our first year on the air. total sales for all polk in 1998 reached $28.7 billion. online book sales increased 300% to an estimated $650 million. ..

>> this book is now in its ninth edition. for more information on this and other facts from 1998, booktv's first year on the air, visit booktv.org. >> now on booktv, the foster care is examined inside the united states. the author is a foster mother herself and she reports how children are moved throughout the system, and profiles numerous kids including the group aging out of foster care and what that means for a future. this is a little under one hour. [applause] >> it is such an honor and so exciting to be with my old friend, chris, talking about her beautiful book. i thought i would maybe start with what god is on to the book, which means enchant pleased

let's start with the most difficult relationship of your life, marriage. [laughter]. so what got you thinking about this.. >> first of all, thank you for having us. and thank you for coming today. >> make it funny. >> okay, so funny and difficult stuff. well, i grew up in a crappy family. so that happen. and i wasn't removed. although that i did last we when i was 14.

and i live with the guilt and pain for a long time. and there was no secondary intervention. then i moved in with my father and child welfare did come into our family, but i would never be removed and i was always terrified that they would come back. so i have this fear where he needed to be removed at some point, but i was afraid of being removed. i really did not want to be removed. i just wanted to get through in the situation where i was. like a lot of kids, i did fear foster care and i didn't have to think about it as a kid. then at 28 years old i became a foster parent by accident. that was a complete accident. and here comes more people that i know. adam knows the story because we

were both living in los angeles at the time. there was a girl that was a high school teacher and she got into some trouble and she was sent to a probation school and she was transgendered and none of the kids knew that she was assigned a boy at birth. so one of the guards found out all the other kids that she was born this way and threatened to kill her. and they would have. so what happened and she called a group home and said you better come pick me up, they are going to kill me. and they said the van is in use. and oh, you have a fan. i mean, foster care is always about a van. so she ran from her school, this

is a violation of her probation. and they call the called the cops. when they called the cops, they put out a warrant for her arrest. they closed down her back, she didn't have anywhere to go. so she called me and i said, okay, i will come get you, we will figure this out. and when we finally got with a probation worker and caseworker, they said we don't have anywhere to put her, do you want her? so that is how this came about. through that i started really thinking about how is the system that is designed to protect children and is supposed to take care of them, how is it doing so much harm? so i really wanted to look into this more deeply. >> it is such a beautiful and masterful book. it took you five years, and it is so rich with the powerful

deep stories and lots of statistics. i just want to go through some of your favorite statistics. >> okay, i asked them not to do this. i said i can tell stories, but don't make me go over the statistics. [laughter] >> the statistics are all through the book and they are correct. i double checked and double checked. >> i am interested in the process. five years in and out are intimately in the slides. could you talk about the green family, that seems to be a family spent the most timely. can you describe a little bit of what their situation is and what you saw unfold? >> okay, they were a family that i knew a lot of foster families, and i had talked to a number of foster families. i was interested in finding

foster families that love their kids and wanted to do right by their kids. because we all know that there are a number of mediocre families. we know that they are pretty families and their families and the terrible ones are the ones to make the news. and they say oh, my goodness, we have to change a system, nothing really happens. so wanted to find a family that was really great we can see that the system will actually wrote about this family, and the greens. they are a family in brooklyn. and they have 11 kids, some of them biological. and i was interested in them because they came in foster care and forget the foster to foster care. they came into this program a lot of ways it an and it just might. the father of the family, his sister couldn't care for the kids. it was a family foster

situation. the family decided that we'd have room, room, let's take him more. so they decided because they had a good experience to take in more. by the time i met them, they have some of foster kids. the way they managed it was to become very strict. the religious family had good and deep valleys. and kids have had a lot of trauma. in this way, it is not unusual. a lot of the kids have gone through many homes. one of the girls i talked to had been through 22 homes and a whole dream was to become adopted. a couple of them really wanted to be adopted. some of them had his relationships with their biological families and some of them do that. and what i did was i followed what happened with this family. >> it's insecure their ally.

