booktv continues with nine a month. this is about an hour. >> thanks. i have been a fan of these offense that julianne has run and i wrote him asking him if he would allow me to present -- i am the economics and a review editor of errands and not only are we being televised by booktv one of my favorite weekend stations, we are also being covered by a reporter from barons rob milburn who is sitting in the back so we are covering in two different ways.

everything is on the record. whatever you say can be used against you. .. now, also, alternatively, i think that in march, demonstrated, learning how to read, declared nina's book is an ex-excellent moving tribute to the vision and commitment of

jeffrey sachs and how much can be achieved by reasoned determines, -- determination and will hopefully be encouraged to read her book. they may have a rude shock when they do. one has written it's a fascinating book about a fascinating man and a set of ideas that are intriguing and there's something important in there but it's not quite clear what it is about. however, here we hit bay -- pay dirt. hubris run amok. that's pretty accurate. but even more accurate is the following from reviewer, williams easterly, professor of ny and a specialist in development. he has written the following: in one of the most readable and evocative accounts of foreign aid every written, virtually nothing about foreign aid is easy.

that's a word that jeffrey sachs uses not infrequently throughout the book. jeffrey sachs offered a message to westerners, they could be they saviours to end poverty in africa after reading munk's book, no one will think ending poverty is that easy. that's in a forthcoming review in barons, having read the book myself, i think that's pretty accurate. nina is also the author of a previous book called "fools rush in." not a bad title for a current book, except fools would be singular. the unmaking of aol time warner. she has confided that while in a certain way this book was a very different experience, in another way it was rather similar because steve chase, jerry live

yip and their like reminded her a bit of jeffrey sachs. but i want to first of all begin by just quoting from nina's statement about sachs, and indeed, anybody who reads the book is going to recognize that if anything she bends over backwards to respect and be kind and to do jeffrey sachs all the justice in the world. she writes on page three: in his speeches sachs presents his audience with an ethical choice that is no choice. leave people to die or do something about it. who can resist the call to action two billion people on the planet are scraping by on less than a dollar or two a day. nina munk, please, tell us. [applause] >> especially for those who are watching book which -- tv, jeffy sachs, who is he and why did you

do a book about him. >> probably best known for, mook lay people, for his 2006-2005 best-selling book called "the end of poverty." and it is a book that, when i read it, and i imagine many of you have read it or read parts of it -- remarkably compelling book, a book that offers a tremendous promise and is a very, very hopeful book, and when i read the book i was immediately interested in this man, and man who assured his readers that we could in fact end poverty, we can in fact end the suffering of the billion or more people on the planet who continue to lead lives of extreme deprivation, and i decided i wanted to follow him while he attempted to put into practice his theories of ending poverty. i met him first in 2006, not

that long after his book came out, and i wrote a profile of him vanity fair magazine, and that profile convinced me this is a story that required even more research and was something that i wanted to dedicate more time to. and it thus became a book, and what started out as a six-month magazine project became a six-seven year book project. >> well, plunging with us for a moment, i'm going to quote from east early's review because you actually were at ground level. you create some have vivid characters, and munk chose two scrimmage for more are more intensive coverage. one in the northern kenya and uganda, with novelistic skills,

she tells the villages' story from the point of view of the local man in charge of the sachs project. they both come alive on the page. talk about the two men and what happened there and what you saw. >> guest: jeffrey sachs decided, who -- began an organization called the millennium scrimmage project, and received funding of around $120 million, about halve half of which came from george, and he put into practice these ideas how to end poverty, these theories he outlinedded clearly in his book, and started out by rolling out his project in a half dozen villages across africa, and i was lucky enough to be there from the beginning when these villages were starting up, and i then wound up focusing on two in particular,

the two that gene just mentioned, and going back there again and again and again and again and again over a period of six years, really watching from the ground as gene says, as things began to unfold and then unravel, unfortunately, in certain casesment and the village in particular that gene mentioned, there, too, is -- right on the border of somalia and kenya. a truly desperate place, arid. populated. sparsely by camel herders. it really, i would say, noose reason for being. there is no economy to speak of with the exception of gun-running and cattle raiding. there is an extraordinary amount of violence, as you can imagine, as a result of the civil war in somalia. guns just pour across the border, there is no water. it's almost impossible to grow anything. when the rainy season does finally come, and it comes with

