there is something that the fast narrative pace that is being most ideal lead to the form. .. is need to understand, so it really go back and forth. >> one more time, the web site? >> publishers marketplace.com and it's a free e-book called buzz books 2012. >> we have been talking with michael cader the founder of

publishers marketplace and publishers plus. thank you. >> now a few interviews interviews from booktv's recent visit to georgetown university here in the nation's capital. talked with sheryll cashin about her book "the agitator's daughter" a memoir of four generations of one extraordinary african-american family. this is about 15 minutes. >> the agitators daughter is the name of the book and sheryll cashin city author and she is a professor of law at georgetown university. professor subbyte who is the agitator? >> my dad, dr. john cashin jr., who just passed this last year. >> what kind of an agitator was he? >> well, my dad founded an independent democratic party in alabama at a time when the regular democratic party was

dominated by george wallace, the dixiecrat and despite he was two-time valedictorian, his ab mentation was -- and this was in the 60's mind you, and early 70's into his political party, so that alabamians could vote for lyndon johnson rather than george wallace and the hundreds of thousands of newly registered by voters would have people to vote for. not just vote but run for office and so that was his life's work and he was very much committed to read capturing the greatness of african-americans in terms of the political participation and very steeped in the arab

reconstruction. his grandfather had been a reconstruction legislator and he grew up hearing about his grandfather, grandpa herschel while he was coming up aging jim crow and have radicalized him to be living under jim crow in alabama while hearing about the fact that black people used to actually have a lyrical power and be in office including his own family. >> who was herschel cashin? >> that was my great-grandfather. a handsome man. in our family laure herschel cashin was the first black lawyer in the state of alabama and the architect of reconstruction. i grew up listening to my father repeat this over and over and my eyes would roll. in this book i go off in search of my father's passions and found outlines galore there. he was admitted to the alabama bar in 1878. >> the alabama bar?

>> the alabama bar. not the first but the fourth colored in the state and he did serve in reconstruction, served two terms in the alabama registers. >> as a republican. >> as a radical republican. i father used to say, a radical republican that but he wasn't the architect because by the time you get elected reconstruction was already closing down but my great-grandfather, the gentleman in the picture, for the next 40 years never stopped giving up on this idea that people of color had a rightful place in politics so he continued to be active in national republican politics, attended for national republican conventions and raised a family and my father grew up hearing about it and was determined to as a matter of family honor, restore black people to their rightful place in politics in alabama. that was what my father was all

about. >> sheryll cashin why do you write about your family? what made you take it this far? >> well, i got tired of hearing my father saying you have got to write a book. he said if you're not going to write this book -- and was terrified that this incredible lore would die with him and so in my mid-40s, early 40s i should say, i finally just got tired of hearing him talk about it and i just took out a tape recorder and started interviewing him. i wanted to know everything to be sure didn't get laws. i started interviewing him a about what he knew about the family but also about his political party and everything he did and it took on a life of its own. i started researching you now how much of this lore was true and it became an session.

>> what did you find as far as how truthful the lower was? >> well be careful what you wish for you no? if you go out to search in your family history you will find that-somethings are chew and some are not. one of the chief parts of our lore was that we descended from a benevolent irishman named john cashin who was never a slave owner. a white man, an irish immigrant. galore was this guy john cashin and his brother james came over to the u.s. during the potato famine and that one was a slave owner and one was not and we descended from the benevolent who was not true. we did dissent from this guy john cashin but inconveniently he was a slave owner and not only was he a slave owner, the father of my great-grandfather great-grandfather -- hershel's father, that guy's father who was also named john, was one of the more prominent

slaveowners. so here i have to contend with not only did i dissent from slavery but i descended from considerable wealth, born of slavery and i could tide my family's history of relative advantage to four generations of educated people. my great-grandfather was -- had a classical education in philadelphia and became a lawyer. at the time it was new and a revelation and i reconciled myself to that by what my grandfather, great-grandfather chose to do with that. he chose to go back to the south which he didn't have to and he chose to work for people of color. he chose to identify with people of color when in fact several of his siblings were pale enough to

