>> i'm afraid the ranking members that we get lanny davis to work for free. [laughter] don't try it. . .

>> if we can see the same solutions, and, often, if we can just agree on the same facts, we can work together op solutions. the last congress, people saw all the things we did as adversaries, and there were plenty, but they saw, i hope, when it came to the effects of human growth hormones and the doping that was still going on in the nfl, and something that's not easy, we took them on, and we're still pushing to make sure

that we rid, not professional sports say, but because young athletes follow that. in the lance armstrong revolution, we have to ensure role models are clean. those are areas we can easily work on only because we agreed on. we felt the same about it. we are finding other areas we agree on, and it's not always easy. we've agreed that in the next two years, four years, the most important things we can do together is put most of the effort into things we agree on. there will be times, and we know it. there's going to be times in which we look at the same facts and reach different conclusions and publish separate reports and let the public decide, but, lanny, we look forward to, if you will, the bigger project of delivers whatever service level is agreed to more figurely, at a better value for the taxpayers,

and those things are at the very heart of what our committee does, and then if we succeed in that, help me with postal reform. [laughter] that's why we are here together is that we can focus on what, and i know there's press here, focus on when we don't agree or you can look and realize the vast majority of the time, our committee should be and will be working to try to find the areas we can work on together and find whatever solutions we can and, lanny, you've been on both sides of that, and you've been excellent at it. i blessed you and encouraged you on television. [laughter] on virtually every network there was or was. [laughter] i just stress the word here tonight, and that's why i want to thank both of you. [applause] >> thank you, mr. chairman, thank you, congressman. a quick word before introducing the man of the hour.

i didn't introduce myself. i'm the managing partner of the washington law firm, and when we -- i came aboard the firm about a year and a half ago after having done other things for awhile. one of the first things i wanted to do when orders were to light up the washington office because i reached out to lanny davis, and the times appeared to be right. that was the coming together, and that was before i got the convincing the coming together of the boards. everyone knew who he was. everyone had seen him on television. they said, how's that work? i think the answer is in first of all, the mutual respect built up in a decade of working to the on various kinds of projects, some of which were in the news, .nmewe

he's good enough that they probably won't be. that level of trust, i think, is an embodiment of the pup l the chairman and congressman cummings talked about in that our objective is not to advance partisan mission, even though lanny's famously a democrat, and i nevertheless is a long term republican. working with lanny, since he came aboard, they bought off on it, and it's great, great fun ever since, and we hope to have more follow-up together with lanny and his associates at purple nation strategies, and solutions -- >> solutions. >> excuse me, excuse me, and with lanny j. davis and associates. it's always been entertaining. it's been exciting. most important for me, even though i've been doing this sort of thing more or less for 30

years has been highly instructive. from lanny, i learned a great deal. he's a master at what he does. the trick is to figure out what it is he is doing. [laughter] it usually comes right in the end. i would say that the kind of instruction that i've taken at his hand has been to my enormous benefit and also to the clients. he has a unique gift for getting all of the external stuff and finding the nut of the problem, which is how you get to the solution. what lanny does, crisis communications, calls it strategic advice, and i call it simply problem solving of the highest order, and problem solving admits of no party, no ideology, you got someone in trouble or about to be, and you try to remedy that. many of lanny's exploits are

well known. i think his best are not. i think the best work he's done is the stuff you never see in the papers. if, on the other hand, you end up in one of his books -- [laughter] actually, my understanding is that everyone mentioned in the book is they are definitely with their con acceptability -- consent and approval. [laughter] "crisis tales" is not so much a memoir, i think, as a tremor. it points out that what we have tried to work on developing together is an approach to problem solving that is both legal in communications oriented, and what lanny does in "crisis tales," is show you that you think a crisis manager, how can you possibly anticipate his services? it's always going to be when something's already happened you figure out you need him or her, but that's not true, and what lanny strives to show although he's called in as the fireman often, the best work that we can

do, lanny, as a cry kiss communicator and manager, us, as a law firm, providing support and background, is what lanny calls a crisis audit. all the things that you -- you wouldn't think would be as welcomed as he is in corporate offices for a man who lives his mantra is a weird form of murphy's law. if something can go wrong, it certainly will. you're not ready for it. it's going to be public. let me help you. [laughter] that's what he does. he does it brilliantly. i learned a great deal from it. i think it is the highest form of problem solving to anticipate the problems. no one does it like him as you'll see in the book, but rather than have me talk about it further, let me introduce you to my mentor in the business, the man who literally wrote the book, lanny davis. >> thank you. [applause] >> i'm not leaving until every one of you greets and honors me

