future, and prison guards in the past and epic battle that will decide america's fate. "the bully pulpit" by doris kearns goodwin. in the book "double down" by authors mark halperin and john heilemann, the authors provide the presidential campaign review. and returning to the country was born in and "the ministry of guidance invites you to not stay" by hooman majd. and then in the book "american minor" by deborah solomon, the biographer and author explores the personal life of norman rockwell. it is lauren taylor of the history of health care in america in their book, "the american health care paradox", by authors elizabeth bradley and lauren taylor and then finally, "this lane that i love" by john

shaw look for these titles in bookstores and watch for the authors on booktv and on booktv.org. >> booktv continues with robert spoo. he talks about the clash between literary pirates over copyrights going back to 1790 and discusses how it has shaped the copyright laws that we have today and this is about one hour. [applause] >> thank you so much. as the dean indicated, most of us and a large number of legal scholars, you might be surprised to learn that an area that is not compelled by law, something

that is informal but very organized, and it has grown up to fill the various needs and the various cracks in the wall of law and i am going to be talking about one of those major cracks in the law today and i will be focused on the 19th century in the united states and particularly on authors and publishers in america, really from the 1820s and 30s amah up to lease the end of the century where, as you will see, the world is really kind of turned upside down where publishing is concerned. lawful piracy is still regarded as piracy and yet it was lawful. and uncopyrighted works well protected by an informal system of rights that were recognized by publishers and how could this be and the answer lies in some of these mysteries of informal

norms that exist alongside the law and sometimes even in place of the law. it's a very fascinating thing for me and i know for the dean as well, this area of law, particularly the trans-atlantic law which i'm focused on. and we usually think of the world word pirate is the violator of a former legal right and the specter of widespread piracy have huddled behind the feverish lawmaking of recent years and starting from the premise and the digital technology, that left unchecked would destroy interaction in turn interaction of the property and there is an expansive protection for authors, including copyright management information in the senate

judiciary committee summarized the prevailing account in these words that due to the ease in which digital works can be copied and distributed worldwide are virtually instantaneous and copyright owners will hesitate to make their words readily available on the internet without reasonable assurance that they will be protected against massive piracy and that word in the phrase massive piracy refers to a violation of legal rights. and the 19th century, which is my subject today, also condemned the piracy of copyrighted works. but running alongside the sons of piracy was another meaning of the word, the unauthorized copying of works or not protected by copyright in the united states or by any other law in this seemingly paradoxical usage was mostly reserved for those who took

advantage of the refusal to grant this for non-us citizens and this moralistic use describes unprotected foreign literature as the century wore on and the call for congressional action to protect u.s. authors and grew more strident. it had been written into the laws as early as the first federal copyright act of 1790, the first statute that the congress posed constitution enacted for copyrights and here is the wording. nothing in this act shall be construed to prohibit the importation or reprinting or publishing within the united states of any map or chart or book or books written by any person not a citizen of the

united states in foreign parts or places without the jurisdiction of the united states. so quite simply americans were permitted and even encouraged to sell foreign works without the networks of foreign publishers or authors in the law did nothing more than immunize acts that if committed on u.s. soil against american authors, could have resulted in damages and fines along with forfeiture and destruction of infringing copies. over the course of the 19th century, congress enhanced the rights and remedies of american authors but continued to withhold protections from foreign authors although the u.s. patent law on the other hand is friendlier, i think for various reasons and the revision of the copyright law, it sharpened attacks and said that

no protection existed for any person, not a citizen of the united states or a resident within the jurisdiction thereof. in a major the major revision of 1870 repeated this language and its ended this to include any dramatic or musical composition and engraving were photographed. and they were stripped bare and during the 19th century accusations of foreign works often carried a double or shifted meaning that on one level critics might be a sailing those responsible and on another level it might be attacking congress or the nation itself for failing to protect foreign authors. protests sometimes where the

target, making it unclear whether the inertia of politicians or the feeling of businessman was more to blame and some critics distinguish more sharply between legislative and individual responsibilities, though he was a strong individual of this, samuel clemens conceded in testimony before a subcommittee in 1886 it was wrong to accuse americans of dishonesty and he said in his words that you i do consider that those persons who are called pirates made pirates by the collusion of the united states government. if anyone is to blame, it is not dishonesty. similarly, the american copyright authority, summed up these exonerating distinctions in his 1879 ridings that piracy is the use of literary violation

of the owner and is not piracy to take without authority either in part or the whole of what is written if neither a statue or the common laws are violated. this is not piracy because no law is violated and without misrepresentation, many american repairs of the time could not have had this. yet those others slipped away their distinctions in the indignation. the practice of reprinting books have become widespread and then

they scramble to the vast and continuous resource and over the years sir walter scott in the brownings and george eliot and thomas carlyle, just to name a few. charles dickens was a fiercely contested prize. hundreds of thousands of copies of his work circle throughout the united states and in the frenzied competition for new english fiction among the weekly periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s, firms like harper's regarded themselves as authorized publishers as an unbound part at 12.50 per copy. he denounced what he called books on this here in the united states and he denounced the scoundrel booksellers who have grown rich from publishing books

which do not reap one thing from their issue and that was not well received in the united states. he was well received when he opened his mouth about the american newspapers turning against him. writing to dickens in the same year, thomas carlyle adopted these terms to discuss with his american pirates, saying that we belong to a different nation and cannot steal without being hanged for it and it gives me no permission to steal and thou shalt not steal at all. so it is written down for the men in the logbook of the maker and in latter the latter part of the 19th century, american publishers or aggressive in reprinting often without payment and the fierce competition led to the overproduction and the

ruinous lobbying of the market and the mayor of casterbridge, when he was published, he assured thomas hardy that we will do the best we can but it seems next to impossible to do anything with this. so aggressive was a reprint industry at the time. and oscar wilde learned that he was the victim of american pirates while on his favorite tour in 1882 and printed together with one of his lectures in the seaside library and the imitations quickly

appeared and he said assigned individuals selling my poems stolen and i never can resist the impulse to eat out a lesson in the heinousness of the offense. yet they also helped them earn thousands of dollars as a sheer and piracy in the 19th century was a complex activity bound up with the copyright law and as one commentator put it in 1882, piracy was the product of law. her firms were not always distinguishable from each other just as u.s. copyright act openly encouraged the unauthorized reprinting of foreign authors and reprinting was an enabling condition of much legitimate publishing in the united states. not only did low overhead

underwrite publishers and authorizers, promiscuous rebooting a lot money to acquire lists and capital the later prepare them to power this respectability. in the anti-bill on years, and this includes widespread learning. legislators built piracy and copyright law as a way to accommodate the democratic values of literature and education. and piracy was more than an enabling condition of legitimate publishing and it was also a necessary condition of literary culture throughout much of this century we were a net importer and british books were eagerly sought by an increasingly literate populace.

