[applause] [applause] >> good morning everybody. i'm excited to be up this early. we are all wishing this was not a breakfast, more for lunch but here we are. i'm very delighted to be sitting here with wally lamb, doris and these amazing authors. i'm eyes excited to be involved with anything with respectable

authors and to be involved with the book community since i have a television show on the e network. so i'm very grateful to every individual here who goes out and sells her books and has her books in your stores and everything you do for the book community. it's an honor to be here. i am not sure how the publishing industry is going or what direction it's going in, but i would like nothing more than to be somebody who's involved in keeping it alive. and i was first asked to come here in person and i figured i could just appear on kindle but they said no you were going to have two set your alarm which i never have to do. i usually do that from 3:00 p.m. on. this year i will release my fifth book which is called you've got to be kidding me

quite it's about all of my trials and tribulations traveling as an accomplished american in places i have no business being in. a five-star safari asking where we can hunt live lobster. i was thinking about calling it, are you there vodka it's me corby after mikhail gorbachev but then i realized a i'd -- russians and i don't know gorbachev. i decided to write on my globetrotting adventures of the past several years and i have had incredible experience of being fortunate in the book community and in the tv community, which i can say for my compatriots ,-com,-com ma where i've been to some spectacular places. i have a merry band that i take with me everywhere i go. so, i was going to talk about that but i'm looking at all of

you and looking at me and thinking who gives a -- really. [laughter] i got in here last night about 2:30 in the morning from los angeles and we pulled up to the lincoln tunnel and i'm like when can i take my sleeping pill? i have to be up at 66:30 for a book wheeler and this 18-wheeler came in before the lincoln tunnel and could've said under the tollbooth in the lincoln tunnel. i got out of the car and i was like no. there were police officers everywhere and they were guiding us to back up so we could get on whatever street takes us away from the lincoln tunnel. i can't, have to walk to the lincoln tunnel. i was yelling at the guy driving the truck sing hey but buddy don't you know how tall your truck is? the police officer looked at me and said chelsea, get back in your car. i thought wow i have really made it.

[laughter] i was about to read a passage for my book but it's not ready yet and i'm publicly asking for an extension. [laughter] i am not joking. i would love to read a passage but i wrote it in swahili and my translator is detained. we will have a wonderful program for you and everyone, each author will tell you about their books and first up the incredibly harrowing tale as a a boy soldier in the memoir a long way gonzo please welcome ishmael beah. [applause] >> good morning everybody. i also want to echo what chelsea said. thank you for the introduction. i want to echo what she said about thanking all of you for making our work possible, for

making our work accessible to readers. you are doing a fantastic job and we are still around which means you're doing a fantastic job. thank you for that. what i want to do is perhaps speak a little bit about my emergence into writing, becoming an author. i remember the first time in my first book came out in 2007 i was at an event and someone said to me oh you are that author and it was the first time somebody referred to me and those in those terms. it took me about two minutes to realize that they were speaking to me and i said oh yes actually i am an author and i realize that i am a writer. but before that, way before that even before i thought about being a writer i grew up in a place in sierra leone in a community, in a small village where as a young boy my

imagination was sparked by the tradition of storytelling that was part of my life. it was part of the daily deliberations. at 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 that we can encounter in our lives and how we can deal with them and also stories of the foundations of our lives and how we build those that pass the monde, the most important part how we pass them on to the next generation can learn from the joy, celebrations and whatever it is we want to pass on to them. as a young boy i knew this growing up because every evening i would sit around the fire and my grandmother and the older people in my community would tell stories. these were stories that were

instructions about the moral and ethical standards of my community, but how to behave in some of and some of them are just funny stories. some of them were scary stories to the point where you were afraid to go to the bathroom at night. all of the mice had a meeting in a recent for the telling. one of the techniques i learned as a young kid was whenever they would tell a new story they would reach helen older stories so when they were telling that older story they have things that were not part of the story. if anybody in the audience does not protest then the audience was not listening so they would not tell you the new story because it meant you're not ready to receive the new story. as a boy growing up this was part of my life. to even begin with that, i remember i must have been six or seven years old and my father would put him on his shoulder and we would walk to the village square. there was dancing going on another things and he would say

to me, we are going to play a game. i'm going to pretend that i'm a blind man and you have to direct me in the places we are going and described to me the things you are seeing. so i would say to him well you know go left and he would say what you mean by left? what is left? do know if you raise this part of the hand of yours and make it this way that is the left so as a boy he had chewed struggled to describe things that i would say a oh there's a fire over there and he would say to me, what is fire? i am blind. can you describe it to me? can you make me feel the the warmth of it and what is coming from at? this is really how i started thinking about using my mind to describe the things around me. later on when i started school sierra leone being a former british colony. i went to school and learn shakespeare in all of these things. people would come to me to read letters that their children had written from wherever they were.

