1961-1964." thanks so much. >> thank you. >> she marries at the age of 16 d helps teach her husband to be a better reader and writer. of during the civil war, she sneaks supplies to the unionists in the tennessee mountain, but by the time her husband assumes the presidency, she's in poor health. meet eliza johnson, wife of the 17th president, andrew johnson, as we continue our series on first ladies with your questions and comments by phone, facebook and twitter monday night live at 9 eastern on c-span and c-span3. also on c-span radio and c-span.org. ..

>> good afternoon. excuse my hobbling about but not so long ago i had a knee replacement which some of you here will know something about. they promised me is that it will be a full recovery after a a year and better i don't have to wait two years. it is also lovely to be out of the cold and wind of new york city for a while. i will come up this morning feeling as if my knee was all better. it is the second time i have spoken here and my wife and i spoke together last night

because we have written a book together and this one i wrote all by myself alone which after two coauthored books i survived. i survived and i survive with the help of lee who has always been my favorite editor and with that in mind this morning i asked her and our wonderful hostess which of the various ways--and i named them -- i should use to start the talk and one of them was by telling the story and that is what i am going to do. the story is a curious and wonderful one and it is a useful introduction i think to the book. the book contains a chapter on

john rockefeller sr. and is entitled to richest rockefeller and rich he was. the richest american who has ever lived. his fortune in contemporary modern dollars, conservative estimates was $190 million. this takes bill gates and warren buffett who have $30 million, $50 million and puts them to shame. washington was an interesting character because as president of the united states he was the richest president we ever had. but i want to talk about rockefeller and talk about rockefeller's death because it was not quite what he was hoping. he hoped he would live to be 100 and he made it to 97. and there was the whole question of how to lay him to rest, this

is very rich man. his favorite place was right here in florida and that is where he spent most of his final years suppose there was a small sort of -- he was taken in a casket to his home on the shores of the hudson river built for him by his son. a far grander place than he wanted to be, but nonetheless he did spend time fair and so there was a service there with organs playing softly, in his music room and after is that, he was loaded on a train again to be taken, his body, to cleveland, ohio where he began his business career and he was buried there next to his mother and his wife,

and i am sure within the family there was considerable discussion about how they were going to as it were memorialized the sight. what they decided to do was build a very large obelisk which looks like a smaller version of the washington monument. and was rockefeller washingtonian? he wouldn't have said so and i don't think he would have said so but his family were happy thinking themselves so this is what he got as his memorial and its stance on a kind of platform where you have to go up a number of deaths to get to it. one of the things rockefeller did in his life towards the end was to hand out to anybody who

was anywhere near him but mostly children, shiny new don imus. this was something that endeared him to his fellow countrymen. ivey, lee, hired as public directors -- public-relations director had the idea to do this but it was actually a book rockefeller had read, the correspondents of amos lawrence, another character who figures in the book. that was the whole tradition of the shiny dime. if you go to that site of the obelisk to this day you will find that people bring shiny don imus and weigh them on the stairs which i think is a marvelous tribute to something or other.

but what is going on when people do that? is fascinating to ruminate on that subject. in a sense the book that i have written is one that finds its heart in those kinds of issues, issues involving blood? issues involving very rich people, the legends that they construct about themselves, particularly their generosity and the american people and how we have collectively responded to those individuals and their lives and their money and their generosity and the stories they construct about themselves which is a lot to do in what is a fairly short book and i want to

go further by explaining a little about how the book came to be written because it is an odd story but i set out to write a short book. other books i have been not too long but long, blanks, usual book went and i thought it would be nice to write a short book. i was going to write a short book and it was going to have a series of chapters mostly on people iad written about before and they had these characteristics or experiences in common. they were all very rich, all among the richest americans of their day. mostly to some extent a injured their fellow countrymen, some of the lot in the process of becoming rich and the third thing about them that they had in common was that they were all generous with their money.