>> i would hang out down after school, i would also shore up for important events like adoptions and chordates and whatever. i would do show up. but then when something would happen, like when a child would go back to the biological mother, that sort of use that is a moment to look at the history in foster care. think about it often as foster care is a feat accomplished disaster. and it's not. at certain points in history, it is really favoring the biological parents. you know, in removing the kids.

>> there's a lot about who is the latest horrible child. >> guesstimates driven by news, various trends, news and theories and i would use these moments is sort of pan bottom up and historically. historically. but then i was really interested in the story announcement of the story. >> the fact that they are not saints or perfect, there are times when you kind of want to yell at him. but they also are not heroes, but they are doing things very heroic, which so many of us don't do. which is taken particularly with these older kids. it's cute little kids that were not six months old or something. these other kids. i would say that hero of the book is marianne yonkers. >> yes, that's right.

>> how did you guess? [laughter] >> let's talk a little bit about mary. i mean, it is sort of this amazing thing. >> yes. >> it's amazing thing to do. because i think it's just when we need it most. because we have gone through this journey and sorted through the green, we don't get lost in the sensationalist meyer of the worst cases. being a solid b+ family doing the best that they can. you get how agonizing it says. just when it's almost too much to bear, the pain of this family, i just can't imagine. that is what we need. and it really feels like best. i'm sure that marion is not a hero, but she is the hero of

this book. and please tell us a bit about her story. >> well, she's a hero to me. and you keep hearing again and again from the kids and i know this from talking to so many people and life. what kids need and what often the agencies don't support. i'm not trying to demonize these people because there are amazing agencies. there are systemic approaches. it is the sense that people are really interchangeable and what we need to do is find the kid a bed, we talk about finding them

a bed. and we are always saying, oh, the kid is in the wrong classification, we have to stick the kid in another van and once the kid reaches a particular age, the kid is done in a sign the papers and the kid is out. and it's like mary really defies that logic. what she thinks about this is attachment. attesting to the kids. so what she does and she has this big house that the kids call the mansion and it is kind of a mansion. it's very big. it's not really that fancy. >> be described as an acoustic guitar. >> yes, it's kind of like an acoustic guitar type of mansion. soft and comfy like that. but she lets the kids stay as

long as they need. and she let them stay past the 21st birthday and there's no cutoff date. and that's really important because i think that we all need family beyond her 21st birthday and when you think about your first job loss and birthday. you think of jobs anything the people. their other people that do this as well. she shows us anyway. >> they didn't even occur to me that you could so think about adoption. even if the legal system doesn't provide it, you say that i'm taking on the responsibility of a relationship with you permanently. i mean, you have these kids that

enter the world of the book, which is later. they are still sweet and goofy kids. and some of the kids, by the end of the book they are in their 20s. and they would be classified as serious threats. there is one that it is a talk too too much about it, but clearly has robbed people. and this is a theme throughout the book. how foster care undergirds the population in so much of societal ills that they -- they enter the system is young children and the system somehow ejects them out if they are not lucky enough to meet a mary along the way. they are no longer institutionalized through this

caring system, they're in the penal system. i don't like it too far into the specifics, but talk a bit about that. you make a point of homelessness in foster care is really too much of our society that sees it as just about childhood. but starting to the rest of. >> i think there is a link or the criminal justice them. i don't but i don't have all the answers as to why that i think that it's deeply rooted, from what i see, it's deeply rooted in this and a lot of people that do know a lot about it, think that a lot of it has to do with, where and there's all this stuff