by allowing me to sign the book [laughter] first, start with politics and then personal. cal thomas in the back of the room started many years ago as a conservative and very religious man, forgiving my political sins, and then actually tried to redeem my spiritual sins, and thank you, cal thomas, for being here. [applause] probably the greatest lawyers that i know, sheldon, the greatest lawyer. [laughter] you know, so gives me the wrong golf clubs when i ask for a club [laughter] thank you, ted olson, not only because we forged a friendship in the president bush white house advisory committee we served on, but because you've done your country a great service with david boys timely overturning what we hope is

forever, discrimination based on sexual preference and more power to you for your courage and thank you for being my friend. grover norquist and i forged a friendship and is absolutely beautiful and incredibly intelligent lifer, forged a friendship, and they don't understand how we're friends even though he's virtually wrong about everything. [laughter] he's literally a gentleman. thank you, grover. i've got so many other elected officials here to thank. an old friend of mine and great member of the congress, but i do want to end before i get to the personal, and then i'm done. it is to talk about elijah cummings and darrell issa. i got the call from the chairman, and i thought he was calling to scold me for something i said about him, but, actually, i never did saynowhato i respect the person who has a

different opinion than i do. when the chairman calls me and asked if i would help work on a common problem that we could bring red and blue together into the color purple that michael stehle and the other partners, mcman and i forged in this new company, purple nation solutions, he said he would reach out to his ranking democrat, elijah cummings, a hero for me as long as he's been involved in maryland politics. and when i went up to talk to him, we talked about many people we would want to involve to prove to the country that we can actually solve problems even while holding our political philosophies. i'm ad good -- i'm a good liberal democrat, except on the deficit, i'm not good on the stand point of being a deficit hawk, but we met, and we have great hopes of maybe

changing or at least symbolizing the possibility of changing the toxic atmosphere in washington and actually prove you can disagree and still find commonground and common solutions, so elijah and darrell, thank you for honoring me. finally, i'd like to thank maddie, elenor, and victoria. [applause] michael, my partner, and these are all the ultimate crisis managers, far better than the person who wrote this book because they are managing me, and i'm the ultimate crisis. [laughter] i have two sons here in the room who i'm extremely proud of, josh davis and jeremy davis, would you raise? [applause] i've got an older daughter who i should say is my younger sister because she's so beautiful and

i'm so proud of her, and my son who was wise enough to marry my daughter, marlo and david, where are you? [applause] a very easy teenage female to raise. the most perfect. [laughter] at one point, my older son, seth davis, i'm known as his father because he does television himself, and i toasted marlo and steph when i was trying to figure out how to raise them as teenagers, and i toasted them, and i said, "to two perfect teenagers, never lied, never did drugs, never alcohol, never partied, to two perfect kids," and they toasted and said, "i want to test you, dad, to the father who never had a clue." [laughter]

some crisis manager when it comes to those. they will be watching at three o'clock this morning on c-span, and he'll tell you he was perfect. both were great children, and so now after introducing marlo and josh and jeremy, seth and david, there's another daughter that i have that doesn't have the same last name as i. that's susie hudson, a member of the household, and i'll just simply call her my adopted daughter. [applause] finally, you want to talk crisis management? you want to talk about managing a hurricane, which is what maddie says i am once in awhile? you want to talk about being married to a very boring male, always on an even keel? no highs, no lows.

i met caroline atlow davis, and a lot of you have seen her, remarkably, younger daughter too, but she is my wife of 28 years, and with one day to go before this book got bonded at the margins, i looked at the last page of the book, the acknowledgements, and realized i wrote 29, and did quick math and said i got that number wrong. [laughter] they worked at the national center for exploited children, member of congress, and helped the national center for missing exploiting children, and when i went to see him, his first words are, "how's carolin e?" what am i, a potted plant? i i'd like her to come forward, as she helps chirp really all

around the world. caroline davis. [applause] where do i sit? sit here for as long as it takes. i have not said thank you, arnold, there you are, and josh, adam, my colleagues, crisis management, dave with me at the white house, where are you? thank you, all, and i just can't thank you enough. thanks for being here all the years. thank you. [applause] >> again, thank you all, very much, lanny will be here to sign books. the wine is still being poured. come get some before the sequester takes effect. [inaudible conversations] >> you're going to get tired

