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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  November 3, 2013 5:50am-8:01am EST

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were not so close off from society. there was a lot of penetration to outside and inside. people delivering refreshments, bringing the bottles, juice and water, making these deliveries into dachau. airports, these sites. dino from the holocaust museum's incredible research, the whole
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camp, we have to understand is much larger. we also have more guards. i can't believe we can talk about 40,000 kids and not raise the number of female guards to 3,500. that story will change. i wanted to show that this was something much more widespread and very in its form. >> the question children have, it appears -- inaudi [inaudible]
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>> you have got -- this same area -- it is -- this part is a military occupied zone. they cannot produce it. and the rest by the ukraine. a big reception here. so western russia, moscow, leningrad, that is part of the village of occupation. goldman were there too. any soldier's homes set up in that area, this is geographic.
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>> the other question i had you mentioned those who were killed. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> absolutely. women were really -- this is one of their main activities featured in the book. i have thousands of regular order police and secretaries and they are massing on huge amount
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of plunder either because they get access near the killing centers. some are from the actual mass killing sites. the nurse that i highlighted today at one point described to me how she was charged with going through the clothing that had been taken from the killing site and was being amended and repair and send back to gemini through the welfare association which was the women's professional charitable organizations so they are handling the movement of little jewish clothes, cleaning them, mending them and sending them to german refugees. this is part of it. the secretary in that case because so many jews were deported to -- from germany and killed in a place outside the
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city, bonds filled to overflowing with jewish belongings, and they developed a whole language around this which i think there is so much going on behind the scenes that is part of this history. jewish sausage, the women organizing the food that is confiscated coming into the office, like in the office people are putting food out or maybe they didn't have a celebration and taking a beating this food and talking about it, the gold taken from the bodies in the safe, as a secretary, very important incidents, she needed a gold filling, went to the dentist and needed a gold filling and her boss said her bring a certificate and you can have access, take the gold that is in the states.
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she was questioned about that after the war and insisted that she did not have that bold, it somehow got lost. she did not deny taking it, she said it got lost at the end of the more when their house was raided during the occupation. the prosecutor didn't tell her to open it up. >> a lot of these killing fields out there -- did you find any stories about efforts in this area? [inaudible]
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>> what we think of in terms of women being mediators or nurturing or may be involved in more resistance activities, maybe even encouraging their husband not to be so violent, playing these kind of roles and their worry these cases. there's one case in particular that is in the book, and she was involved in hiding a jewish girl, and she was a i think the wife of a force there and -- forster, she was killed. the judge in the verdict in that, the not the court at the end of the war said she should have known better. he came from an educated households and should have known better. these stories of women who defied the system, they are very
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hard to piece together. but they are there. i think that is something that has to be researched. i don't think they are as numerous as the picture i've portrayed today. the reason i know about her is she was hiding those photographs and other things from the dachau camp in her family's behalf, at that was a smart hiding place. it was a -- for her civil courage. for various reasons, tried to do something. what could i have done? the nurse i was talking about,
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what could i have done. it was the end of this entire system. what could i have done? [inaudible question] >> it is so hard to document or even interpret what might be signs of feelings of shame or remorse or embarrassment. when you talk to witnesses, men and women who were involved in this, even involved in the crime, it is -- first of all women are not traditionally telling gruesome war stories so is difficult for them to recount that level of an unpleasant part of the past, would rather not
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talk about that. when it is discussed it is difficult for me to interpret psychologically what their feelings are about that. if someone says to me, and this has happened in the documentation as well as in person, starts to speak about jews and use the language of the time, anti-semitic language of the time as if time had not passed, then i can conclude that that ideology is so embedded in their identity and their thinking that that is probably how they were before but it is really hard especially with the passage of time for people to express that kind of -- you don't know if sometimes we mix up shame with remorse. it is very tricky to know what is being expressed when the person is having a hard time
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talking about what she witnessed or did. [inaudible conversations] >> we have this ability to adapt. human adaptability. if you are not on the receiving end of it, if you talk to -- if you are not a victim of the crime, if you have a power of committing it, in terms of trauma and being able to distance and adapt and move on it is probably a lot easier but a psychologist could tell me otherwise. >> along those lines, you are talking about something unique. [inaudible]
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>> i think the basic human behavior that comes out of this history is not specifically german. those were special circumstances that brought that out at that moment in germany in the 20th century and the jewish population. that is very historically specific about the kinds of brutality and motivation behind it, the greed, the way men and women participate in this, the system to create genocide is not uniquely german. hitler did not invent genocide, he did not invent auschwitz.
