not the prison. there were 1490 majors mostly from our country but from around the world too. it is a big school. someone asked me what is the biggest problem that i worry about, and the answer was american weakness. why do i say that? the signal that is being sent out from this country is that basically we are modeling the american economy on europe and it is a failed model. doesn't work. there is no way you can have the deficits we have had and have the debt we are incurring without sending out a signal to the world that this country is not going to be what it was in the past. there is no way you can do that. if you are not going to act responsibly people take that message and they see it and then

you turn around and when i went to washington eisenhower was president. i came out of the navy and served during kennedy, johnson and congress, we were spending 10% of gross domestic product on defense. today we are spending less than 4%. our allies in europe are spending less than 2%. the signal that goes out before the sequestration is we cut $493 out of the pentagon defense budget and we are about to cut another half a trillion which brings it close to $950 billion out of the ten year budget. the signal to the world is the united states is not going to be in position to contribute to a more peaceful and stable world in the decade ahead. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

>> booktv recently rented book expo america, the publishing industry's annual trade show. over the next few hours here from several others whose books are being released this fall. we start off this block of programming with a panel discussion, ishmael beah, doris kearns goodwin, and wally lamb talk about their books and stay tuned after this for an interview with malcolm gladwelker, author of david and goliath. [applause] >> good morning, everybody. very excited to be out this early. right about now we are all wishing this was not a breakfast, more of a lunch but here we are. i am very delighted to be sitting here with wally lamb, doris kearns goodwin, ishmael

beah, i am excited to be involved in anything with respect waters and to be involved with the book community since i have a television show on the e network. i am grateful to every individual here who goes out and sells our books and has our books in your stores and everything you do for the book community. it is an honor to be here. i am not sure how the publishing industry is going or what direction is going in. but i would like nothing more than to be somebody involved in keeping it all live. and i was forced to come here in person and figured i could just appear on kindle, but they said no. you have to set your alarm to be funny which i never had to do either. i usually do that from 3:00 p.m. on.

this year i will release my fifth book which is called you gone the be kidding me. it is about my trials and tribulations traveling as a pompous american in places i have no business being in. safaris asking where we could find a live red lobster, thinking about calling -- i realized i hate russians and i don't know mchale gorbachev. i decided to write about my adventures over the past several years and had incredible experiences in very fortunate in the book community and the tv community which i can't say for my compatriots and i have been to some spectacular places and have the band of misfits i take with me everywhere i go.

so i want to talk about that but i am looking at all of you looking at me saying who gives a ship really. i got in here at 2:30 in the morning from los angeles and we pull up to the lincoln tunnel, where can i -- have to be up at 6:34 e-book fair and this 18 wheeler came in right before the lincoln tunnel land couldn't fit under the tollbooth of lincoln tunnel and i got out of the car and i was like no! police officers everywhere guiding him to back up to get back on what ever street takes you from the lincoln tunnel, i have to walk through the lincoln tunnel. i got out of the car to yell at the guy who was driving the truck, don't you know how tall your trek is? the police officer looked at me and said get back in your car. i thought wow, i have really

made it. to read a passage for the boat, and asking for an extension. i would love to read a passage but i wrote it in swahili and my translator has been detained. we will have a wonderful program for you meant each of their will get up to tell you about their book and first documented his detail as the boy soldier in sierra leone in the memoir of a long way gone. so please welcome ishmael beah. [applause] >> good morning, everybody.

i also want to echo chelsea handler said about thanking all of you for making our work possible, making our work accessible to readers, you are doing a fantastic job. will still around, you're doing a great job. thank you for that. what i want to do is speak a little bit about my emergence into writing, becoming an author. i remember the first time my first book came out in 2007. somebody said to me you are that also. it was the first time somebody referred to me -- it took me two minutes to realize they were speaking to me, yes, actually i m. i realized i am all right. before that, way before that, before i thought about being a

writer i grew up in of place in sierra leone, in a community, in a small village where as a young boy my imagination was sparked by the world tradition storytelling that was part of my life, part of the daily deliberations of whatever is that i did and so had a very young age i learned the importance of actually telling stories of how stories are pretty much excerpts of our lives, stories are the most potent anecdotes for anything we can encounter in our lives and how we can deal with them and stories are the foundations of our lives and how we build those and pass them on, the most important on, pass them on so the next generation can learn from the celebrations and whatever it takes the we want to pass on to them. as a young boy i knew this growing debt because every evening i would sit around the

fire and older people in my community would tell stories and these are stories that were instructions about moral and ethical standards of my community, how to behave and some were just funny stories, some of them were scary stories to the point they didn't want to go to the bathroom at night so there are all sorts of stories, all of them had meaning for the telling and one of the techniques i learned as a very young kid was whenever they wanted to tell the news story they would tell an older story so when they were telling that older story, there were things that were not part of the story. if anyone in the audience did not protest, they knew the audience was not listening so they would not tell you the new story because they meant you were not ready to receive the new story. as of boy growing up this was part of my life but to even begin with that, musty six seven years old, my father would put me on the shoulder and walked me

to the village square, there was dancing going on and other things and he would say to me we are going to play a game. i am going to pretend i am a blind man and you have to direct me to the places we're going and describe to me the things you have seen and so on would say to him what do you mean by that? what is left? you know. if you raise the other hand of yours, that is the left. as of boy i had to struggle and i would say to him there is of fire over rivera and he would say to me what is fire? i have never seen what it is like and he described it to me. can you make me feel the warmth of it? what is coming from a band this is how i started thinking about using my mind to describe the things around me. later on when i started school from a british colony i went to school and learn shakespeare and all these things, in my community people would come to

me to read letters that the children had written from the capital city or wherever they are and so i would read letters to them and write letters for them as well. also the earliest time for me to stop translating because some of the letters were either too long so i had -- i give the person a 6 think the version of what the message was about but the writing part was the most incredible part because i learned about the secrets of my community because people would tell me things they didn't want other people to know and sometimes -- a woman wanted her son to come back home. instead of saying that she said please tell my son, his mother who was in labor with him for six hours, to bathe him every morning, his mother, she went on and on for seven minutes, all that to say i miss my son, come home. so i listened and wrote please come home, your mother really

misses you. to some extent you got to get to the point. you want people to follow the narrative structure. before all of this i never thought i would be a writer. even storytelling was a strong part of my life. going to school and becoming a writer was not something you wanted to discuss with your parents because -- let's take them out and be an economist and all of these things. these are very noble career choices. i went to school wanting to be an economist, not really but i was interested in writing. this was pretty much my early upbringing and all these were part of my -- in addition to oral traditions storytelling. another thing that i learned as a young age growing up, all the places i grew up had so much richness in language in terms of different languages. we have 15 languagess in three

dialects such as a boy growing up you are immersed in a culture where everybody speaks the languages all i grew up speaking seven of them and one of my own languages is very rich and diagnosis until i started writing but when i am writing i am always struggling to find the english equivalent of things i really want to say. for example in my language when you -- how you describe it is to say the sky rode over and changed its site. that is what you say. when i am writing a fire right that and all of a sudden it is a new way i am using the english language. for example a ball in my language, a nest of air that carries air. so they kicked around a nest of air all of a sudden it has a different meaning. i went out and started writing, all these things were part of what made the language reach for me and whatever became of it.