soon. >> finally. hanging in there for me. >> i want to go to bed. >> you hung in there. >> make one out to mark masters. why not? >> all right. >> katherine, the provost, and lanny davis. >> thank you. >> i love reasoning to your perspective. >> what would i do without giving him a hard time and vice versa? >> ha-ha, congratulations, i can't wait to read it all. >> when people listen to you i get calls from various places around the country, they want to know if we're brothers? >> outside the beltway. thank you for saying that, that's kind of you to say. >> i get so many calls doing your show, and a.j. is focused in the new york party, i think, said he was going to come through here. >> yeah, yeah, congrats on this. i can't wait to read it. >> i can't wait either, it's going to be great. >> i have not heard back. th introduction, and i said, hell, if i had to say anything lanny, i would say, damn, man, you

remitted dan snyder, ladies and gentlemen, lanny davis. >> ha-ha, this is one of the things i'm kind of stubborn in that chapter, i wrote up to the january playoff game and inserted the result of the score. it says january 2013, rg iii hurt his leg. how did you do that? >> right up to date. lanny, thanks, buddy, hey, thanks for all you do. appreciate it. >> thank you for the great introduction. >> congrats. >> on a recent visit to london, booktv sat down with great britain's most acclaimed historians, philosophers, literary critics and more to talk politics, war, history, religion, and culture, for the next several weeks, watch these interviews every sunday at 6 p.m.. we start with richard, the author of four nonfiction books including american insurgents in

"unhitched" discussing communism, resignation from the party, and discussions of the arguments of the late christopher hitchens. this half hour interview startings -- starts now. >> host: now joining us on booktv in london is author richard seymour. introduce yourself to the audience. >> guest: okay, well, i'm a p had -- ph.d. student, i write for the guardian newspaper, wrote a few books and blog as well. >> host: what's the blog called? >> lenon's tomb. >> host: why? >> guest: what's worth rescuing from the 20th century communism, if you like. that's what i spend a lot of time talking about. it's just generally for left wing politics. >> host: are you a communist?

>> i would describe myself as a socialist because i don't want to be associated with the stalin and dictatorships erected in the name of communism. i don't call myself a communist. >> host: what about a marxist? >> guest: yes, very much so. >> host: why? >> guest: i consider it a superior way of explaning societies in the way they work and explaning politics. >> host: did, in your view, the soviet union subvert marxism? >> guest: i wouldn't say it subverted marxism. what i say is a hopeful experiment in a radical new type of socialist democracy was crushed very quickly due to starvation, civil war, and all sorts of things that is a author tear yap kick traitorship in

which was a free flowing ideas of marxism that became a state religion and dogma, and that's been rep kateed, not just in the regimes around the world, but various parties around the world. >> host: what is the socialist worker's party? >> guest: the party to which i used to belong until monday. it is an organization that is at the heterodoxin in some ways and works with the stall inist regimes, and, yet, maintaining a revolutionary socialist politics. again, one of the subjects, christopher hitchens, a forerunner of the international socialist before it was the socialist workers party. i stood very much in the same political tradition as him, one of the reasons i decided to write about him. >> host: you mentioned

christopher hitchens, and your book "unhitched: the short trial of christopher hitchens," of what do you accuse him? >> guest: i think there's a few things. first of all, i think that in the last ten years of the life when he achieved to the greatest accolades, the greatest celebrity, and probably the most money, he was the least convincing as an intellectual, as a political writer, and, for example, i think that in his writings on religion, he took an essentialist point of view, which is to say that religions are fairly monolithic. you can reduce them to a concrete coherent set of ideas, and, you know, they are not susceptible to interpretation in the way that people implement them, so as it happenings, many

of the interpretations of religion were based on straightforward error or misrepresentation, and that's what i find looking through scholarship in reviewing the writing, but i think it was -- the problem with it was that that was secondary to a wider political agenda because christopher hitchens back the war in iraq, in favor of the war because it would free the people of iraq from a terrible oppressive regime, so far, so good. the problem is after the wars ended, nonstop chaos and bloodshed, and he has to explain this, and e essentially, he says it's because of the religious, it's because of the islamic fascist, it's because of the religious agreements that have been tearing the country apart since the occupation began, and it's not because of the occupation itself and the way it introduced a degree of sectarian politics into the iraqi state, and he generalized out from that to explain lebanon, israel,