i would read the letters to them. it was also the earliest time for me to start translating because some of the letters were long so i had to write and pretty much get give that person a succinct version of what they message was about but the writing part was the most incredible part is i learned about the secrets of my community. people would tell me things that perhaps they didn't want other people to know. sometimes they were the most elaborate it for example a woman wanted her son to come back, and instead of saying that she said you know please tell my son his mother who was in labor with him for six hours, his mother who took him to the river to bathe him every morning when he went in his pants. she went on and on for seven minutes. all she wanted to say was i miss my son and i want him to come home. so i just said please come home your mother really misses you. [laughter] to some extent you have to get

to the point. when you are writing you want people to follow the narrative structure. before all of this i never thought it would be a writer. storytelling was a very strong part of our lives. becoming a writer was not something you want to discuss with your parents because -- [inaudible] it's a very noble career choice as well but i went to school wanting to be an economist but i was always interested in writing. so this was pretty much my early upbringing. in addition to the oral tradition of storytelling another thing that i learned at a gang age growing up was all the -- is so much richness and language. we have 15 languages and three dialects so as a boy growing up

your honor culture where everybody speaks these languages. i grew up speaking seven of them and one of my own languages my mother tongue is very rich and i did not notice until i started writing that when i'm writing i'm always struggling to find an english equivalent of things that i really want to say. for example in my language when you say the night came suddenly how you describe that as you say this guy -- so when i'm writing it's a new kind of way i'm using the english language. for example a ball in my language means a nest of air or a vessel that carries air. all of a sudden it has a different meaning. when i started writing all of these things were part of what made the language richer for me and my work and whatever became of it. now in sierra leone we had a civil war that went on for a

number of years that ended in 2002 and is a young boy i had the misfortune of being dragged into this war to fight as a child soldier. i was locked into a room and through remarkable people that i met in my life and my mother who is here tonight, this morning i should say, who is here. and so you know i started living in the united states. i came here and then the writing of the book came out of this desire to have people understand what it happened there from my own personal experience of it. because when i arrived here i didn't really know -- from the country coming from so when i started writing i never intended to publish it. i was writing it as a way to prepare myself so that when i had the opportunity to speak which started happening and i was able to present my thoughts and ideas very well. this was the idea and i was at

the university so i started writing. actually the first time i wrote something in the over city newer city was a competition to write a fiction for a prize at oberlin college that was $3000. i was a poor student so i thought why not? so i sat down to her three hours and i wrote the story about when i was in the capital city when the tidal waves would come at noon and try to form the strongholds of the rebel groups. this was a the time when the families would go out to cook. if you click at any other time of the day the people with guns will come and take your food from your family and eat it. when they were running from the -- that is when they went out to cook. you can imagine they cooked very quick we. everybody ate it and sat around like nothing had happened. i wrote the story and then i won the $3000. everybody got really upset as i was a political science student.

i wasn't studying literature so everyone got upset. a professor at oberlin college became interested in me and said you should write. i started writing. i wrote it and my mom read it and other people read it and i was not adjusted in publishing it. i wanted to go to law school and an agent said give me 50 pages and let me read them and maybe i can refer you to somebody. he read it and said i want to take you on. i said what does that even mean? we discussed that in the said i want you to meet somebody. i think you're going to like her. i think you should meet her. i met sarah, this tall woman and says hi i am sarah and we had lunch and got along immediately. we started working on the book i remember after the book was finished and when i realized what had really happened i

signed the contract in everything and i remember thinking to myself, oh my god i just gave my life away to these people. i don't even know them very well. what's going to happen? i wanted to go back and say to sarah, can i have the thing back and we can pretend that none of it ever happened? >> anyway i'm glad i did not do that. it had a life of its own and thanks to all of you for supporting it and putting it on the shelves. a lot of people read it and it had a life of its own. ..