we had a civil war that went on for a number of years the ended in 2002 and as a young boy i had the misfortune of being dragged into this war to fight as a soldier. i was lucky to be removed from that and through good luck and remarkable people that i met in my life, my mother who is here tonight, this morning i should say who is here, so i started living in the united states, i came here and the writing of the book came out of this desire to have people understand what happens, from my own personal experience of it. most people did not really know about the country i was coming from so when i started writing and never intended to publish it. i was writing as a way to prepare myself so that when i had an opportunity to speak on a panel which started happening to me that i will be able to

present my thoughts and ideas very well, this was the idea and i was at the university so i started writing and the first time i wrote for something was a competition, to write a fiction for a prize, $3,000 and why not? i will give it a shot. i sat down two or two errors and worked the story about when i was in the capital and they will try to bond the rebel groups and this was the time when the families would go out to cook because if you could get any other time of the day the guns will come and take food from your family and eat it so when they were running from the place everybody went out to cook so they can actually eat the food so you can imagine they cook very quickly, and everybody ate it like nothing happened so i wrote the story and gave it in

and won $3,000 and everybody got upset because i was studying literature and everybody got upset ainge a professor at oberlin college and a writer became interested, i started writing what became a long way gone. i wrote it, already sent the and people and really was not interested in publishing it. a great literary agent decided, let me give you 50 figures and maybe i can refer you to somebody. he said i want to take you in, what does that even mean? i don't know what that means. we discussed that and he said i want you to meet somebody. and i was like all right. so i met this tall woman and we had lunch and got along immediately.

and we started working on the book but i remember after the book was finished, and i realized what had happened, signed a contract and everything and i remember thinking to myself oh my god, i just gave my life away to these people, didn't know them very well. i wanted to go back and have this back and none of that ever happened but i am glad i did not do that because the book came out and have a life of its own. thanks to all of you for supporting it and putting on the show and a lot of people read it and it had a life of its own. back to my background, in the oral traditions for, when you write the story, when you tell a story, when you give out a story is no longer yours. becomes a whoever encounters it and takes in, you will only become the shepherd of the story because it is coming from you.

sometimes someone go away and what i want to say is in the editing of this group and got really close and i will leave you with one anecdote and talk about the new book, i remember when we were editing, this was so intimate in the journey, so exhausting running from work and all that comes with it but every time i come to do some editing, have lots of food for me on the table and i am ok but because it was so much in the narrative, i was hungry so still running from the war and not hungry and the issue of a sandwich and a okay, i am really okay and in new york city now. in a way, we began to realize

the narrative, had the power because we could not teach at ourselves from it so strongly. so we came out, took me on the road and i began to learn about publishing, what it meant and all of this when it became a new york times best-seller, they are calling me and say you are on the best-seller -- sedna know what that meant. so i was at chicago, got to get on the plane for the next event and later on in my life had to discover what all of this man so i am still learning a lot about the publishing world but for me the most important part of my world is to share the story, to write the story and let other people do what they can to make the public see it and i take this very seriously because as i mentioned earlier, stories are the foundations of our life, how we make sense of the realities

around us, even shape the dreams of our life and how we go forward in the future. at the end of the book there is a story i told, it took me many years for me to understand what the story actually meant. this story was told to me as a boy and told me as most of the other people say, you would understand this story at some point and the story is this. underwent into the bush to hunt among them and he sees to hunt and animal and sees a monkey in the tree and shoot the monkey and the monkey is scratching the side of his belly and the monkey said hold on, what are you doing? very obvious what i am doing and if you shoot me your mother will die and it you don't your father will die. when i was a kid they would tell the story in front of your parents and as far as i always said i would go to the bathroom because i didn't want to answer,

parent knows how you're going to feel about this. when i have a chance, hunting animals who do not speak back to human beings. the point of this story really is what happens when we take action. it is what happens when you engage in violence, lift a weapon. it is what happens when you engage in anything, there's a consequence for what you do. there's a consequence when you raise a fist. what you decide to to rice or carry yourself everything has a consequence and it took me throughout the war to understand what this meant. for me the power of stories and supporting this, these things go beyond all of our lives, maybe somebody would be touched by something, so in that way we are shaping the future through all of us together, writers, publishers, people who made sure

people read this stuff and all of us so thank you for being part of the future in a way and the present as well because -- whatever lies in between. what i am going to speak of briefly before i end is my new book which is a novel coming out, it is called "the radiance of tomorrow". i have a little bit of thoughts to myself that after writing a memoir, even though it is a book that stands well on its own i was a bit exhausted, didn't want to write another memoir because i felt actually it is not shane for one to speak about him or herself for many years in a row. i did not want that but also the story was pulling at me because of the first book. i wanted to really have people understand how does it feel to return to places that have been devastated by war.

these narratives, "the radiance of tomorrow," looks at a family that goes back to their village, to raise a family, to rekindle the traditions that were destroyed because of the war. how do you do that, how do you shape a future if you have a path that is pulling at you and what do you bring after you left the homeland where the traditions you lived have been destroyed, people don't believe in it anymore, how do you come back and recreate yourself, people, particularly the younger generation because their parents or grandparents told stories about how this place is, the older people are holding on to the old traditions, younger people in between, not as young as the children, lived elsewhere so they want something new but don't know what it is. in this narrative you have this

pushing for, but people trying to live together in this place and it is called "the radiance of tomorrow," you will meet some strong characters, the father of this family, you meet an older lady who returns to this place and discovers some of the things that i had. what i'm going to do, we are at the murder rate gathering, in the service if i read a little bit. this is the first five figures of its, the rest you will see. and generally in 2014. i will read two short paragraphs and end my talk so "the radiance of tomorrow," first time reading it in public, was the first to arrive where seemed the wind no longer filled, several times the

trees that entangled each other for the ground burying the leaves into the soil, so blind their eyes the of the sun would not promise and tomorrow with its rays. was only the path that was reluctant. the story anticipated it would soon ending starvation for the want of what gave it life. the long and winding paths were spoken of by snakes that one walked upon to encounter life or to arrive at the places where life lives, the cars that are not ready to shed their old skins for new ones and such occurrences take time with unnecessary interruptions and began one of those interruptions and maybe those years had many feedings, are always the first to rekindle their friendship with the land or may just happened this way. they did not have everybody covered with that type of flow that faded toward the town.

