but nothing to people who are concerned with or where they originated. i remember the department sales certainly soared. the kind of cars people owned, this is before, etc., and they thought it was an outrage atthgt that time comes to the point iss really how about the commercial aspect of the ownership of this data? don't the data belonged to me dy talk -- blanc to me is that of the 10 -- company? shouldn't they pay me for that? >> there is a company in

great britain that allows you to profit even though that is part two. >> it you have to pay me $1,000 per year to slow the process down. >> one reaction hot is there is a lot of things you get for your data, a free media content, you can use google, i think we give up our data for the great online services that are free but they are not free. there is a cost. >> do you really have a

company that makes $2 billion per year or could another group of 20 somethings make a little less with a little more privacy protection in still get the benefit of the service? >> good observation. those who are not suited to the problem is protection against the information not suppression. a lot of the conversation has been you can protect yourself. you actually can because anybody could put up the information we would not normally considered private. we don't want to suppress freedom of speech in my classmates but that from years way before this has

scanned letters and photos from high school and put them on the web. [laughter] >> i am sure you're always a professional. >> with those that go what could be put up by their friend. >> and i do think facebook and the other services have made important changes in the right direction and one of them includes where people cannot just 10 a year without your permission. >> on the other hand, they have developed facial recognition with automatic taking -- tagging and isn't this great? now i don't have to tag

everybody but maybe they wouldn't tag the picture of you kids seeing somebody else's wife or you keep on in the audience floor. you can untie yourself but the technology i have been reading where the patents are going. i snap your pitcher with my a smart phone it tells me every day being cite your honor will you listen to and the whole idea. >> you will never be able to control what people say about us but now they could say it where they have a huge audience and that is the difference. >> and the people that they tell it don't know things about you that you really are a responsible person to

the world audience. >> i had double cut four years but i cannot do now. >> in rural america their reserve release march story of wonder if we could put the link after the talk so you could see the pieces and articles in issues of the things that work. >> but in small towns across america there's a special network that not many people know about here in new york or boston and washington where it is a nasty in many of the small towns because they don't have the hour real identity. >> o.r. if you are married and want to have an affair one friend went to close his parents' house after his father died in he found all

these people that he ran into have the post office advertising to have affairs. more could be happening. >> really like what kashmir has to say. the benefits of social media are did tremendous the only talk about negative behavior that has psychological limitations but what about the positives aspects? i am also of fraud investigators so i do see both sides. in addition to my personal life are enormous and i would love to have a conversation about the positive benefits. >> good great way to end on

that note to this extol the virtue of the social web of whatever format you choose. >> look what happened in the last year 2011. we sought in tunisia, egypt, bahrain, is not just social networks but social networks and it is the cellphone the ability to take a photo of what was happening to them in the ability to transmit data around the world saved them at some very, very difficult and dark moments. then with what we saw occupy wall street. the horse has left the barn and people document their experience. social media at his here to

stay and we're learning how to use it and it is everybody's responsibility. >> i am away eight -- amazed to read my christmas shopping spotted women stuff spelling out on the sidewalk i thought maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend but i spotted a prescription i am naturally curious i flipped it over and her name was there i google her and her twitter account came up and it said six hours earlier her car was broken into. i said i think i found your staff and she said where is it? her friend went and collected it. my mind was blown buy back. -- buy it before twitter or facebook is a small story but i think there are urban

many benefits. >> also the difference it has made with our two our music with that of a and/or a falling but also crowds were saying i started novel you add it to its even the science they find the individual is better out -- better trying to figure out people are working on a particular project shortly after the revolution there a little baby girl was born and her dad named to her facebook

it's the centennial of the civil war in the library of congress is in on the action. this is a new book but not by the library illustrated timeline of the civil war and margaret wagner is the author or the editor? >> i am the author of the book. >> do you work for the library full-time? >> i do. i'm a writer and editor at the staff of the publishing office of the library. >> what are we going to find in this book? we going to find a library of commerce artifacts? >> you will find over 360 library of congress artifacts. a number of them never have seen the light of day before. we've never published them before. you will find a very annotated timeline covering many of the aspects of the war which is one reason we did this time line. many civil war books cover the battle for the politics for one aspect, and with the timeline

approach, we are able to cover all sorts of events including those. >> margaret wagner with the pictures in the book what are some of the things we will see that perhaps have not seen before? >> you will see some manuscripts we have not seen before. we have a new collection of civil war photographs that were just donated to the library this past year and some of those are in the book. you will see this very sort of charming which is like a moving picture of the depiction of the civil war. you will find drawings by the civil war special or this and maps and illustrated envelopes with a lot of the civil war political messages and patriotic messages.