that the experts we talked about in terms of resources that the kids will get out of the system and 18 or 21. they don't have the resources or connections. so they have to turn to various things and that is how they end up in the criminal justice system. the one i have seen is that when a kid is removed at five or six or eight or 10 and is put into a stranger's house so traumatizing. we need to think about when we are removing a child and what that means. just imagine being taken out of your family home. even if there is neglect. imagine being yanked out even if it's not the greatest home. how terrifying it is to be in a stranger's house. so then what do you do? you start wetting the bed. that's like pretty much number one. so many kids don't talk to god

taken out of their first home because they wet the bed. they get sent back to the agency. so then what happens? they calcify and harden and they get freaked out. they feel unloved again. they feel like they did something wrong. they didn't even do something wrong the first time, but then they start to feel like they did something wrong a second time because they wet the bed. a more restrictive home and a more restrictive home. then they are put into institutions. by the time they're 18 or 20 years old, you feel pretty unloved and pretty unwanted. and they don't really have somebody reflecting that would've done that here is who your best self is. here is who you are is a welcome member of society. here is who you can be. it's partly about lack of resources, but also partly about being wanted and valued as well.

i think that's the real reason that we see a lot of this in the system. it's a little soft, but i think it's there. >> a shadow in the book is the thing that is missing, which is just a good enough childhood. evil who have sustained attachment. >> you know, i think that it's true that love is really what is missing and what is needed. fundamentally, that's what's missing. >> i studied economic issues for a living. >> would love. >> yes, with a lotta love. [laughter] from an economic standpoint, it does make sense that this would be a neglected area because it

clearly imposes a lot of costs on us as a society, but it does it in such a diffuse way that it's hard to allocate that cost properly. it's something that you want government to be good at, and it's hard to think of any private factors other than people like mary who take it upon themselves. it's hard to think systematically how some people can take that on. >> i think of it as we are spending $20 billion. and i think why is there not more outrage that it's not being managed in a more vibrant and interesting way. >> you know, i think from a political and economic standpoint, you actually genuinely want to take on an

issue will make the world a better place and also get you elected. a terrible want to take on because let's say you came up with a solution that would fix it. the benefits would be very diffuse. hard to measure. it would take place over decades. and so if i want to win an election next year, the fact that there will be fewer arrests in 2040 or less homelessness in 2035 is a very hard thing to run on. and i do think that what you are doing by articulating the many areas. it could you describe how this

can create a negative outcome. but at least looking at the costs throughout society. at least we are aware of it. >> i also think that child welfare is not something with discrete edges. i think that it is actually in all areas of society. so when we are thinking about writing about were talking about all kinds of public policy, one of the problems that we had is that we have only been talking about child welfare is this issue over there. it's something that is affecting only these people in this one area and it's impacting all of us are talking about issues of education and race and poverty

and issues of all kinds of issues that affect all of us. but i don't think is just a discrete thing. but i do think that one of the ways really change the conversation about child welfare to talk about the ways that it is part of our culture overall. if that makes sense. not to sound like a politician. >> all right, i'm voting for you. [laughter] >> so we are going to questions very shortly. but i sort want to know what happened to you during this journey. >> i made a lot of charts. [laughter] >> i made a lot of charts. and at one point my editor, i

had written 500 pages in my poor editor was like, oh, my goodness. this is a master of each write all of the characters on one side and all of the issues on another and start laying them out. and you have these boards that i had all of the office. so that's what happened to me. i got very disorganized and very organized. i had always been interested in teenagers, but i really thought a lot about the teenagers most of all. what i saw was a lot of things. but i thought about the teenagers in the way that the numbers changed. how the numbers shifted and we brought the number of foster kids down overall. it's something to cheer about, most definitely.