she removed her flip-flops, said the mom her head and carefully placed her bare feet on the path weakening the kick dirt with a gentle steps, with both eyes she conjured the street smell of the flowers the turn to coffee beans, the wind into the air. it was a freshness finding its way to the noses of visitors, such a sense was promise or traveler of life ahead and quench the thirst and perhaps ask for direction if one was lost, but today it made her weep, stopping slowly at first and became a cry of the past, a cry, why its memory refuses to be part and celebrate what has been left, however little with revenues of old knowledge. to our own melody, an echo of

her voice, first filter making her body tremble and feel the forest. pulling shrubs that her strength allowed and toughen them. before end -- [applause] >> a few very much. "the radiance of tomorrow," january 14th it will come out but i want to say this. writing became a comment from war-torn place and a place where most people have not heard about. when i arrived in the united states writing came to me a way to bring to life some of the things i could not provide people physically. for example when i write, i do not even have a report card so my mom would take me to school and not admitted because i did not have a way to show that i had been in school so one of the essays i wrote to get it was why did i not have a report card. when i was in high school most

people brought their baby pictures for a year ago, i did not have the muscle i wrote a poem about how looked as the baby. most people thought i was an ugly baby so i did not want to provide a baby picture but for me really it became a way to bring to life some of the things i did not have physically so that people can feel it. there will be more tangible feeling for people when they see this so i use words in that wave tuffet the landscape and evoke in motion, so people see and feel where i am coming from because i have no proof except my memories. that is what i try to do with my writing. thank you for having me. [applause] >> thank you, ishmael. i would like to say to you on a personal note i got a lot of report cards and they are not all they were cracked up to be.

ismail and i will be going home together after this. please welcome presidential historian and pulitzer prize-winning author doris kearns goodwin. [applause] >> there could be no better transition for a hearing about storytelling than my belief history at its best is about telling stories, stories about people who lived before, about events that create the condor's of the present, we study the lives of others in the hope that we the living and learn from their struggles and triumphs. i spent a lot of my time telling stories about our presidents, waking up with them in the morning, thinking of them when i go to work at night. it may seem an odd profession to spend days and nights with did presidents but i wouldn't change it for anything in the world. each time my embark on a new subject i am catapulted back to different era, absorbed in the daily lives of a different set

of characters, reading the diaries and letters they wrote following their personal lives, the people they loved and lost, the events that stoked ambitions. my only fear is that in the afterlife there will be a panel of all the presidents i never studied and everyone will be given ample time to tell me everything pull thing i got wrong about them. .. as long as yours was about me? now, it used to be a badge of honor to say you were a 24-year-old white house intern, it's gotten a little more complicated in modern day. [laughter] truth is, it was a fabulous program, we had a big dance at the night, president johnson did whisper he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the white house, but it was not that simple. like many young people, i'd been active in the anti-vietnam war movement, had written an article against lbj which unfortunately came out two days after the dance in the white house, and

the title of the article was how to remove lyndon johnson from the power. [laughter] but somehow he said, oh, bring her down here for a year, and if i can't win her over, no one can. so i did end up working for him in the white house and accompanying him to the ranch to help him write his memoirs when he was so sad and vulnerable that he opened up to me in ways he never would would have. and i'd like to believe that privilege of spending so many hours with this man fired within me a drive to understand the inner person behind the figure, as i moved from lbj to jfk to fdr, to abraham lincoln and now, finally, to teddy roosevelt and william howard taft. i think the answer is simple, the most important cry tier criterion is that i want to live with this character year after year after year. i could never write about hitler or stalin, i couldn't wake up with them in the

criteria hen far more dramatic eras are out there waiting to be captured. but there's a problem. it took me six years to complete franklin and eleanor and world war world war ii, longer than it took the war to be fought, ten years on lincoln, and i'm now on my sixth year of t.r. and taft. and each time i start on a new subject, i have to shift the books relating to the old guy to make room for the new guy, a shift that sometimes feels like an act of betrayal. i'd like to believe that the reason my books take so long is that all of them have actually been multiple biographies. hundreds, if not thousands of other people have chosen the same president to write about for the same reason, they're the most dramatic, the most interesting. so the challenge is to find a fresh angle, a new way to tell the story that will not simply

go over the same ground. so i chose to write about three generations of fitzgeralds and kennedys instead of simply jfk, to tell the story of world war ii, i settled on the home front instead of the war front and chose to illuminate the partnership between eleanor and franklin instead of concentrating solely on fdr. and i loved having a woman at the center of my story. then after the pleasure of franklin and eleanor, abraham lincoln beckoned. the prospect of living with him was absolutely thrilling, but alsoer terrifying. 14,000 books had already been written on him. at first i thought i would focus on abe and mary as i had done with franklin and eleanor, but after two years or more i realized that unlike eleanor who was everywhere i needed her on the home front be, mary's story was, essentially, a private story. her activities would not illuminate the public side of the story, so i was stuck.

but then after further reading in the diaries diaries and lettf the time, the true treasures for an historian, i began to see abraham lincoln in a sense was married more to the members of his cabinet than he was to mary, spending time with them in the afternoons, taking carriage rides, playing poker at night. and then when i realized these central figures had all been his rivals for the nomination, then i finally knew i had the story i wanted to tell, abraham lincoln's team of rivals. well, when i started casting about for my new subject, i returned to my favorite era in american history, the progressive era. that heady, optimistic time at the turn of the 20th century when reform was in the air, when we had corrupt robber-barons, corrupt politicians, corporate exploiters of our natural resources, the country prospering as never before, but the gap between the rich and the poor grown exponentially. indeed, in the census of 1900 it was said that 1% of the people were said to own 99% of the

wealth. it was an unnever -- un9/11ingly familiar time. when the quickened pace of life made possible by the telegraph and the railroad and the telephone was producing a toning increase in nervous disorders exacerbated by the rise of the tabloid press that exploited every local horror into international news. it was an era dominated by thier doer roosevelt -- theodore roosevelt, a man who had fascinated me ever since i was a little girl take to sagamore hill. so i knew from the start that i would love living with this interesting character. how could i resist a man who possessed an unusual ability to laugh at himself, to take criticism with grace, a trait that endeared him to his fiercest critics? when the rough riders, his memoirs about the spanish american war was published, it was given a devastating review by peter dunn.