greater infrequency, it tends to just rain and everything is washed away, and then of course one can sometime goes for years where there is no rain at all and everyone's camel will die, and there is no opportunity and no hope. and it was in this village that jeffrey sachs proposed to demonstrate that poverty could be ended, and if in fact poverty can be ended in a place as desperate as dertu, well, arguably, poverty could be ended just about anywhere, and if you could prove that the experiment, so-called, worked in a place of such extreme misery as, then, again you should be able to make it work almost anywhere. >> host: you mentioned dertu, and talk about rehira, uganda. >> guest: what was interesting about jeffrey sachs' ideas, he recognized he had to show his experiments or his ideas for

ending poverty could work in various places, and so he chose purposefully villages that were in a variety of different kinds of agricultural zones, different kind of environments, and so by sharp contrast to this arid camel-herding community on the border of somalia and kenya, the other village i spent a great tell of time in was in the southwestern corner of uganda, and it is seemingly very fer fertile. the main crop is bananas and the soil has been leeched of any nutrients but it's a very different community. they're christians as opposed to muslims. in the somali community, they're settled farmers, so i spent my time focusing on two minutes that were -- had absolutely nothing in common competence for the interventions interventionsy sachs in the millennium villages

project. >> host: as another indication of nina munk's generosity, she writes at the end she i indebted to him for giving me the access to write this book and shadow him in his work. he never asked to see me manuscript, nor did he try to censor me. i'm grateful to him and members of his staff, at nina points out, he never did any of these things, all he did was try to deny her access to information whenever the information was unfortunate for his project. as she writes in a book itself, that when the thing -- when things were getting a little bit tough, she, for internal purposes-found that the millennium villages project commissioned two reports to discover why so few farmers had upheld their side of the neutral

accountable bargain. this had to do with something that nina will explain. when i asked for copies of the report my request was dismissed. millennium had nothing to do in handing over the report to an inquisitive journalist, i inferred. things got tough. tell us what that was about, and was frustration you did experience after a while when these projects were continuing. >> guest: i think jeffrey sachs is a character who, to many of us, is recognizable. a mono man nye -- maniacal man, who set out to try to publish something enormous, and really staked his career on the claim that he could end poverty, and he could do it in our lifetime. and very graciously, think, allowed me to shadow him in a

way that is terribly intrusive. any of you have had a journalist like me cover you, it is intrusive. it's not fun. i ask a lotto questions. i stick my nose in everywhere. i demand to see every document, and when things were going well, that was marvelous, for jeff sachs he was hopeful and i was hopeful that the outcome would be a positive one. who doesn't want poverty to be ended. and yet as the time went by, and as it became clear from the work that i was doing in the villages, from the ground level, that the hurdles were ever great are, i compared it to some people asked me to the game, you keep trying to knock down the little things that pop up and -- whack-'em-all thank you. and the team would implement interventions in the villages and make improvements improvemee

would be improvements, but as soon as they thought they solved one problem there would be a host of unintended consequences that would pop off and then they would have to whack these problems down. it was heartbreaking to see what was happening. but from a journalistic standpoint and from the perspective of shrub who -- someone who cares about the visibility and about transparency, i suppose you could sigh, as a journalist, what was equally heartbreaking was that jeffrey sachs and his team became ever more entrevorred and the data that was coming out entrenched and the data from the organization was increasingly problematic, and the numbers no longer match up with what is would was seeing, and the end reports and studies coming out were clearly misrepresented. there was growing amount of obfuscation, and in so many ways it really mirrored what i think happens unfortunately in a large number of ngos 0, nonprofits

generally, which is that people are under tremendous pressure to raise money for their dough knows and satisfy their donors and make sure their money is not being wasted. none of us wants to think if we give $100 to an organization, it's missing or stolen or wasted. and so i -- it was very disheartening for me to see what actually happened, the disconnect between the reality on the ground and what was being told in the official publications and press releases of the organization. >> host: well, i'm also now again going to quote from bernie easterly. excuse me. easterly was not interviewed for the book by nina munk, but he is

quoted briefly and he mentioned in this review the following. i. i i'm quoted at one point as remarking that sachs is essentially trying to create an island of success in a sea of failure, and maybe he has done that but it doesn't address the sea of failure. actually, i got that wrong. munk even raises doubts about the island of success. i want to also quote from nina's book in his way. a key point -- this comes up self times in her book -- is the following: on page 217. director of the uk's institute of development studies asked the obvious question: who on earth will pay for this once the donors leave? in other words, aren't we creating an eternal dependency?