but it has become a system really about the older kids. and i do not know that systemically we have addressed that on how to manage it. and then there is a kind of study about the kids and what happens to them. and there's barely any about the foster parents. we have a few and mostly it is anecdotal and we have very little data about who's taking care of our kids and there are some gaps. >> if it's okay, i wouldn't mind hearing from mary a little bit. [applause] >> thank you, mary. [applause] >> the one to tell you anything specific we met. >> i found reading the book --

that made me really want to be a foster parent and also think, wow, that seems really tough. can you talk about and explain how these foster kids have been handled and what it's meant for you? >> i don't use the wood foster, i just use kids. and because i did begin as a foster parent, and what i learned is actually the kids taught me things. they taught me that they needed just one person to care about me, regardless of what they do. and they have different behaviors and stuff like that. but they needed somebody who said that they were of value and

could talk about that. it's so difficult that i don't minimize that. but i do think that it is also the most rewarding things you can do in your life. these things are not immediate. they are not even may be long-term. but eventually you can survive it now, because my kids are full-grown. there is nothing but the gratitude pouring in and there were many years when that was not the case. but i wanted to make a difference. i wanted to help some kids. i was originally interested in helping lesbian teenagers, but that didn't happen for a long

time. eventually that did as well. have a very mixed bag of kids. i claim 12 kids. that number has now gone up. some good claim he saw the number increases regardless of what attracted you to stop it. it's the most powerful thing you can do. sinnott 21, 22, etc. and i find them again when they leave the system with nobody. the constant stream of kids that are without resources and its topic. it's so tragic that this is happening to our kids. >> surviving it is really not that difficult. you're not caught up in needing

instant gratification. if you are not doing it for the wrong reasons, it's a very selfless thing. and you can get through to not take it personally. but if you get caught up, it will destroy her. but if you can maintain a distance, the kids will be okay and you will be okay as well. again, there's nothing that you could do. >> thank you so much, mary. thank you. >> are there questions? >> hello, my name is simone. i'm the director of development. we do the foster care residential programs for parents and teens. i have a quick comment and question. the common is that it is true that if you are a politician,

you cannot easily tie advocating for restructuring the foster care system. however, in new york state i personally think there is a way to tie it to decreasing homelessness rates. so if anyone is working on, please feel free to come over and say hello. and the stories in your book are so tender and nuanced and beautifully rich. what you want the books to accomplish? what would your ultimate dream for this book impact be? >> well, there are a couple of dreams. and i think you. that is a great question. i wanted to turn up the volume on a couple of conversations that were already going on.

so the people that might not have been hearing those conversations could hear them, to sort of brought in the landscape of who is talking about foster care. so that we could open it up a little with her and bring more air into it. that was my goal. and i would love to talk about this. i think that child welfare is such an important and vital part of our culture. i wanted to have more dialogue around it. i really wanted more people to be reading about it and understanding it and thinking about it. because it is so important and it's all of us. so i just wanted more people to think about it and talk about it and bring in more voices and have it be taught in every school. [laughter]

>> she wants it to you to buy a copy as well. [laughter] sumac hello, you talked a lot about the problems and i know that foster care is a pretty sensitive subject. but i'm wondering if any particular states are better at handling it, if their other countries that have models to look after, those who do differently than the united states? >> i think that there are places that have interesting models. there's stuff that's going on that's quite interesting right here. i have a lot of hope in the waiver system. and i think that it's something that could really change the. >> can you explain that? >> i think it will change the way that child foster care systems are. the way the foster care is funded. childcare is funded on a per diem basis, which means that

every day, if i take jennifer here and i put her into foster care, i have to remove her from her family and put her into foster care in order to get any money money from my agency. so then once i see what kind of bed sheets with you. let's say she has some special needs and she gets to go to a psychiatric home, so she gets a little bit more money. and then as an agency, after request the money from acs from the city. the city then has to take my request in the state and has to request it from the federal government. this is a lot. so most of the top, in fact, a lot of the time it is time-consuming expense and the

reason that we do it this way, the one thing that we can track where each child is in because these are public monies, we want to make sure that the money is not being spent. a lot of people say we are spending more time on paper. what florida has done is they have said, forget it, we will take a flat sum. and we don't have to remove jennifer to get the money. we can just get a flat fee. so they do this to about the tune of $140 million per year for five years. what that means is it's much more complicated. they can take this $140 million and put it into finance services, so that they could do domestic violence treatment, if you put could put money into the neighborhoods, they could do this and not have to remove the kid up front. some people say there is an incentive to get the money.

