let me come back to that. make me go blank. >> anything else? one more question. >> did you go through a longer list of people before you settle down or connected best with these three? >> absolutely. when i started the project i interviewed a lot of people. i knew i wanted it to be between classes of 61, and 65 so they would arrive in college at the height of the college revolt so i had a tremendous selection of people to choose from and these were the people that i settled on. i know that i wanted someone who represented the old left which was tom. i wanted somebody who was in

opposition to the school because i didn't want it to be just sort of an uncritical love letter. i wanted -- it contains a lot of contradictions and wanted to bring those out. and a lot i wanted to represent a woman. just fascinating, and an african-american, couldn't resist. and all three still doing what they are doing. in the mid 70s or 80s never slowed down. tom sort of switch his focus but is still working for his beliefs. their beliefs may have changed over the years but not terribly much and they are still fighting for them and that is inspiring.

>> thanks. [applause] >> we would like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> in facing the wave -- "facing the wave," greta ehrlich looked at the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit japan on march 11th, 2011. she spoke at the mechanics institute in san francisco. just under an hour. >> thank you very much for coming here and listening to me in the middle of the warm, beautiful california day. i spend three months in japan after the tsunami. i waited until june to go. i didn't want to be confused with the journalists who were flooding in and out quickly, better to let people settle

down, what was left of their lives. in june, september and december it was almost as rich as if it was three different groups of people each time. i will talk about that as i go along. the great seventeenth century japanese, the person in morning is a slave to czar of. nobody i saw in japan was a slave to sorrow. the pain was real and extremely deep as you can imagine. the pain of losing people, not necessarily the pain of losing houses and cars and computers and bicycles because this is a country so seismically dynamic

that all the rural people said this has happened to our family many times over the last 500 years. my great grandmother swam to safety and survived. it wasn't unexpected this. there was an earthquake in three months. so you are constantly reminded of impermanence, that the landscape shaped consciousness. shaped how use of the world every day and you see this, you felt it all these years i have been going since the first visit in 1968 and it is the sense that

the beauty, the sense of beauty shaped by impermanence, shaking eight islands, shaken into a sense of freshness that on the flip side of the pain is this incredible open door that keeps opening and opening to more and more freshness. nobody escaped the wave all the way up the coast about 375 miles. everybody was impacted some how. a read of one person called a swimmer, a fisherman trying to get to the harbor to get on his boat and drive his boat didn't

quite make it. the passage of water, how one swim senate, from a seismic risk in the sea floor, and travels that jet speed and its short. and driving his car, when his car was almost shaken off of the road. six minutes later he turned toward his parents's house to rescue them knowing a tsunami would come, his father was going the other way bicycling for the harbor. don't go there, but the elderly man didn't hear. by the time he caught up with him, his father had climbed the sea wall and was clutching a steel water facing the sea. he remembers a roar, water was receding, surging backwards until the open floor was

exposed. we have got to get out of here? but his father didn't move. the war intensified. a white wine appeared at the horizon, the wave was coming fast. as he climbed the to get to his father, water came at him. his father shook his head refusing to budge. one last look, then the young fisherman jumped off of the wall. my father chose to stay and i thought it would be the same for me. water tower over him, he saw nine tons, teetering on the waves -- swinging and shattering, and swept into the river that splits the town in half. he climbed onto a metal roof but it sucked him backwards, pulling

in not to see. and was black with the land gas, sewage, derek and blood and he rolled and crashed inside its debris, marbles, and there was another war and another way of coming, water covered him again, and he saw a rope dangling, before the ocean began so i reached and grabs it, the lower half was submerged, debris was being hauled out but i can't hold on. as the water drew away my legs were pulled in front of me. i was holding tight, floating on my back with my head up. i was not worried about losing my grip but my hands got so cold. water came in title sequences.

between waves he remembers another period of stillness. a lot floated past. i climbed onto. sitting astride the dead tree, he could see the extent of the destruction for the first time. the entire port had been demolished. fishing boats had been hurled to the tops of buildings. lost his boat. almost every house was gone. abeam floated by. she was swimming in the remnants of his past. the first part of my june trip, traveling with the young woman and ended up living with parents, we all lived together, no place to stay up the coast and no place to each, and that

was wonderful. her extended family were all rice farmers. and was a big expansive of flash and the actual city in the downtown area is higher up. it was safe. it had earthquake damage but was saved from the water. all of the rice growing families and everything. and talked about and had to tell their head back just a brief and the next wave competed house and they got to the third floor of the building and tells this long story, kind of breathtaking and looked at me and says the more i lose the happier i am.