you will find the people and the voices and that is one of the reasons that i love working at the library and projects like this and you get to know so many of the people, and the people in the civil war era were very eloquent and very opinionated, and i come to like many of them. estimate is this divided between the north and south? >> it blease is among the north and south and the border states, and it also brings in the international aspect for all of the world, and especially in europe. people were watching what happened in the united states. would the union survive, what the government of and by the people survive? this was a huge test that was important to other people. >> writing a book for the library of congress. how is that a different

experience perhaps than just the independent? >> well, you have a great responsibility as all authors do but to represent the library collections and the library standards and also it is a great privilege because it shows you the collections and the assistance of curators and specialists at the library. so, i learned a great deal with every single project that was done. >> do you get the proceeds as the author of the book? >> no, the library gets the proceeds and we receive royalties and that goes back into a revolving fund so that we are able to publish other books. the library as you know is the largest library in the world. it has more than 147 million items. about 20 million arana on line but that leaves 127 million that are not. so our mission is to introduce

people to materials they might not find online. and in this book at the end of the book there is an appendix that introduces people to the civil war collections in the library and gives them information about them and it web addresses so this is our mission to let people know what we have. >> is this suitable for high school students, for middle-age students? >> absolutely. i just had some students stop by and they were telling me they were studying the civil war in the social science and we had a nice chat about it so it's perfect for students at the aficionado. >> margaret wagner is the author of the new library of congress' books the illustrated timeline of the civil war. [applause] >> now charles de pecos charles shields recounts the life of

kurt vonnegut childhood in indiana. his time spent 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 and his tone attempted suicide. it's about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you kuhl ladies and gentlemen for coming out. let me preface my talk by reading you just the first page of the prologue and the will serve as a kind of springboard for what i have to say about his life and his work and the relationship that i had with him, our friendship. this is from the prolonged 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. he zoomed across the head west in early september, 1965 and his

sons and volkswagen beetle his six-foot frame to the country and against his head against the recliner it was a failure cluttering behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper. the ashtray was stuffed with old pols cigarettes and the windshield with nicotine from 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 the 20 year marriage to his first love the former jane who he married barely five months after his release from the prisoner of war came at the end of world war ii. this past summer he had been trying to start an affair with a woman in new york 20 years his junior who in turn was waiting for the writer to divorce his wife so they get married. is this writer president jobs in the respected all iowa writers workshop didn't suit him he was going to leave it and compensate himself for his troubles by

coming on strong with sarah. on the other hand, he would rely her that he was just an old booze helm on the hunt for affection and she was just a girl and she was old enough to be her father. she needed him. now, why start a book in media rest like that? it's because kurt vonnegut was at famous, walls and popular on how he was almost 50-years-old. for the first part of his writing life the majority of it in fact, kurt vonnegut was a free-lance writer who was writing fiction for popular magazines like collier's and blease home journal, the saturday evening post, and just barely making it. he has a large family, six children, they lived in a grand house on cape cod and curt was living from paycheck to paycheck to try to 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 automobiles on the cape because he thought it was an ideal job for a writer. he put the new cars in the show room people come and body and you can sit in the back and write all day. so, curt wasn't doing well in 1965 when he went to iowa for the writer's workshop. now, a jump ahead just a few years to when he sort of swings into my view and into the view of a generation. its 1969 and i am a college student at the university of illinois, draft eligible, facing the war in vietnam, and like so many of the young man my age, our fathers have fought in world war ii and we were facing a moral dilemma. what we serve, where did our duty why? we fight? what if we didn't, what would we do instead? and then suddenly breaking like a storm over us is 1969, and we

embrace it because here we were feeling bewildered and disoriented, not knowing what we would do, and a private trolleying foot soldier who doesn't know what is happening and worse than that suffering from a strange phenomena when he ricochets around in time looking back now for the post disorder which was not diagnosed at that time. the program finds himself talking to the rotary's and then somebody will say something and suddenly he's back in the battle of the old law being in the snow and then he's back in front of the rotary, and then he's in his office and some wear on the plan that 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 to read this