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>> about how these regions got out and information that started with your going to do. how many witnesses did you find? >> my research took me to many archives in d.c. the holocaust museum, i went to many archives in germany, national and regional, local archives, back to ukraine several times, was in poland, france, paris. i went to various repositories to collect documentation, national archives in washington and quite a bit of field work so starting an interview project in germany to collect witness testimony and that often got me
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closer to people who were more involved. whenever i found about these women i sent letters, made phone calls, tried to find out if they were still alive and see if i could talk to them and ended up searching for these women because this material was rich enough to tell their stories and they were representative of these different types that identified but i talked to many more women and couldn't get enough, and the entire trajectory to put the chapter in that context from 1920-present. i spoke, interviewed 40 witnesses and the 13 women here, in direct contact with seven of them. several had passed away, one died in 2000 or 2003 so many of
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them had already passed away. >> and their children? >> yes i did. [inaudible] >> rock salt, yes. right. [inaudible] >> i didn't have a chance to talk to her. she died in -- she died in 2003. mensa petrie died in 2000. i could speak -- i spoke to the prosecutor, talked to the defense attorney, talked to jewish witnesses who went to the trial.
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very interesting. but she was completely -- she conveyed absolutely no remorse. she was actually the way she conducted herself in the courtroom and the prosecutors said to me -- she is someone i would never want to encounter on a moonlit night, she was ice cold and in the court room was not a sympathetic defendant whatsoever. she was indicted for aiding and abetting in the killing of 9,000 jews. [inaudible] >> absolutely. that is another issue. applying the old prussian criminal code which is regular homicide, regular murder in a context of genocidal kind of
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system. joint fit. but it can be interpreted differently. today it is being interpreted differently. it is up to the prosecutor and the judge. after the war she went to this west german investigative authority and send documentation about people she spoke to, soldiers who admitted they had taken part in mass shootings, she denounced them to the authorities after the war. she was a judge in germany after the war. she told me my efforts were rebuffed. and the records she submitted in the west german -- i could see what she sent in and how they were reacting to it. you had your hand up. [inaudible]
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>> cannibalism would be references to the soviet pows left in these camps, three million peer dubyas who were killed during the war because they were shot or the nazi abandoned them in these pow camps and they had no rations and resorted to cannibalism. the jewish sausage is more about a kind of office talked-about plunder coming from food. >> based on your sudden history, germany now accept the reinterpretation that the people knew what was happening and that
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is the way it has been taught and therefore although it may not be -- it is. have they come to grips with the enemy within as opposed to the previous explanation that it was a large -- [inaudible] >> you are getting to what extent germans have come to terms with this history and to they -- the broader complicity. >> the question that the world war ii generation dying off rapidly. assessing this and dealing with it or being augmented with the concept of american history.
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>> west germans in particular over the years developed what in aftermath studies became model history of restitution issues, more realization activities, secondary education. what has happened in germany since the war is quite remarkable and impressive for a post genocidal society. but you have got the reality of individuals who participate in these crimes. this is specific to west germany and also austria. so this is about wanting to return to normality and normal understanding of women's behavior and that kind of normality and yes. putting that history behind them and moving forward and there were steps the west germans took that were clearly indicative of
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napoli moving forward but letting people get away with murder. so the legal reforms, they let people re-enter the civil service. indicted eventually for killing 11,000 jews was able to go back into the police force after the war. these people could continue their careers in these professions and were clearly involved in the holocaust. that kind of story that surely shows the system was not aggressive enough. they could have interpreted the law differently. they became all about interpretation. they couldn't get -- the ukrainian guard who was convicted, that was a new understanding of the law. they decided at this late stage that because he was a guard, the primary purpose was to kill.