his father and mother drove me up the coast. it is very much like the coast, really beautiful. in every cove is not a million-dollar house but gorgeous little fishing villages. so every single one was wiped out and fishing boats all over and people's clothing hanging from big tall cedar trees. was astonishing. also the path he took when he was writing his fifth travel diary. one of the counts he visited, a large town, of all the towns i visited, terrible devastation, hospitals with fishing boats on

the terrace and x-ray machines hanging out, people, patients and doctors have all been swept away. and we are arrived, it was getting dark and the tide was coming coin. this is what i saw. after being displaced that the rupture site, becomes a moving mass whose bird is like something solid yet it slips and slides, shelves and gatherers, splits the end of things, fills and carved new shapes that are tipping the sharpest knife. a fisherman stands in front of his boat, it's about piercing the second story of its house. apiece drips out from the front shore, broken dishes lie in the

streets, arms folded, stands and stares, the sky darkens and a curtain of black rain begins to fall. he doesn't run for cover. more than 3,000 people in this city died in one day. everything is black, black water rising, dirt roads drinking it in, row after row of fishermen's houses bend, crushed and battered by what must have been fishing boats and debris. we moved through merck and ink. in the spring of 1689 one wandering put set off to search far north as well as the inner regions, lost his way and emerge from the forest. even then it was a thriving seaport not much to his liking.

hundreds of merchant ships were gathered in the bay. and smoke rose continuously, i thought to myself i never intended to come to a place like this. we refused by everyone. where was bosh0 right now on this page of destruction? an aftershock rattled the car windows, the latest two feet hired is not enough. at high tide water splashes against the tires. this area moved southeast 17 feet. and down two feet. all over the port, water enters and reenters every wrecked boat, house and living room. when the tide recedes, water drains from the road as well from a boat discovers a single line of cars and trucks bumps

over of ridge. the sea wall to protect the town was submerged, rubbish play 200 foot wall of it, lines one side of the road and on the other smashed cars stacked three i. a paper factory is in ruins, its sawdust piling obstructed by a ship turned sideways, water across its bows and trying to get back to the highway we drive on a pot told road so narrow we almost go through the front door of another ravaged house. a buddhist priest walks me begin slush along buildings that have been uprooted like trees. he vows toward a submerged shrine. there were wondering itinerant priests. we identified two of them who we saw walking up and down the

coast. i saw one bowling in front of a ruined crematorium where there was a handwritten sign that said please bring the bodies in one at the time. don't have the facilities. there was a line of wheel barrows. as each one went in decreased about. these were just everyday sights. i don't think i need to remind you there were three disasters on this day. they ran out heights between 60, and 130 feet high and then before the meltdown which are still -- which will always be affecting that country and the people. one of the wonderful things that

happened because of my friend put me in touch with an american for this -- put me in touch with a japanese, the niece of a man, and abbott, small country temple so we went to see her. also have to say one of the crazy things that happened was in the second part of my trip, my interpreter and my driver had strange names. the interpreter was named nicky, half new zealand, half japanese, and the key means diary. so she was a famous diary that people like that wrote. the driver was nicknamed abyss.

we call it the mickey know of this. seemed appropriate. we went to this wonderful temple. the upper river, 6 miles up the river, nobody thought this tsunami would bother them but it did. the abbot's entry was slender and tall. he sits with impeccable posture. i have three daughters, i put them through school and they haven't been back since. than my niece came visiting and said she wanted to become a nun. i thought she was joking so i told her to shave her head right away and she did. that meant she was serious. i sent her to her monastery. there were two, one was two meters high, it reseeded and came back as a three meter wave, a big tsunami wave. the bottom of the river showed. this had never happened before. the temple of the road was

washed away, lost all the head stones from the grave, rice fields were swept clean. no one wants to live in that village now. your calls after this tsunami began snowing hard. and 89-year-old woman showed up at the door soaking wet and shivering. the average's wife gave her dry clothes. after the tsunami water came up the river we had 70 or 80 people staying here. it is a small country temple and the came too crowded. we had nothing to eat for four days. i sent them to an elderly lady's farm down the road for vegetables. 100 people died who lived near the temple. is only a roof in a frame now. the most extraordinary thing happened. survivors began dragging the dad out of the river and bringing them to us. some were carried over men's shoulders.