doing them a defense service without providing them the means of sustainability. nina. >> guest: i said this in a radio interview the other day. it does not give me any pleasure to have to report in my book that jeffrey sachs' experiment is by any standards a disappointment, certainly, and arguably even a failure. i don't take any pleasure in that, and i have said many times, and i will continue to say, that when i began this project, i truly was hopeful. i'm a great skeptic, both by nature and by profession. that's what journalist do. but i was really hopeful that this project would turn out well. and i think bill easterly, who we do have to take his review with a grain of salt, because he is very well known as a great jeff sachs nemesis, and he is a

brilliant man, and when gene mentions i didn't interview easterly for the book, i did that on purpose. i didn't want anyone to be able to say -- or jeff sachs in particular to be able to say you were swept off your feet by my critics. and i wanted to be clear it was i, personally, really as an outsider, i'm neither a development expert, i'm not an economist, i am, quote, simply a journalist. i went in there, i watched what happened, i followed the story as it unfolded on the ground, and frankly, i've spent a lot more time in these villages than any other outsider has spent. certainly much more time than jeffrey sachs. and it is to -- my great unhappiness to report that none of these experiments worked as intended. >> host: i want to quote one part of the book that william easterly actually criticizes.

he said: should be nod a holm anyone numb attacks of jeffrey sachs. nina writes, columbia university paid 8 million for sachs' townhouse in 2002. part of a package of benefits designed to lure him from harvard. among the six bedrooms and working fireplaces what is particularly appealing is the south, facing garden and he was grateful for the garden. >> guest: it is a lovely house, and i will say that bill easterly is an academic. i'm a journalist, i think the details about the kinds of homes people live in are fascinating. call me a voyeurist if you want, that's fine. i also, to my defense, i think it's important, and i know that all of news this room are guilty, whether you live in an

$8 million townhouse or rent a thousand dollar a month studio, we have no idea, we can't even begin to understand the gulf between the ways we live, between the extraordinary lives that we lead, just by having running water, let alone a garden with tulips, growing with ease, and to me part of the reason why it was important to point out that jeffrey sachs lives in an exquisitely beautiful townhouse on the upper west side, is to demonstrate again how difficult it is for someone like jeffrey sachs to even begin to understand what it means to live the way people in the villages that he is trying to help, live. and i can tell you from first hand, again, that even in my case -- and i spent a great deal of time in these villages. i slept in these huts with people. i did to the best of my

abilities i attempted to empathize and understand how they lived. i didn't begin to scratch a surface to be in a place where there is nothing, at a reporter, an outsider, always knowing at any moment you can turn around and get the hell out and get on an an airplane and go home, by definition means you don't understand it, and i can assure as much as i don't understand it, jeffrey sachs really, really, really doesn't understand it. >> host: well, another reason perhaps why jeffrey sachs didn't like nina's book. another quote from the book: it's never easy to disagree with jeffrey sachs. you might trigger an argument. you might ruffle his featherses. he'll make you feel small. he might call you misguided or ill informed or ignorant, and millennium project meetings, everyone in the room depended on his paycheck. to be a dissenter took courage.

that is not a good reference for anybody to run such a project. let me finally lead off with a quote from easterly on the general subject of where he stands and have nina comment on it: it's not that we choose aid or no aid. is his message. aid has had some focused successes such as vaccination programs, but aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. only home-grown development based on the dynamism as individuals in free societies, can do that just as it do for the lucky people of the world whos whose forebearers climate out of poverty. poor people are their own resource in solving poverty. any final communities before we have questions? >> guest: i couldn't agree more with that. i don't think i agree entirely with bill easterly on all of his

platforms, but i agree with that and i feel strongly and i myself believe deeply in charity and i believe in foreign aid, but i think that it's very, very important to differentiate between charity, between doing good, and so-called development. and when i give money to heifer international or money to this organization i adore, called married meals, that helps provide free lunches for school children in poverty-stricken areas, i don't imagine i'm changing the world or the course of history. i'm neither that arrogant, i just -- i don't believe that is possible. so... >> host: okay. we can leave it open to questions. jerry, other question. >> thank you very much two questions. the singer, bono, is very close