so florida's numbers went down. it looks kind of good and obama opened this up in 2001 and said, okay, now we have 30 states and cities that have applied us this and we are going to see what happened. it could change the way the foster care looks because we are not having a per diem system and i do think that that is hopeful. i think we are getting way from group homes in general. some states not so much, but we are overall kind of getting to this, where it's not great, and i think that there is movement and i think that here we are getting at. for organizations that are amazing and going and i don't know if it's the primary role, but they are doing oversight with agencies to say how can we redesign what we are doing to be

more child centered. i do think that there is stuff happening here. and you know, i think that we have gotten this in this way. >> okay, so there's an incentive to have fewer services? >> yes, it's like, jennifer looks pretty good, and she's an average kid, so let's make all the services that jennifer. then we are not thinking about cat, and pat is the kid that we have to take care of. but things are not going to get mad because i really think about jennifer. so that is the risk with flat fee. the overall thing is that you have to think about every single family and individual and every kid as an individual. if we do that, we will be a million miles ahead of where we are now.

rather than trying to make one model fit everyone. [applause] >> is her question that there? >> thank you. >> please wait for the microphone. >> congratulations on the book. since the book has been released, what kind of hits have you got on your e-mail? >> what kind of remarks are you getting? >> that is so interesting that you asked. okay, doreen is in the book. she's another star in the book. [laughter] and the rain is a biological parent who lost her child when her child was 23-month-old, is that right?

okay and she is a very powerful woman. how many years did we meet? >> six or five -- seven years ago. >> we were teaching? >> yes, when i was teaching. she was a student of mine. and so what kind of comments? a lot of people have been writing, saying that i lost my kid. and i just heard you on the radio. i'm really interested to know about this topic. i have been happy with is it's been foster parents, adoptive parents, all kinds of people have been writing in to ask questions. and i'm happy in that way. because i didn't have any

writings of the demonize me. because i really don't feel like there are bad guys in child welfare. i don't think that there is. i've met some parents and i were kind of bad guys, they're no there are no bad guy roles. so i haven't had any of this. most people have been pretty interested. >> a question? >> you a lot about foster care before you started. what would you say is the thing that surprised you the most in terms of what you learned? >> well, a couple of things. i was surprised at how little was known about foster care. and this includes what range there is in the training. in some states we don't have to train him at all. but some states we have to give them a lot.

there is no exact consistency and not. this happened with my own daughter, how consistently -- and i thought she was sort of an anomaly. how consistently the kids need to stay connected with their biological family and how we saw that again and again. even when they know it is destructive to them and i think that the system doesn't make a lot of allowances for that or for how they manage that. that is something that needs to be thought about more. and i was not surprised at how directors and commissioners speak and acronyms that are completely incomprehensible. and i was -- there are so many

really smart people in here in this field who are dedicated and smart and creative people, doing really great work and mostly what they're bucking up against is bureaucratic gridlock. that's really what i have found. >> deals the commissioner has read the book and if so, has he commented? >> yes. >> the comedy made as there is no wrong person in the system. i think the system is scary in and of itself. but i think that most people on the same page. when i think about the commissioner, with the changes that he's trying to make with the close to home and what he is doing and prevention would be evidence-based programs, it feels to me like what he's

trying to do to keep children in their homes. some wondering if he has read your book. >> he knows that i interviewed him. and he was very careful. there were two media people in the room while he talked. they had a lot of hand signals. so he was being very careful when you talk to me. and i couldn't quite get him to be very extemporaneous. so yes, i sent him the book because he had read it. and he was in. in the book i talk about close to home. and i questioned what he had