>> every time i do editing with sarah, she would have a lot of food on the table. and it was like i ate so much because i was such a big. [laughter] >> still she said this boy is so hungry. and i would have this and that. [laughter] so we began to both realize that the narrative that we had had a power of its own.

we could not detach ourselves from it so strongly. so i began to learn about publishing and what it meant in all of this and when it became a "new york times" bestseller, i remember sarah said you're the best. and they were like a meteor on the bestseller list. and i was like oh, that's great. later on in my life, i really begin to discover what all this meant. so i'm still learning a lot about this publishing world. the most important part of my work is to share the story and write the story and let other people do what they can. i take this very seriously. stories are how we make sense of the realities around us.

it is how we shape the dreams of our lives and how we can go forward in the future. there's a story that we told so many years after the war what it actually meant. it was told to me as a boy. so thank you it story at some point. the hunter went into the bush to hunt. he sees a monkey sitting in the tree. the monkey is scratching the side of his belly, eating things. the monkey said, hold on there. what are you doing? and he said well, it's very on is what i am doing. and he said he must stop this or your father will die. when i was a kid, they would tell the story in front of your parents come and i always said that i had to go to the bathroom

because i didn't want to answer. your parents always wanted you to know. but the point of the story is what happens when we take action. it's what happens when you engage in this and you lift the weapons. it and as a consequence and when the resistance there is a consequence. what you decide to write. everything has a consequence. it took me a lot of time to understand what it meant. so for me, the power of stories was going beyond us. it goes beyond our lives. so in this way we are actually shaping the future to all of us here together, writers and publishers and people who read this stuff. thank you for being part of the

future in this way, as well as the present. as well as whatever lies in between. now, what i'm going to speak up briefly is my new book. so after writing the memoir, it is a book that did very well on its own. i was a bit exhausted because i felt that actually it was not seem to want to speak about themselves for many years in a row. but also the story was pulling on me because of the first book. i wanted to really help people understand how does it feel to return to places that have been devastated by war. this narrative is set in that

way. it looks for a family that goes back to their village. to try to rekindle some of the traditions that have been destroyed. so have you tried to do that shape the future if you have a past that is pulling at you. and what also do you bring after you have left your homeland where the traditions have been destroyed. some of it, people don't believe in anymore, how have you come back and try to -- re-create yourself again. using all of this fits of people go back home and typically younger generation goes back because their parents and grandparents have told them things. the older people are holding onto the old tradition sure the younger people in between have lived elsewhere and they want something new. so how people are trying to live together, you meet some very

strong characters. one is the father of the family and you meet an older lady that returns to this place and discover some of the things as well. so i think he would be at a disservice if i don't read a little bit. this is the first five pages of it. and i think this is the value of it. it will come out in january january 2014. i will read a few short paragraphs for you. the radiance of tomorrow. the first time reading it in public. she was the first to arrive and the wind no longer xl. we have branches winding the

eyes so it was only a path that was reluctant. as though anticipated starvation the long and winding path arrived at the places where life lives. they were now ready to shed the old skins for new ones. such occurrences take time with necessary interruptions. they are always the first to rekindle broken friendship with the wind. or it may just have happened that way. it was fated from many washings. she had removed her flip-flops and set them ahead and place

them on a path. we closed eyes and she conjured this week saw the flowers. it was the freshness that used to overcome the forest and found its way visitors many miles away. it was a place to rest and quench one's thirst and ask if one was lost. but today, the senate made her weak. it then became a cry of the past two more in the memory that refuses to depart. and to celebrate what is left of old knowledge. her own melody, or echo of her voice, she lamented and then

tossed them aside. thank you. [applause] thank you very much. >> i would like to say that for me, writing became something that came from a place that most people have not heard about. when i arrived in the united states, writing became to me a way to bring toy something. when i was in high school, most people brought their baby pictures with her yearboand

i did not have one. so i wrote a poem about how i would have looked like as a baby. most people thought maybe i was an ugly baby. so i didn't want to provide my baby picture. it became a way to bring to light some of the things so for me, use words in that way to fit the landscape and evoke emotions so that we can actually see and feel where we are coming from. i have no proof except for my memories. thank you so much for having me here. [applause] >> thank you so much. [applause] >> i would like to take you on a personal note, i did get a lot of report cards and they are not all they're cracked up to be.