others were put in wheelbarrows for in the back of small trucks. the dad kept arriving. corpses filled fat temple courtyard. it was like a graveyard. they were lying all the way around the center pine tree. we had ceremonies for the dead even when there were no bodies. two families missing, four family members, only one has been found that there are still seven missing. another neighbor found his family, he read in the newspaper they had died. the most courageous of the mall was a young woman on pregnancy leave. she had her baby just before the earthquake but her older daughter, 6 greater was washed away and hasn't yet been found. naomi, the mother, got a license to drive a back hoe. now she did for the missing every day. not only for her own daughter but the children of other

survivors. so far she hasn't found anyone that she won't give up. and i had a friend call last week, naomi is still digging for survivors. amazing woman. in japan is unusual to see a woman driving a back hoe as well. we are particularly proud of her. i am going to read a couple more things. a tiny short chapter called night sprinkled through the text. a bit more personal. hard rain began, crystal instability caused the ocean bed to keep moving. sea foam clobbers city's edge and the on waves, shoulder of long shoes fractured spines.

two more shakes before dawn. one goes the distance in not warning sign in. the very old, it must be reminiscent of the second world war, when news came of the mysterious a bomb twice dropped. in the newspaper woman tells a reporter she lost houses twice, once in nagasaki and again in this tsunami. before rain stops, what feels like a mask drops of. not the safe mask we have been wearing to protect ourselves from toxic dust or the elegant ones i once watched being carved 30 years ago but the heart and exterior we present to the world made with a rough skin. one small boy he said i feel one way when people are watching but i am another person when i am

alone. another young boy who watched both parents brown has not spoken since the tsunami. i set up in the dark. too often we do not relate directly to experience. the mask, the scarf, the tall boots, the mask is, a few pieces fall. maybe we don't have to take all the way of. it is enough to let rainwater listen it. to glimpse the possibility of nakedness. it sticks and slides again. i cried for only the second time. and the whole purpose crumbles. is not so much a question of giving it up. the mask begins to give you up. there is no function for you

anymore. lying down, my rib cage floats. it rises to the ceiling and hangs there. wrists, knuckles and bees, the bones as light as toys, rain comes hard and morning light is blocked, tsunami shadow wave in the air and gone back to scrape darkness from stone. i will read one last little bit. because there was no place to live, most of the trip by ended up going to stay at the driver's house if you want to call it a house, sort of a very wonderful

tradition but rundown place up in the mountains. took several hours to get there from the coast, two or three hours and so we spent a lot of time in his sort of hippy van. i felt at home, that generation. an ended up composing a lot of parts of this book's while we were driving on my blackberry because it is too rep to write. it became our medication time and it is a very precious time and this is one of those things i wrote. the ocean is have the. as the planet took shape water came from inside the earth.

a litany of natural disasters is nothing compared to the eruption and earthquakes of the early earth when the temperature fell to 212 degrees below zero and spewing water vapor, condensed into oceans as we know them today. oceans were made from water, squeezed out of primordial earth. later in the making of birth, water rich pro planets crashed here spilling more liquid. morning star, evening star. we live between them, a rat of cloud wiping away the eye, drowning a tiny i surface to take a last look at the ruined church, and human excesses' and defects at its genius.

and here it is music. water slapping down. even underwater i tried to to see. the of this is dark or fed by fire? i hold a crack team bowl in my mind. it is lopsided, beautiful, spilling. the chill depths into which i slide break open like doors. other son says you have to be alive to dive. thank you. [applause] questions? >> we will take questions from

the audience so please wait for the microphone. >> hal well were you received by the people and general? did they think you were there for curiosity? or to exploit -- >> no. they were so open and welcoming. because we were just drifters like they were. traveling in other people's cultures i don't have an agenda or plan. people see that in new. they see that you have come to

listen. we had a hard time getting them to talk just one at a time. the beauty of me she was she does simultaneous translation. she was whispering into my ear. they didn't realize i didn't speak japanese. it worked well. this is a wonderful 48-year-old longhaired worker in that area. he spoke the hole dialect and often he would just sit talking and and many trips down the mountain we talk about what was important to think about in this situation. how do you deal with this situation? how do you see it and see it head on? and he just started talking. it was a great time. when you have these kinds of things happen in your life, we

have all had many losses and all kinds of things happen to us, but it is a sort of breaks the doors down. of time i was there i felt as if walking of the chartered ground was sort of made of walls and as we walked they kept falling away. ..