book with its long chronology, with its flashback schumer and moments of terror really seemed to capture what a lot of us were feeling. so, when i finished mockingbird and i was looking around for another subject of 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 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 the books that suddenly became so popular, so sudden because, you know, he was out of print as i say in the prologue in the mid 60's, and by 1970 had a body of work that had been resuscitated

from the sort of literature like god bless you mr. waters and the titan mother might come cat's cradle, he had work suddenly before he had been somebody in drugstores and bus stations and also the least the next great literary thing. who is he behind these novels? was he the man that we thought he was? if you can remember back in the 70's, he comes across as kind of a character with a shiver of a mustache upside down like peter word george harrison. was he in fact that man that embodied some of the virtues that were in his novels about humanity and being kind to each other? and then finally i wanted to try to figure out where if any place

does his novel be long in the canon of american literature. the jury is still out on that. although he's an iconic cultural figure there are still some people today who really don't come are not agreed upon as a post american post world war ii american author. we were walking down the street together and i said i have to be honest, my editor when i told him about doing a book with you said well, kurt vonnegut is that he kind of a colt author, and this was in 2006 and he showed up and he said i still get a lot of that. so he never felt that he quite broke out of the fiction ghetto that he had been confined to in the 1950's and 1960's, but the critics and new york never gave him his due. so there were some things about his legacy that i wanted to explore and as i say i wanted to find out whether he belonged in

the pantheon of american writers. let me tell you how i approached him. it was 2006, and i finished the mockingbird book and what i did is i wrote him a letter and i just told him i wanted to do a biography of him it was as simple as that. i would surprised nothing had been done yet. and i thought i could deliver a big one for him. well, instead of the reply to my letter what i received in the form of the reply that it will send a letter per say it was a 20 by 17 piece of paper like artists use torn out of a sketch pad and on it was a sketch that he had done it himself looking up a bemused and underneath it said this is a portrait of me did bearing on the author of charles shield to be my biographer. i thought what kind of response is that? so i propped up on the mantelpiece and my wife looked at it for a few days and she was the one who pointed out that

demurring isn't a very strong word. it's not like absolutely not or don't do or something like that. it's demurring. the way somebody might say thanksgiving when you offer them a second piece of pie and they go know i couldn't possibly. so i wrote back to him again and this is a sort of technique i picked up from reading an interview one time. he said if you are going to get to know somebody come if you're going to interview them especially coming you have to reciprocate. you can't just ask them questions and ask to take things away from them. what was your childhood like, how did your parents get along, what is the first memory you can recall, things like that. you have to ante up. you have to throw down in a sense. you have to show the other person about you as well. so the second letter was a small biography of me. i told kurt the 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 are a public relations person for general electric, my father worked in public relations for the ford motor company. kurson market is about my age. you were a journalist for a while. i was a journalist for a while. so - all these commonalities between it and then kind of in modest i guess i ended up at the end of the letter saying i guess someone could cobble together a biography of neutral in the internet and finding some salient facts and trivia they could utilize a lot of secondary sources in the library. i know you've given hundreds of interviews over the year. somebody could fabricate a biography of you using this information. line a good writer and a good research and i am the person for the job. so i sent it off and about a week later i received a

postcard. i flipped over and on the back was a little drawling looking up to it above his head was one word, okay. the was the beginning of our relationship. from then on, kurt and i got to know each other more and more to the point i considered him a friend. kurt at the point that he was out in his life was discovered as a rather lonely man. the phone would ring at 9:00 at night and i would pick it up and on the other and would be a voice that would say this is kurt vonnegut. how was my biography coming and he just wanted to talk. the fact i was writing a biography was just an excuse to reminisce and he loved to talk about his boyhood. talked about growing up in indianapolis in 1920's as he put it it was a german-american aristocracy. his family owned the largest hardware store in town to the candy factory.