to jeff sachs and he is in recent years, particular lay couple weeks ago, made an announcement about the virtues of free trade and direct investment and getting the world out our poverty and is moving more and more in that direction. did you happen to interview him because of his closeness to jeff sachs? and when will the day of reckoning come for sachs and the millennium project? the proof will be in the pudding some day. when will that day of reckoning come and when will the jury be in or out or whatever juries do? >> guest: i did in fact interview bono, he was charming. one of the nicest people i've interviewed. he didn't hold me up for hours. that's something that celebrity do to poor journalists, and i think bono is very much

reflecting the pop already opinion. when bono began with jeffrey sachs, when i started working on the story, there was this moment where the general public seemed to be behind the great surge in foreign aid. there was a real belief, i think, still then, or at least popular support, for heavy influxes of foreign aid. and i think we have seen a dramatic shift, and most recent live with obama's visit to africa, i think it's been made pointedly clear that the popular opinion is nights crease foreign aid. americans who survey after survey are against that, for better or worse. but that more and more there's an idea that we should be doing is backing investment in africa and helping businesses develop and helping the economic growth that, quite frankly, is happening in some done countries rather vigorously. your other question -- read my book. >> the day of reckoning. >> guest: read my book.

very soon, i'm hopeful. >> host: quote the great economist who taught me years ago that aid actually foreign aid from government to government can do harm and does harm simply by empowering and strengthening governments that suppress develop in their own countries. so the thought that aid can only do good, aid, some governments especially, can do harm by, again, suppressing development. >> guest: or by supporting a corrupt government. >> host: precisely. john smith has a question. >> is there any indication that george sorros or any of his staffers read your book? >> guest: i have a soft spot for george soros. i interviewed him very early on and he had just given $50 million to jeff sachs at the time, and he was a very -- he is

a cool customer, and he said very casually, well, you know, 50 million bucks. he said, look, it might work, might not work. the worst thing that happens it is doesn't work and i have ugiven away 50 million bucks for a humanitarian cause, and if it does work, well, hell, i mean, that's a bet i'm willing to take. as you know, george sorros likes high-stakes bets. >> what he thinks of what his $50 million did and where else he might spend that money. maybe on real development. anyway. >> or on a honeymoon. he got married last week. >> i haven't read your book and all the reviews i read, i'm absolutely inclined to read it. what i don't understand from what i've read and heart, what their me methods he employed? what was he doing with the money? how was it being spent and what was the plan?

>> guest: that's a very good question. a fundamental question. in parts of this telling you to read my book. the truth of the matter is there's nothing about jeff sachs' prescriptions that are absolutely novel. what jeff sachs was prescribing is they ben done in a systemic, what he reverend to as a scientific way, with everything at once. so rather than just building a school in a poor community, or just digging a well, his idea was if people were trapped by poverty in a way that if you just looked after one problem, without solving all of them, holistically, as academics like to say, that there was no point. so it was really a matter of single-minded focus and doing a lot of things all at the same time, putting in a health care clinic, recruiting nurses, building wells, bringing in diesel generators, solving the water problem, and trying to take everything all at one go. >> infrastructure? >> guest: no, a combination, some infrastructure, some very

basic health services, and schools and bringing in teachers, better medical care, mosquito nets. sort of a packet of a dozen, let's say, basic interventions. fertilizer and high-yield seeds and vaccinations for livestock so a packets of low-cost interventions that in his mind, when you did them all at once, had a sort of exponential impact. >> hi. i have to confess, nina munk is my friend and classmate from columbia. but i'll ask a legitimate question. i'm originally from uganda and i was with a ugandanan a short while ago who actually work with jeffrey sachs on some of these programs, and he said the key problem was that he didn't listen a lot. he wanted to, for example, talk

to presidents and not secretaries of the ministries who actually knew what was happening on the ground. my question is: how much was it about jeffrey sachs caring about the people and the projects and how much was it about him trying to prove that jeffrey sachs could do this amazing thing, that perhaps would never be duplicated again and be remembered for a long time? because you wondered why with all his connections, why did he have programs that could make capital available to african entrepreneurs who lack access to capital. my final question is, do you think as a consequence of this whole experience with jeffrey sachs, there's going to be some sort of backlash, people that might want to engage africa effectively will become a little reluctant now because of the