in the voice of mr. dooley, the irish bender who regularly appeared, the review poked fun at roosevelt for placing himself at the absolutely center of every single action that took place in the war. it is the biography, mr. dunn clearly said, of a hero who knows one. mr. dooley said, if i was him, i would call the book "alone in cuba." [laughter] well, three days after this satirical review was published to the laughter of people all across the country, theodore roosevelt wrote to mr. dunn. i regret to state, he said, that my family and intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book. now i think you owe me one, and i shall exact that when you next come east. you must pay me a visit. i have long wanted to make your acquaintance. and how to resist a man who found be ways, endless ways to relax and renew his spirit. reading, of course, was a staple. in the midst of the worst days of the coal strike which was then when he was president the most formidable deadlock in the

annals of our history, he sent a letter to the librarian of congress requesting a good history of poland and some early histories of the mediterranean races. i owe you so much, he told the librarian two days later, it has been such a delight to drop everything and to spend an afternoon reading about the relations between asyria and egypt which could not possibly do me any good and in which i reveled in anyway. beyond reading, exercise was a critical measure of his relaxation. throughout his presidency late afternoon was the time for a horseback ride, a strenuous hike along the cliffs, he would drag visitors and friends along through the wooded section of the park with one simple rule: you have to move forward point to point. you could not go around any obstacle. if a creek got in a way, you forded it. if there was a river, you swam

it. if there was a rock, you scaled it. if you came to a precipice be, you let yourself down over it. journalists delighted in these late afternoon rambles as roosevelt's fellow walkers desperately tried to keep up. stories plied about this cabinet officer who dropped out and fell along the way, but the great story is told by the french ambassador who left a celebrated account of his first walk with the president. he arrived at the white house, he recalled. he was an afternoon dress inside a silk hat as if we were to stroll in the champs dell say -- champs -- he assumed they would rest for a moment and then turn back. judge of my horror, he said, when hi saw the president unbutton his clothes and heard him say we had better strip so as not to wet our clothes. so he said i, too, removed my

clothes for the honor of the french. to be without gloves would be embarrassing if we should meet ladies on the oh side. [laughter] and there are hundreds of these stories. but, of course, in choosing t.r. i was once again choosing a man about whom so many fine biographies had been written. so once again i needed a fresh angle. strangely, this time -- unlike any of my other projects -- i saw the story of the book from the very start. i knew after only a few months of research that i wanted to focus on roosevelt's long and come to plex friendship with william howard taft, a friendship that strengthened both men for two decades but finally ruptures which in 1912. i've been able to trace their friendship which began when they were in their 30s through the more than 400 letters they exchanged, letters that have never been fully mined. and i found that taft is a far

more empathetic figure than i realized. we, of course, know that he was fat, ballooning to 340 pounds when he was unhappy in the presidency, but i hadn't realized that in between that when he graduated from yale he was only 250, when he finally became supreme court justice and was happy again, he was 250. so eating was his way of getting out of depression. i knew, of course, that he was governor of the philippines and secretary of war before becoming president. but i hadn't realized how extraordinarily successful and popular he had been at each of these posts. one loves him at first sight, theodore roosevelt once said of taft. he has nothing to overcome when he meets people. i real that i always -- i realize that i always have to overcome a little something. i almost envy a man possessing taft's personality. roosevelt had hand picked taft as his successor and was as nervous about his selection as his own. don't be seen playing golf,

taft. don't be photographed on a horse, it's not good for you and certainly not good for the horse. [laughter] when he was finally elected, theodore roosevelt said he is as fine a man as ever sat in the president's chair. and henry adams, an acute student of the american political eye for nearly seven decades, called william howard taft the best man for the presidency in his lifetime. a prominent new yorker argued that taft was the greatest all-around man ever to reach the white house. every subordinate post he had occupied, he had achieved great success. but as it turned out, the man who had served brilliantly as the second fiddler could not fill the first fiddler's place. he did not have the audience sense. he had no comprehension of how to deal with the press, of how to use the bully pulpit -- the name coined by theodore roosevelt. once i determined that the biggest decision tins between

taft and roosevelt was not that roosevelt was progressive while taft was conservative, but rather that taft had never understood how to position himself with the public, then i was drawn to another set of characters in my story. the muckraking press. the journalists who pressured the conservative congress whose complex partnership with teddy roosevelt ai sured -- assured his success. and when i found that the most brilliant gatt kerring of these investigative reporters were all in one magazine, mclure's magazine, i knew i had the story i wanted to tell. ida tarbell, considered the most famous woman of her age, lincoln steffens, whose autobiography is still taught in journalism classes, ray baker praised as the greatest reporter of his era. and their editor, sam mcclure,

is a larger than life figure. his restless enthusiasm and manic energy infused the magazine's atmosphere with a touch of genius even as he suffered from periodic nervous break downes. together these celebrated journalists produced exposes of no knoplys, fraudulent medicines, unsafe railroads becoming the vanguard of the progressive movement. mcclure's formula was to give husband writers enough time and resources. he would put them on salaries for years to produce long, heavily-researched series. it was soon copied by rival magazines producing what has been called the golden age of journalism. i knew from the start that the climax of the story would be reached in 1912 when teddy and taft engage in a brutal fight for the republican nomination complete with fistfights and revolvers, with cries of corruption, a fight that divides their wives, edith and nelly, their children, their closest friends, a fight that tears

apart the handsome young military aide that i've sort of fallen in love with. he served teddy roosevelt first and then stayed on with taft. loved both men, so saddened by their rupture that he couldn't sleep at night. taft told him you've got to take a vacation to get ready for the election. he goes to europe in march, he comes back on the titanic, devastating his death for both men. and i knew from the start that when teddy loses the nomination, that he decided to form a third party, but i didn't realize the full drama of that bull moose convention. the delegates truly believed they were witnessing an historic moment, comparable to the creation of the republican party in the 1850s. the platform called on government to be an agency of human welfare, to shift the national income and the blessings of our civilization so that everyone could enjoy it instead of the few. writing decades later, one of the delegates claimed the new deal went little further. with the republican party split