the owned a factory that made overalls for working men, even though the factory that own coffins. from birth to death he encountered in indianapolis a crown cemetery, tar heels cemetery in indianapolis and with their relatives his mother was from that same german american aristocracy. she inherited a fortune from her father who was a managing director that won the largest brewery in the midwest. indianapolis brewery company but when a gold medal in france for their beer and the secret ingredient was a pinch of coffee. that's what made it different from everybody else. so, he was an upper middle class person whose father was an architect and these factors combine to give the kind of an idea about who he was so to speak so what i could see of them easily and how his out and received, how we proceed as

outlined, but when i really got to know him is when i met him in person because after these phone calls periodically, you know, late at night i finally decided that i needed to go to new york and i needed to talk to him personally. the was a was nice to chat on the phone. i wanted to sit down with him and have my little list of questions in the studio and just work through all these things. so i went to new york, and you have to picture this situation. i took a cab from where i was standing down to east 48th street where he lived and it was raining, it was december, 2006 and i felt i should stop and get some flowers for his wife. so, i stopped and got out of the cab, went over to a flower vendor and got back in the car and got in the cab, and arrived at his house and you have to picture this scene. i'm getting out of the town of and at the top of the flight of

steps going back the door opened and out stepped kurt vonnegut. somebody i read about for 35 years and here he is, and his hair is gray, the wind sort of blown, he has on chinos and a short for college and he is stepping out of the door command line is getting out of the cab with a bouquet of flowers and for all the world looked like we were going on our first date together. i was coming to pick up my prom date, and i come up the stairs and he invites me in, and this is a clue to how he was in a sense to have a new friend because kurdish was an extrovert. some writers are in word turned. they spend a lot of time alone, a lot of time thinking and writing, but kurt really enjoyed people. so when i come and he closes the door behind me come in and then in the time-honored style of one

boy meeting another, he says want to see my room? [laughter] sure. so we go up the stairs and to where he does all his writing and that there is a big bed that he has come sort of a queen size bed for taking naps, and he has a low coffee table in which he has his computer. he was careful to point out that he only needed it for writing. he wouldn't use the internet. he was proud of saying in that regard. his books are lined up against one wall and his windows overlook 48 st. so, i walked around making appreciative noises and looking at his things he sat there and just nodded and was pleased that seemed i was there to do nothing except find out about him coming 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 didn't expect. first i found out he seemed to be a lonely man.

in the second thing i found out is that he was a man with grievances. we tend to think of people who are elderly as coming to some kind of accommodation with the past, for giving those who have done as harm come forgive us our trespasses as a sense and yet when i began to talk about him 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, his brother, elder brother who became a famous atmospheric scientist was in fact the much loved child, the preferred child coming and 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 he still is recalling that to be and he blamed his poor -- brother for going to college she didn't enjoy.

for all the world if i closed my eyes i would have thought that i was listening to a 19 year old who was angry, just coming to realize his life hadn't been on the deal and here he was facing abel plug and wanted some kind of accounting for things that happened to him. and later as i worked on the book i really think that part of the reason for his 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 that had a lot of unsolved or unresolved issues from his past. and i think that if we stick to here in a vonnegut novel when you open up, that voice that appeals particularity young people is a voice that they can relate to because he's still there in a lot of ways he's still very emotionally. so, how does this have a? how did this come about? would this older man still have

these problems with the past? well, for one thing as i alluded to, he felt was a favorite child, that his elder brother bernard was. also he to witness a great falling off in his family and he felt bad for his father and mother but as a child there was nothing that he could do about it. understand that he was raised as an upper middle class child. his father was an architect. she never picked of a dirty sock from the floor. the yard man and a cook as they told the mother. during the great depression, his father lost all of his commission and because of prohibition his mother's legacy from her father who was the beer baron of the midwest, that legacy dried up and the fellow themselves strapped for cash selling off china and silver we're all in an effort to stay afloat financially he felt his parents humiliation and felt there sort of floating disquiet

and then there is not about this, but that's not unique to vonnegut. what was unique to vonnegut as a couple of things that happened directly for which she never understood about why these things happen and how he should adjust to them. one thing when he was about to go to college he had done well in high school being a high school journalist. he found his niche working for the high school newspaper. right when he was about to go to college his older brother who was at mit studying physics said listened come he can't go into english, can't go into journalism. the liberal arts or ornamental. that is no way to relieving. the way that the future is technology and science that is where the new frontier is and that is where he should go as well. kurt was very bright and he had an appetite for science. i saw his high school report card he had a high iq and got an

a-plus in physics, said he had the mental horsepower to go into science but he didn't want to go into science. when his parents forced him to go to cornell and to declare himself a science major, he did everything he could to pull against the trees is. the college newspaper became known as a mischief maker and a columnist. meanwhile his grades went south. when he realized he was way to be kicked out of cornell, he dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1944. as a private parents or heartbroken. they couldn't believe the police refuse to be one day country club in the family used to take dancing lessons on wednesday night and had gone to an ivy league college is now a private in the army carrying his pack and rifle. his mother left and his father said well at least i hope they teach you to be neat. they went off to the army and in