according to david saunders, the first catalogue of harpers contained 234 titles of which 90% were english and prior to the civil war, approximately 50% of all fiction bestsellers were unauthorized foreign works. and the report of the british royal commission on copyrights worries that they have cheap rates of 40 million, perhaps most active ones in the world. and unauthorized reprinting can be viewed as a vast free rider problem or maybe in easy rider in the sense that there were some cost associated. but a lot of overhead was removed. but why do the authors continue

to write and publish if the incentives were removed. in part because copyright laws of their own country allow them to capture the domestic benefits of their labor. they might hope for payments from american publishers and this was irresistible to american publishers. and the american public domain, as i call it, it was parasitic in this regard and it runs without the risk of resource

without feeling to incentivize it. the publishers are also producers unlike authors they require economic incentives to out and produce. so why would a publishing firm in new york invest in a dickens novel way from across town could bring out this within a few days. the publishing industry faces this problem throughout the 19th century and this includes the unrestrained competition and what is a constant concern. predatory pricing threatened to tear the american publishing industry apart in the 1840s and resulted in a steep decline in the reprinting of foreign works in the late 1880s and how can i be part of this comments?

well, the answer is that it was something the industry called the courtesy of the trade. looking back over 40 years, the american publisher, in 1893, he defined a the trade courtesy it is the duty not to jump another person's claim. i grew up between 1850 and 1876, the unwritten law of trade courtesy. it not only prevented ruinous competition that is with american publishers, but secured to foreign officers most of their rights. trade courtesy and fully developed form had a horizontal and a vertical access in my requiring them to reprint a

foreign title, a regulated what otherwise might have disintegrated into disruptive competition in the form were. and he acknowledged that this aspect was simply the result of an enlightened self-interest and vertically this system ordered relations between authors and publishers by encouraging payments to the authors or publishers and self-interest was again at work. payments help to cement relationships and signal to other publishers that the firm was responsible as a member of the trade and it was an entirely voluntary system of informal norms that filled this caused by our own statute there was a

famous 1865 case and the u.s. court stated in looking at this i feel like there's a challenge based on trade courtesy and the system rests upon no, ma the country it stands on the mirror well or the courtesy of the trade and within that circle of the participants, the courtesy claim of one publisher was recognized at the time and some scholars trace this to

self-regulating practices of irish publishers prior to the extension of english copyright law to ireland in 1801. similar norms are known to have existed in scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries were before english works were protected. even in england, regulated cartels arose to protect publishers and uncopyrighted ways shakespeare and others. it is a common feature in that they took place within close-knit communities that shared economic interest and scholars in various disciplines have noted that they have succeeded best within relatively small cohesive groups and this includes the norms and the sanctions evolved by the community of main lobstermen to

preserve customer trapping boundaries. and this has given right to social norms in the culinary industry. a chef must not copy someone else's recipe exactly. one chef may not reveal another secret recipe without permission. standup comedy is another area that is governed by informal rules and hear the social norms, including rules for establishing prohibition and punchlines have taken the place of formal enforceable laws and fashion design is yet another area that has evolved in an informal norms-based system of entitlement.

in this has been protected by a lot of international property rights. this is what american publishers did in the 19th century when they developed the century of trade courtesy. although estimates vary with the correspondence and it reveals that at least nine major publishing firms observed courtesy during the 1870s and that has been extended to many others, including small publishers and the practice of the courtesy is a vivid example of what robert ellison has called order without law. a system of a close knit group and community in which the informal norms have come to take the place of formal and legal rules and one individual ground his conclusion used for dealing

with trespassing in california and other scholars have explored other norms operating in the american cotton industry in the grain and food industry and the diamond trade in new york. the publishing world did not have the luxury of choosing between informal norms and actual laws, since many enjoyed no legal entitlements at all in those publishers were faced with a stark choice between informal self-regulation and no regulation at all in order and chaos. anticipating this by 80 years, henry holt is a proud defender of trade courtesy and described it as a brief realization of the

ideals of philosophical and autism and self-regulation without law. it has helped us to issue a noncopyrighted hornbook. and we have recognized this and it was agreed among this medium and this became the primary organization and further by supplementing an announcement, and this is critical, with a contract to the foreign author over his or her publisher. they could perfect this uncopyrighted work and reinforce that title and make it stronger

against other potential encroachers. they also developed this kind of option in the first book, you get to publish his next book if you want it and this was based on the rule of association. and houses that absurd trade courtesy interfere with other houses of association. the authorizer would gladly have added to his wife to its list of authors bound to the superior go

on enforceable claim as a publisher and reluctant to meddle with this, she remarked about it being a funny set of christians here and fully developed and courtesy provided the bright line rules for foreign works and a method for recording claims in the recognized public mediums so disputes could be taking care of more easily. as well as a basis for making payments and further rules and as publishers recognized at the time, this system imitated the broad features of copyright law. registration of rights with public authority and payment of outright songs or copyright

owners and publishers sometimes paid handsomely for some uncopyrighted works. as early as the 1820s and 30s, a major firm was making payments to sir walter scott and he received 75 pounds which was a considerable sum for his waverley novels and 300 pounds for his life on napoleon bonaparte. in charles dickens was paid 360 pounds and 1000 pounds each for a tale of two cities and 2000 pounds for the never finished mystery of edwin drew, and that is a lot of money in 1817. the firm could boast of being an

authorized publisher and such a relationship conferred with respectability on the firm to lift it up out of the mass of mere pirates and indicating to some that the firm enjoy the prestige and publishers frequently included letters with statements of authorizations and if you thumb through 19th century novels published in america, you will see this often. this includes reproducing a letter and sometimes they would actually reproduce an image of the letter in which they authorize the publication exclusively and of course it was publication of an uncopyrighted work and acknowledged that the publisher had made me a participate in the pecuniary profits of the american edition without solicitation or the shadow of any expectation on my

part without any legal plan that i could play. the publisher thought of trade courtesy as the golden age of the american publisher and those who practice this courtesy were inherently honest and the courtesy system itself did not share the assumption that publishers left to their own devices would always be good. instead along with rules requiring these exclusive rights and maintaining them, the courtesy involved a series of calibrated penalties for transgressors against these sanctions, including increasing severity, remonstrations, public shaming, refusal to deal and predatory prices and outright retaliation. and a polite rebuke often expressed as an urbane inquiry

became an angry protest one a threat to courtesy persisted. in a heated dispute arose between the harbor firms in 1881 over an addition of reminiscences of thomas carlyle in the united states and after bitter exchanges, the two houses issued their respective positions and took to the trade paper. harpers placed a full-page notice in publishers weekly reminding them that this is part of what the leading publishers print in the country. in the reminiscence charged is a violation and he responded with this and these public

accusations were part of a further courtesy sanction. the most severe form of public shaming and this includes denouncing an unauthorized publisher as a pirate and now you begin to see how complicated this is in the united states particularly after brought by the publisher and this includes a funk against the new york evening post for having charged him with pirating this at the time and publisher holt testified that the words tired and beat are freely applied to those reprint books already equitably in the hands of other publishers. in this is favorable to his

reputation of the trade. it shows that he acquired a specialized meaning in the american publisher business. it signified deviants and they use negative gossip and public shaming to expose and compel reform and that is a rhetoric of aggrieved authorship in the 19th century. the severest punishment of all was reserved for the worst outrages against courtesy and this was retaliation employed by individuals when their rights were threatened and retaliation meant printing on a transgressor at a competitive price and in 1871 harpers road, a detroit

bookseller, that the courtesy right belongs to us alike for canada and the u.s. and any year in interference, retaliation could be devastating. in 1870, harper and brothers responded to a breach of courtesy on the part of the company by issuing an illustrated edition of these works. and one other publishers piled on ms. often had a domino effect it was severely eroded and it triggered the very behavior that trade courtesy has been creating to avoid and scholars talk about the cost of violating punishments within one's based systems like this in the shows

you this because the courtesy had been created to wipe out this kind of aggressive and radical situation and it was being resorted to as costly. even sanctions with retaliation had no effect and during the competition of the 1870s and 1980s, such renegades became increasingly common and less interested in respectability and maintaining author associations than others. and they printed the cheapest formats and exploited the book publicity for which the first publisher to pay. and this includes nothing

immediately to gain and little to lose by flouting it. and this unraveled at the edges with new or opportunistic firms at little cost to themselves. and this was a thin barrier and houses that observed it as if they were protected by the most fragile copyrights. the young firm justified reprinting kipling's works without permission on the ground that his books had already appeared in so many other unauthorized american editions they have lost the aura of courtesy protection and the firm regarded itself, in its words, as honorable prices.