ishmael beah and i will be going home together after this. please welcome dorris kerns goodwin. >> there can be no better transition been my belief that history at its best is about telling stories. stories about people and events in the past to create the contours of the present. we study the lives of them in hopes that we can learn from their struggles and triumphs. i have spent a lifetime telling stories of our presidents waking up with them in the morning, thinking about them when i go to bed at night. it may seem in our profession to spend days and nights with dead presidents, but i wouldn't change it for anything in the world. each time i embark on a new subject come i am catapulted back into a different era and absorbed in the daily lives of a different set of characters in

reading the diaries and letters of a row following a personalized for the people that they loved and lost in the events that stoke their ambitions. my only fear is that in the afterlife there will be a panel of all the presidents i studied and everyone will be given ample time to tell me every single thing that i got wrong about them. and the first person to shout out will be lyndon johnson and how come the book about the kennedys was twice as long as me. now, used to be a badge of honor to say you were a 24-year-old white house intern. i got a little more complicated. we had a big dance at the white house and president johnson accepted that he didn't want to be directly selected for the white house. but like many people, we came

after an the title was how to remove lyndon johnson from power he was so sad and vulnerable that he opened up to me that he never would have had i known about the height of his power. he fired within me the drive to understand the person behind the public figure. now finally to teddy roosevelt and william howard taft.

far more dramatic is fdr and theodore roosevelt out there waiting to be captured. but there is a problem. it took me six years. and i'm now on my six year and each year i start a new subject might have to shift the books relating to the old guy to make room for the new guys. a shift that sometimes feels like an act of betrayal. i would like to believe that the reason that my books takes so long is that all of them except lbj have been multiple biographies. the price of choosing our most erratic president is that hundreds have chosen the same to write about the same reason. the most erratic and

interesting. the challenge is to find a fresh angle in a new way to tell the story that will not simply go over the same ground. i chose to write about three generations to tell the story of world war ii and i settled on the homefront instead of the war front. and chose to eliminate the partnership between them and i love having the woman at the center of my story and what a woman she was. then abraham lincoln back and read the prospect of living with him was absolutely thrilling, but also terrifying. 14,000 books had already been written. finding a new angle would not be easy. at first i thought i would focus on the rest of them, but unlike eleanor who was where i needed them on the homefront, the story was essentially a private story. her activities were not eliminate the public side of the

story after further reading and diaries and letters at the time, the true treasures, i began to see that abraham lincoln was married more to the members of his cabinet. spending time in the afternoons, playing poker night. when i realized that these central figures have been rivals for the nomination, then i finally knew that i have a story that i wanted to tell. abraham lincoln's team of rivals. i started casting about for my new subject, i returned to my favorite in american history, a heady optimistic time at the turn of the 20th century when the form was in the air and we had corrupt politicians and corporate exploiters of our national resources and the country prospering as never before. but the gap between the rich and the poor grown exponentially in the census of 1900 it was said

that 1% of the people were said to own 99% of the wealth and it was an unnervingly familiar time when corporations were merging and economic opportunity was shrinking. when the quickened pace of life was producing a stunning increase exacerbated by the rise of the tabloid press that exploited every part of international news. a man whose mental curiosity had fascinated me ever since i was a little girl. a new from the start that i would love living with this interesting character. how could i have read about this man who took criticism with grace. when the roughriders come his memoir about his experience was published, it was given a devastating review by the

reviewer peter dunne. the irish bartender who regularly appeared in the columns, it poked fun at roosevelt for placing himself at the center of every action that took place in the war. it is the biography of a hero who knows one. mr. dooley said if i was him, i would call the book alone in cuba. three days after this satirical review was published to go after people across the country, theodore roosevelt said i regret to say that my family and intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book. and i think you only one. and how to exist the man who found ways, and with ways to relax and renew the spirit. reading was a staple. in the midst of the days of the

cold strike, the most formidable deadlock in history, he sent a letter to the library of congress requesting a history of poland and some early histories of the mediterranean races. i owe you so much, he told the library and two days later. it has been such a delight to drop everything relating to this strike and spending an afternoon reading about the relations between syria and egypt, which could not possibly do me any good, in which i reveled accordingly. how all of you would have appreciated this love of books. exercise was a critical measure of relaxation. late afternoon was the time for a boxing match, tennis, a hike along the cliffs in the park, he would drive visitors and friends along through the wooded section of the park. you have to move forward point-to-point. we cannot go around any

obstacles. if there was a river you swim in it, if there was a raw, you still do it. if you came to a precipice, you let yourself down over it. journalist delighted and descriptions of these late afternoon rambles as roosevelt's bellows desperately try to keep up. stories are right about this or that you dropped out and fell along the way, but the great story told by the french ambassador who left a celebrated account with the president. he arrived at the white house. he followed roosevelt at breakneck speed through fields and other rocks and they came to a wide area. judge of my horror, he said, when i saw the president unbuttoned his clothes and say we better strip so as not to stay in the creek. he said i removed my apparel as