experience with jeffrey sachs? >> guest: you know, this is an interesting question. i myself pondered often with jeffrey sachs, was he just -- it was often difficult for me to understand why he didn't seem to be following the advice on the ground, and why he didn't seem able to change course as i think watching it from the outside, it seemed that he should have. i think in the end, i feel very strongly, he, as some of you know, and gene alluded to, he has been sharply critical of me and my book since it has come out, and i think there's a real poignancy there and a sadness, because you have to wonder, is

refusing to engage some of the ideas in my book and refusing to discuss openly some of the failures of the project, is that in the best interests of the poor people in rural africa or is that in the best interests of jeff sachs personally? i think that's what you're alluding to, and it's something that i can only venture to guess at. really don't know. i forget what your other question was -- oh, i was also going to say something. you mentioned about the undersecretaries and other people in the african ministries at lower levels. the truth of the matter is there's a kind of -- i think in some way everyone is in this together when its comes to not telling the truth about the failure of the programs, and i think that not only the villagers whom i interviewed, not only the secretaries at different levels in the government and the ministries in

africa, not only the presidents, the last thing they want, even if they know that jeffrey sachs' program is ludicrous and is never going to work, they're perfectly happy for obvious reasons to continue to encourage the infusion of this aid. and the villagers themselves -- one of the astonishing discoveries when you spend enough time in these villages is to discover how quickly these villagers realize that when the outers, when the white guys, the rich guys, show up, how quickly they have to assume a certain persona and they have to assure that visitor that his donations are going good use. and i think any of wuss do that. that's called survival and you had be stupid not to. and so there becomes a kind of enter dependency that can be quite dangerous, and no one -- at some point, who is growing to break the glass and pull the emergency trigger and say, this is a bloody joke. very few people.

>> backlash. >> guest: excellent point. i raise that point, i think or i allude to it in my book. this is the terrible thing jeffrey sachs has accused me of cynicism. i am not cynical. i am skeptical but believes deeply that transparency is the way forward and the only way to make donors want to help is to be fully transparent and reveal and speak openly about not just the successes, but also the failures, and by speaking about the failures, you, i think, accord more weight to the successes. people are more likely to believe in the successes if you are honest about the failures. so i think there could be a terrible bashlash that worries me deeply. >> thanks. that was really interesting. i actually worked with jeffrey sachs as a post doc and have continued to work with the institute. so it was interesting to hear your perspective on it. i think -- i'm not sure i agree

with everything it but oning there you have done well is highlight how complex and difficult it is to do development, and it is very difficult to measure success and impact and causality. so i wonder if you could reflect a little bit on what the villages would have been like, the state of the scrimmage without the interventions and millennium village project, any benefits. >> guest: it's such an important point because part of the difficulty with reviews and even a short talk like this, people talk of these projects very much in the black and white. success or fail schnur that's not the case at all. there was simply no doubt, and i make it patently clear in my book, when you pour $10 million into a village or half a million dollars you're going to see some magnificent success story and you see impact

of foreign aid in africa. people's lives are saved, people are lifted out of poverty. have the opportunity to go to school that might never have gone to school. children are pulled out of ma mama layer ya comas and its will make everyone in this room willing to give money to africa when you see it first hand. trust me. that, however, that kind of success, that kind of small scale, incremental, personal success, where you're talking about helping a single person, or 100 individual people, is something very different than what jeffrey sachs promised us, and i think jeffrey sachs, and many people stated this, jeff si sachs' great failing was overpromising. he promised us he was not just going to transform the lives of anymore a dozen villages about he was going to give us a mod toll end poverty decisively in our lifetime and a mod that

could be scaled up and could be replicateed in any environment, and that is what to this day no one has figured out how to do. none of us knows how to do it unfortunately. and development economists like billy and jeffrey sachs can argue until the cows come home and they will not have a solution, because we don't know how people are uplifted out of poverty. we understand it's related to economic growth, and we understand that prosperity and wealth are related, but we don't really know what the drivers are and what exactly makes its happen. otherwise we would have ended poverty by now. >> thanks. one thing i wanted to add as a followup to that. thank you for that. i think one thing -- i don't know if you touched on it in the book but oning there that is interesting to mention is that jeff is working across scale so there's the millennium village project and the develop goals and sustainable development goals jeff is helping to lead with the secretary general, he