shaking you into a kind of freshness. >> did anyone express a desire to move to some other part of japan or some other part of the world even when they know there is so much radiation they've been exposed to? >> well it's very rural. it seems to be extremely traditional. you can't just say i think i will raise some rice fields these are people generation after generation for hundreds of years have been on the same place to bring the same thing

including the young people now so nobody wanted to move. who hadn't already moved. this may be always somebody in a family that is young and can't find their way so they go to a city and do something else but for the ones who stayed, they wouldn't be able to move. so that was part of the extraordinary quality of being there. for all of us there is no escape. there is no escapes from surviving, from dying, from the list that may come to all of us whether we are exposed to radiation or not. so as my friend michael said,

you just face what is. facing the way of is facing the problems of living and surviving. and so it made it all the more precious and poignant >> i can't resist asking one more question. how did you feel about the children exposed to radiation and what will happen to them? that would be a whole new level of consciousness in historic memory. >> some children have been sent farther north, farther west and a sort of boarding school type of situation. a man i know who owns the patagonian of japan build a

sustainable housing further north for children from the fukushima area. when you go to the kurdish restores food is labeled where it's been grown or harvested so sadly the cheapest food is the food that's the most radiated but this is market economy of the world. but you do have a choice coming and we were also very careful. no fish or meat. we ate vegetables and rice from the previous year of harvesting but it's a terrible problem. >> thank for your readings which were quite beautiful. you said he visited three times on three different trips and i

wonder if you detected any changes in attitudes or feelings or emotions come frustration levels and then if you could apply that to yourself, with your thinking or incites. >> wonderful question. yes, in june there was a sense of the survivors euphoria discreet openness and it may not be fully comprehended. you can only take so much at a time but then i return in september and a really large force seven typhoon came

blasting up the coast and all the rice farmers i know -- the land was covered in three or 4 feet of debris and the bodies and pieces of boats. wasn't a place he wanted to grow food but they have been buying donated so alien to maneuver and stuff and we are growing winter but troubles because they had to have something to eat. when the typhoon came, it flooded everything that had been planted even many of the timber greenhouses people were moved by the government after they got of the e evacuation centers and schools and people then had to be evacuated again and any of the houses the for standing but in many cases it was still

little also they were repairing their houses. all of that was wiped out. elderly couples were committing suicide of the time because they felt they had to make room for the younger people because there was a lack of food and housing and everything so they were making space. it was just a shock but they were despondent. this great uncle and aunt of mine interpreter said they just got permission from the government to fix up their house which was right at the edge of where the water came and they were really excited.

he is a great flower former and had ordered all of these flowers. he was a little bit manic about it but he was so excited to be able to read least start again and then put in a big winter garden, and it was completely wiped out and he said i've told the carpenter not to come. i don't know what i'm going to do. in december when i returned and was very cold and snowing. it was more like the june visit, not as wildly euphoric but a kind of determination to just keep going forward to make things right. the middle replanted, the were harvesting.

they were building greenhouses. the government was giving fisherman between 75 to 95% of the money it takes to buy a used boat. it's the worst radiation disaster history but they were working with green people will fall to measure the radiation because no one else was doing it in the was better to eat the fish because they come through quickly instead of the seaweed or the bottom feeding fish. so people were working at and my moods changed accordingly and

have a high fever and was delirious and was depressed and then i went back and was different. i was just mirror and whatever i was ingesting from them and they all seemed to be doing pretty well considering everything. >> have you been in touch with people that have interviewed you and welcome to be able to bring your book to japan for either english or will it be translated? >> the book will be translated. we are getting the sort of out now i hope quickly. what was your first question? >> are you in touch with people and that you -- >> every few months i get updates and and i hear about the

rice farmers and fishermen. the elderly rice farmer who told his carpenter to go said no, now i am planting. you have to come here for new year's. so i donated some money to have the big bell from the tempo up the street that had been washed away and they are using the money to build a house so she said that's being built you have to come for new year's and we will ring the bell together. the fishermen are getting their boats built. one thing that hasn't happened and i'm interested in doing, people don't have time to

actually rebuild a house. they are still in temporary housing. let's say happened to be wealthier than most of the others but they're busy fishing and farming and taking care of each other. so i'm trying to work with builders and japan to go from village to village to see if we can help with rebuilding economical and sustainable ways to build a really nice small houses that have some traditional japanese esthetic and we will see if that works out.

>> [inaudible] with your rating in the beginning of the first disaster people were unwilling to take anything for themselves that was more than anybody else had. very much as cooperative but beyond that thinking of for everybody together. >> the priest said everything is based on two concepts which means to get your, living, and the emptiness from which compassion rises. we are all working together and we all understand each other.