done with it so far. because i have been very happy. it has been a movement to bring the kids outside of the city, to bring them into the city and be closer to home. and so far what they have been doing is bringing the juvenile delinquency into the city. but there are foster kids are out there that have not committed crimes that are not being brought back. so i question why and how the focus has been on us. and i would be curious to see what some of you think. i have some questions about the big merge. in most people think that this is a great idea. because it is -- because they

say so many kids need to get both services. well, i think that it is a presumption of a foregone conclusion. i mean, this is me being the idealist. but what if we combine foster care. and what we just want a different kind of thinking about this. and why is it always this kind of model. so i think the commissioner is very -- commissioner richter, i don't think he's a bad guy. you know? i don't personally think he is a bad guy. but it's hard to tell exactly. i think he is a politician. >> hello, terry.

>> i'm just a bystander. i thank you very much for the work that you're both doing. i have a question and you have been giving a sense one of the reasons why we can't get more entities from the public because there are no votes in addition to the fact that the kids aren't voting in the and the parents are voting in the social workers aren't and there's no one to vote for because no one is touting this as an issue. where are we in terms of the general public that it's going to say, i've had it, not undertake any more. you. do you have any sense of that? is that a clear question two. >> the general public, for instance. >> some of you might have a better sense of that. does anyone feel that people are going to rise up? >> have an opinion about that. and i might have heard it on her

show. i'm not sure who show. [laughter] >> on one of the npr shows and about how politicians work. it depends on what committee there on how easily re-electable they are with the idea. and education committees for the federal government. those people get the least amount of donations because they are not sitting on the energy committee giving out all the petroleum dollars. they are not the real movers and shakers. because who is funding the education system? >> definitely not exxon. or dupont or any of the pharmaceutical industries. i can't remember what program, but i think that this speaks to what you are saying, on how we look at the system and then how

do we as individuals look at the system. then who will be entrusted inside the federal government actually listen to us, because we do not have this kind of funds. so there is the congressional caucus on foster care now it is mostly representative and there are a hundred and some of them. it is bipartisan. >> what that? bipartisan. we are not spreading rumors. [laughter] >> and they have gotten some

attention. but on florida, they have done seattle, they have done away. and so they have been going around, and that has -- i don't think it has big bucks, but i think it has a lot of people. that is the first time that this has ever happened. i think that there is some political movement here. >> i would think that the way anything will change this. like if someone decided for some personal reason. no one wants to have this. they need to define the senators and congresspeople who have just happen to have visited haiti or had a staff member from haiti. but when they found those people and they got them together, they could sometimes get them to use

a tiny shred of their power. >> that is what the book really tommy. it's not a system out there. it works best when you know somebody. when you become a parent. it's because you know that kid and you care about that kid. that is when the magic happens. and that is where we will actually see some change. it's not about really changing the system in a big way. like we can rebuild the building. it's about knowing someone individually and working with them in that way. >> is probably why we have as many places you might guess from i think that is analogous.

and that's how it works. [applause] >> i would like to ask one question and i think we are running out of time. but i have found myself, i found myself feeling like maybe i would like to be a foster parent. and what is involved? maybe pat can talk about his remarkable program, which is a little different. can you talk and we can get cut to talk a little bit about what does it take for someone to become a foster parent? >> you have to take it different in some ways. so it's practically not like this, and that's not the hard part. what is amazing about this program is that they start with the kids. they start with the kid knows

and the idea is that homelessness prevention rather than thinking about it at that. that's why i wrote about this, because it's not an agency that it's like, oh, no, here's a kid, here's a crisis. but what they say is, here is a kid, who does the kid now. the kid knows somebody. and all the families that i know, like my daughter was in trouble. and i said, okay, we can have a better open. and that is why work long-term. because i care about her and committed to her and the it lasted. so they find kids and then they say, who do you know. for now, they work with the parents and give them that support. >> that was really nice. but the other thing is we are interested in anyone want to take this as a learning experience.

we've made wonderful connections with young people we previously did not know. so it starts with a class. i would say sign up immediately to take a 10 week learning experience. >> why not? >> i tell my wife is when the kid comes home. >> bring your wife with you. and there is no commitment to take up a learning experience. we have had lots of people from the general public really connect with the kids because they became equated with them from the learning experience. so that is what we encourage for everyone. just to learn about it. even if it's just 20% of you, a good percentage will have wound up doing it. and that is what we need. and then -- is that typical? you would start with some kind of training program and get certified?