pass, and they did

>> did it help that huntsville was an educated city? >> what but helped i think more than anything was that huntsville had tied its fate to its base industry and werner von braun was already there and a lot of engineers and scientists had descended on alabama and the city wanted to disassociate themselves from the rapid racism and the rest of the state and that help them to negotiate this quietly. so yeah, from the beginning i have memories of my parents who were civil rights activists and active -- after the voting rights act then they pulled to -- turned to politics. i'd grew up with the national democratic party. i have memories -- to my father

ran for governor against george wallace in 1970 and i have these memories of my summers being taken all around the state, those counties that were the center of the plantation economy during the antebellum era and not surprising 100 years later where all the black votes were and it felt like particularly during that election in 1970s, it felt like i had been carried to every black church in the black help you now and i watched my father give this stump speech over and over again invoking the famous line, those who deprecate agitation are like -- [inaudible] and that is where the line comes from. frederick douglass, the title "the agitator's daughter" but he was my fathers he wrote. he was always quoting him but when he was on the campaign

trail in the black belt, speaking to these dirt poor sharecroppers trying to give them a reason to register to vote and go to the polls he would always invoke douglas and say you know, don't sit around waiting for other people to do right by you. frederick douglass says power received a man. go forth and demand your power at the ballot box. >> sheryll cashin what do you teach here at georgetown? >> i am professor of law. i teach a legal history course called race in american law which covers most of the major race cases by the supreme court. i also teach constitutional law and administrative law and sometimes property. sometimes local government law. >> when you approach public affairs or when you sent this manuscript to a publisher, what was the answer back from public affairs? why were they interested in the

story? >> well, fortunately i already had a prior relationship with them. my first book was a book about, the book that is titled the -- but it was about why we struggle to be an integrated society so i had why have a relationship with them and i sent a proposal to them via my agent and they were familiar with me because the first book, they were promoting the first book and i think they knew -- they knew that as hard as it is to get attention to a memoir, think they knew that i was appealing to it and they found the story compelling. >> at short conversation with georgetown professor sheryll cashin about her book "the agitator's daughter" a memoir of four generations of one extraordinary african-american family. by the way, booktv covered

professor cashin earlier on this book and it's about an hour in length. you can go to booktv.org. go to the search function in the upper left-hand corner and type in her name. you can watch the entire hour. thanks for being with us. >> stuart firestein how many brain cells do we have? >> that's a good question. we used to think 100 billion. that number hung around for ages. it's in all the textbooks but then a couple of years ago a young narrow anatomist and brazil called and e-mailed around asking how many brain cells people thought we had all of us who taught science and where we got that number from. everybody wrote back 100 also

wrote back its just in all the books so she developed a new method of counting brain cells. it's actually not a trivial problem to kalb rain cells and you can count everything that is several billions, several tens of billions so she developed a new method and it's very interesting and she recounted them and found there were in fact only 80 billion. that is in order of magnitude okay so it's not that big of a different. the larger difference might've been that we thought we had 10 times as many so-called glial cells which are the packing cells in the brain, the non-brain sale parts of the brain to keep it all together and in fact the word glia means glue on the greek and we thought we had 10 times as many, 1 trillion glial cells and it turns out we only have 80 billion of those as well. in one fell swoop we lost 120 billion cells in the brain. plesea no -- >> so what don't we now?

>> oh well that's an awfully big question. as i point out ignorance is a much bigger question. i think the question is not only what don't we know, but what don't we know that we don't know? the fame most donald rumsfeld quote. so sorry he got to that before i did but there does. he was absolute correct in saying that although he sounded a bit e-filed when he did because he was worried about a war that wasn't going so well but that is really a good question. are there limits to our ignorance because that is more important important anyway than the limit to our knowledge. >> you say in your luck that when you get together with other scientists you talk about things you don't know rather than the things you do no. >> not. >> my favorite quote was from marie jury who upon gaining her second graduate degree wrote a letter to her brother saying something to the effect of one only cares about what remains to be done and i think that is the attitude that drives scientists along and gets us into the lead

early in the morning and keeps us there late at night and moves us along. we don't really care so much about what everybody knows. that is done now. let's get onto on to the next thing. what don't we know? what do we need to know and what would be the next best thing to know and so forth? >> page 28 of ignorance, george bernard shaw and a toast toasted a dinner setting albert einstein proclaimed, science is always wrong. it never solves a problem without creating 10 more. >> yes and i say is in that glorious, which i think it is. i think that's exactly the right description of science, absolutely. either way i should i believe george -- years before that had come up with this idea of question propagation, the principle of question propagation that every answer begets more questions. >> do scientists rest on their laurels after a wild? >> well i guess everybody rests on their laurels after some