in no case did we ever reprint anything that had never become public property by having been reprinted by everyone else in the business. it certainly strikes the modern legal individuals as bizarre for an uncopyrighted work to be described as having become more property it gives us a status of private property and insurers book legal monopoly and the magic of this system might continue undisturbed for many years until one day a discourteous individual decides

to seize upon the courtesy protected work and issue it in a flimsy addition. the spell broken, other houses would weep in and try their luck and suddenly the artificial order of courtesy is temporarily wrecked by the anarchy of an unregulated issue. the trade regards them as having returned to the following conditions among the mass of materials in the commons and this loss of exclusivity was lapsed into a renewed public domain and a second death of protection. get the free availability also been confident this in the publishing trade and even the vested interests in the housing. the young firms could develop

booklist over for your costly costly overhead and the risks of experimenting with new and unknown authors and the public as well could benefit and did benefit from aggressive competition were cheap and popular books and the price went down and down when they started competing for the uncopyrighted works. there was an apparent decline, and i say this carefully, it of the courtesy in the 1890s. the cheap reprint houses had been assailing the gentlemanly club of publishers, the new insurgent publishers that were part of the mass production of cheap magazines and dime novels and so forth and they assailed courtesy publishers as a trust or monopoly and those were their words, the trust and monopoly in one other publisher that i mentioned a few minutes ago, and

this is another insurgent publisher that is part of the courtesy firm and the perception that courtesy was an anti-competitive trust and it is sometimes someone who rebels that was going to choose a wife and that is a similarly suggestive individual to describe what he called the normal relationship of author and publisher. and he moved opportunistically from one american publisher to another and is prohibited the

conspiracies of trade and commerce they also criminalize the facts. the law was aimed at monopolies and cartels that harm competition in the marketplace and the publishing house the practice trade courtesy was part of this and the cast iron cartel, the publishers divided this into exclusive assigned books and authors tacitly

honoring the other courtesy titles in this agreement to refrain from posting on other houses potentially injured foreign authors because there was no competition to better the offer and this is what the economists today call control of the market and in this case the publishers have published. there is also the control of an oligopoly here in adhering to courtesy that allowed fellow publishers to fix this and constraints upon prices and supplies occur as a result of ordinary copyright protection and legal monopoly functions

that way as well and copyrights are legal monopolies granted by congress under the authority of u.s. constitution and trade courtesy, in contrast, created an extra monthly effect fabricated through mutual forbearance to compete in the free public good. although trade courtesy was not challenged in this includes trade courtesy in this inhospitable climate. and it was also the rise of the literary agents in the 1870s and 1880s and the agents helped the authors to grasp the complexities of contract law and to exploit recently valuable

market for such city or a rights as serialization in translation and dramatization and these savvy middlemen became especially valuable to officers had to deal with hustling americans from miles away and even today, publishers and agents and authors don't necessarily get along and there is built into the relationship and adversarial stance that a supposed result in the benefit to represent the author and obtain his or her best interest. she was by definition hostile and this includes complaining

that agents struck at the heart of the courtesy relationship between authors and publishers in this includes a lack of copyright protection, feeling that agents threatened the integrity and stability of this time-honored relationship and they introduced the friction of market competition into the paternalism. and in addition to the pressures of ruinous competition and antitrust law and literary agency, the dramatic changes in american copyright law a direct impact on courtesy. in 1891, one year after the antitrust act, congress passed the chase international copyright act and the last granting full copyright protection to individuals, but legal protection came at the price of large concessions to

american typesetters and plate makers and the chief among these was the express condition that they foreign or domestic book in any language could acquire copyright protection in the united states only if the book was, in the words of the statute, printed from types that within the women's of the united states or plates made and so forth. or two copies were deposited in the copyright office on or before the first day of the publication anywhere else in the world. these provisions were known as the dreaded manufacturing clause in along with the stringent deposit requirements, it effectively made simultaneous manufacturing and publication mistakes and a condition of american copyright for any published abroad and some may be able to satisfy these requirements, especially if they were well-connected or

resourceful and many others could not in place of an absence of copyright protection, congress had granted them a protection that was open and conditioned upon inflexible rulings that benefited american typesetters and plate makers and printers and bookbinders. and trade courtesy had become difficult to practice openly for some of the reasons that i have given in this includes trust busting punctuated by the clamor of politicians, made the proud collusive mess of genteel publishers and antiquated and suspect chivalry. and more visibly, the new

protections created a perception about the courtesy code that was unnecessary and gentlemanly and upfront sons could not get and this is a practical matter and simply binding is defining the set had been printed abroad would not satisfy them in the pressures generated by the laws ensure that authors and publishers would still be racing against time but the compulsions are now legal ones not fueled or subject to a code of honor among statutes created this way.

and copyrights, were they superior to these relationships? they were both part of gains and losses and qualifying foreign individuals could look to federal law protection against this instead of to an informal system of self-regulation and the copyright law was complex and technical and machinery was operated by lawyers and coercion demonstrated by the courts and under the laws frigid rules, a dispute between publishers are publishers and authors was no longer adjusted by honorable concessions and many were not publishing swash bucket situations but it was part of bureaucratization and although american publishers continue to preserve an ideal fairness, there is no doubt that the old paternalistic spirit had been diminished somewhat and some of

the sense of professional camaraderie and the joint pursuit of honorable ends. but the chief drawback was the manufacturing clause for foreign offices and many of them simply could not comply with the strict requirements and you can imagine a new author in britain being able to comply with this. protectionist, discriminatory, together with other copyright formalities prevented the united states from joining the international convention for protecting literary and artistic works for a century after other major nations had minded in the late 1880s and we finally defeated to that major international instrument in 1989. but the manufacturing clause that more than create obstacles for foreign authors and a

program for american lawmakers. it perpetuated to a significant degree the international copyright had been enacted and they could not satisfy the rigors and it played the same rules for the withholding of copyright had played earlier. failure to accomplish this deprives these with fresh materials that were lawfully available to all. just as form works had been prior to 1891. piracy has not yet been vanished and it had merely been limited in scope. more to the trade courtesy vanish by any means. still existed even less exacting

forms is a pattern of behavior and an occasional tool for resolving disputes and no longer openly practice, it is still quietly governed with each other and officers and courtesy survived well into the 20th century and i read about write about this extensively in the book. elements of that informal norms-based system were repurposed by t.s. eliot and other major modern figures to combat piracy and protect and consolidate the american market and to lay the groundwork for an emerging celebrity. in the tradition of courtesy with its sanctions authorizing and honorable payments played a