is also raising awareness at a very high political level -- >> guest: no question. two chapters of my book are devoted to his really extraordinary work on malaria, for example, and he has done probably more than anyone in advancing the very, very practical ways to try to reduce ma layer a, transmission in africa, and he has been a magnificent advocate on that front, and so, yeah, you should e-mail me after you read the book and i'd be interested to know what you think. >> i'd like to ask -- >> host: excuse me. yes? >> are you aware and in fact did anyone else describe or mention the fact that most african nations are at the bottom of the economic freedom indexes that africa is the most overregulated region in the world by a significant margin? did that ever come up?

>> guest: is that a let core cal question -- rhetorical question? >> guest: i think one of the fascinating things about my book or the journey i traveled on, i into say, which i report in any book, is that jeffrey sachs himself progressed from originally thinking you could go in and provide water and better health care and better schools, and at some point along the way realize very quickly -- it strikes one as sort of obvious in hindsight, that in fact the key to this was providing some sort of business infrastructure, and suddenly he began to scramble to figure out a way to get businesses up and running, and the only way to create long-term wealth, as milton said earlier as well, is to create businesses, and for africa, as you say, for -- as for many countries that remain poor, remain mired in poverty, it's very often one discovers there is an enormous amount of regulation strangling places, or

the corruption is so intense you can't start a business unless you pay off ten people, or there are no roads to get your product out of a village, or any other number of serious hurdles to starting businesses. and naturally that is a terrible, terrible problem. >> host: just one more question. in your book, you document that early on, jeffrey sachs wanted deregulation for russia. he wanted deregulation basically -- let's have capitalism for some of the other countries. he has been accused of being oddly inconsistent in that he didn't think the africans should have deregular la racing -- deregulation. >> guest: i think, gene, to be fair, he didn't not think that africans should have it. that's just not where he began his quest to end poverty in africa. he could have started from the probusiness route. that wasn't the way he went about it, rightly or wrongly.

>> host: next question. >> do you address the corruption of the leadership in africa? and my other question is china's involvement, the chinese government's involvement in that country for their self-interests. >> guest: it's both such important, important issues, of course, for the continent, and i do absolutely address corruption. i go out of my way in the book not to -- my book, i try very hard, and i think anyone who read it can attest to this. i travel lightly and observe and let my reader reach his or her open conclusions. so you see over and over again the fact that the government clearly thing goes missing, and things disappear, and money goes missing, and solar panels just disappear overnight, and there are all -- i think i allude to the problems of corruption, and yet my book is not about corruption. it's about something much larger, of which corruption is one part.

and china also is something that i talk about in the book, but again, the book is not about china. but china is such an important model, not only we all know they have been plowing enormous amounts of money into africa, but interestingly, china itself at this point has lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty more successfully than anyone necessary recent years, and they have their own methods of doing that, and whether those methods are relevant to africa or not is a question that i pose. i certainly don't answer it. but i think it's something that is on the forefront of the minds of anyone who is interested in these subjects. >> you said that you're not cynical but skeptical. i was wondering, did this experience make you more skeptical of experts, and maybe lot office scientists and steamed experts and politicians across the board, academics, are actually useless gas bags or

just self-promoters, something like that? >> guest: are you a journalist by any chance? >> sometimes. >> guest: i think you can't possibly be a journalist unless you question everything you hear. and that's -- we're taught to do that, and many people call is cynical, many people complain about u i've heard all, and they may be right, they'll may be wrong, but i will tell you that i don't trust any experts. and that's just my professional constitution. i'm hopeful often that once i do the research myself and once i go to try to back it up, that i can demonstrate that person was right, but i never take anyone's word. until i've done my own reporting. >> i just wanted to say, i spent

an entire night last week reading nina's book cover-to-cover, really mesmerized me and it's hard to mesmerize me at that level. it's who -- >> host: still us who you are. >> host: i am senegalees and i have spent a great amount of my life on these issues, and when i started reading nina's book i was very afraid. my heart was pounding because i could tell how fair she was trying to be, and i thought is jeffrey sachs getting away with this. it's beyond him. it's an entire thinking class of people who never, ever would ever imagine the their minds that africa, just like anyone else, we're no different than anyone else. the only way we're going to make this is going to be through capital rhythm. i like to say conscious capitalism. that's the only way forward, and