they gave millions, billions of dollars away to make the world a thestion t how these people made their money, how they lived their lives, why they decided to be as philanthropic as they were, those were a series of questions that i thought could use fully be asked about these live as and what i discovered was a, which at first surprised me, when you put the lives next to one another they had the things i mentioned in common, but there were a lot of things they didn't have in common, they made their money in different ways. they began giving away different points in their lives, they gave to quite different things. if there was a pattern here, it

was not a pattern that wenty fabehe surface. there was a wealth affect line beneath the surface, very hard to construct generalizations about. and i think there was something else that i became very conscious of when i was writing the book and that was the stories could not just the about them, because they didn't live live in isolation. it also had to be about americans and how americans perceive these people, what they thought of them. and that was the trickiest thing to get at. but it was important because there was a sense in which these individuals were playing to the

american people always. they were putting on performances, performances they knew would be looked at and considered, weighed in moral terms. they wanted to be sure the american people got it right which meant getting it the way they saw it. but in any case, the question, what americans thought of these individuals and why they thought what they did. there was a nice short book and, just about finished writing when something extraordinary happened and that is the top phenomena materialized in new york city where they are now living which called itself like the rest of

us occupy wall street and that was something extraordinary because it highlighted a concern that some americans had lower something that had been true of our collective existence from the beginning, and that is that we have a great interest in and fondness for the rich, that is true. we are also an intensely and deeply democratic people in terms of our ideals. democracy, and i am referring to equality of condition, he found a higher level of equality of condition in america than any place he had any knowledge of on

earth. he also discovered in the americans liked money. thinking about it, talking about it. how did you take these two things which logically are in conflict with one another, if you're going to treasure each quality, how do you simultaneously treasure the rich? isn't there a paradox? that was the subject, broadly speaking, of a small book that i wrote, and along comes occupy wall street and suggests that at least some americans have decided that we are at a place now where it is not possible to reconcile a fondness for wulff with a love democracy and the

quality. and affect one feeds to choose and it is terribly important. as a historical phenomena and this is intriguing because of those americans were comfortable enough with the paradox and one of the things that made them particularly comfortable with the paradox was the fact that these very rich people had given away so much money and it seemed to be a way in which they in this end embraced equality, embraced democracy. so there was that resolution of the paradox. here was occupy wall street and these people were saying no, no. this is indeed a conflict and it is a conflict that can't be

resolved. fascination that we must shoes and these people have chosen, equality, meant to take their stand. as the summer and fall and early winter progressed people kept saying all right, what are these people going to do about this? are they going to found a movement? how is the movement going to function? who is going to lead it and the reality is none of those things happened. they demonstrated, they got a tremendous amount of coverage in the press, but face themselves never organized as a movement and that enabled some people who wanted to say it has gone away. the whole thing has disappeared and i think if we look at the

last few years it is clear is that it hasn't. if we look at the last presidential campaign is clear tht hasn't. essentials the barack obama campaigned on the occupy wall street platform constructed by those demonstrators down in the financial district in new york, campaigned and won, won and election in spite of the fact that the economy was at stake, won and election in spite of the fact that he faced an organized and highly well-financed opposing campaign and so it suggests has the appearance of occupy wall street itself did

that this is a story that suddenly have acquired -- ahead here i thought was going to end at with john d. rockefeller and all those shiny dimes all those people put on the stairs to his funeral monuments but i had to carry it forward to where we are now so the book grew longer. i did my best to keep it short and succinct but in the process of doing this, i worked closely with two things that bear examination for a variety of reasons, one was the four magazines, list of the 400 richest americans published every year, and that is a fascinating source of information designed to speak among others things to our

fondness for the bridge, the information itself is conveyed in what is he essentially a celebratory mode and this was further embellished just as the economy turned decisively south, by something bill gates and warren buffett decided to do which was set up the so-called giving wedge which is interesting because it worked largely, the two men worked largely with the forbes 400 list in the beginning and their goal was to get people to pledge in formally, there was a legal character to the pledge, to give away half of their fortunes for the purpose of making the world better place to live and

basically that meant philanthropy. it got a lot of press at the time and the forbe 400 editors a fair amount of attention to a and in the years since, two four years since then, the number of people who have embraced, signed in effect the pledge, has grown to somewhere less than 100 if you're talking about the ford 100, but it has grown a bit and it is a significant phenomena and. for my purposes what was wonderful was pull one thing you had to do if you signed the pledge now was provide a brief description of the your thoughts on well, your thoughts on philanthropy so that it could

become part of the giving pledge website. so here it is a whole bunch of material about very rich individuals, how they made their money, how they felt about their money and how they felt about being philanthropic, giving away, giving back a lot of that money. facilities were all things that had to be added to the cauldron and that is what i did in the later part of the book. if you want to know how the story turns out, you will, i wrote, read the book. i can honestly say that as it flowed from my black number 2 pencil i was surprised now and then by some of the conclusions

that i reached, by some of the conclusion that i think other people would reach, putting these things together, and i th rthesults is a book that interesting ways doesn't contradict the first part of the book as i wrote it but does add to it in ways that a deeper and more complicated. and that pleases me about it. it has been interesting to look at the reactions of critics to the book because and it has been moderately well reviewed except those liberals who read it think