role in modern writing in the united states and that is another story in the a story for another day and i thank you. [applause] [applause] >> i think we have the opportunity for some questions, which i am happy to answer. >> okay. professor, robert spoo, you have a very elegant and eloquent story here about informal law and operating together and i guess i'm going to push you to take a normative position on

sort of informal legal systems versus formal. on the one hand you use the word magic and solving a collective action and so on the one hand this trade courtesy was a very effective and efficient way of at one time filling in for the lack of laws and another time sort of doing this around the situation that was not particularly effective. i think especially today that we can appreciate that this around the formal law is sometimes effective when we think about law and what legal systems are

like accountability and participation and due process and i'm wondering if you can comment from a normative perspective on which way you lead. >> it's probably in a couple of different ways and i hope to keep it upn a couple of different ways and i hope to keep it upright. but it's a fas>> it's probably f different ways and i hope to keep it upright. but it's a fascinating question about how based on all of this that i have looked at into the 20th century, whether i take a position on limiting this to the area of copyright and how necessary it is, that it always is for maintaining order and creating and sustaining an incentive to create and generally creating punishments

for those who violate the rules. what it shows is that released in limited circumstances and not consistently, it is possible for works to be created and incentivized and for there to be protection. the thing about a practice like this, at least you and i have seen it in many different areas is that it has to be limited almost by definition to a close knit community of some sort that recognizes the issues and it can cooperate with each other and the problem is as the publishing industry group, as it grew and grew up in those cities and populated the midwest and the south and west coast, the

courtesy became harder and harder to maintain and i think in the end it could not be sustained at that level of sort of widespread activity. but even today but we see that there are various industries that do not have to be or have to be hyper incentivized with trademark protection i mentioned one, which is like chefs and culinary investors. that do without the maximalist protection that many copyright proponents urge should be the

case. here is my position is that a one-size-fits-all copyright law is not necessarily the most effective way to protect creative products across the entire spectrum of creativity so that it may be in some cases back, you know, we are now up to protection and that here's a hundred and 20 years of total protection and there are many ways in which we are creating these industries as well as scholarly industries and discovering that this has all kinds of negative effects and i think one thing that the courtesy shows is that there may not be a one-size-fits-all kind of protection and then some cases there can be less protection and in other cases

there might be almost no protection but there will be in limited cases a sort of coming together and agreeing to protect. >> i'm wondering if there's any role for trade associations in this process. your description of courtesy sounds a lot like what the norm says in the distance of copyright in england, where there actually was a kind of gilded court that enforced courtesy among the different individuals in terms of possession and entry of various published things. and this includes what we know about the ownership of intellectual property by printers and stationers.

>> yes. >> were their associations and group meetings of recognized publishers in philadelphia in the 19th century were courtesy among the many other things might be discussed? >> lars engle has asked if there are organizations, that we recognize a courtesy and i'm not aware of this formal organization. ..

in the early part of the 20th century actually enforced by all kinds of sanctions and forced the sale of legitimate designs and dresses and clothing and punished those retailers and others who marketed knockoffs. this was found to be violation of antitrust laws, similarly for a publisher's association that grew increasingly upset because there was a great deal of price

slashing in books sold in major department stores like macy's. the notion of price fixing that covered both copyrighted and and copyrighted works, they were set down by the supreme court for antitrust violations. and our sponsor -- to the extent that this could become a large-scale phenomena and, it could run up against strong antitrust law that might stand that down. they are not going to sue chef so and so for participating, and probably not sue robin williams for recognizing the informal rights of some other stand-up comedian benefit was larger it would run against antitrust of a major sort.

thank you. [applause] >> i never expected to write an entire book on this until i was diagnosed and a relatively young age, diagnosed at 36 and i was astonished at how wrong different i thought it was, how different was going through treatment than what i had heard about cancer and what i expected cancer to be. i sort of expected to join a well oiled machine in which there was not obviously guaranteed but people knew about my particular cancer and when i

found out something really different, i couldn't help starting to write about it. >> a cancer survivor exploit the economic impact of cancer on american society sunday night at 9:00 eastern on after words, part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. >> next from the southern festival of books up panel discussion about issues relating to mental health in america and the rest of the world. this hour-and-a-half long program is next on booktv. >> good afternoon. let me try it again. good afternoon. thank you. good to see you. welcome to our session "prognosis american: mental health at home and abroad". i am gregory melchor-barz, professor at vandenberg university and today's session

is an extension, part of the yearlong program sponsored by the robert penn warren center for the humanities at vanderbilt titled diagnosis in context and i thank you manatees tennessee and vandenberg center for medicine helped and society in addition to the center for their financial support of today's session which is part of a larger series of events going on at the southern press world of books called taking our calls:promises and pitfalls of modern medicine. thank you for coming. today we have three presenters. we are a session, not a panel so each presenter will be presenting separately. ethan watters, kenneth macleish and allen frances will craft their 30 minute time, some will be reading from their texts. others will be snoozing and talking to us but i have to be

ruthless and cut them off at their 30 minute time so that we can move onto another presenter. during our question and answer period if you would be so kind as to address your questions at the microphone that will be set up in the back so that we can be filled by c-span and here everyone's comments and questions so we will be inappropriately. our first presenter is allen frances who arrived last night at 11:00, great to see you. allen frances was chair of the task force, member of the leadership of the dsm free and 3 are, former chair of psychiatry and behavioral science at the school of medicine at duke and lives in california. what part? >> san diego. >> nice. today he will be talking about his latest book, the heaviest of the psychiatric diagnosis, dsm-5, big pharma, and the medicalization of everyday life".

is that what psychiatric diagnosis, dsm-5, big pharma, and the medicalization of everyday life". among many issues tackled in allen frances's text one of the most profound underscore is the politics and economics of diagnosis. please welcome allen frances. >> i am a schmooze their. i have been worried about the current situation in mental health in america and only slightly hopeful about future prognosis. we have become law pill popping society and the wrong people getting the pills. the people who need the pills are not getting them. the people who shouldn't be taking the pills are. the statistics are astounding. 20% of the population takes a psychiatric medication. 20%. anti-depressants 11% of the population and among women over 40, a quarter of women report taking and to depressants. we have four% of teenagers taking stimulus, and 4% taking

anti-depressants. a class that should be restricted to a small percentage of the population have become a modena the most revenue producing drugs in america. $18 billion a year, they are being used for all sorts of things. anti-depressants $12 billion a year, stimulants' $7 billion a year. completely useless and dangerous drug, xanax, is one of the most prescribed drugs in america. the dangers of this are enormous. we have 7% of our population addicted to prescription drugs and it has become a bigger cause of overdose and death. more people die from overdose with prescription drugs than die from overdose with cartel drugs. people are taking many drugs in nursing home said. it is common for people to be on

anti psychotic drugs that shorten their life expectancy. drug companies have moved away from adults because that was a saturated market and they have overwhelmed the kiddie market and the last three epidemics in psychiatry have occurred, a dd, childhood bipolar disorder and autism. how did we get to this point? is there anything we can do about it? one problem is diagnostics. i am responsible for 60% of it on my watch. the diagnostic system is completely irrelevant to the world until 1980. with dsm free diagnosis became interesting. dream interpretation was the subject of cocktail party chatter. after dsm 3 because diagnoses were so clearly spelled out, started talking about zero diagnosis, their boss diagnosis,

diagnosis became a popular topic. to dsm even though they're expensive, fat and boring books are perennial best sellers, hundreds of thousands of copies sold every year, more than -- the lawyers are buying the lot but so are people because it is interesting to study diagnosis. this is good because the diagnostic system is used well. it is bad if the diagnosis system is used for the. 80% of the diagnosis and medication is being done by primary care doctors, not psychiatrists. 80%. ninety% of prescriptions for anti anxiety agents, 80% for anti-depressant, 60% stimulants, 50% for anti psychotics. not by psychiatrists but primary-care doctors. little training usually 7 minutes with a patient. psychiatric diagnosis was a crucial moment of a person's life. if it is done well that can lead to a better life.