there was a little looting. it was very funny. outside of the big factories like to leota. so people were going down and getting -- everybody was saying we have gone through a lot we deserve of kebir. there were probably some problems but not nothing bad, nothing grotesque. >> can you also talk about your

first love and what got you interested? >> when i was young i think i was 12 and my mother gave me -- my interest in japan is inexplicable. it's something i don't know where it came from but my mother did give me a book of japanese poetry translated by arthur and i still have this precious copy so i've been reading it for a long time in the diaries. the crew went round the world and we just sort of trouble around. we didn't know anything, we had no contacts. alana is in those days you could

go down a couple cobblestone street and go to the public and here they lived down the street and the monks were coming through in their traditional way and housewives were running out giving money and those were common sights. when i came back from the very first trip, i was living in los angeles and i immediately went to the center in los angeles and began meditation practice. after that, i spent writing a play that was supposed to be in the novel that i wrote about the feet mountain internment camp in wyoming where i lived most of the time and wyoming. i never finished but there were

two women that were extraordinary and i went to the rehearsals every afternoon and then to the performances at night. another time in the mid-80's with a friend who is fluent in japanese we just traveled route and hitchhiked. we stayed in the temple and just kind of wandered. what i saw on the northeastern tip of. in the summer they sort of set up their little booth and you can go and ask them to talk to your dad or whoever and receive

messages back. i've climbed and just wandered around. if what happened they're occurred here in the united states, how do you think the reaction would differ? >> that's a really loaded question. i don't think i want to go there. [laughter] all i can say is i hope we can learn from these other examples.

i talked to evo since we are at the brink of extinction and he said we need to learn to live cooperatively, collaborative lee and we've to change the way the world works altogether. there are so many people around the world who have been living this way for a long time, and there are people in this country some of them sitting in this room that i know live this way. so we have people who can help remind us how to behave. there is somebody in the front

that has been raising her hand. >> [inaudible] i have images still. i was going to show them that they were not that distinctive and i don't think it's anything you can't see online. i took pictures on my phone like anybody else. but the photographer took pictures and she said. she's terribly afraid of fraid s and she had a problem with ghosts while we were there.

i never bring -- i traveled with indigenous arctic people per 20 years and for the first probably ten years i never even took a camera. i just didn't want --. i just wanted to be like a regular passenger on the path. was their anything you were able to do to actually help the people? [laughter] because she is young and she reads every second we heard of a remote village on the peninsula

that still was having food problems so that previous each donated our own money and bought a whole load of food and drove it out there. we helped put people in contact with other nonprofit groups who have lots of people doing a fabulous cleanup projects. the next step is going to be the hardest and away because the government -- while they are lying about radiation they are also helping people everyday play is then you are kind of freely on your own and have to figure out how to build the house and pay for it.

i would like to thank gretel ehrlich for her bouck "facing the wave". ayaan the director of defense and we look forward to seeing you very soon again. [applause] >> thank you.

david is the author of spin master of the media ignores the news and help re-elect barack obama. what was the news that was ignored? >> you have a great number of things, stories about the economy, stories of the foreign policy, etc.. what prompted me to write this though is the benghazi attack. it became clear that the political news media rather than focusing on a story of foreign policy failure and a president that promised the muslim world and was failing to produce eight it significantly destroyed al qaeda yet we see the terrorists acting up again. instead of that story will talk about the net from the gap and immediately he probably didn't

handle the situation well with his press conference he called it the wrong time and said the wrong things but there was an actual real policy story about the guy that runs the entire foreign policy apparatus in the united states and there really does seem that -- i used to work for robert and he used to say that a reporter is someone that would sell his soul for a good story but it turns out that when it might make barack obama look bad or his presidency look like a familiar, reporters suddenly lose a lot of intellectual curiosity. and often when you have a news media and especially its 90 present liberal according to surveys it votes 90% democratic. it's very unrepresented. they are going to miss a lot of stories simply for the inability to see and feel your to be interested. >> you're the editor of the examiner. would you take any issue with

the way. we covered it the way that of all the editorial base we covered it the way i wanted it to be covered so if i have anyone to blame it is only myself. but you know, there is no real reason. we are proud of we are as the examiner but we also -- there is no reason we should be the only ones to find obvious trends in the labor statistics that we were practically the only ones to write about it and in some cases the only one. people seem unaware the economy is lousy. but obama has always been able to make the argument we are about to turn the corner doing everything we can people don't realize there's a labor market depression for people my age and 8125 to 54 that group hasn't regained a single job since the recession ended, not began. don't blame obama for the crisis. look what's happened since june of 2009. there are fewer of us working

today than in 1997, and why -- all of the jobs being recovered are taken by people 55 and older. why hasn't a student like that been written about? the fact that young people have no opportunities today and are not finding jobs, not recovering the jobs that were lost and moving ahead that is an enormous story that was completely missed in the election and there is no reason we should have been the only ones to see it. >> how the media ignored the news and help re-elect barack obama. thank you.

>> now one book tv, robert pollin argues the to this government should be pushing for less than 4% unemployment. also known as full employment. a policy goal she says was abandoned in the 1970's on concern about inflation began to take precedence. this is b