it is too conservative. those conservatives who read it think it is too liberal. which at least verify is the fact that it is an interesting book. and it is a book that you can have a variety of opinions about. i am a historian and i was writing history and one of the things about writing history is it should not be primarily about your political, your political, your political ideas, your political values. i purposefully intruded on the subject not all that much, and had my own sense of where the book stands on some sort of political spectrum fee and i am not going to tell you what that is event because you will find

out for yourselves when you read the fourth. i will say that several things in the course of writing it became clear to me and one of someone's i found the rich truly interesting. i found an truly interesting for how they made their money. truly interesting for how they did worry about what their wealth represented in a democracy. it was not a question that they sought to avoid. at least the people i was writing about. and they looked for ways to try to resolve that paradox, with his aged, it is interesting that they tried. the other thing, to get back to what i said earlier about the american people, a think that

you could fairly say that these individuals to the satisfactio of most of their fellow countrymen did succeed through their generosity in resolving the paradox. that is nice that they feel that way. that is a good thing that they have managed, people who think about such issues, managed to find the kind of resolution here. the question that i addressed at the very end of the book, and i think this is a terribly important question and again if you want to find the answer to if you need to read the book and the question is this -- with these individuals, the cheri

rich individuals who were so very generous, how typical workday of the american rich? i think we have a tendency to assume that they were typical and that is important to our view of ourselves, to our democratic values, but it is a question that can be answered svidenc conclusively but there's enough evidence to make, and i think, a considered judgment about that which in fact that 2 but you have to read the book to find out what that judgment was. it is an important issue because if we feel that they were typical, it goes -- could be imagined to the long way towards

resolving making less in palatable, making you feel tterbout what is this moment in our history and desist changed through the years up and down, but what is demonstrably a very high level of inequality in our society, much higher than it has been at other times. and this particular interpretation of the ferry rich, that they are as a group very generous might help make that as i said more palatable or

less troubled, troubling dutch that is something that again is open to historical interpretation and also open to statistical interpretation. if that is a question that occurs to you, an interesting one, i present a certain amount of evidence in the book on that question. on that at the end, i wonder what's those people putting those times on rockefeller's monument thought about these things? is this a way of saying thank you? we are all in the same boat, we can be generous too? we can even be generous to you because you were generous to us? or is this the kind snide way

of saying you were john d. rockefeller and tried to when our affections with don imus and you can have your don imus back? because you haven't persuaded us. probably people put those times thinking one or the other of those things. it would be nice to be terror observing over a period of time the people who did this and sneak up to the afterwards and say just what was on your mind when you laid that dime but you can't do that. so you are left as you always are with historical evidence with the needs of interpreting it. in a way that is what i was doing in this book, i had great fun doing it, i had great fun doing it because to my mind is

an intin at vari times it has loomed so large in our consciousness. large numbers of americans are genuinely values the rich for the contribution to american life. there was a gallup poll done last spring which asked whether or not the united states benefited from having a small class of very rich people without adding any more gloss on the question then the words i have given you. 63% of the people who responded fox we were better off for having a small class of very rich people. that alone is evidence. that bubbles around in the same caldron as the rest of these things in the book and i hop

you enjoy it and i hope it persuades you and the question will remain what did persuade you of? which has a lot to do, more to do with what you think and what you bring to the books than what i bring. in any case i would be happy to answer any questions you have and look forward to doing so. i would remind you they want you to come to the microphone and ask your questions. don't let that put you off. it is easy to do and not really would welcome your questions. ..

>> north of a billion dollars, what percent would fall into the category of good rich in the sense of sharing their wealth? and what percent would fall into the not so good bucket? [laughter] and how, whatever that percentage is, how would that compare today with what it's been throughout our history? >> um, both good questions. both good questions. um, there's been a study done of the philanthropic giving of rich people which suggests that

somewhere between 40 and 30% of the very rich are generous with their money, notably generous with their money. the others seem not to bement and what do they spend their money on? well, look at architectural digest or -- they spend their money making sure that their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren are going to have what they would consider decent lives. um, as far as putting this on a timeline, it has varied. i mean, there's no doubt about that. i mean, put it this way, that inequality that i talked about has varied. and it was highest, um, many -- in recent history in the 1890s, in the 1920s. and both of those decades were