done poorly it can haunt and hurt. we don't want to get a psychiatric diagnosis and medication treatment after seven minutes with someone who doesn't really know what they are doing. we could take psychiatric diagnoses as seriously as we take buying a house or car or getting married. should be done with care. it is not being done with care. the illusion was created because dsm 3 and its successors are easy to read. the illusion was they were simple to lose. if anyone could make a diagnosis, it did require clinical judgment, all mental illness was due to a chemical imbalance, treatments for mental illness or a closed solution. the drug companies let off of it and they got up power in america that is unique to us in new zealand and you need to us to advertise directly to consumers. the tv waves, the internet, magazines are filled with

disease mongering. selling the psychiatric deal is a way of selling psychiatric hills. so we have a combination of diagnostic system that can be easily misused. a pharmaceutical industry working hard to make sure it is used in the direction of increasing public awareness when really they don't, insurance companies that doctors right doctors before they provide reversal. because of a period of time to study the person and see where they are going, doctors forced diagnosis, the first visit is almost always the first day of a patient's life. you don't judge people for long-term functioning based on the misery they are feeling at the moment they feel forced to get help. people get better on their own with natural resilience, help from family, change in

environment, we did a study 25 years ago when age was a killer. testing people and steadying before hand their emotional status. after the testing, tell them whether they were positive for negative and do more emotional testing and see what happened. of people who were positive, it was a death sentence usually within a year. people who were positive had instant spike in psychiatric systems. people who were negative felt grateful. by six weeks they were balancing out and back to their usual state. even getting a death sentence, you have aids, people are resilient. and it is over 50%. very little added by active

medication except side effect. most people who get a bill from a doctor after a seven minute appointment will get better on their own but don't know that. they think it is the medicine that often they stay on the madison for a lifetime because they miss a tribute to success for the pill rather than time, resilience. the terrible paradox is while we are overtreating people who don't need it, people who in the pace of everyday life have troubles but get better on their own were undertreating people who desperately need it. only one third of individuals with severe depression get to see at mental health worker in the previous year. only one third. we have closed 1 million psychiatric beds in the last 50 years, during that time a million prison beds for psychiatric patients.

there has been institutional is asian. what was originally going to be a community psychiatry movement with dollars saved from hospitalization, and decent housing, and institutional is station where the person doesn't want health on the outpatient side. admitted to prison. and the behavior problems to be put in solitary and even crazier that makes it hard for them. and all the resources we should be spending on the psychiatric beef that people who are basically normal but expect more problems in life. the against out-of-control psychiatric diagnosis, dsm-5,

big pharma, and the medicalization of everyday life," we have to save the designations of normal for people who are now being misdiagnosed. the new diagnostic system which came out a few months ago makes matters that were already bad much worse. we discovered even though the loss provision 20 years ago was very conservative the way it was used, we have at the bent -- epidemics and it was tripled and autism which increased by 40 times, childhood bipolar disorder which increased by 40 times and adult bible in disorder was doubled. a conservative document in directly led to the tremendous increases in diagnostic legs that were mostly exaggerated. opens up the floodgates to create a kind of diagnostic hyperinflation. we already had diagnostic -- turn it into diagnostic

hyperinflation. in dsm 5 normal briefs will be misdiagnosed as major depressive disorder. all you have to do after losing the love of your life is have sadness, loss of interest, loss of appetite, trouble sleeping and less energy. you have that for two weeks, two short weeks and you can be misdiagnosed as having major depression disorder. i have been through that. i still have minor cognitive disorder. old age, cognitive disorder, there is no way at this point we can accurately identify people who will go on to alzheimer is. there is no treatment for. is premature to be labeling not be able to find my car or this room as pre dementia. i may be there soon but doesn't make sense to label me now especially since there is no treatment. i have binge eating disorder.

you only eat one huge gouge a week for 12 weeks. i eat two or three for 55 years. my grandkids could easily be on their worst days diagnosed with destructive mood regulation disorder previously known as temperatures regulation disorder. they are normal kids that get them on a bad day when the doctor doesn't know what he is doing the diagnosis is made and attention deficit disorder will be very easy to get for of adults. performance enhancing drugs and recreational is clear that these will be abuse even more than they are now. 30% of college kids are getting drugs in the secondary market, people sell their drugs, the secondary market, 30% of college kids, 10% of high school kids getting diverted stimulus because it has become so ubiquitous. one anecdote. in canada a study of a million

kids, the best predictor of adb was when you were born in december or january. the youngest kid in the class especially level was twice as likely to get the diagnosis as the oldest in the class. we should be spending more money on smaller classes, a gym teacher's the kids can be active rather than mislabeling as medical problems we are really educational problems. you will hear a lot about ptsd which is over diagnosed because we don't give our troops and easy transition to civilian life and this is the only way they can get better. the symptoms are ubiquitous but we don't have to label it a medical disease as the only way they can get medical care. when there is an economic recession linked to depression disability go way up. some of that is real depression but a lot of it is we don't provide enough of a safety net for people who are unemployed. returned a social problem into a medical problem. the only way to pay the rent is

disability based on depression's so we are turning social problems and to psychiatric problems. inappropriately. the dsm manual is too important in decisions outside the confidence, drug companies are out of control, spend twice as much money on marketing and controlling politicians as opposed to research and most of the research is an infomercial for products to extend their patent life. they haven't been successful in getting more effective drugs, just slightly changed the profile to focus on revenue rather than the health of the population. is there any chance all this can change in the future? or real david and goliath problem because hundreds of billions of dollars in america spent on promoting overdiagnosis and overtreatment, tiny amounts of money, in the low millions spent on confronting it.