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it was a murder operation that one is by association guilty because you are working in a killing operation. that is the task. suddenly this was a broader interpretation of that. that could have been the case earlier on and it wasn't. the germans in general there are generational issues, confrontation, young germans, those, a lot of fatigue with this subject matter. they don't get enough of it in college. the university level, the time you approach this seriously. and try to get holocaust studies. and into the curriculum at the university level because people need to be trained to run the memorials in this history in
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germany. there are pieces in the system that are not perfect. we are still working on that. it is difficult to this day. there are still some taboos in terms of talking about this history. >> do you view the families -- what are they thinking? [inaudible] >> yes, i did interview one of the perpetrators, the family of one of the perpetrators. it is an interesting story and i don't -- i don't want to go into a lot of detail about it. they believed that their mother was so much a perpetrated during the war but a victim of postwar
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in justice. they pointed the finger at the east germans for arresting them mother, keeping her in jail for life and killing their father. that was their experience. because you cannot blame the children for the sins of the father. their experience was loss of their parents after the war. [inaudible] >> in the early 90s when i went to graduate school. i was exposed to it in the 80s. i was in vienna in 1985 studying german and music, nineteenth century, hadn't gotten to the 20th century yet. and that fat point -- the scandal came out, i was going to some of these meetings or even
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smaller towns, i was listening to these former austrian soldiers talk about the eastern front and realized -- oh. one last question. [inaudible] >> lack of investigations and trials. there has not been a war crimes trial against a nazi war criminal in austria since 1975. the cases you read in my book about the women in terms of the few that were present pursued and the way they were treated as defendants was a little too much respect. [inaudible]
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>> thank you very much, thank you. [applause] [inaudible] >> you are watching booktv. nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> john foster dulles had recently died when the superairport in virginia was being built and president eisenhower immediately announce the airport would be named dulles airport. for a while when kennedy took over he didn't want to name it after a crusty old cold warrior but there was pushed back from others and the decision was made to name it after dulles. you can see the film clip of kennedy opening the airport with eisenhower there, he pulled back
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the curtain and hung the curtain on this giant bust of john foster dulles and that stance in the middle of this big airport. i went to see it when i was writing this book and i couldn't find it. i started asking the security guards where is the big bust of dollars? no one had even heard of that. was a long process and finally thanks to the washington airports authority i was able to discover that the bus had been taken away from its place in the middle of the airport and is now in that close conference room opposite baggage claim number 3. i find this a wonderful metaphor for how the dulles brothers who exercised earth shattering power and were able to make and break the government have now been effectively forgotten and airbrushed out of our entire history. >> with john foster at state and alan at cia the dulles brothers
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led avert and covert operations for good portion of the cold war. find out what the ramifications can still be felt some 60 years later with stephen kinzer tonight at 8:00 on c-span's q and a. this fall booktv is marking our fifteenth anniversary and this weekend we look back at 2007. the national book award that year went to tim weiner for legacy of ashes:a history of the cia and that henry paula achieve award given to andrew roberts for a history of the english-speaking peoples since 1900. national book critics circle award went to brother, i am dying. the haitian port of recounted her family's emigration to the united states on booktv. >> uncle frank remembers the scene. was difficult to register emotion in the voice box but sounded like he was caught up in something he had no way of
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understanding. is not true. they can't put you in prison, you have a visa, you have papers. did you tell them how long you have been coming here? uncle frank asked uncle joe's of to put the officer on the phone again. he is going to crone, the officer said. decaf, uncle frank said. he is 81 years old, he is an old man. uncle frank asked if he could speak to my uncle one more time. the officer told him we already have a translator for him and hung up. at 11:00 p.m. my uncle was given some chips and soda and again. at 11:45 he sign a form saying his personal property was returned to him. the money, the wrist watch, at 11:00 i received my phone call. at 4:20 a.m. my uncle was transported to the airport satellite detention area which was in another concourse.