it reminded me of an argument i had at some point with an -- a woman who said she had the nerve to said, heard some talk and i can see why capitalism and business, work in china and indiana -- india as vehicles of economic development but i don't see how that is relevant to africa. how come they have capitalism and we get economic development. >> guest: you make an interesting point. i talk in my book, there's this tremendous overlay or suggestion of neocolonialism, and its can make you feel terribly uneasy when your on the ground as an outsider in africa, watch thing absolute domination in foreign aid and humanitarian aid circles of europeans -- they mean

americans and europeans -- and it is unsettling, and of course there are so many people who, who in development in foreign aid who are deeply devoted. you don't work in those fields unless you are devoted to your cause. but it is unsettling, and i think you raise a very important point. >> as you go around and talk about your book, and i don't know if you spent any time on it interviewing people, but i think it would be -- i would have loved when i was reading the book, to see some hints on what i like to call the business -- the industry of aid, because it's a real industry. >> guest: sure. >> jeffrey sachs is lucky to have her write this book. she spent six years leaning over backwards. she is not a reporter who has a deadline in the morning and has no time to check anything. so you'll be lucky to read her book, six years in the making, six years of hard research. it's a great book. [applause]

>> we wanted america to be better. we wanted america to live up to the declaration of independence. live up to our creed. make real our democracy. take it off the paper and make it real. when it got arrested the first time, i felt free. i felt liberated, and today more than ever before i feel free and liberated. >> that's civil rights leader and congressman john lewis from

last year's national book festival. he'll be our next guest on in department, sunday, october 6th, and will takure calls and comments, live for three hours. also scheduled for in depth, know 3, biographer kitty kelly. december 1st -- and book tv's book club continue this month with "this town." read the book and leave your comments on our facebook page and on twitter. >> all we ever had to go on, and what's been accepted by everything are is what manson himself wants to tell people. illegitimate son of a teenage prostitute mother, who cared so little about her child that she once tried to sell him for a pitcher of beer. how, as a child, he was abused by the uncles she would have move in to their home, one after another. how when he was nine or ten, she was so tired of having to even

try to prefunker toly take care of him, that she threw him into the juvenile justice system where he suffered greatly and from there his life turned bad. he didn't know who his father was. he didn't think his mother knew who his father was. senator he said he finally learned, even as a child, that the street was his father and prison was his mother. and that's what everybody pretty much accepted. i decided to check it out. so the first part is, let's look at the man's whole life. how did he get there? second question, where was he and what kind of things were happening in our culture that made it possible for a charles manson to recruit a few dozen followers, who would do these kinds of god awful things? again, history doesn't happen in a vacuum. and i'm kind of convinced that if charles manson had been

paroled from prison in nebraska, and end up in omaha, instead of los angeles, and he tried these things, he would have been impaled on a pitchfork and stuck up in the field as a scarecrow. he was in the right places at the right time. how did that happen? so what i thought i'd do, because you folks tonight, you have heard over and over during the years, people's different versions of what happened on the nights of august 9th and 10th, 1969. i will tell you there's some in material in my book because in the course of my interviewing quite a few people, including especially patricia krenwinkel, who was involved in both nights and on the 25th anniversary of the murders has never given a full account of it. she explained it install such

depth, with such honest and clarity, that she ends up answering the final couple questions the lapd had about the murders all these years. so there's some new things. most of all, if it's okay with you, i'd like to talk briefly about four parts of this book, charles manson, his life and the world he grew up in. let's begin with his childhood. we talked just a minute ago about all the things manson claims. guess what. they're all lies and it's all documentable. i put 21,000 miles on my car in the last couple of years, and i went everybodyplace he went. a lot of the lies can be proved with simple visits to county coursehouses. he was not illegitimate. his mother, kathleen, when she was 15, was unhappy with her fundamentalist christian mother,

nancy, who believed that girls should not cut their hair, shouldn't wear makeup, and above all, should not do the terribly sinful thinglet led to every evil in the world ask and that, of course, is dancingment. well know now kathleen's side of the story for the first time, because charles manson's sister, nancy, never before interviewed anywhere, and i found her, and he told her mother's side of the story for the first time. gave me dates and places that i could go try to look. so here's what happened. and this is what everybody in the family knew. the real mainson family. including charles himself. when she is 15, kathleen maddux, living in kentucky, acrosses the bridge over the river to a town called ironton. she sneaks out of the house, goes to ironton because there some clubs there where people can dance. and at one of these clubs, ritzy