the best help is not from psychiatrist but the rest of medicine surgery. there is an initiative promoted by the greatest medical journal in the world, the british medical journal, helped along very much by consumer reports and a few universities focus on this to make clear how much america is overtesting and overtreating not just in psychiatry but across the board that we spend twice as much for patients as other countries with these results. i personally right now have a friend who died from kidney disease that was caused when she got contrast cat scan testing for lung cancer. the lung cancer won't kill her. but she got testing she didn't need is destroying her kidneys. the evidence is the movement towards a preventive medicine that we get there early, intervene early, reduce the

burden of illness, while the oversold across medicine. the best example, two years ago prostate testing, not recommended. prostate testing didn't increase the life expectancy of the people tested as the mortality was the same but it did ruin their lives with excessive treatment, surgical and medical. it turned out we have been doing too much testing for breast cancer in population too young and without risk factors. we expect women to have the same bone density of 60 as they had at 24 and everyone at a certain age starts -- we are treating hypertension too early. there is a wonderful initiative called choosing wisely that you should all google and follow closely. with ten medical specialties including psychiatrists trying to identify areas of overtreatment, overdiagnosis and to slow down the system so that it is not just cost-effective

but better for people, sakai at tree will be part of this effort. we don't have the power in psychiatry to change all the problems in our field but if america wises up peer of the treatment is sometimes applied treatment, early diagnosis is often misdiagnosed. we often should be devoting our efforts more to the people who are really sick rather than overtreating or overdiagnosing those who are really well. that is the best chance for the future. the best example of the possibility of change is big tobacco. the 25 years ago big tobacco ruled in the way big pharma rules now and no one would have imagined a small group of people trying to to alert the public to the risks of smoking could have any degree of success and it changed like that because they couldn't advertise and because they were stigmatized. i think the conquest of

overdiagnosis and overtreatment, the taming of the industrial complex is the same way, the public will have to realize we have gone overboard, we have to have a directive that brings the best interests of the patient to the fore, choosing wisely initiative is the best sign to me the we are moving in that direction. i think there is some hope the despite the david and goliath mismatch that we have a slingshot that may be successful in the future. >> we have questions? >> excellent. excellent presentation, thank you. appreciate how you didn't read from a script. so refreshing to see that. i have asked burgers syndrome --asperger's syndrome and the

media this course is troubling with autism spectrum disorders. it is a disease to be cured. i find that very insulting and i find it a symptom of a narrow typical society that cannot accept neurological differences. i am fine away i am and i don't want to be cured. i am eccentric and that is who i am and i feel i am a good contributing member of society so i wanted to know your thoughts about that. thank you. >> we have homogenized everything in life. we are eating all the same genetic corn, we homogenized school curricula, less individuality in education, i think people are different. evolution of the diversity. the great expression here is god must love beatles, he certainly

made enough species of them, rain forests don't have one kind of tree, they have hundreds of different species, we can't tell from apart. but it is useful to have the diversity because you never know what will come up in the future and evolution is playing the long game. very often making things uniform, standardizing, factory type stuff in the short run works that disaster in the long run. we are different because evolution wanted us to be different. the tribe needed to have some people who would see the world little differently because there will be situations you'll see it clearer than everyone else in the tribe. it needed people to be compulsive, needed people to be demonstrative. and need people to be paranoid and narcissistic but there isn't one way of being that is best for a personal best for the tribe. having diversity would be -- i reviewed every definition when i wrote one and they are nonsense.

the definition of mental disorder is works very well operationally to decide what should be considered a mental disorder a foot in a manual or who has a mental disorder. we can define the individual disorder is quite clearly but the constant mental disorder is the vague as the concept of illness. there's no good concert for illness. what is an illness? try looking up, you'll never get a good definition. i talk about definitions of normal. there is no good definition of normal. most definitions of normal get to what is abnormal and most definitions of abnormal get to the totality of what is normal. and psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, it is always arbitrary where we draw the line between normal and abnormal. in 1860, the first census of mental disorders. there were six disorders, and a tiny part of the population had

them. we have a couple hundred disorders ants twenty-five% of the population will be labeled as mentally disordered one year and 50% lifetime and if we keep going like this pretty soon everyone will have a bunch of disorders before they die. week expand the system and any time you make a small change in the manual, we didn't realize, we thought it might triple the rate of classic autism, we never dreamed it would go to 1 in haiti last year, one in 50 now, one in 38 in korea. the rates are arbitrary, the definitions are fuzzy. it is a populist boundary. you make tiny changes in definition you capture millions of patients. if we had known asberger's with exploded like this i don't think we would have included it.

better to consider it as a problem for some but not necessarily a mental disorder especially at a mile above will that you occupied. >> i have a question. to use the metaphor at the end of your talk about david and goliath it occurs to me that you use to the goliath, you were the editor of the dsm and now you are on this other role of being outside and criticizing. i am curious what the reaction has been to your book and how receptive the profession of psychiatry and mental health in general is to criticism you brought to the table? >> there is nothing i said today that isn't absolutely common sense. nothing in the book, absolute common sense is all i have. i am not a deep person, just have common sense. the only people in the world who don't get it our experts in the field. i have been -- they now lot

about it. everything about nothing and nothing about everything. i have been hurting experts for 35 years. i never heard an expert once say my area is too widespread. my area needs to be reduced. .. i think clinicians in general get it but the experts in the field have been very stubborn. a lot of them were my friends

and i was not unable to convince them of the fact that they should have had a public trust that went beyond their own narrow perception. they felt what they were doing was right. a lot of us talk about drug companies influencing them. i don't think it was a financial conflict of interest that led to these terrible decisions. i think was purely an intellectual conflict of interest and in a way intellectual conflicts of interest are dangerous. it's harder to confront and expose then it is financial conflict of interest. >> we have time for one more question. the eye which is like to say i think you are right on target. i think all of us have some mental disorder as we go through life and hopefully we overcome bad as time goes on but is there anybody that is really perfectly normal? i just don't know.

i think normal is today a little bit abnormal but i think you are right on target areas there's too much over diagnosis of things and treating them probably the wrong way. >> there is no definition of normal that holds up against careful scrutiny. it's culturally determined concept that has too much power because once you get the labels mentally disordered lots of things happened that can be good for you if the label is reasonably accurate but can be very harmful if it's not. i am saying we should be restricting the term mental disorder to the five to 10% of the population who has such clear-cut symptoms that everyone says they need help but they are really distressed. they are really impaired. we need to help them in a certain portion of that population will desperately need medication. we should not be extending the term mental disorder with all the patients with it to 25% of

population at 50% in any given lifetime and extending that further because at the boundaries it's very hard to diagnose. what i would be doing and recommending for you as consumers and family members, it's always a good idea when it's unclear to take time to learn a great deal about the situations and not trust first opinions. get second opinions and get opinions from your family and not to rush into a diagnosis, not to rush into treatment. most people with a milder problems ultimately won't. psychotherapy is terribly underutilized. psychotherapy is as effective as medication for mild to moderate problems across different symptom areas. it has much longer lasting effects and in the long run it's cheaper. i'm not talking about psychoanalysis. i'm talking about reef treatments within the context of

dean -- 10 to 15 sessions. we should be thinking about normalizing the milder problems and not rushing to diagnose, to use advice and counseling. when that doesn't work, psychotherapy. a diagnosis should come only after all of this. it shouldn't be prior to it. >> what was the cause of the paradigm shift? >> i didn't shift. that's a very good question. when i took over dsm-iv i was very concerned the system is changing too much and expanding so we have very conservative approach. we have 94 suggestions for diagnoses. we have rejected almost everything. we thought at the end of the day we had done a good job. we thought we had a good plan on

the expansion of the diagnostic system and we were terrifically naïve. the rejected childhood a polar disorder the drug companies at our university were able to convince the field that childhood bipolar disorder could be applied to kids who didn't have moods but temper tantrums. the biggest goliath in the room is -- so i was trying my best and it failed. i only got involved in criticizing dsm-5 when i realized it would take this current situation which is bad enough and make it much worse by opening the floodgates to all these mild diagnoses at the boundary. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you allen.

next kenneth macleish an anthropologist and assistant professor of medicine health and society at bangor university where he teaches trauma and the anthropology of healing. his research and writing look at how american military servicemembers and their families and communities experienced war and military institutions in their daily lives. today he will be reading from and discussing his look "making war at fort hood" life and uncertainty in the military community. ken's lucas beautifully crafted and beautifully written. i thought the book was all coming together for me as a reader in the section entitled spaghetti. when you pick up that book that's a chapter to read but it all made sense as i read the books postscript that details the shooting spree of nidal hasan a powerful topic and a powerful writer. please welcome kenneth macleish.