1944 he was about to shed overseas when he came home on mother's day to suppress his mother. he had a three day pass and walked in the door all spit and polish to. the one soldier doing his duty, and this resulted in one of the episodes in his life that he never to satisfaction understood or could result. 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 occurrence of killing yourself on mother's day when i'm home on leave? is it but i failed as a son or you can't bear to have me fight? what am i supposed to learn from this and as he said later in his riding the sons of suicide always find something lacking in

life. there was that stain on his young adulthood. well he's reached up to the front, captured at the battle of the bulge, put on the cards and is taken to an internment camp with thousands of other jihadi -- gis. he's told to line up for roll call and a german soldier comes up and says you, you, you, step up. it turns out he was glad to be part of a 150 man work team that was going to be sent to dresden to work in the non-combat duties. the geneva convention allow soldiers to noncombatant type of work. it sure beats standing around in a camp in the middle of the woods in germany caging smoke. now she 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-years-old city and aboveground museum of architecture. the war hadn't touched dresden at all and as they walked down the streets with people having breakfast at the door cafes they couldn't believe their good luck all of those other four guys in the camp living on the russians and stuff like that and in this marvelous city they were taken to a converted slaughterhouse and was a place that was used to house animals that had been cleaned up and converted into a p.o.w. camp and put in the months. for about a month or so kurt worked in a factory boil down grain and turned into a high protein server for pregnant women. now and then he could steal a little of that honey they were making from the grain and was nourishing and warmed his stomach but then one night in february, 1945, he was lifted

out of his bunk, his captors took all of the men across-the-board and 50 feet down into a basement area. a giant cellar where there were carcases hanging on tenterhooks. it was so far down below that it was naturally cold down there and they were using it as an undergrad refrigerator. the men were told to sit down and wait and suddenly the ceiling began to shake. the one bold hanging swung back-and-forth and dust sprinkle down on their head. they were there for eight hours while curt said it sounded like giants were walking over head. when they came up eight hours later, dresden was gone. the city was in flint, 35,000 people, maybe more, had been killed overnight. the fire storms were so intense from the air force bombing that people running on the streets were caught up in the cortex and thrown skyward. it was blown apart and the

animals hattie's cade in the street, people who were in their basements hiding thinking that they were in his dollars and in places they could get away but instead of the air was sucked out by the fire storm and they were suffocated where they sat. for the next couple of months, the occupation changed from working enamelled factory for pregnant women to being a lot the minor and he and the other 50 would go down into these dark cellars some of which were flooded and and you retrieve floating bodies and the there when they buy the against the wall through them over their shoulder, carried them up into the streets and piled them in and enormous he would where people from the concentration camps who had worked with the situations like this doused the bodies with line and set them afire. after about a month of though it became clear that they could no longer bring up the body. so instead they were pulled in

and the flames were shot down and the basement and they were incinerated. if ever there was a vision of hell or a glimpse into the apocalypse, that was it. and kurt was as i said just 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 him that there was always something going on in his mind. something that he was rehearsing for going over again and his children and nephew told me, too that he seemed like a haunted person. it's often said of depressive, people that are depressed they go over the same episodes in their mind again and again hoping for a different outcome, hoping for maybe they had done something differently. as i talked to him it seems he was only listening with one year within sight of his mind he was thinking about something that was completely preoccupied and

was kind of a melancholy era about him. so she knew he had a great book to write out of this. he still wanted to be a writer and he had seen something really monumental, something disasters and the civilization and felt he could write about it. maybe it could be the thin red line from here to eternity or the young lion but there was a problem with what he did not see at dresden. he saw the first act and the third act. he didn't see the second act. he was missing the metal to his narrative. he can to dresden when it was intact. he was hustled down into a basement room and he came back out and there was no dresden he had gotten off the ships at troy and saw the towers of troy and a volume and then he fell asleep and when he woke up the trojan horse was already inside and was time to the board the ships for home because he was liberated by the russian army not long after