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by then my uncle was so cold he wrapped the airplane blanket he was given tightly around him as he curled in a fetal position on the cement bed until 7:15 a.m.. at 7:30 a.m. they left the detention area to board of van to chrome. he was handcuffed best of my uncle would not be handcuffed because of his age. the officer agreed not to handcuff my uncle but said to tell him that if he tried to escape he would be shot. >> over the next few weeks booktv in its fifteenth year on c-span2 is taking a look back at authors, books and publishing news. you can watch all the programs from the past 15 years online at booktv.org. >> what is incredibly important is a concept of universal service and that is the idea that all americans no matter where you live should have access to comparable and
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affordable telecommunications services. as we have gone through this evolution over the last several years from telephone service to a broadband world to an ip world, how do we ensure world americans have access to the same services and applications that come across on those networks? that has been a big focus legislatively and with the fcc, talking about how important it is to maintain the tenets of universal service. what that means and how that mechanism has allowed folks in wrote areas to have comparable service? >> making the jump from copper wire to fiber-optic in rural america monday on the communicators that 8:00 eastern on c-span2. >> bill bryson examines a north events from the summer of 1927 that place the united states on the world stage from the first solo nonstop flight across the atlantic by charles lindbergh to
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president coolidge's decision to not seek a second term in office. this is a little under an hour. [applause] >> thank you very much for all those kind words. and thank you to eagle eyed books for selling my book tonight. thank all of you so much. there are so many of you. very honored. one wonderful place this is. you never know what you are going to get. it wasn't that long ago i did everything to an audience that my people at barnes and noble, it was an audience of five, put
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out six shares. that was a pretty good turnout for me. the five people that turned out, one manager to buy these books, two more were friends of my parents who had just retired to pennsylvania from iowa and did what my mom and dad were doing. the fourth was a guy named bill bryson who had come from preposterous distance from delaware or wheeling, west virginia, a long way so we could stand together and lookit his driver's license. we were both named bill bryson and the fifth person was his wife who didn't seem to want to spend the evening with anybody named bill bryson. this is really fantastic so i am very grateful to the turnout on
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a friday night. something about getting up with room for the people, a distinguished setting that makes me feel like want to say something important or significant. high was one of those people who has a knack for saying of the wrong finger. the example i was given some years ago i had to allow an author questionnaire for publication at a british bookstore chain. one of the questions was what would you like people to say about you 100 years from now? really tough question and i thought about what people would say about me 100 years from now? the answer i gave was the amazing thing is he is so sexually active. [laughter] >> i found out in advance that was the right thing tonight.
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there is another little statement, there has always been the vanity, pleased and honored that you came. and like everybody authors create tension and we tend to be pretty anonymous people. if you think of it there is not that many authors you recognize if they came in the room even if you are famous and might admire them a lot. i wouldn't have the faintest idea what he looks like. i am sure he would love to be recognized. i know i would. a couple times a year i recognize on the street because i have a higher profile but never get recognized from my own country and secretly craves for a long time. and it so happened that month i was in colorado because my younger son had a job there.
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he graduated from college in england a year or so ago and a good vantage of american passport. and in the summer. these are entry-level jobs. and a great time and a month ago we decided to go out for a while. and still working, the third or fourth day, downtown in store windows and doing that i heard a voice, i heard bill, mr. bryson and this young man was inventing towards me with a big smile on his face holding his hand out. this had never happened to me
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before. i shook his hand and said how would you know me? he said i am one of your son's roommates. [laughter] >> we had dinner with you two night to go. so when i say thank you for making me feel important, no idea how grateful i am to you. i don't know what you are expecting, i said something indicating talking about summer of 1927. i will tell you a little bit about who i am and where i come from and maybe read you a couple passages from my earlier books and at some point would like to tell you my bear story because i always tell it and hope you enjoy it. particularly this is where appalachian trail starts though no better place to tell it then georgia. let me tell you about myself. i grew up in des moines, iowa, a
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long time ago. i know i have a funny voice, you don't come from des moines, iowa. but i do. several years ago as an effort to prove to the world i really did come from there. it was such a fantastic time to grow up, a really magical place. i am sure it is always a splendid event but the middle of the country, the middle of the 20th century, a nice happy middle-class households was a real privilege. my childhood is almost totally happy particularly my mother was -- is still alive.