[applause] >> thank you so much for the kind words and thanks to all of you for being here today and thanks to the southern festival of books and humanities tennessee and of course the warren center and the center for -- society. it's really a joy to be able to be here with you all today to be part of this. like craig mentioned i'm a cultural anthropologist and so in a way the very core of what i study is just what is normal for particular groups of people in their lives and their daily experience and very much the way allen was describing in describing in such a way to give us a sense of how high the stakes of normalcy can be and

why it really matters to understand what's normal from place to place and person to person. in my work i'm particularly concerned with ways that people experienced war and military institutions and this phenomena that for most of us in this room and maybe not all of us but probably most of us in this room seemed to be relatively remote from a regular experience and we tend to regard as exceptional and certainly outside of the norm. my research and writing took place at the u.s. army fort hood in central texas in 2007 in 2008 and fort hood is one of the biggest military installations in the world. it's grown to 50,000 soldiers and during the time that i was there a number of people stationed there have come back from fort hood after participating in some of the heaviest fighting in the iraq

war. of course this is a war that went on for quite a long time. any soldiers at war could went through numerous and quite lengthy deployments. this is a place where war is very much a part of everyday life were in many ways it's like a chronic condition built in the structure of peoples work their livelihoods and their families rather than an exception, rather than something that happened that was once far away. it's also a place where war and the effects of war were normalized people's mental and emotional experience as well. again not as an exception but as a standard aspect of everyday life. i am really thrilled to be sharing this panel today with such insightful and important critics about mental health or

what allen calls in the subtitle of his book the medicalization of ordinary life. in no small part because it's tremendously important in my own work. many categories of the lay public and the military itself understands the human toll of wars through medical categories not the least of which is post-traumatic stress disorder, ptsd. and one of the things that really began to strike me in my research was the way these medical categories occurred against this background of a different set of norms and normalcy in with the rest of us are accustomed to and what science and medicine may have had in mind when they constructed these categories. at the very least they have incredibly complicated histories. and so there are complex

challenges and profound vulnerabilities that care your eyes military life that are not necessarily well captured by many of the diagnostic labels that are applied to those experiences. labels and diagnoses can be incredibly important for connecting people with care and compensation that they need and that they have earned and they deserve but they can also blind us to some of the broader field of what it is that's a normal experience in the military. and so with that in mind the passage i'm going to share today is not specifically about diagnosis but rather about the broader field of conditions and with apologies i am going to read, but i hope that it will be worth everyone's attention.

before it i begin i just wanted to also add that i am incredibly grateful to an incredibly indebted to the people who shared their stories and their trust and their insight with me to help me make this book what it is. the title of this passage is -- the departure and return of events the book ended deployments are called bureaucratic roll call combined with either a prolonged and devastating farewell or a quick and joyful reunion. they have the sort of folk mythic significance and military communities as scenes of event fullness and intensity that defined the collective experience of absence, anxiety, separation and strange detachment. the stonefaced inhumanity of the war apparatus apparatus and this definitely -- extravagantly human frailty of

the people caught up in it. people wanted to know what i was afforded if i had been to a manifest and they wanted to make sure i did go to one. a lot of the time the manifest their health and jim -- gym's and indeed the gym is such a familiar scene of imminent absence and endangerment that its bleachers and brick walls provide the setting for the ads for military life insurance that appear in army times and other military publications. it seems both odd and appropriate that this wrenching ritual of departure should be set in a place laden with youthful associations of sex, competition disciplined play humiliation and urging bodily prowess. the gym looks like a normal good sized high school gym with patriotic slogans and i can soaring eagles geometric designs of stars and stripes on cinderblock walls above stacked bleachers. the gym's afforded due so much duty for manifest for their signs hanging up permanently

banners with messages specific to the occasion to serving as constant reminders it would seem to soldiers playing basketball or lifting weights. of the doors out in the parking lot, come home safe. on the opposite wall the first thing you see when you enter, will come home. rooms are configured for coming from and going to war. for whatever reason this manifest is outdoors on the lawn and parking lot next to unit headquarters battalion on battalion avenue. there is a long line of battalion hq building stretching for a mile or more through this part of the posts and like all the other cool things this one is square bland and tanned inside and out. not much to it but a long corridor a reception desk a handful of offices a conference room. the walls are mostly bare. in front the well-kept lawn slopes to the street behind a long stretch parking lot filling now with cars and the barracks

in next-door at neuroequally nondescript warehouse were in a couple of our soldiers will line up to retrieve their weapons. the manifest is for several soldiers a good part of a field artillery battalion. some soldiers to plan the next day and a smaller number have gone it. field artillery was at the time of this writing one of the only combat arms branches with positions open to women so the soldiers are mostly men. in accordance of mine daniel has invited me to this event. her husband is the senior nco who has already served two tours so he got assigned to the units raided catchment while the rest is deployed. daniels tall broad shouldered and broad shouldered him with a disposition that was once cheery and forceful has spotted me in the parking lot of the organization were we volunteered a few weeks previous and told me where the unit was deploying and shepherded me to a series of events leading me to the departure. first there was a massive

briefing in the auditorium with powerpoint slides handouts outlining for families family members to tedious detail of deployment where the soldiers would be when they could and couldn't be reached to the contact with questions and problems circumstances. the army was taking the soldiers to iraq and it would not bring them back and tell it was with them. the next event was a family day a couple of days later a company picnic for the entire that jeanne described as mandatory fun. there was barbeque donated by a host of chefs from all over central texas served served under tents on a bare field watched over by the façade of the stadium and the giant water tower. there was the flag for fall tournament with teams drawn from the italians and impromptu blonde dancing blaring over the

pa. manifest in contrast isn't about getting ready are getting together. it is about saying goodbye. the soldiers will gather at 10 to a few less duties and with little fanfare assemble in formation and toward the plain white school buses that will carry them to the army airfield where they will then board a plane to kuwait and convoy to baghdad. the wives and children and friends of parents of many of these soldiers will gather and wait with them past on easy glass couple of hours together before a good life. they will watch the buses depart and they themselves will desert areas around 10:00 a.m. soldier show up in uniform toting bags big sacks they will carry with them and vigor.ticket donned in the parking lot and loaded onto a plane. the soldiers cluster in groups and stand in lines across the parking lot the loading dock next-door waiting on squadron platoon leaders were comrades

who check their names off the list. they pass in and out out of the backdoor hq building that opens onto a strip of sidewalk in the parking off where the buses will fill up before too long. the soldiers settle all over the lawn joined by wives and kids and parents and siblings and friends. the field of crew cuts interspersed with blue jeans t-shirts and sneakers longhair. two little girls in matching shirts alternate between cupcakes and clinging to their dads lakes. teenage boy holds the leash of a pit bull puppy with source on its back. the crowd grows and spills across the lawn around to the front of the building. it's a summer day in texas mostly overcast but still hot. people crowd into the scant patches of shade. soldiers without family or visitors to see them off in groups by themselves. family sprawling multigenerational groups. little kids run around playing tag.