that. so he was missing the metal and it wasn't until he arrived at the workshop in a 65 that he finally broke through the structure of the novel that he suddenly realized because of his interaction with other fiction writers he could do something very different and exactly what he wanted to do. he was kind of random cape cod with his family as a free-lance writer and he had very little interaction with other writers and professionals, 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 workshop he's with donald justice and vance and people making names for themselves in the writing of novels and what they told him was you can do what ever you want. you don't have to abide by the convention of fiction. you can go any direction you want. so he broke free of the

chronological order that he had been trying to tell the story and instead he told it as a private who had no idea what was going on. a private who was just trying to serve, a private was a victim of circumstance in a way and who had been severely traumatized by what has happened to him. the book is alternately funny and michaud is at times grotesque and other times bizarre. it's really a high wire act by an author taking a creative risk because he powered his novels on ideas, not plotz, not character. but he would just take the possibility of what if and extrapolated and stretch it and make it go as far as he possibly could, and i really think that slaughterhouse five is his crowning achievement. well, he became famous and he had been denied the fame he wanted for so long he couldn't

resist the pull of celebrity. in 1970 he left his family, went to new york took up with a woman 20 years his junior, could be found, hobnobbing with all kinds of people and they were part of a celebrity set and he was loving and but ultimately feeling guilty about what he had done, and what he owed to his family and his children and his children were in fact very angry. i think that his career after that follows a kind of remark because he left his wife behind, his first love and as i began to explore the personality and the interaction i think it was his in-house editor critic advocates she majored in english and was a phi beta kappa and she knew literature. curt had an incomplete education and here was his wife who could really help him and did. after he left to think it is no

coincidence that his novels after 1970 become more and more autobiographical. the fiction begins to dry up and he talks more and more about himself until you get all the way to the 1990's when it's a collection of reminiscences. so when he was under the gun to write to take a risk and after he became famous i think it actually sort of cramped his style. i think that the persona dropped over him and made him into an expectation of people, somebody that he couldn't do much with after at that point because that character, that persona 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

of 2007. we had been communicating a lot. he sent me letters and postcards and i had been sending him all of the quotes from his former students that i could find coming and he seemed to be enjoying that. when i came to see him in march was obvious that he had had a very rough winter. he had some congestive problems. he was a chain smoker, he would one poll 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 cushions like this and he was playing with a breath mint behind his teeth just looking up at the sofa and he just presented a portrait of a man who was exhausted. and he had begun seeing in the interviews before he really didn't expect to live this long. that he was tired. he said gave no longer run him in the stands, right? i'm tired i can't seem to write any more. so i can to him in march and interviewed him one day and 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 do you believe in god? because in the novels is never quite clear whether he does. sometimes he seems angry. i said do you believe in god? he said well, i don't know, but who couldn't come and i left. there was his pronouncement, and i laughed. about an hour after he was taking his stalled out for a walk and they made a kind of an odd pair when they walked down the street in new york. here's a six-foot three man very attenuated, very tall with a tiny little lot of soap that looks like a nut on a leash, tiny ligon bald and she was walking down that steep flight of steps out his flat i saw an

ad earlier and he tripped over the bald's leash and hit his head on the sidewalk and never regained consciousness. a month later he died. it's very interesting, but the irony about that and no one tries to bring in a strange paradox is and come incidences' into their lives but i have to tell you this, that one of his characters was out in space with his dog and gets caught into some kind of time warp and of every seven years reappears on earth walking the dog. about 45 minutes you can talk to them and he knows what will happen in the future, and then like ectoplasm he begins to fade and disappear and he's gone and he exit's leading his little dog and the this sort of what he did, but more than that i can across hundreds of letters that he didn't know existed. he told me they didn't have any

letters, that they lost them in a fire in a study and everything that he had with his papers and indiana university. those were not very many were small letters. letters i found were letters he had written to friends and friends kept them for years because they were long the chatty letters. i think that he needs to warm up his fingers at the typewriter every day fall into his voice by typing to friends, writing a letter to friends. my wife and i found letters that were written on the same day. to single spaced pages of how things were going home and how difficult the book was and how brooch he was. no, incomplete. but in one of those letters in 1975, he said writing to james come he said on had a recurring premonition and it's that i'm going to be killed by a dog. an odd in the tree life but strangely inappropriate for the post-modernist who inserted himself into the literature and took chances with the narrative who broke all the rules and he