well, said the honor of france, except i kept on my lavender gloves. when we got to the other side, roosevelt south entrance at what you have is gloves. to be without gloves would be embarrassing if we should meet ladies on the other side. and there are hundreds of these stories. stories come as you say. and once again this time, i saw the story of the book from the very start. i knew after only a few months of research and i wanted to focus on roosevelt's long and complex friendship with william howard taft that strengthen both men for decades but finally ruptured. i have been able to trace their friendship that began in they were in their '30s. they were intimate letters that

have never been fully mine. i find that tap is a former a pathetic figure, more than i realized. i hadn't realized that in between that when he graduated from yale, he was only 250 and when he became looking for justice and was happy again, 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. i hadn't realized how extraordinarily successful and popular he had been at each of these posts. he has nothing to overcome and he needs people. i realize that i have to overcome something and almost envy a man possessing his personality. roosevelt had handpicked him as a successor and was as nervous about his election as he was about his own. constantly giving him advice.

don't be seen playing golf, mr. taft, don't be photographed on a horse. it is not good for you and certainly not good for the horse a prominent new yorker argued that taft was the greatest all-around man men's reach the white house and many agreed in every subordinate post he had occupied. he had achieved great success. as it turned out, the man who had served brilliantly could not fill the first place. he had a program to have to help deal with the press. no understanding of how to use the presence platform and the bully pulpit. once i determined that the

biggest distinction between him and roosevelt was not as commonly thought, and he was progressive while taft was conservative and that taft had never understood how to position himself with the public as his predecessor had done, then i was drawn to another set of characters in my stories. the journalists who mobilize the public from outside and to pressure congress. the complex partnership with teddy roosevelt assured his success and the lack of relationship determined his failure. when i found that the most brilliant gathering for all-in-one magazine, i knew i had the story that i wanted to tell. they formed a great cast of characters. they were praised as the greatest reporter of their era. and the editorials in kansas

newspaper were red all around the country. the editor is a larger-than-life figure. the restless enthusiasm and energy infused the magazines amateur with a touch of genius, even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. fraudulent medicines, unsafe railroads, becoming the vanguard of the progressive movements. it was to give his writers enough time and resources that he would put them on salary for years to produce long heavily researched series that were copied by rival magazines producing what had been called the golden age of journalism. i knew from the start but the climax would be reached in 1912 when they engaged. complete with fistfights and revolvers uis have these

characters that you fall in love with. he loved both men. they were so saddened that they couldn't flee. tap said that you have to take a vacation to get ready for the election. devastating his death for both men. i knew from the start that when he loses the nomination that he decides to form a third party called the bull moose party. but i didn't realize the full drama of the convention. the delegates who we believed that they were witnessing a historic moment in the platform called on government to shift the blessings of our civilization so that everyone can enjoy it instead of just a few. one of the delegates claimed that the new deal went a little

further. what the republican party splitting it. seriously diminishing the progressive wing of the republican party forever. the double defeat forms a natural ending of the book and i somehow wanted to keep the story alive a little bit longer to end on a different note. i was delighted to discover an incident of an epilogue that would bring the story full circle. it eventually drew taft together with him. a year before teddy dykema to happen to me in the dining room of the blackstone hotel in chicago and he approached them with a smile and he said that they threw their arms around each other. all the guests were aware that this was the first time they had come together since the election began to cheer, sitting together they talked warmly and the press proclaimed in headlines and next day that they had buried the hatchet. eighteen months later when he

suffered a coronary embolism and died in his sleep, taft was at the funeral seated with the family and the last one to leave. when he was elected president, taft finally realize his lifelong dream and was made chief justice of the supreme court. but the memories of roosevelt remained strong. i want to say that he told him that we were very glad to come together after the painful interval. i would've mourned the fact all my life. i love him and i will always cherish his memory. in similar fashion, i was thrilled to find and interview that leo tolstoy had given this at the turn of the 20th century about lincoln's place in history. all his life and have empowered by the dream to accomplish something worthy so that his memory will live on. even lincoln when signing the emancipation proclamation could

never have imagined how far his memory would actually reach her at the reach of that became abundantly clear in interviews that tolstoy gave. he told of having gone through a very remote area recently where there were a group of wild barbarians who never left the area. it was so exciting, they said. he said i told them about julius caesar and others. but before i finish, the chief of the barbarians stood up and sent him away come you haven't not told us about the greatest ruler of the mall. we want to hear about batman spoke with a voice of thunder and laughed with the sunrise and came from america. tell us of abraham lincoln. he was stunned to know that lincoln had reached this remote corner and he said he told them as much as they could.