point. i think resting on laurels is a dangerous thing for science to do because those laurels tend not to be all that, all about foundational or all that strong a foundation. i think one of the things that probably the public recognizes at least about science is that we tend to have less regard for facts then was generally thought to be the case and science is although we work for practice and we work to get data, we also realized the most malleable least reliable part of the whole operation that whatever you find today will surely be superceded in some way or another, revised or overturned completely in the worst case but certainly revised by the next generation of scientists are the next generation of tools. buses been for the past 400 years in 14 generations is what we have done and i think we welcome it. sciences revision. we welcome revision. revision in science as a victory. >> you writing here that science

and nature magazines are very important for scientist to get published and that if you are going to recommend to your students to read those he would recommend not reading the last issue but 10 years ago. >> they should read the issue to stay current but quite often what will happen is a gradual come rushing into the lap with this weeks nature which has a great set of experiments and suggesting that now i can see what the next one is and let's get to work on this. of course i know the people who wrote that paper have already done the next experiment in the next 10 experiments or at least thought of them and the real place to go often for ignorance, for good ignorance, our papers that were published in her 15 years ago in nature. high-quality papers, the leading papers of the day but which couldn't have asked certain questions because we didn't know them to ask it. they didn't have a the technology or the tools that were developed in last 10 the last 10 or 15 years so to be

revisited. >> has technology helped in discovering science? >> sure, technology is a critical part of the whole arrangement. often science drives -- questions the drive of technology and technology then goes ahead and drive science. so instrumentation has always been a critical part of science as galileo and the telescope really began it all some 400 some odd years ago. >> besides the number of brain cells professor firesign what is another fact that we knew that has changed? >> i guess my favorite one because my laboratory happens to research taste and smell, senses of taste and style so we work in what are called the chemical senses so we work on that in one of the best-known facts, it's the so-called taste map which you will find in every high school and college and medical school textbook and most people believe that there is a map of sensitivity on your tongue and

that you taste the sweet things on the tip of your tongue, sweet and sour things on the sides in the bidder in the back. this is completely and true. is a mistranslation often and total, totally anecdotal report by a german physiology professor in the early 1900's which was picked up by a well-known psychology professor in the 1940s named of all things boring, so his book is called psychology by boring and you can imagine it's a joke for generations of undergraduates but the purpose of this book is if it were in fact a well studied fact. apparently it's a mistranslation and stood the test of time somehow or other even though it's totally wrong. >> what has stood the test of time from 300, 400, 500 years ago. >> so many of them do but maybe not in their original form. certainly newton has stood the test of time. newton continues to work. we can launch the shuttle's and build bridges and all the rest

of the sort this sort of thing using newton's laws of gravity and force and so forth and so on but significantly most notably by einstein and many scientists sciences since einstein so they have been changed but i guess the way we say it is that the regime in which newton's proposals were made and were true, they are still true within that regime. what is changed in the ways the regime. we have expanded the regime so now newton's formulations work as long as you don't travel at the speed of light which we don't very -- don't do very often so they're workable but when you begin to travel you have to evoke einstein's theory of relativity. for example pbs devices we send signals to satellites and back of the speed of light needs to be adjusted by einstein's relativity in order to work properly. >> albert einstein --

>> albert einstein has certainly stood up although einstein wasn't certain he would have stood up. yet questions here and there which turned out he claimed were one of the biggest mistakes he has made in cosmological conflict but now it is combat. it has come back and now seems very important. certainly einstein has stood the test of time but it's only been a century. >> what is your class called? >> my classes called ignorance as well and i've it's a great treasure to be able to teach in a place like columbia university where they let you run a class called ignorance. the class started about five weeks -- five or six years ago in 2006 and it was based on my feeling that i was doing students a disservice. i was being a diligent teacher giving them 25 lectures a year in neuroscience, sell your molecular neuroscience was the name of the course using this text with that i'm fond of, one of the leading textbooks by eric