followed by periods of pretty radical, far-reaching reform. and i think that political fact, or the two political facts together -- the existence of that level of inequality and the response to it politically -- says that we are capable of being aroused on this subject. says that the rich if they mostly responded in ways that have made most americans comfortable with their existence, um, that hasn't always been so. that hasn't always been so. another interesting fact is that philanthropic giving among the

rich dropped notably in the recent financial crisis. which shouldn't surprise you too much. but if you had a, if you had a program of philanthropic giving in mind, then the market went down as far as it did in '07, '08, you were still very, very rich. are rich. very rich. and ought it to have been, ought it to have had that kind of impact on philanthropic giving? well, it suggests a bunch of things. i mean, it suggests that many people see as truly consideration their in the sense that they will decide what they're going to do and when they're going to do it and how they're going to do it. it suggests that crisis, that

financial crisis shook the rich just as it did us. of course, we also know that their assets dropped less in value than the wealth of average americans, and we also know that the drop that occurred was recovered upon more quickly among them than other people. in that sense -- does that answer your questionsome. >> thank you. >> okay. >> when, when you talk about philanthropy and the 400 and the giving pledge, i notice that if my recollection is correct that steve jobs, for example, did not sign that pledge as did, i

think, oprah was also one of them that didn't sign the pledge. >> right. and i talk about them both in the book. >> then i don't have to read it. [laughter] >> yes, you don't have to read it. >> but my question really is that -- is the category of good rich only those people who participate in philanthropy, or are the good rich also for people for what they do or what they've invented to make our hives better? >> -- our lives better? >> your question is good, and i think your answer is a good one. it is possible to get with off the hook, to get off the hook of being very rich and make us love you anyway even if you aren't philanthropic. and certainly steve jobs is an example of doing that. he not only did not give, he scorned giving and said that most people were simply doing it

to buff up their reputations. and he wasn't going to be involved in playing that kind of game. there was a lot of adverse comment during his life about the fact that he was so ungenerous. oprah was different in the sense that she was philanthropically, is philanthropically inclined, but she didn't sign the pledge either. and made a point of not signing the pledge. what does this say about her? well, i think both she and jobs could be comfortable with the fact that they had enormous numbers of americans who admired them sufficiently for what they did, for what they actually did that they didn't have to worry about these issues. but inventing marvelous new

pieces of technology that ordinary americans can use in their lives or day after day after day listening to people on your show describe their lives, the tragedies of their lives, the triumphs of their lives in ways that make the information accessible to millions and millions of americans which oprah did, that those are things, i think, americans decided were of significant value so that they could be treasured in their own right. um, it isn't so easy to find things that you can do that in and of themselves are going to make you loved. you know, is there anything that investment bankers do in the

nature of what they do that is calculated to make americans love them? well, i don't know. you can be of two minds about that, i suppose. but the fact is that the achievements of your average investment banker aren't going to be as appealing as an ipad or as an iphone. and so it does depend on what you do. you can win, in effect, without having to do the conventional thing. what has become the conventional things. yes, it can happen. and there are examples where it has. in a general way, it happens whenever people point to the rich and say, well, they're rich, and they're perhaps too

rich, but they're great job creators. well, yes and no. some of them own companies, manage companies where large numbers of jobs have been hipped overseas or -- shipped overseas or where job creation is not necessarily what actually happens that as we know by looking at what bain capital did that a lot of times the way to success involves eliminating jobs, not creating them. though you can say, well, you eliminate some jobs, and you create others in the process, and that's true. and it goes round and round and round. these are not issues that i took a stand on in the book because i left it for my readers to do that.

[inaudible conversations] >> i know, i know. i appreciate you doing it. >> you mentioned there was no, you couldn't find any real correlation between the rich and what they did, their lives. they seemed to be -- there wasn't anything that stood out, that one was, one group was totally different than the other. and i'm curious, how about their politics? was there any correlation in the political persuasion? >> they tended to be conservative but not consistently enough so that you can -- i mean, one of the people i discuss in the book, again, is george washington. the richest president we've ever had, perhaps the richest person in america at the time he was president.