palestine, where i come from, northern ireland, explained that with reference to religion. i come from northern ireland, and never heard anyone refer to the ira or the uvs, the sort of gangs there, as religious death squads until he did because we never understood it in those terms, and it felt to me, as somebody who came from there, that this was the position of somebody from the saying these backwards, little clop yal places with the fen funny ideas kill each other. it's actually always a lot more complicated than that, and ironic that it took tony blair in debate with hitchens to point it out. i find myself on blair's side, perhaps, if the first time. >> host: so when it comes to christopher hitchens, were you an add mier of his prior to that? >> absolutely, absolutely. a lot of what he wrote

afterwards, well worth reading. the problem, i guess i have, is that he seeks to be as unpredictable as he had been. i mean, i almost knew what he was going to say every week. else if it was about war or religion. i knew almost exactly what he was going to say. if he talked about the kurds, they were an example of what iraq could have been, had the liberation of iraq could have went if not for the religious. going to talk about religion, going to talk about the effects on democracy and so on and so forth, so he lost the edge, i think, a bit of the originality, which i was thinking existed in the fact he was somebody who was quite unique in american politics, not just the bad boy brit who, you know, wound up the american establishment, but argued for socialist politics in a country where hardly anyone does that. >> host: richard, was there a different solution or

nonsolution to iraq? >> guest: yeah. i think they should have been allowed to have their moment. the moment of tahrir square in e just a -- egypt where they faced on a well entrenched dictatorship. it was not a dictatorship that was weakened and isolated by years of sanctions and so on. this was a regime that was internationally respected. blair said on television this guy is a pretty good guy. >> host: president mubarak? >> guest: yes, and biden said the same thing. he had international backing, republic, and -- backing, respect, and a degree of authority. nevertheless, he was overthrown. i'm convinced had the united states rather than sort of invading in the way that it did, destroying the existing state apparatuses, and, you know, creating chaos and unemployment, had they left the country alone and left the people alone to

rebuild, you know, i think they would have found a way to amsterdam, and i think that was, you know, we've seen that in tunisia, and we've seen attempts in yemen, algeria, and elsewhere, probably bahrain, so i think that the arab spring shows the way forward. >> host: so, richard seymour, currently, the situation in syria, where, if anything, would you like to see the international community get involved? >> guest: it's a concept i like to unpack, who is it, what does it consist of? you know, people, countries are you united in and of themselves, nevermind with one another. i think there's great divisions intergnarlly on what to do with syria. personally, i think one of the great problems with syria is the degree of intervention authority taking place. there are countries that are intervening, supplying, really

radical wahabi sort of squads with arms in a way that's not helping the revolutionary process, but helping the most right wing forces there, so i think they should keep well out of it. on the other hand, i think that if the revolutionaries on the ground in syria want to purchase weapons, forge agreements with others outside the country, nay are perfectly compelled to do that. i think nothing should be done that comes from above as if to say, you know, we are going to come in and save the day because that almost never works. >> do you think that iraq, baghdad, could have p a tahrir square moment? do you think hussein and mubarak are the same person in essence? >> guest: no. i think the hussein regime was a lot worse, but not just worse.

by the time, 2002-2003, it was weaker in many respects. partly, this has got to do with how well they have a broad social basis. it fell in the same way, the social basis narrowed and kept narrowing to a smaller and smaller elite so that larger numbers of people were excluded from the regime, and they couldn't be contained within it. issaddam had terror. the means of terror were depleted. he lost his international respect, you know, previously, he had the support of cries like the united states, france, and so on. he lost all that. he lost any agreement with saudi arabia. he was isolated internationally and regionally. on top of that, a number of uprisings that proves the regime was not pop pew --

popular, and, of course, lost northern iraq, and basically is a kurdish state led, so i really think the regime was vastly weaker than it appeared to be, and the fact that they, the threat of war, they talked about we're going to release all the political prisoners or we're going to have a vote on something, you know, probably, not a serious vote, but they felt they needed to make the gestures. now, i think this is a weak regem and would have quite plausibly crumbled in a few years. never second guess these things, but one thing i would always say is that given what happened in iraq as a result of the invasion, with the deaths that resulted, with the destruction of infrastructure, with the chaos, ethnic cleansing, no matter how bad a dictatorship is, you can always make it worse. >> host: richard seymour in "unhitched," of what is