perhaps not as great as napoleon or frederick the great, but the greatness to suit of the integrity of his character and moral fire of fiber of his being. the dream that carried him through his dismal childhood. his string of political failures and his story would be told. for most of us today, we may not have our faces carved in marble and washington. but the stories of our lives will be told for the memories of our children are our friends and our politics. which is why it is so important to retain the art of story telling in our fast-moving world. as many of you know, i always come back in the end to my own love of storytelling to enter my own love of history to the days when my father taught me the art

of keeping score when i was only six years old circuit court for him the history. when you're six years old and your father comes home every night, and i recounted every inning of game that had just taken place, that he made me feel that i was telling him a fabulous story to make you think that there is something magic about history to keep your father's attention. i'm convinced that i learned the art for my father. i would blurt out that the dodgers won or lost, which took much of the drama way. so i finally learned how to tell if a story from beginning to middle to end. [laughter] you can carry a leader from beginning to end. keeping my father's attention, he made it even more special for me when i was only six years old. all of this was part of the

sports pages the next day. i couldn't even follow baseball for a while. so we have had season tickets now for over 30 years i imagine myself a young girl once more in the presence of my father when i see my sons in the place where my father once sat, i feel loyalty and love licking my sons to grandfather whose face never

had a chance to see. but his heart and soul they have come to know the countless stories about old. which is why 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 and allowing me to believe that the people we have loved and lost in our families and the public figures that we have respected in history really can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and retell the stories of their lives. thank you for letting me share with you these stories. [applause] [applause] >> thank you. that was just wonderful. so wonderful. quite a panel of others up here. our next author is one of opera's favorites. he is also one of our favorites.

please welcome mr. wally lamb. i saw the new star trek movie a few days ago. and it started me thinking about time travel and how if we zoom 40 years into the future, honey boo-boo would be menopausal. [laughter] justin bieber might need viagra and beyoncé and jc would get the senior citizen discount at wal-mart. one of the ironies is that life can only move forward beyond but

be understood backward. with that in mind, i would like you to hop with me on my time machine and i'm taken back to 1966. we set up a genetic experiment to study a single family of fruit flies. a fruit fly is an ideal subject for such study because of its manic lifecycle. it is true to be won on monday morning and played your grandkids by thursday afternoon as a fruit fly. my task is to feed the fly. at the end of each school day, climb the stairs to the biology lab and open the glass jars older populations.

a drop into each piece is on bananas through the woods clues began. sometimes after completing a task, i put my face to the diamond study for a few minutes with the feasting and fornicating that will ensure the continued survival of the species. the fateful friday afternoon of climbing the stairs, dropping in the banana, then forgetting to replace bullets. by monday the entire four-story building is invested and this is when the teacher gives me a briefing finger wagging speech on the subject of scientific responsibility. i found myself in a senior class called onerous physiology.

it was taught by my teacher's husband. my classmates and i had become so is sufficient that we are presented with dead cats. one plastic bag corpse for each physiologist. the specimens are expensive, the teacher told us that the cats are expensive and they cost the school a lot of money. opening his mouth as in methow, the cat is a study in sheer terror. it's mine 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 corpses being bulldozed into a pit. in the same campus and i will get my first glimpse protected from a screen. may 20, 2013 come i see the trio of images. stiffest high-performing, the death masks of killers victims and the visage of the twisted souls and amongst painting.

what is it for? life or death? twenty-first century. my teacher is a man that is a coffee drinker. he makes the assumption that we will act honorably whether he is in the room or not. so what is his practice to leave us for long stretches of time with our cats and our worksheets as he strolls onto the teachers room while we engage in higher level scholarships. that we are not honorable. we are kids that are irresponsible and i see in retrospect, we are intimidated by all the rigor mortis around us. all of the silent screams of death. in fear we grope for comic relief. it is either proposes the idea of staging a mock wedding. to my surprise, the concept catches on and my peers and i abandoned honor and scholarship in the feline circulatory and digestive systems and we throw

ourselves into the nuptials to come. on friday, the teacher leaves on schedule at the beginning of the hour with the coast clear. we dress the corpses in their makeshift tuxedos and gowns carrying the cats, one is the bride, one is the groom, and one girl brought brownies for the reception. i am the officiating man of god. father were wally. unwisely i'm performing the ceremony with my back to the door when all around me i classmates eyes drop and their cats don't back down against the lab tables. the teacher has made an unscheduled visit. he has crashed the wedding to pose this philosophical question. who started this foolishness. [laughter] with two scientific strikes against me and the blessings of the teachers, i abandon my career and life science and then

become an english teacher and then a fiction writer. when you think about it, when you reduce it to the lowest common denominator, what it comes down to is that we are governed by three basic instincts, the need to find foods that we won't starve. the need to satisfy our sex drive so we won't become extinct, and the need to understand and interpret the world around us. it is that their impulse of a hungering to figure out how we are different than the lowly fruit fly. unlike the simple life forms, we scratch our heads.

