american history, as dan said, and

recently reviewed the history of african-american debate with henry louis gates in this our book, and from my perspective one of the most striking things about richard's work is his ability to pull back and look at long-running debates from a fresh vantage point. this is particularly important in our time of polarized politics when so many debates are reduced to little more than alternating talking points. and while he grapples with conservative and liberal ideas, he maintains an eye on the greater social good. he also has a strong sense of history which comes through in his discussions of the powerful and important role that civil rights legislation has played in eliminating legal discrimination in america and also in his critique that current civil rights cases have moved us away from the historical basis for civil rights legislation as a route toward eliminating group discrimination. many of you may have seen the review of rights gone wrong in

yesterday's new york times. jeff rosen writes: ford does not offer an equivocal, cautious, middle of the road critique of civil rights law. his book is sharp and surprising and casts the discrimination debate in a clarifying new light. will you join me in welcoming richard thompson ford. [applause] in his new york times review of your last book, "the race card," orlando patterson praised your work writing: the end result is a vigorous and long-overdue shake-up of the nation's stale discourse on race. in this new book, do you -- is it motivated by stale ideas that you think need shaking up? >> with in a sense, yes. i want to attack the idea that

every social injustice is a civil rights issue, and i think since the 1960s in particular there's a very powerful tendency to think of social injustice issues almost exclusively in terms of civil rights. the result has been that a wide range of disparate issues with different causes that are in many ways incommensurable are kind of being shoe horned into a single approach, an approach that tends to focus on bias, on bigots, on discrimination as the central evil. and i think that's been bad both -- or another consequence has been an overreliance on courts and on legalistic arguments as a mechanism for dealing with social injustice. and a relative lack of attention to other forms, everything from, um, public persuasion, changing hearts and minds to -- and also the legislative process, the popular branches of government.

and, um, so the result has been a narrowing of imagination about how to think about social injustice and a narrowing of imagination in thinking about potential solutions. and those are the kind of ideas that i do think that they're stale ideas. i think they're ideas that, um, are important and play an important role but have been kind of occupied the field and crowded out other ways of thinking about the issues. >> interesting. that sort of ties into something you write about in "the race card," this idea of racism without racists. is that -- can you talk about that a little bit? is that connected, something that you're moving on and connecting with this book? >> yes, absolutely. so the idea of racism without racists as i see it is that many of the most severe injustices particularly in the area of race but also other areas addressed by civil rights-type legislation and laws don't involve bigots or racists or at least they

don't -- the bigots and racists and bias animus are not the main causes any longer. instead, what we have are problems that are much more complex this nature that are the result of the legacy of past discriminatory practices but perhaps not contemporary racists or bigots, cases in which if there is bigotry, it's very difficult to detect. in the some cases may be even unconscious. in cases which there are another range of institutional day-to-day practices that may in some sense be innocent, but at least the innocent in terms of intent, in terms of the mental state of people, um, engaging in those practices, but never the less, perpetuate injustices. and it's this kind of second generation of racial injustice and social injustice that we most desperately calls out for new approaches. >> okay. what would be a specific example of something that you think we need a different kind of

approach to confront? >> well, and one example involves the very high incarceration rates of african-american men. there's a great deal of data about this. to my mind, it's up with of the most -- it's one of the most severe remaining he says of america's long, sad history of accelerate racial discrimination. and yet it can, first -- now, i don't want to suggest that there are no racist beliefs, to racist prosecutors. there certainly are. but the extent of the disparity can't be explained by old school jim crow-style bigotry. instead you have a correction of factors including neighborhood segregation such that, um, racial minority groups, particularly african-americans, are more likely to reside in neighborhoods where crime rates are high. they're more likely, therefore, to get caught up in crime and in particular the kind of conspicuous crimes that attract police attention. um, you have the problem of

economically-deprived neighborhoods, neighborhoods in which in some cases the, um, gray market, um, which is already teetering on the edge of criminality is one of the main sources of income for many people. >> right. >> so you have a whole, the isolation of the under class such that they don't have access to job opportunities, they don't have access to good role models. all of these kind of factors which are a legacy of past discrimination. but for the most part, not the result of ongoing bigotry and ongoing overt discrimination. these are, result in, um, high incarceration rates for young black men. so you have a collection of social injustices, but the attempt to address them by trying to find a bigot is, um, is not going to produce results. >> right, right. you said most of them can't be explained by bigotry, but some of them can. >> sure. >> so you're suggesting a

two-pronged approach where you do use the civil rights laws or for cases that they might apply like racial profiling or, um, or corrupt police for larger issues look for policy or look for other kinds of solutions. >> yes. i'm certainly not suggesting we abandon the civil rights approach. there continue to be instances of accelerate discrimination that we can detect and discover, and civil rights laws are important in correcting those forms of discrimination. but what i'm suggesting is that the attempt to shoe horn the entire problem into that relatively narrow approach has been unsuccessful. and in many cases we find that it's either very difficult to, it's difficult to prove discrimination, and it's controversial whether discrimination is the main cause of the problem. even in something like racial profiling, the fact that tre