i mean, you wouldn't describe his politics as conservative, i think. in the scheme of at least world politics. >> and i was also curious, what did a person like steve jobs do with his money since he didn't give it away? >> he, um, put it back into his company. and he, i'm sure, set up large trusts for his children. i kept -- >> a huge amount. >> it's a huge amount of money. i kept wondering whether after he died the time was going to come when we were going to be surprised because it was going to be revealed that after all he'd been extraordinarily generous, he just didn't make a lot of noise about it. well, i think by now the estate has been probated probably, and if there was anything, we'd know. and it doesn't look like there

was anything. and was that a bad thing? he very self-consciously explained what he thought about philanthropy which was that it wasn't really about benefiting the world at large or other people, it was really about buffing up the reputations of the people who were philanthropic. and you could say that. it was very often part of the motivation that lay behind philanthropic giving. could you say it was always this? i think it was always there in some measure, but the measure varied. john d. rockefeller, that extraordinarily rich man, his first year in business in cleveland came very close to tithing. and he was upset because he

wasn't able to tithe fully. every other year after that he did. in other words, he was philanthropic from the get go before he had a reputation for being an evil man that he needed to buff up. that's true of i talk about the lawrence brothers in boston. that was the first great industrial, american trillion fortune. industrial fortune. the older of the two brothers also was philanthropic from the get go. and some people are. and one gathers, you know, as i said, motives vary or responses vary, and variations are interesting. and i think they're significant. yes. >> can you tell us, bob, what you have brewing next? >> yes. well, i'd be happy to do it,

because i trust i'll be back here in a few years talking. [laughter] it's always a pleasure to come. i am writing a novel which is a wonderful experience for me. it's a novel about george washington during the last two or three years of his life after he left the presidency and went back to mount vernon. there are and i get to do two things in the novel. i get to have washington, martha, the people, the circle of people around them which grew, had grown constantly larger and what they do during those years. and that's the first thing. the second thing is i get to give the reader snapshots of george washington and martha washington as well reflecting upon events in the past. and what they meant and how they see them now after a period of time.no it is at that point that

the book becomes truly fiction and not history. and why am i doing this? well, because i'd always thought it would be fun to write a novel, but, you know, asking myself why, what makes it fun is that it enables you to do something you cannot do as an historian, and that is go beyond the evidence. go beyond the existing evidence on paper or whatever and say what you think was really going on in these people's minds. and what they were thinking. and it's such fun because if you know individuals well enough, and i feel i do know george washington very well as a result of the book we wrote together about him, there it is. you feel in some sense you know

it. but you can't prove it. well, be you're writing history -- if you're writing history, people are going to say dalzell makes all these claims and statements, and many of them are not proven. well, you don't say that about a novel. [laughter] you can't say that about a novel. so that's what i'm doing. and i'm having a wonderful time doing it. it's like having a very good dessert. [laughter] and it's terrific fun. will this novel ever get published? i have no way of knowing. it's an interesting thing. when you write a piece of history and you want to get it published, what you do is you put together a proposal which is an outline of the book, a few statements about why you think it's important and a chapter or two. and on that basis your agent,

um, sells the book. you hope, to a publisher who then decides to publish it. well, when i told her that i was writing a novel and asked her if she would read part of it, e said, i'd be happy to. she said, but you have to understand that publishers don't take, um, the first novels on the strength of a few good chapters. you have to finish the story. and that's what the publisher's going to want to see. so i don't know. i have no contract yet to publish this, and who knows whether i will -- but as i said, i'm having great fun with it. [applause] >> booktv is on facebook. like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers, watch videos and get up-to-date information on events. facebook.com/booktv.

>> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. activist eve ensler discusses her battle with uterine cancer in her memoir, "in the body of the world." jim paul who worked for 25 years in the futures industry and previn can moynihan recount mr. paul's $1.6 million loss in "what i learned losing a million dollars." in "strange rebels: 1979 and the birth of the 21st century," christian carroll argues that 1979 was the most pivotal year of the 20th century and shaped the world we live in today. adrian rain, professor of criminology, psychiatry and psychology at the university of pennsylvania presents new research on the correlation between brain functions and violent crimes in "the anatomy of violence." and richard haas, president of

the council on foreign relations, argues that the u.s. needs to focus on restoring its economic infrastructure in "foreign policy begins at home: the case for putting america's house in order." look for these titles in bookstores this coming week, and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> this weekend on c-span before tonight's white house correspondents' dinner, we'll show selected dinners from the past three administrations starting saturday at 3 p.m. eastern, and then our live coverage of this year's dinner starting with the red carpet arrivals at 6:15. and sunday, thursday's dedication of the george w. bush presidential library and museum. >> franklin roosevelt once described the dedication of a library as an act of faith. i dedicate this library with unshakable faith in the future of our country. it was the honor of a lifetime to lead a country as brave and as noble as the united states. whatever challenges come before