>> yes, usually in new york the last 10 weeks. and then someone comes into your house. it's the same process. they come to your house and they make sure that you have a better and the right number of things. they make sure that you have a background check and that your house is fine and it's pretty simple. and then they put you on a list. you tell them what kind of person you are, in a kind of worked out that way. but if you want to do it, it is not bad at all. >> what happens is when the kids come. then there is a story. because the setup is not the problem. >> we have come to the end of

our time. thank you so much for joining us this evening. [applause] >> thank you all for being here. if you haven't already, make sure that you talk to the author and a copy of the book. [applause] >> you're watching c-span2 public affairs featuring live coverage of the u.s. senate. on weeknights watch key public policy event and every weekend on the latest nonfiction authors and books on booktv. you can see past programs and get our schedules at our website. can join in the conversation on social media sites. >> here are some of the recipients of the last 15 years for the national book awards series. the first hearing was 1998.

that year, the national book award was given for this book on slavery. >> my father used to tell me about plantation owners. did i ever tell you about elias? he was a mean fella. he fun indian wars and own about 100 people. isaac the confederate, he was my father's grandfather. and he enlisted to fight in the civil war and ended up in central north carolina in the last stand against sherman. but my dad never said much about the slaves throughout these stories that are family owned. i learned later that her family had controlled 25 rice

plantations along the river ,-com,-com ma north of the city of charleston and we played close to 4000 african-americans over a period of 170 years. later calculated that the descendents of those families numbered between 75,700,000 living americans today. my dad had a joke that there are five things we don't talk about in the family. religion and sex, that's not, money, and the negroes. and it was some years before i gathered the courage to break the taboo on the subject of slavery in my '30s. when i did, jonathan was there. he shepherded this book to its completion.

spirit did watch all of the national book award ceremonies from the past 15 years online at booktv.org. in 1998, the pulitzer prize recipients were edward larson, author of some of the gods for history, jared diamond, author of guns for general nonfiction and for biography or autobiography, katharine graham for her memoir of personal history. >> one day you're talking about your lawyer, nancy the government. is anyone to confuse? >> they do not because once people are in the government, the relationship changes. you can be friends with people in the government. and sometimes it does things to

attack people and sometimes you can leave a with the editor, but mostly you have to just stand by. spirit watch this program on booktv's first tv year on the air, go to booktv.org. in 1998, mr. hume along with david trimble received the nobel peace prize for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in northern ireland. the founding member of the social democratic and labor party in northern ireland, and he talked about his book on booktv in 1999. >> the quarrel on the island has been going on for some 300 years. the last 30 years, it has been particularly difficult.

and a lot of that has been happening the last 30 years. there is a billion and a half people and many of them have lost their lives. that tells you how serious we are. >> over the next few weeks, booktv in its 15th year here on c-span2 is looking back at authors and books and publishing news that has been discussed over the years. check out booktv.org. >> science doesn't tell us what to do. it tells us what we think is going to happen and we must make choices about that. and one of the implications of this line of argument and said the societies can change and adapt in many ways, and of course we don't know that that is necessarily the case with the

climate problem. it could be something that we can adapt to. but if you take that idea that society can adapt, it leaves us with the question of even if we can, is this kind of world do we want to live in with the extreme heat, the droughts, the sea level rising. so many things that we care about our endangered by the changes are happening. and we do have a choice about this. ..