we try to make order out of chaos. trying to understand the world and our place in it. thinking leads to reading and writing. which is where you and i commend. sometimes it seems insurmountable. how could the holocaust have happened? whited hunger and homelessness persist in this land of plenty. how could a psychotic young men have entered sandy hook elementary school and opened fire on five and six years old kids and what did they imagine they could accomplish by detonating bombs on that beautiful sunny day in boston. it is the 70s and i am a

college sophomore during turbulent times. politics and changes are inviting baby boomers like me to fight for social justice and party. the sexual revolution has arrived. the vietnam war and the civil rights battle intensifies. it segues from this is the dawning of the age of aquarius to the time i got to woodstock, we were half a million strong to soldiers and nixon coming, we are finally on our own. preparing ourselves for the real world. saying, i am on strike, i told my father after the invasion of cambodia. the heck you are, he shouts back. you get to class. but my data and richard nixon are more or less interchangeable of season.

i hang up the phone on the old geezer and i stick my fist in the air. and i join the protests. his 1972. i graduated from college. but i have not launched myself into the chaotic world. i have taken a you turn, returning to the high school from which i have graduated in order to teach english. hello, to my teachers. molly, we are colleagues now. it is toward the end jimmy. oh, okay. my first class schedules are the ones that no one else wants. students that are my age, 21 years old. my plan is to win them over by releasing them from who has been here until i've gone there. i will open their mind by their education relevant. my honeymoon for about a week

ago but did i approach a surly senior and ask them to take his head off the desk and pay attention. thus works nights and he sleeps during the day. he opens his bloodshot eyes and says, why don't you go. i know doris and ishmael beah would be cool if i said what they said, but i don't want to offend the sensibilities of chelsea. [applause] let's just say that he said i engage myself in an activity more commonly that involves two people. when they make it. [laughter] [laughter] the class and i hold our collective breath in the school of education is not prepared me for this. so i have no clue about how to respond. then mercifully, that unfolds his legs and stands and ambles

voluntarily out the door to the principal's office, thereby saving my teaching career and 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 i began to write fiction. this is during the summer of 1981. the exact same month that the first of her three sons is born. he's a toddler and i find out that my story will be published. i pick up and toss it into the air. exuberantly so that his head hits the kitchen ceiling, but not to worry, our kitchen at the time has one of those drop ceilings. with the acoustic foam panel. so it disappears for a couple of seconds and then comes back into view. later when he was a high school senior, i will overhear complaining about the old

geezer. and i will look around to see if my father had come around. but no, he will mean me. joni mitchell, the singer songwriter once observed that the singers go round and round, the painted ponies go up and down. we are on the carousel of time, which indeed, we are. parenthetically and another one of her songs, she saying that we woke up and it was a chelsea morning, which it is. [laughter] but that is beside the point. my next book is a story set here in new york. now, the template for the fictional three rivers is my nonfictional hometown of

norwich, connecticut. you know, when you mention that you have come from the nutmeg state, you're likely to conjure and peoples minds leafy bedroom towns these people unwind at the country club and send their kids to school. i come from the other connecticut. east of the connecticut river of connecticut. we are more feisty than fashionable. more liverwurst than pepe. boston and providence have a greater on us than new york. so we use the word we did as an adverb, as in this example. we had a nor'easter last winter and it snowed wicked hard and it was wicked heavy to shovel. in writing, we are water, i travel too much childhood focusing on two events i remember vividly. one was the death of a black man

that was ruled accidental that might've been murder. and the second was a terrible flood that cut a path through the city and to buy people's lives. i was eight years old when the man's frozen body was discovered at the bottom of his driveway which was stained by trail of blood that led back to his house. he had been a laborer who later in life began inexplicably and incessantly to make art. he knew little about perspective or techniques. but his his paintings were alive with color and story. he could not sell his work in his lifetime. but today it is highly prized by collectors of american folk art. two things made him noticeable in the 1940s and 1950s and norwich connecticut. 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 new convertible. second he was the first african-american resident had married me white woman in wilhelmina. and he would drive through norwich with his car and white wife coming as construed by some as rubbing his good fortune in the town's face. perhaps he should've been one of merely because a few years earlier a relative who lived on his property had been found drowned. the corner had ruled that death accidental as well i was 12 in march of 1963 when an earthen dam holding back a lake gave way on a rainy night, unleashing billions of gallons of water and sending slabs of ice the size of refrigerators shooting downhill