in two, of course, the democrat, woodrow wilson, wins bringing defeat to both teddy and taft, seriously diminishing the progressive wing of the republican party forever. while that forms the natural ending of the book, i mow wanted to keep the -- i show wanted to keep the story alive a little longer, so i was delighted to discover an incident for an epilogue that would bring the story full circle. shared opposition to woodrow wilson eventually drew taft and t.r. together. in may 1914, they happened to meet in chicago. taft approached teddy with a spoil, teddy ease. they threw their arms around one another, all the guests in the dining room aware this was the first time they had come together since the bitter election began to cheer. sitting together, they talked warmly, and the press proclaimed in the headlines the next day, they have buried the hatchet. when teddy died in his sleep,

taft was at the funeral seated with the family and the last one to leave the grave. when harding was elected president, taft finally realized his lifelong dream and was made chief justice of the supreme court. but the memories of roosevelt remained strong. i wallet to say to you how glad theodore and i came together. had he die inside a hostile tate of mind toward me, i would have mourned the fact my whole life. i loved him, and i will always which cherish his memory. ..

became abundantly clear in the interview that tolstoy gave. he told of having gone to a very remote area recently of the caucuses where there were a group of wild barbarians who would never left this part of russia. they were so excited have tolstoy in the midst they asked him to tell a great story. he told about napoleon and alexander the great and frederick the great and julius caesar. before i finished the chief stood up and said but wait, you haven't told us about the greatest role of them all. we want to hear about that man who spoke with a voice of thunder, the laughed like a sunrise. who came from the place called america that is so far from here that if the young men should trouble there he would be an old man when he arrived. tell us of abraham lincoln. tolstoy was done to know that link and then had reached this remote corner so we told him everything he knew about lincoln. then they said what made him so great and he said he wasn't such a great general perhaps, not as

great as napoleon, not as great as frederick the great but his greatness consisted in the moral fiber of his being. so that dream to be remembered which is empowered to link all his life had indeed been realized. the dream that carried him through his dismal childhood, his string of political failures and the darkest day of the war, his story would be told. for most of us today we may not have our faces carved in marble in washington but the stories of our lives will be told through the memories of our children, our friends and our colleagues. which is why it is important to retain the art of storytelling so perfect to have followed him in our fast-moving world, to share the stories of her parents and of our grandparents with our children and their children in turn. and as many of you know i always come back in the end to wear my own love of storytelling to begin, my own love of history to the days when a father taught me that mysteries art of keeping score when i was only six so i

could record for in the history of that afternoon brooklyn dodgers game. when you're only six and your father comes home every night and i now realize, recounted every inning of the play, he made me feel i was telling him a tag is a story, it makes you think there's something magic about history to keep her father's attention. i was convinced i learned there to the art because at first i would be so excited i was blurred out the dodgers one, or the dodgers lost which took most of the drama of the two are telling away. [laughter] you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end. much later, even if you're writing about a war as a narrative historian you to imagine you do not know how the war ended so you can carry your reader with you every step along the way from beginning to middle to end. so in some ways i just learned keeping my father's attention, he made it more special for me when i was only six, because you never told me than all of this

was actually described in great detail in the sports pages of the newspapers the next day. so i thought he wouldn't even know what happened to the brooklyn dodgers. although my father died when i was still in my 20s before i got married and had my two sons, i had passed his memory as was his love of baseball onto my boys so when the dodgers abandoned us and went to los angeles i couldn't even follow baseball for a while until it moved to boston, went to fenway park, became a red sox fan, we've had season tickets now for over 35 years and i must do as i always do that i can say with my sons at the park and close my eyes sometimes an imagine myself a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players upon you on the grassy fields below. jackie robinson, duke snider, dale hodges but i must say there is magic in these moments. when i open my eyes and i see my sons in the place where a father once said, i feel an invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see, but his heart and soul that come

to know through the countless stories i have told. which is what in the end i shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to believe that the pride of people have loved and lost and our families, and the public figures we've respected in history really can live on, so long as we push to tell and retell the stories of their lives. thank you for letting me share with you these stories today. [applause] >> thank you, doris. that was wonderful as well. quite a panoply of others up here, and by the way, you can have the dodgers back. [laughter] they are a huge disappointment. our final offer this morning is dazzling author and is one of oprah's favorite, so by united states law is also one of our favorites, please welcome

\mr.{-|}\mister wally lamb. [applause] >> thank you, chelsea. i'm rocking my new pda thread here. [laughter] hoping i've gotten all the tags out. so i saw the new star trek movie a few days ago, and it started me thinking about time travel, about how if we zoom, say, 40 years into the future, honey boo boo was menopausal. [laughter] justin bieber might need viagra. and beyoncé and j.c. would qualify for the senior citizens discount at wal-mart. but as kierkegaard once wrote from one of the central ironies of human existence is that life can only be looked forward but understood backwards. and so with that in mind i would

like you to hop with me onto my time machine. i'm taking you back to 1966. lbj is the president. and valley of the dolls was writing the bestsellers list. i was a high school sophomore. my biology teacher had set up a genetic experiment in which we are to study heredity and characteristics through several generations of a single family of fruit flies. now, the fruit fly is an ideal subject for such study because of its manic lifecycle. she said. which is true, it's possible if you're a fruit fly to be born on monday morning and play with your grandkids by thursday afternoon. [laughter] we budding biologist are assigned tasks, and mine is to feed the flies pixel at the end of each school day i climbed the stairs to the biology lab, open the glass jar that hold our population, drop into each piece

a piece of rotten banana and then screw the lids closed again. now, sometimes after completing my task i put my face to the jar and study for a few minutes that these things come in fornicating, that will ensure the continuation of the species are now, a genetic experiment proceeds on course until the fateful friday afternoon when i climbed the stairs, open the jars, dropping the banana and then forget to replace the lid. by monday the entire four-story building is infested and she gives me a bracing finger wagging speech on the subject of scientific responsibility. all the while batting at fruit flies around her. now it's two years later and despite my shortcomings in the life sciences i find myself in a senior class titled honors physiology taught by none other than mrs. menke's husband, mr.