exited this life leading a dog like one of his characters. so that's really all i have to say about my relationship was like with him and how i got to know him and a sort of synopsis of his writing. if you have any questions i would be happy to answer them. >> have you ever found any kind of reconciliation with his brother bernard, did he ever -- >> well, consider this. when i saw him in 2006, bernard had been gone for a number of years, and here he was complaining about it, about the influence that he had on his life and forced into this and that and i said did you ever tell them how angry you were and he looked kind sheepish and he said no. so the chance passed him by. he never leveled with his brother and i asked him why did you interfere? why didn't you let me live my life the way that i wanted to?

other question. >> after world war ii, throughout his life did he ever go back to dresden? there was a constant presence. >> he did go back to the he received a grant in the complete slaughterhouse five and he felt he needed to do is jump start his imagination on the looked. he had an idea about what he really needed to do was to walk those streets, go back to the slaughterhouse, feel those. and when he gets to dresden and it is in east germany behind the iron curtain and it's been sovietize, there is no such word but here's the cement slab box building and as i say in the book the overhanging electrical wires that look like the whole city ran on extension cords and these little to cylinder cars buzzing down the street in the factories, this wasn't what he recalled. but the trip was worth it in that he realized dresden was no

where physically any more. it was all going to have to come out of here. she didn't have to show up the fed devotee to the past. it could all take place up here. so the trick was worth it in that regard. they've since undergone a wonderful rehabilitation, and they understand that today is a beautiful city. but when he went there in the late 60's it was in the throes of the soviet plan. other questions? >> i'm curious about the biography or you expressly interested in the writers biographies or what is it about the biography that attracts you, is there one book that starts you do not have? >> that's a couple questions. all of them are good. when i was in college i came up with a goal of reading 15 books every summer. i was working in the steel mills and the railroad factories and

the books for my brief vacation at lunchtime or that might, so i just began reading whatever appealed to me and i found myself drawn to the biographies because i wanted to know what was it in a person's life that had led them to become alexander hamilton? so i liked finding out the clue in their childhood or adolescence. beyond that though, the reason i really like to write about writers is i like to figure out what they are doing, their craft, decisions that they make, and biography as a genre gives me an opportunity that i think life. i learned a lot about my own, by extending some compassion for people's mistakes or trying to understand why they took the wrong turn or why they love 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 are making it up as we go, and he was very much right in saying that life is made up of a series of accidents and we are all involved in this random exercise of trying to get along in life. other questions? >> did his brother to place blame on him or make him feel like it was partially his fault? >> he never expressed any kind of connection between his brother and his mother's suicide. his theory was as he put 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 she couldn't go on. but even that rationale doesn't explain the timing of its.

mother's day when he is home to visit her what was she trying to say? so 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 medicine to control her mood and what she died was was an overdose that nevertheless never solved the satisfaction, the emotional ritual of the emotional rebel of why did you do that what did you want me to know? >> any other questions? >> well, thank you. i have enjoyed this. [applause] thank you. >> for more information visit the author's website,

charlesjshields.com. on your screen is the newest book by longtime washington foreign correspondent gorgie anne geyer predicting unthinkable anticipating the impossible. what is this book about? >> it is a compilation of my poems since the fall and i fought for many years that we have to do, those of us we have to anticipate and that is what this book is trying to tell. >> rot your years as a foreign correspondent, where have your travels to can you? what are two or three of the most exciting places that you've been in situations cubin? >> i've been all over the world. egypt, israel, cuba, i

interviewed there many times, and really almost everywhere. >> if people sit down to read predicting the unthinkable what are they going to find in their? what would you like them to take away from that book? >> there from all parts of the world and thinking of different people to anticipate. we have great [inaudible] >> so, if you were to travel today, where do you see a future problem or future situation we

should be aware of thinking about now? >> certainly syria. i think the rest of the middle east have come out of this quite well but syria is such a violent place that it would have to be in all else revolution. they are not doing much of anything, going full speed ahead but they depend upon us and so almost everywhere you look including our own country. >> we are here at the national press club and its author's night at the national press club and we are talking with gorgie anne geyer, whose newest book right there is on your screen. regular viewers of news shows from cnn.com msnbc come c-span, fox, all of them