in the search, carrying trees and cars and pets and human beings. to this day i can hear the thunderous roar and the screams of third shift factory workers who were buried alive in the rubble. a young mother lost her life that night. she and her husband in the mid- 20s made the fateful decision to try to outrun the water that they had been warned was headed their way so they loaded their three little boys, ages four and ages two and 10 months into their car and they took off. sadly they could not outrun the flood water. it carried the car along with it and pitched it up a 10-foot wall. the family went underwater but managed to get out of the car and onto the low roof of the

storage shed of a ford dealership. the father climbed into a nearby tree or the mother handed the three boys up to him. just before margaret got up into the tree herself, the water carried her away and drowned her. her husband has passed on now. those three little boys had survived and thrived and are today in their early 50s. in the writing of my novel i became their friend. two summers ago the four of us walked the way towards the tree they were rescued. the tree of life, it is what you think nicknamed the tree. indeed it was. when i began writing we are water, i began writing about the events.

i set them apart from each other like electrodes, i guess. the space between them, kind of an electrical energy began to bounce and crackle and generate itself. an electrical arc, if you will, that over the next four years became the arc of my story. this fact became fiction, he is like a individual that became accused of terrible things. and margaret has a baby daughter who parishes in the flood and his 5-year-old daughter grows up and becomes an unschooled outsider artist and one of the novel's characters. before i close, let me do a little bit of time traveling.

this time into the not-too-distant future, at the end of october of this year, books are available over the internet and i want you to know how grateful i am to each and every one of you, the publishers and booksellers and librarians and bloggers will connect my book and the book of stories and ishmael beah and chelsea handler. i want you to think of it this way. if the writer and the reader are two poles apart from each other. wizened gentleman, you are electricity that can access. i thank you. [applause] [applause]

>> thank you, molly. you are obviously obsessed with me. [laughter] i think it is pretty inappropriate to talk about this kind of things this early in the morning. [laughter] this has been wonderful to hear. i just want to reiterate how grateful all of us are, as different as each one of us is, how grateful we are to have people like you who are able to reach and touch so many people no matter how we do it. we are going to continue to do whatever we need to do. i think a bunch of us will go out and take photos. i hope you all enjoyed your breakfast and we will hope hope you enjoy the rest of the day as well.

thank you all so much. [inaudible conversations] >> we would like to hear from you. send us your feedback at twitter.com/booktv. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv would like to know the max hello, i'm the editor of national review and i have a lot of books i would like to read this summer. i'm looking towards 2016 presidential race. one of the people i am looking at is chris christie. one of the books i picked up is the inside story of his rise to power. it's a fun read so far and it takes you into his political career in new jersey. before he became the u.s. attorney. he was involved in a lot of county politics and it takes us behind the story with president

obama in new jersey, it really asked who is chris christie. it is a fun read. i would recommend it. chris is a likely contender and we have to know where he came from and what his politics mean ahead of the election. the second book is by kevin williamson called the end is near. it is going to be awesome. how going broke will leave america richer and happier and more secure. one reason i think this book is fun is because the fiscal cliff in 2013 was a big story that was covered and later this year you're going to have a debt limit that consumes congress. kevin williamson looks at the debt and the political perspective and talks about the consequences of the debt and how it's taking up a lot of time. how it could ruin the country, and make it go broke. i think the end is near is great. third on my list is a journalist

here in washington, there is always gossip about what is happening. who is leaking to to do, mark really has a great book coming out that is all about that. it is about the inside scene in washington. in bethesda, in georgetown, that book gives us a story of the political media establishment. in the parallel lives of baseball's golden age is another one of my favorite books by one my favorite sportswriters. i was just watching the cleveland indians and chicago cubs play baseball. this book is great because it looks at two men, mickey mantle and willie mays who became stars of the same time and formed a

lifelong friendship. something that i did not know. that's a great book. a great book for baseball fans. i'm looking forward to reading all of my books on my list. thank you. >> send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. ... well, now joining us on our booktv set is radio talk show host, columnist and lawyer larry elder. his most recent book, "dear father, dear son: two lives, eight hours." mr. elder, who is randolph elder? >> guest: randolph elder was my father. you heard the term tiger mom? my