candle and his colleagues but i'm fond of pointing out this textbook weighed 7.5 pounds, twice the weight of a normal human brain so that can be right. so i think the students i got the idea in my course that everything is known about neuroscience and that's certainly not true in the way we can track what we know about neuroscience as we build up facts and stick them in these encyclopedia books and that is not true. we don't know much about the brain yet at all. we don't even know what we don't know about the brain in some ways. we are still finding marvelous things out so i thought really i ought to teach these students something in neuroscience so i devoted a couple of lectures at the end end of course my thought why not try a whole course in this? why not see if it works with other sciences as well so that is what we do. the course meets once a week. it's a seminar course for two hours an evening and i invite members of the colombia faculty who are other scientists

visiting to new york to come in and talk to the students for two hours about in a specific way, not the big questions, not what is the nature of consciousness and the nature of discovery channel. they do a marvelous job on that. these are what i call case andreesen and currents, how an individual scientist grapples and why he chooses this rather than not question. don't know this rather than added things of that nature. >> who is a scientist that you used in the course? >> in the book i include case histories of scientists and in fact a couple of them are confabulations of two or three. one of them as a scientist named diana reese who reese who studies communication and cognitive russ is as in animals and i start the chapter off by saying is if anything harder than knowing whether bread is the same -- there is one thing harder which is knowing what is in an animal's mind and what they think so she has done marvelous

work with dolphins and things like that. i should be honest about it and tell you that she is my wife as well. but she was just a visitor in the class but i thought her work was so marvelous, highlight the three physicists who work in experimental and theoretical physics and compared the two of those and i highlight a couple of neuroscientists who work in various areas of neuroscience with new questions that we haven't thought of a few years ago and then curiously i use myself as a case history. that happen because in one class we had a speaker a terribly ill at the last minute and could not make it and i didn't know what to do. my wife said well why don't you fill in? why do you be the speaker and i will run the class and you be the speaker so i did it and it worked out pretty well. i have the transcript from a so i thought alright i will be honest about this and use myself as a case history too. >> how important is money to this research?

>> well, how important is money to almost anything? x. extremely important and something that did think about carefully as a culture how much money we want to put into research and where we want to put it, basic research versus applied research and how to make that balance work out. i think the cornucopia we have gotten out of research over the 14 generations that we are doing it is a testament to the reason why we should continue to support a date even when we don't know what we are going to get out of it. my favorite parable comes from one of our founding fathers benjamin franklin, who witnessed the first human flight which actually happened to be a hot air balloon, not a fixed-wing aircraft and this was in paris. there was a series of balloon flights human beings lifted off the face of fear for the first time and another spectator at the park there said to franklin, well this is fun but what use could this possibly be? and franklin's retort was, really, what use is a newborn baby? that is a little tough i suppose

then that is franklin but he is right of course. what use is a newborn baby? we don't know but many of them turn out to be quite useful so we invest the end them as we should do in science. >> stuart firestein is a professor of neuroscience and chair of the biological science department here at columbia university. this is his book, "ignorance: how it drives science" and there's a web site associated with this book, ignorance.biology.colombia.edu. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i am chuck todd with nbc news. i have five books in my queue if you will. i'm reading, read about 60% of the time on my ipad and 40% of the time an actual hardcopy. let me start with my nonfiction this summer. during the last break over winter break i read a book on

fdr and the election of 1944. there's another one that just came out by stanley weintraub called final victory about the same campaign. i'm obsessed with this for a number of reasons but why it may be interesting to political junkies in today's time period. you read about thomas dooley and you see a lot of mitt romney, the good, the bad and all the issues that you see when you talk about mitt romney. when you read these books thomas dooley especially the campaign of 44. the campaign in 44 as well and that is one i'm working on and i'm finally getting into a nonfiction book that i've been meaning to read for some time about a friend of mine. he wrote a book called pinched and it was about, about the great recession and it is chronicling sort of how it's

culturally changing is not just in the pocketbook but what kind of long-term changes taking place in many places around the country, talking about a white male underclass. is one of his in there, but it's a good way and i'm thinking about making it required reading frankly for a lot of my folks internally but every politician not to read this because it's really, it explains as well as anybody that chronic pessimism that's out there. we see it in all the polls but that is something, why is it we are so pessimistic about the future? we don't have a optimist many more. were stuck about the importance of optimism in a presidential candidate that but there is just a pall of pessimism. it's not necessarily translating the benefits frankly one party over another. look, we have gone through this before as a country. ak