ray's is the name of it, she meets a man, an exciting older man, 29 years old. his name is colonel scott. colonel is his given name, not a military rank. but the colonel doesn't mind letting the 15-year-old girl think he is a war hero. of course, he actually works in a fact tricker is married -- in a factory, is married and has two children. that's the part he leaves out. not long later kathleen becomes pregnant. she is 15. and she tells colonel scott. the colonel announces that he is going to do the right thing for her, but he has just been called away by the army. he is going to come back in just a couple of weeks, and they'll take care of everything. and so kathleen goes to her mother, says she is pregnant,

the father is going to marry her, you can imagine her mother's reaction, but nancy really does love kathleen, and she says, she'll stick with her. they'll all get through this, it's not the child's fault. and colonel scott never comes back. and kathleen is furious. there's another fellow in kathleen's life who would like to get her attention. his name is william manson. he is a common laborer whose dream is to be a dry cleaner. and knowing kathleen is pregnant with another man's child, he marries her about five months before the birth. there was never any question that charles manson was an illegitimate baby. his birth certificate was filed a few days after -- a few weeks after his birth, william manson lifted as the father, but the whole family and charles himself, new throughout that the

real father was colonel scott. no doubt whatsoever. so, the later rumors that manson hated and feared blacks because he had a black father, for instance, never, ever. manson and kathleen's marriage lasts a couple of years. he divorces her. she is still a young girl. she is trying to run around and have a little fun. her son is never just left with strangers or offered for a pitcher of beer. instead she does what many young women that age do and sticks him with her mother or her sister and her husband and daughter, but he is cared for always. kathleen and her brother, luther, spectacularly botch an attempted robbery. they tried use a catsup bottle, pike it in somebody's back and say it's a gun. the newspapers have a great time calling them the idiot catsup bottle bandits, the greatest

dunderheads who committed a crime, and kathleen gets five years in prison in west virginia, luther gets ten. yes, that's on kathleen's record. never once, anywhere, before then or in the next 15 years, was there any record she was arrested for prostitution, ever warned about being a prostitute. she bungled a crime. she never should have tried to commit it. but charles manson was not the child of a prostitute. not then, not ever. he goes to live in west virginia, little factory town. with his uncle bill, aunt glenna and cousin joanne, who's who is a few years older. i found joanne who never talked before, and if you get a chance to look the book, you'll see the photo section includes pictures of charles manson from his baby pictures through his wedding album. those came from joanne and his

sister, nancy. they tell the real story. here's an interesting one joanne told me about charlie. she said, from the time he came to live with them five years old, he is scary. he is violent. he lies about everything. the first person he ever physically attacked was joanne. he picked up a sickle in the back yard and tried to stab her with him. her parents stopped him. his explanation, she made he do it. it wasn't my fault. she is older than me. i was defending myself. in first grade, not only told to me by joanne but corroborated by other people who were in school with manson at the time, first grade, he organizes some girls in his class to beat up a boy he doesn't like. the principal comes looking for charlie. his explanation? the girls were doing what they wanted to do out of their own --

that's what they wanted. you can't blame me. the same defense he uses all the years later with tate la bianca. >> you can watch there is and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we were going to do the book after he died, and i was hero identified, and then i was delighted. >> i always felt that people are really more alike than they are different and so the artist in me rose to that occasion, that if i can create something that is so moving and that from its kind of distance you sometimes need from what is painful, then people will understand, and understanding is basically what is fundamental.

>> the point is that no argument is given to that effect. none of the relevant facts are considered, and this is regarded as one of the half dozen cases where a just war theory entails that the use of military force was legitimate. >> devoted to nonfiction books. we're marking 15 years of booktv on c-span2. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. press the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org, easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the payment and selecting selecting the format. book tv streams online for 48 hours every weekend, with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org.

>> up next on book tv, after after words with guest host, craig witness whitney, living with gongses, liberal's case for the second amendment. third week, him gets her gun but obama wants to take yours. in it the "washington times" columnist argues that the obama administration has plans to create a gun registry with the purpose of confiscates firearms. this program is an hour. ...