christopher hitchens guilty of in the end? >> guest: okay. i think there are number of things. first, he lost his critical edge. he lost his ability to maintain distance from the establishment and government. i'm not saying that it's in a completely discriminate way because there were things he criticized bush for, but when he fan -- fancied the bush administration was effectively a force for liberation in the middle east, was going to be, like, the republicans in the spanish civil war, you know, i think he lapsed into a delusional state. i think partly it had to do with the relationship with paul. paul persuaded him, look, we're not just kissingerites and politickers, but going there for democratic reasons. i think he really believed that. i think it also had to do with the wider historical perspective. he'd come to the conclusion after 2000-2001 that capitalism

as such no longer faced an enemy, no working force, a working class, whatever, capable of challenging it, and capitalism was the only revolutionary force left. it was a force of creative destruction and a phrase that joseph used, but nonetheless, a revolutionary process according to him feeling that in most of the world, spreading capitalism, liberal capitalism is a step up, and that, therefore, america an american power was on the right side of history, and to support it was to support the progressive force in history, and for that reason, he thought not only that america couldn't lose in iraq and afghanistan, but that if america really dedicated itself, it couldn't go in any way awry. the problem with him in this respect is that i don't think he was even able to get it right in hand sight. he never recounted.

he certainly saw things were badly wrong, but never turned around to re-examine basic assumptions saying, let's have a war or rather there won't be a war, so bring it on. >> host: did you think about writing unhitched while hitch hs was still alive? >> guest: much was written while he was alive. part of it is based on an essay i wrote in 2005, which i e-mailed to him, because we were having correspondence. he was lightful and charming, and i didn't want to like him, so i provoked him, sent him the essay, very damming of him, and he yielded and vaguely insulted me, but -- pardon me -- and it was a very amusing conversation, but it -- it was included there if in the collection of the critics which he dropped the response to included as a post

face on top of that, and that was the official memoir. there were aspects of the life, of the writing that he chose to gloss over, and so some of us were interested in figuring out what was true and what was not true. they contacted me six months before hitchens sadly passed away, and said, you know, you've been writing about hitchens a long time. we are looking to do a book in the series, this one about hitchens. would you like to do it? yeah. who else is going to do it. i just got more of a sense of who he was as a person, what sort of life he'd had, what sort of things he gently sort of

excluded from the purview in hitch 22. >> host: richard seymour, a self-described socialist and marxist. does democracy fit into your belief system? >> guest: yeah, obvious. i don't -- i think any idea of socialism that is undemocratic is not socialism. people in radical democracy, but which i mean i'm in favor of democracy in everything, in favor of, you know, i mean, i would essentially say rather than nationalizing every industry, turn it over to workers' control. that's what i would favor. doing things from below. this was based on real social forces. it was happening. there were, you know, worker council movements, and in the early 21st century, the only glimmer seen of that is the occupy movement where -- or in argentina, they started the 21st

century of turning factories into co-ops. they are democratic movements i'd like to see advanced and radicalized, so, yes, democracy has a central place in it. >> host: given your politics, how do you see the difference between the labour party in england and the congress servetive party and liberal democrats? >> guest: i think the difference is primarily not in the ideas that they defend and argue anymore, but more in the social basis that i have. the party's still very much a part of the trade union leadership, and it still gets votes mainly from working class people, across mainly, you know, england, scott land, and it still has some sort of lineage with the parties of the socialist international to which it belongs. the conservative party, you know, it's always been a party of business, never concealed

this, but in the last, i would say, 20 years, they've learned harsh lessons, which is that whereas they would once have defended outright, you know, hard core cop servetive ideas, the ideas of mrs. thatcher, and would have been elected on that basis, they can no longer do so and moved to the center to get command and electable plurality, and so both parties huddle in the sent i have ground at the moment. i think there are tendencies within the society given the crisis, given the process of austerity that will lead to polarization, but i don't think it's necessarily reflected in the two major parties. >> host: couple years ago, you had the meaning of david cameron. >> guest: yeah. >> host: what's the thesis of that book? >> guest: that a cipher for the wider, sort of historical forces that he remits, and what i did was i took a number of key