menke. we've become so proficient with scalpels and fraud innards that we're presented with a dead cats. one plastic bag courts for each future physiologist. these specimens are expensive, mr. menke tells us, as the yanks one after another out of a big plastic barrel and presents them to us towards. these cats have cost the school a lot of money. our having them come he said, was an honor. i achieved my body back at and stare down in fear and horror. it's for is pungent with formaldehyde. its teeth and claws are bared. it has died in mouth open as if in mid-howl, kind of like this. [laughter] studied in sheer terror in the instant not to die, and it's mind for the rest of the semester. the following year, as a college freshman i will sit in a

darkened history class and watch silent black and white footage of blank faced naked corpse being bulldozed by the nazis into a communal pit. in that same semester across campus, in a darkened appreciation, art appreciation classroom, i will get my first glimpse projected from a slide onto a screen of edvard most famously disturbing painting, the screen. and from that day to this one, may 30, 2013, i see that trio of images superimposed. the face of my dead cat, stiff be formed on the lab table, the death mask of hitler's victims and the tortured soul in munch's painting who stands slap against his face and screams in horror at, at what? life? death rex the 20th century?

the 21st? now, mr. menke is a coffee drinker and he's a man of displaced fate. so as we are an honors class he makes it such that we'll act honorably whether he is in the room or not. and so it is his practice to leave us for long stretches of time with our dead cats and our worksheets as he strolls down to the teachers room while we engage in higher level scholarship. but we are not honorable. we are kids, irresponsible, and i see now in retrospect intimidated by all that rigor mortis around us. although silent screams of death. and so in fear we grope for comic relief. and it is i who proposes the idea of staging a mock wedding. [laughter] to my surprise the concept catches on and my peers and i abandon honor and scholarship in the feel and circulatory and digestive systems, and we throw

our energy into the surreal nuptials to. on friday, mr. menke leaves class on schedule at the beginning of the our with the coast clear we dress our corpses in a makeshift tuxedos and gowns, karen's cat is the bride, jimmy bradley's the grim and connie has made brownies for the reception. [laughter] imb officiating man of god, father wally. unwisely, i am performing the ceremony with my back to the door when all around me my classmates eyes dropped and their cats bulk back down against the lab tables. mr. menke has made an unscheduled visit, has crashed the wedding. who started this foolishness? and so with two scientific strikes against the and the blessings of both mr. menke and mrs. menke i abandon my brilliant career and life science and become instead first an english teacher and later a

fiction writer. still examined life, of course but doing so without cadavers and sharpened instruments. you know, like tommy think about when you boil it down to its bare bones, reduce it to the lowest common denominator, when it comes down to i think is that we are governed by three basic instincts. they need to find food so that we won't starve. they need to satisfy our sex drive so we won't become extinct. that by the way, chelsea, is why we're supposed to be young, have sex. and three, the need to understand and interpret the world around us on some intellectual level, delivered overtly as thoreau put it while he gazed at the waters of walton spawn. it's the third in polls, are hungry to figure out the world that establishes us from the lowly fruit fly and instinct driven can't. and so unlike the simple life forms we scratch our schools that hollows are brains and we

think we try to make order out of chaos because we hunger to understand the world and our place in it. and thinking of course leads to reading and writing. which is where you and i come in. at times understand the world, making order out of the chaos, seems insurmountable. i mean, how could the holocaust had happened? why do hunger and homelessness persist in this land of plenty wrecks how could that psychotic young man had entered sandy hook elementary school and opened fire on five and six-year-olds? and what did those brothers imagine they could accomplish by detonating pressure cooker bombs in the midst of innocent bystanders on that beautiful sunny day in boston? vroom vroom. it's the 70s. i'm a college sophomore

>> is the 70s. i am a college sophomore during turbulent and seductive times, politics, cultural sea changes are inviting baby boomers like me to fight for social justice and party hearty. the sexual revolution has arrived and marijuana perfume's the dorm. the vietnam war and the civil-rights battle intensified and the soundtrack of these years segways from this is the dawning of the age of aquarius to by the time i got to woodstock we were half a million strong to in soldiers and nixon coming we are finally on our own, prepare ourselves for the real world and we were going to fix it. i am on strike, i told my father over the phone after the invasion of cambodia and the killings, the hell you are, he shouts back into the receiver. you get to class. my dad and richard nixon were

interchangeable that season. so i came up the phone on the old geezer and joined the protest. it is 1972. i graduated from college but have not launched myself into the chaotic world at large. i have taken a u-turn returning to the high school from which i graduated in order to teach english. hello, mr. and mrs. mcghee. we are colleagues now. okay. my first classes were the ones not there none of the added features one comprised of students who have been retained to notice some anytime some of the my age, 21. ease what hogs their fond of calling themselves. my plan is to win the mobile releasing them from the prison of school until i got there. i will open their minds by making their education relevant.

the sweat hogs and i were there a week until the day i approach said jinks, a surly senior and i asked him to take his head of the desk and pay attention. set works nights and so easily that school during the day and he raises his head, opens his bloodshot eyes and says why don't you go -- why don't you go -- i note doris and ishmael would be cool if i said what seth said but i don't want to offend chelsea's more delicate sensibilities. let's say he suggests in a profane way that i engage myself in an activity more commonly that involves two people when they are naked. we told our collective breaths. the school of education has not prepared me for this so i have no clue how to respond but then

mercifully he unfolds his long legs, stands and ambles voluntarily out the door to the principle's office, saving my teaching career. i remain at that school for the next 25 years. about nine years into my tenure at the high school, without any premeditation i sit down one day and begin to write fiction. this is during the summer of 1981, the same month jared, the first of our three sons was born. jerrod, who when he was a toddler and i just found out my first short story will be published, i will pick up and tossed into the air so exuberantly that his head will hit the kitchen ceiling. but not to worry, our kitchen at the time has one of those drop ceilings. jerrod doesn't clunk his flock, it just disappears for a couple of seconds and then comes back into view. jerrod, who later when he is a

high school senior i will over here complaining about the old geezer and i will look around to see if my father has come. but no, he will mimi. the great singer/songwriter joni mitchell once observed the seasons go round and round, the painted ponies go up and down, on the carousel of time which indeed we are. parenthetically in another song she sang woke up, it was the chelsea morning which it is. but that is beside the.. we are invited to talk about my forthcoming novel "we are water" which is set here in new york and like several of my earlier novels in three rivers, connecticut. the template for the fictional