us, i will always believe our nation's best days lie ahead. god bless. [applause] >> sunday morning at 10:30. on c-span2's booktv this weekend, twice awarded the bronze star, donovan campbell on leading a platoon of marines in iraq. that's sunday night at 8. and on c-span3, mary todd lincoln. part of american history tv sunday at 4. >> when i started to write it, there was one thing i wanted to accomplish. when you write a memoir, and i've read many of them through my life, you sometimes come away asking your question, asking yourself a question: did i learn anything new about this public person? regrettably, often i have read books and memoirs or autobiographies and thought to

myself i really didn't learn much that i didn't already know from the news. i didn't want to write that kind of book. i wanted to write something different, something where at the end of it a reader could come away and say to themselves, i think i know her. and so what "my beloved world" intended in part to do was to let you into my heart and soul and in doing that i hoped to show you who i was, but also to show you a little bit of you. and there was a purpose for doing that, and the purpose is captured in one part of my book it's probably my favorite

passage. and so i read it to you because it summarizes one of the very important reasons i read this book. it's on page 178, and it reads: when a young person, even a gifted one, grows up without proximate living examples of what she may aspire to become whether lawyer, scientist, artist or leader in any realm, her goals remain abstract. such models as appear in books or on the news, however unspiring or revered -- inspiring or revered, are ultimately too remote to be true. let alone influential. but a role model in a flesh provides more than an i inspiration. his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one might have every reason to

doubt. saying, yes, someone like me can do this. and so it was my hope that every child and, frankly, every adult who read this book at the end would say what i said during my con fur mission -- not my confirmation, my nomination speech. yes, she's an ordinary person just like me. and if that ordinary person can do it, so can i. and that's what i tried -- [applause] to do in the stories of of this book. to tell you my experiences and my feelings as i perceived them

at the time. and you'll find me talking in the child of this little sonia and then give you the reflections of the adult sonia. wasn't so easy to do, to put myself back in time and to tell you what i was feeling. but i did it for a purpose, and that purpose was to tell you what i've learned from those experiences and in the process to have the hope that every single person in this room who has experienced even one of the difficulties i have faced in life -- and those difficulties are as diverse as growing up if poverty, having a chronic

disease, and it's surprising how many people suffer from a chronic disease and live their lives never talking about it to being a child raised by a single parent to facing discrimination and whether it's about my ethnicity or my gender or it's about my background. we each feel the sting of it in some way. to simply being afraid which i think most people experience. and we all create a bravado about, ah, we're okay. we can do this. yeah, it's easy to say. it's hard to do. and so i talk about those things in as ordinary a way as i can and as candid and open a way as i could in order, ihope to

give people courage to talk about and rethink their own experiences. there was a second purpose to this book because, you see, the books that i love are the books that i've read and make me think on different levels. that deliver more than one message. because there is a beauty, i think, in reading books and discovering new things. and you'll learn about how i used books after my father's death to escape the up happiness in my -- the unhappiness in my home. and they became a rocket ship out of that unhappiness, but a rocket ship that landed me on far universes of the world when i found science fiction to

understanding places that i thought i'd never get to visit. i now gratefully have the wherewithal to do it. but i found india and africa and places that i had heard about on television but never imagined knowing. and i learned about them through books. i hope that every child in this audience and any child who hears me speaking understands that television is wonderful, but words paint pictures in a way that nothing else can. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. here's our prime time lineup for tonight. starting at 7 p.m. eastern, ann kirscher in recounts the live of

josephine marcus we were. then david graeber argues that america's political system has disenfranchised those without wealth. followed by dennis bryan, author of "the elected and the chosen." at 10 p.m. eastern on our weekly "after words" program, karen halpert talks about her book, "chasing gideon," with jenna green of the national law journal. we conclude tonight's prime time programming at 11 p.m. eastern with david around sannie. in his book, "obama's four horsemen," he presents his criticism of the obama administration. visit booktv.org for more on this weekend's television schedule. >> you're watching booktv. coming up next, douglas rush

rushkoff. he looks at how our society is reacting to this new world reflected by the rise of the tea party, occupy wall street and zombie apocalypse fiction. this is just over an hour. [applause] >> you're all welcome to sit in the front here, too, if you're floor people. >> well, first of all, thank you, everybody, for coming tonight to celebrate the launch of doug's latest book, "present shock." um, i think doug has been giving lots of talks about the book that i've seen just in the last few days, and so to start us off i think we just are going to get to it. briefly just to contextualize, doug and i have known each other for a few years. i helped him do the research on "present shock," and he's now a blogger at the new inquiry in addition to all of his other accomplishments. and so, doug, can you just tell us what "present s"