words used "progress," you know, and the idea was that essentially the language that he was using was codifying a political project that was mainly continuous with new labor in terms of the support for privatization, in terms of the support for breaking up the welfare state, and in terms of downsizing the state itself being a very important part of the project, but i also tried to root it in app analysis of the changes ideology since edman burke and so on, and one of the interesting things that i think mr. cameron came out with was the particular conception of progress. progress used to mean somethinan the direction of greater

equality and greater freedom. that was the idea or conception of political progress, equality and greater freedom. that was the idea or conception of political progress, but there's also another meaning that is accrued to it, which, essentially means the accumulation of stuff, you know, progress means you keep producing and producing and add up more and more stuff, and as long as you're doing that, that's progress, and you adapt to whatever changes that em poses, and to an extent, that's what david cameron meant by progress, em basing the so lairty of global capitalism, embracing the constant innovation and change that it produces, and calling that progress. that's not something that he invented. i think mr. blair, you know, endorsed a vision of progress along similar lines, so it was about the way in which political language is used in british politics today. >> host: talking with richard seymour op booktv, talking in london with authors, and richard

seymour is the author of four books "unhitched: short trialing of christopher hitchens," "american insurgents": a short history of american imperialism," the meaning of david cameron" in 2010, and the first book "liberal defense of murder," and is it fair to say your thesis in that book is humanitarian intervention equals colonialism? >> guest: no. pardon me. certainly, i trace the lineage, okay? a lineage of ideas and political practices that do go back to the colonial era. if you explain how people today start by calling for the ideas of the 18th century revolution and end up, making bloody cause, essentially, and they did a couple times,

certainly, a few words too few people die in fallujah. how could you sort of unite the two positions? looking into the history of it, i found that i had to go back, not just to, you know, the victoria period or john stuart mill, a liberal, very much in favor of self-determination for women and working class people in england, but also in favor of colonialism abroad feeling those people were not yet able to govern first timely. i had to go wac to the origins of liberalism itself, liberalism as a political ideology finding john locke defending, obviously, the rights of the free born englishman, right to liberty, the right to freedom from certain oppression, and the right to property, property rights, being absolutely central

to purview, but to defending clop yalism and dpefding slavery saying the justification for slavery is in many ways the same of justification for property, in this case, what you've done is by defeating an opposed force, you have, you had the right to kill them. you could have done so, and by sparing their life, they effectively owed their lives to you so you can dispoe of it as you will. also, obviously, the reason and the political rationale for taking control, for example, of the americas was that the natives were not disposing of the land well at all, and there was a god-given mandate to make the best use of the terrain, the territory, so taking control of this as private property and making it into private property, and, you know, applying sufficient methods ofonjust metf production, was a justification for that process. as you progress through the

history of liberalism, you often find it's intertwined with a defense of quite radical ideas for their time, you know, idea that individuals don't owe deference to a king, for example, the idea that, you know, that religious authorities should be separated from political authority, and so on, and you find that that's intertwined with the idea that that only applies to a certain restricted number of people. throughout the 20th century, what happened was that that group of people who are included in liberalism and its promise expanded so it started off being white upper class men, you know, they were entitled to vote. they were entitled to all the freedoms of a liberal state. gradually expanded to include women, then to include working class men and women, and it expanded, eventually, to include black people, certainly in the southern united states, and

south africa, and the colonial regimes were dismantled. there's tremendous changes and foolish to say humanitarian intervention tads is a reiteration. however, there's continue newties, and, certainly, the idea that the fundamental idea that a country's problems are best solved by somebody without who doesn't have to defer to them or ask them or consult. you just go in, sort it out, say you're welcome, you know? that's fundamentally, i think, a colonial idea, but if not for the colonial idea, i think it would be fundamentally wrong and misguided because of the, well, mainly because of the consequences that it has, but because i have a fundamental belief that i believe people should be in charge of the own destiny, and if they ask for helpings that's one thing, and if you are in solidarity with them and in conversation with them, you can take actions that they might ask you to take. that doesn't happen to be the

case when we talk about states going to war. >> host: richard seymour, how well do your books do in the u.s., and have you done a book tour there? >> guest: i have done a book tour. my books don't sell in the u.s.. "unhitched," is the first to get attention in the american press at all. thus far, mixed. the "washington post" review, obviously, was i don't think the reviewer liked it, denver post more positive, but that's the first time i've had any coverage in the american press. the only book tour i've done in america was for "american insurgents," and i did a tour of the sort of the east coast going from dc to philadelphia, boston, and new york, but it was a case of presenting the book to left