three rivers is my nonfunctional home town norwich, connecticut. when you mentioned you come from that stage you are likely to conjure in people's mines and image of a week the bedroom town as presidents commute to manhattan and unwind at the country club and send kids to prep school but i come from the other connecticut, east of the connecticut river, conn. we are more feisty and fashionable, more liverwurst and had a. often providence exerted a greater pull on us than new york so we drop our eyes, root for the red sox and use the word wicked as an adverb as in this example. we had a nor'easter last winter and it snowed wicked hot and it was wicked heavy to shovel. in writing "we are water" i time travel to my own childhood focus on two traumatic events i remember vividly. the first was the death of a

black man that was ruled accidental but that might really have been murder. the second was a terrible club that cut a path of destruction through the city and took five people's lives. i was 8 years old when ellis raleigh's broken body was discovered at the bottom of his driveway which was stained by a trail of blood that led back to his house. willie had been a laborer who later in life began inexplicably and incessantly to make art. he was in school. he knew little about perspective or techniques but his paintings were alive with color and story. he couldn't sell his work in his lifetime but today it is highly prized by collectors of american folklore. two things made him noticeable in the 1940s and 50s, first,

because he had been awarded a substantial insurance settlement due to an accident in which he had been hurt he had been able to afford a gleaming buick convertible. second, he was norwich's first african-american president who had married a white woman, a german immigrant named will mean a. when ellis drove through norwich in his big car with his wife beside him he was construed by some as rubbing his good fortitude in the town's face. perhaps he should have been more leery because of few years earlier a relative who lived on ellis's property had been found around with his feet sticking out of a shallow well and the court ruled that death accidental too. i was 12 in march of 1963 when anderson dam pulling back a lake at norwich's north end gave way on a rainy night, unleashing millions of gallons of water and

sending swaths of ice the size of refrigerators shooting down hill in surge carrying trees, cars, family pets and human beings. the raging flood waters came perilously close to our own house and to this day i can still hear the thunderous roar as well as the screams of third shift factory workers who were buried alive in the rubble of collapsed when the bill. besides the factory workers a young mother lost her life that night. she and her husband, both in her mid 20s made the fateful decision to not run water that they had been warned was headed their way so they loaded their three little boys, age 4, age 2, and 10 months into their car and took off but sadly they couldn't outrun the flood water. it carried the car along with that and pitched it off a 10 foot wall. the family went underwater but managed to get out of the car and onto the roof of the storage

said in the back of a ford dealership. the father climbed into a nearby tree, the mother handed the three boys up to him and just before margaret one herself got into the tree the water carried her away and drowned her. husband has passed on now but those three little boys have survived and thrived and are today in their early 50s. in the riding of my novel i became their friend and two summers ago the four of us walked the flood have all the way from the now fortified damn to the tree from which they were rescued. the tree of life, tom and jimmy and sean mooney nicknamed that tree and indeed it was. when i began writing "we are water" i took those unrelated events, ellis raleigh untimely

death and the norwich flood and set them apart from each other like polls, alexis roads, i guess. in the space between them, a kind of electrical energy began to bounce and crackle and generate itself, an electrical arc, if you will then over the next four years became the arc of my story and so as fact became fiction, ellis raleigh became the younger and more vero josephus jones who dies at the end of the bigoted white father this suspects he at clandestine sexual relationship with his daughter and margaret moody became flood victim a d. a. whose baby daughter parishes with her in the flood and his 5-year-old daughter a rose up and becomes an unsold outsider artists and one of the novel's we to main characters so before i close let me do one last bit

of time traveling. this time into the not too distant future. at the end of october this year, we are what will become available in brick and mortar stores electronically over the internet. i want you to know how grateful i am to publishers and booksellers, librarians and writers and loggers who will connect my book and its mail's to those whom i wish to read them. i want you to think of it this way. that the writer and the reader card two polls, apart from each other and you, ladies and gentlemen, i the electricity that connects us. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you all. you are obviously sexually obsessed with me. and i think it is pretty inappropriate to talk about those things this early in the morning. this has been wonderful and i wanted -- as different as each one of us is how grateful we are to have people like you who are able to put up all that so we can reach and touch so many people no matter how we do it. we are going to continue the day doing whatever we do when we come here and i think a bunch of us will go out and take photos for whoever aspires to the pattern with all of us and i hope you enjoyed your breakfast and we all will enjoy the rest of the day, thank you very, very

much. >> malcolm gladwell, what is your new book about? >> it is called "david and goliath: underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants" and it is about underdogs. i got really interested in telling the stories of people who seem weak and powerless but go on to accomplish great things. that was the puzzle how they managed to do that and i thought it was worthy of a book. >> back in 2009 you wrote a piece for the new yorker, david versus goliath. is that when your interest started? >> nothing in the new yorker made its way into the book but it is what got me thinking about it. it was an article, started with

a story of a guy who was an indian immigrant in silicon valley who starts to coach's daughter's basketball team and they are 12-13 and they are all the daughters of software engineers from silicon valley. they can't pass, shoot, dribble, can't do anything that resembles basketball so he decides what they are going to do is play the defense, have the full court press, 100% of every game, that was so devastatingly effective they go to the national championship so the idea was he responded to a weakness by adapting and by adapting in a way that proved to be pretty devastating and also by breaking the rules, people don't affect 12-year-old little girls, just a little bit and sporting because you know this bill level is such at that stage that no one in the

court, if something is really interesting, an example of someone who chose rather than to remain passive in the face of some kind of weakness to adapt. that at that station is what this book is about, though strategy people use to respond to their own shortcomings. >> what is one of the examples you use in the book? >> i am really interested in talking about dyslexia. an old chapter on why are so many successful entrepreneur is dyslexic? is a neurological problem, it is a deficit, part of your brain is not working properly, not something you would wish on a child dead yet in one case after another many of the most famous entrepreneur as we know have lived their whole lives with this devastating disorder and if you talk to them will tell you they succeeded not in spite of

it but because of it. it taught them something about how to deal with the world and proved to be incredibly valuable in their career and there's something very beautiful about those and very moving about those kinds of stories and i tell a couple of them, a beautiful illustration of this paradox i am interested in describing which is we learn more from our disadvantage is that we do from our advantages. >> host: any connection between "david and goliath," the tipping point, al liars? >> guest: i wish there were. i wish there was some grand unfolding narratives alike argue if you own one you had to own them all, but i don't think there is. they happen to be what i am interested in at the time. and answers to the question why does the world surprise us?