couples hold each other as closely as they can in public. it's an exercise of waiting. everyone sitting through these precious and painful last couple of hours. as a script the edge of the crowded scenes from from the outside surprisingly up the. not much different than family day the week before. soldiers with soldiers soldiers together with families, families together with families an odd mix of tedious official obligation in the pleasure of socializing. the attention of the deploymendeploymen t surprisingly not palpable or at least not to me. danielle introduces me to the wives of the ncos a couple of officers be the tying commander. for many of them this is their third deployment. one of these ladies in her early 30s tells me a lot of young couples won't make it. another woman gestures to the crowd of soldiers and points out almost half have a patch on the right salt shoulder indicating they there've not been played before. they have all been told to expect the deployment to last 15

months and though they will and upcoming home in 12 instead the preemptive extension the whole year plus another season ways on everyone's minds. just stay busy the sergeant's wife said. that's a get through. in a accordance tells me i authority cried once in private. when i talked to this friend a few months earlier she told me she preferred to stay away from the manifest that she and her husband and kids didn't want to be around other people's negativity when they were trying to save their own good dies. people who have been through before have done their talk at home she said. maybe that accounts for the sense of relative calm. earlier this morning she read the notes that her middle and high school age kids had given to their dad and she was proud of them. they were old enough to express themselves well now she said. her daughter quoted psalms 13 in her note. time passes relatively uneventfully. after while a couple dozen

soldiers are called and formation and then a couple dozen more and then they disperse again. two buses arrived. they look innocuous. danielle jokes the family readiness group should have a fund-raiser where whites can pay money for a chance to smash the hell out of one of those buses. the buses are a few feet from the curb their engines off. there's another formation of an danielle says he just wait. they have said this a lot as i've heard in last couple of days and now all morning long. just a few minutes when it starts gene says to me his voice conveying something between scorn and an uneasiness. the women have brought me here to see -- the scene of of the crime as opposed to the families and kids continued to mill around and then the soldiers begin to shoulder their weapons and move towards the buses. little kids have comprehended and are hoisted up by their debts and put that down.

here in in their couples twist into final agonizing clinches and hold on for dear life. once upon the soldiers pull themselves away from their wives and kids arms stretched out hands gripping and release. the soldiers walk across a few feet of asphalt and form an orderly line along the bus and slowly file along. i look for the crying. there is a little here and there. it won't start until the buses pull away danielle murmurs to me. minutes drag on as the soldiers board. nothing about this melodrama happens cleanly or quickly for particularly dramatically. some women russia to steal one last embrace. there is a constant racket a constant record of activity squads and platoons shouting questions names called off jokes. the soldiers are not crying or that i can see. some are smiling. most look a little dazed and tense. they are with each other now on the other side of the strip of

sidewalk and on the the sidewalk and along the families and wives and girlfriends are with each other. the obligations and boundaries for the previous couple of hours can be forgotten and forgotten have snapped cleanly back into place producing a kind of intimate social alchemy. one minute the fatigue the lungs only to the people who have come to see him do there embrace us and smiles and last words in the next minute he belongs only to the army. again without preamble of the buses drive off down the parking lot. the soldiers are now deployed. i look around for the deluge of tears afraid to look and doing it anyway. i see wet cheeks and eyes women hugging. but there is no spectacle and indeed the crowd a sense many of them are begun. on the one hand it seems like a limited moment but for everyone who didn't get on the buses there is no passage to the other side and no clear ending. there are signs protocols and all that for sure but no pop

nowhere gil yet, no flood of tears foreclosure. just the closure come in 12 months or 15 when the soldiers returned? can it when they know they will be headed out again after scan of 12 months home in that filled in with long days of work and weekends away from home for field training? there is no closure only whatever quantity of tears and persisting with daily life with normalcy in the face of the burden of fear, anxiety and absence that now lies before the wives, the girlfriends, the parents, the children and in a different form the soldiers themselves. instead of closure there is the daily work of not coming undone. i said goodbye to some of the women i met and wish them well. danielle looked around for gene. he disappeared minutes ago. a moment later he emerges his giant action figure frames driving out the backdoor the building. he left me and canned with all

the bowling wives. i know he replies why do you think i went back and? you needed to see that she retorts and walks off. gene turns to me. my wife does understand if it's hard for them it's even hearted -- harder for them and because you feel like you are abandoning your family. she called after me when i left the last time and i didn't look back. she was mad. she didn't understand. his voice has more of its aggressive snap than usual. the other soldiers have told me this too. you feel bad when you get on the bus. you look around and see everyone else on the verge of breaking down wiping their eyes and looking away, but you don't let it take you over. the women wanted to see me crying. she me to know this other side. each wanted me to know what the other i think cannot help but now but with the each insist the other has somehow failed to understand. the manifest appears to be a break of some sort. he gets built up as a break reacted to as a break and of course it is but it's also an

ongoing condition that moves in longer and slower waives. that being the absence problems of anticipation, duration, waiting, being stuck. the way through is at worst attrition and best endurance and impact is probably some combination of the two. this is what it means to cry beforehand at home or to know that you will need to stay busy. this slow movement through time of these attachments between people is arguably the feature that makes such a mess of them. it poses the dilemma of which, should matter more or less than another or another or another. thank you. [applause] >> are there questions? >> i have a question. i'm curious about issues of access that you had and whether the army was welcoming of you both in terms of the soldiers themselves or the apparatus and

i'm always curious about whether you have had reactions to the book from either the subjects are anyone in the military apparatus? >> i was really fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time on the base working with a civilian while the interior operation where i was invited as a guest and where he worked as a volunteer, and where he had permission to conduct my research and it was in that capacity that i was able to spend so much time on the base. as often happens with research you throw out a bunch of different feelers trying to link up with people who you are interested in speaking to you and you see which one is getting the furthest end you work with what you've got. i also communicated with the public affairs office at fort hood which was rather slower going than the other avenues that i had for working with people and eventually abandoned

that kind of formal access when i had enough folks on hand you know, to get what i was interested in. and in terms of access interpersonally, you know i really expected when i went that i would run into a lot of people who were really suspicious or defensive or reluctant to talk about their experiences and for the most part it was the case. i did run into a couple of people here and there who were like okay you are that researcher writing that a? i don't want you to talk about me and of course i respected that and i was obliged to. for the most part i was tremendously blown away by the generosity of people to share their experiences and i think

there's a lot to be said for just being an interested outsider in a community of people that potentially feels misunderstood or miss recognized by the rest of the world or much of the rest of the world that surrounds them. i think that we know. i was lucky to meet a tone of fantastic people including a few folks that i became close friends with. in terms of reactions that i've gotten, it's mostly been positive. one of the things i find myself thinking about a lot is as an academic i'm obliged to write an academic book and i know that has -- i tried very hard to make it a decent work that would be accessible to as many people as possible, but it still academic in its tone.

i am concerned about the problem of access that poses potentially but you know among the friends and acquaintances who i am still in touch with from the field, i have gotten at least well wishes from several of them and much more than that in terms of feedback which has been tremendously gratifying. also the book is relatively new too so i'm still waiting to hear from a lot more folks. >> i am curious about if you saw any signs of dissent questioning? why are we taking part in this lunacy of american imperialism? you know the corporate media obviously tons to not