why does the world not work the way we expect? that is the fee might keep coming back to? >> how long do you sit with an idea? >> a long time. i think about a book for years before i start writing it. if you ask a reader to commit a big chunk of their life to your book, you have to correspondingly commit a big chunk of your life to that book. you cannot expect people to make the investment in you if you don't take your time. so i thought about this one and collect ideas years before i started writing. >> host: some of the "david and goliath" stories we heard a military stories, the viet cong heat versus the u.s. army. are those included? >> guest: the book starts with me retelling the actual "david and goliath" story which is not

what you think. very different in reality than has been -- than i tell about vietnam, the guy who understands early on that the viet cong was not who we thought they were, they burn not going to give up easily and no one would listen to him. the military was, the american military in those years was not, like all of us, i think, difficulty with the notion that someone could be without obvious strength, without money, weapons, any thing and still be a formidable opponent. that is, my book says the opposite, don't be fooled by the armor someone is wearing. what matters is the man inside the armor. >> host: how did the tipping point change your life? >> just put me on the map as a

writer. so it paved the way for the success of my other books. it didn't change me personally, just made my professional life only easier, returned my phone calls a little faster than they used to bed didn't turn me into a different person for which i am thankful. such a bizarre on happy accident but that book did so well i am grateful of it. >> host: do you look at your books or do people look at your book as self-help books or business promos? >> all great books are self-help books in that they encourage us to look more closely at ourselves and how we think and how we behave so they are not how to change your life in seven

easy steps but the reason i write them is i want people to take a step back and rethink their own experience. that had not occurred to me or that is how i make sense of that or that should set whole new life on something that happened to me or something. >> host: malcolm gladwell, there's a reason goliaths are goliaths and that is because they have been successful. how do they maintain their success? >> guest: that is a great question. the first half of my book is related to the way goliaths choose to shoot themselves in a foot. the acquisition of success says the seeds for failure. breaking out of that cycle is very very difficult. every single day we look around us and we see once mighty institutions falling. the camera that is recording the show is by sony. sony was once the biggest electronics company in the

world. last year they lost $8.5 billion and some say they should shut down the electronics division. they go from the top of the keep to where people say openly they should packet in. this country, we talk about vietnam, there has never been an individual country as powerful as america was in 1964. what happened over the next ten years in vietnam? we were humble. there is something, i think, profoundly humbling about what happens to giants, to goliaths. to be someone in position of great authority and power is a more precarious position than i think most people realize. why do goliaths shoot themselves in the foot?

there are many reasons. i explore a couple. the same strategies that made them great will keep some great. that is not true. they underestimate just how useful the struggle was, when you don't have enough, when your business could shut down tomorrow, when you are constantly at the end, some cases you fall and die but if you don't, you learn how to be innovative and take chances, take risks and do all kinds of things that compels you to do things you would not ordinarily do. when you get comfortable you are no longer under that compulsion and that is the huge -- that is

a huge transition many organizations or individuals can't make. they forgot how useful their old disadvantage was. >> host: other messages for the american political system? >> i am always wary of ever -- let me say this. i don't know that there are. i am in the minority, as someone who is not in this country i am always impressed at how good our political system is. look around the world. is there one you would trade for the american system? none of them are perfect, hours isn't perfect, it is pretty good, we are happy with it, we pay our taxes, people want to come here. i don't think there's anything, as far as i can tell it is doing a pretty good job. >> host: our u.s. is indeed the >> guest: i remain a canadian. i can't give up my canadian.

>> host: malcolm gladwell, when does "david and goliath" hit the stands? >> guest: october 1st of this year. >> host: this is booktv and c-span2 previewing malcolm gladwell's newest book "david and goliath: underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants," october 2013 it hits the bookstores, thanks for watching booktv. >> next from book expo america the publishing industry's annual trade show we talk to john sargent, c e o of macmillan about the publishing industry and after that conversation with ann romney whose new book is the ronny family table. >> we need another round of applause. your stand on agency everyone in this room are saying to you who are making a fair market place

for books and readers. i know you haven't spoken out publicly, not too much, we are talking about the whole damn story. why do you want to do this now and tell us about the whole damn thing. >> this is the one question i actually prepared for. and so there are a few reasons. i have throughout my career particularly in the last four or five years always tried to be in the background and not be very public. i don't give interviews generally speaking, the i don't offer many quotes from the press. i try to stay strictly in the background. that is my natural implication, this is a little nervous making for me to be stepping forward. there are several reasons why i chose to do it it now.

first and foremost booksellers, otters, agents, partners, what we do, it is a fast-changing and complex business, we need to have the ability to speak to our partners, our partners can understand what is going on. it strikes me as we go through this transition period it is difficult for me to understand what is going on, difficult for me to have the bread of knowledge to make good decisions so i put myself in other people's shoes who were not in the middle of an all day every day, how would it feel to know even less about what was going on and to me we owe it to the community at large to discuss these things, so first and

foremost it is to make sure we tell you our point of view and plans about what we are doing in this time someone comes out to do that. that is first. second, in this rapid changing environment where communications industry and we don't communicate and this pace of change makes it important people understand what is going on and third, i have a great fear about what i think of as the victim affect, having been in the whole of the doj and lawyers everyday, it is hard not to sort of taken the need to be silent and not to say anything or meet with anybody, it is hard to take that and move that aside and i think it is dangerous for us as an industry if everybody in the industry lives under sort of law

all of the department of justice, legal action is actually quite specific. we are not allowed to discuss price, we are not allowed to discuss business models, things like piracy, we are allowed to discuss those things. there are a lot of things we are allowed to discuss and this sort of feeling of the doj is very aggressive and good intimidating and we need not to be intimidated. as an industry, if you look at book sellers of the views this as an industry based on freedom of speech. booksellers have stood up over and over again generations to defend that and we can't lose sight, that is, we are the court, we can't be in a position where we question ourselves on that.

we have to be strong and can't be intimidating, my way of saying this is something i would like to see as more in the industry, we need to talk. .. >> tell me about the whole damn story. >> yeah. >> you talked about the epiphany on a treadmill and how it started. tell us the story, how it all began, and up to the macmillan settlement and feelings on the aftermath. >> okay. first off i say, if you see me struggling with my language a bit and see me being ten thattive, i'm going to be called to testify next week in court, so i have to be a little bit careful so i may struggle to answer all your questions exactly as i should, but -- >> we totally understand, okay. >> the story is really quite simple. it starts with