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she worked as editor on the des moines register, the local paper and she was always off to work and had pleaded demanding job and was rushed home every night and stopped at the store to get food and rushed to drag something into the oven and the rest of the house to do all the other thousand shores the pilot during the day. she was always forgetful any way. on the other hand we didn't call it the kitchen. we call the baboon's unit. and in the oven. and realize the saran wrap wasn't the kind of chili glazed. it was appropriate and like all
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people we got things wrong. and introducing a passage for the book. and what happened was i came from school one day, the modifications my dear mother and well-meaning gesture on my behalf to go to a place on saturday with this family, neighbors of ours. going through this, it was fantastic, about 20 miles south of des moines, a delightful place, was really happy to go there. cote miltons were the most obnoxious people viewed you ever met. they insisted you even too and couldn't avoid eating them. it was just kind of stupid
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frankly. your heart sank if you had to be in their company for very long but they have up little boy named milton. the family has this tradition of giving the firstborn male of the generation the same name as the family's last name and milton milton was famous for being the biggest drip in school and being with him was social suicide. i couldn't believe my mother had agreed to do this because it was going to be such a dreary thing to do but my point is one of those wonderful things about childhood was no matter how bad things seemed to be going, how often they worked out for the best. so i went there in a mood of gloomy submission, the ancient thinking nash, the comfort of the chest freezer expecting the
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worst and receiving it. we got heatedly lost for an hour in the immediate vicinity of the state capitol building, impossible for any normal family to do in des moines. 90 minutes more, much additional disputation unloading the car and setting up the base camp beside the small artificial beach. mrs. milton distributed sandwiches which were made of a thick paste that looked like and for all i know was the stuff my grandmother used to attach a dentures to her gum. a dog had nothing to do with it. they avoid it. having eaten, we had to sit quietly. is it still going? i can help but deal with it.
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okay. having eaten we had 45 minutes before swimming as we get six inches of water. mrs. milton timed this with an egg timer and encourage us to close our eyes and have some sleep. in the middle of the lake was more of a platform on which to get on a diving board. with michael tower. it was the tallest wooden structure in ottawa if not the midwest. the platform was so far out to shore that hardly anyone ever visited it. just occasionally some teenage couples would have a look around, sometimes even climb the many matters and cautiously creep out onto wet but always retreated when they saw how far the water was below them. no human being had never been known to jump from the high board. it was quite a surprise as the egg timer, mr. milton jumped up
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and began doing that rolls and arm stretches and he intended on the high board. mr milton it has to be said had been something of a diving star in high school but that was on a 10 foot board on an indoor pool. another order of magnitude altogether. clearly was out of his mind. word of his insane intention spreading along the beach when mr. milken jog into the water and swam out to the distant platform. he was just a tiny dissident stick figure when he got there but even from such a distance it was hundreds of feet. it took 20 minutes to get to the top. once at the summit, he started up and down the board which was enormously long. experimentally two or three times and took some deep breaths and assumed position that fixed him to the board with arms at his side. it was clear from his posture that he was going to go for it.
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by now all the people on the beach and in the water, several hundred altogether stopped what they were doing and were walking. mr. milton stood for a long time, then raised his arms, ran like hell down a wrong board and imagine if you will an olympic gymnast sprinting at full tilt toward a distant spring board and you have something of the spirit of it, took one enormous bounce and lost himself high and out word and a perfect swan dive. it was a beautiful thing to behold, i must say. he fell with flawless grace. such was the beauty of the moment and the silence of the watch in multitudes that the only sound to be heard was the famous whistle of his body tearing through the air towards the water far, far below. it may only be my imagination but he seemed after a time to start to glow red like an incoming meteor. he was really moving. i don't know what happened,
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whether he lost his nerve or realize he was approaching the water at murderous velocity or what to but about three quarters of the way down he seemed suddenly to have second thoughts about the whole thing and began suddenly to flail like someone in tabled in betting in the bad dream or his parachute hadn't opened. 30 feet above the water he gave up on flailing and tried a new tack, spread his arms and legs why in the shape of a x hoping the maximum amount of surface area he would somehow slow his fall. it didn't work. he hit the water, impacted really is the word for it at over 600 miles an hour with a report so loud it made birds fly out of trees from three miles away. at such a speed water becomes a solid. i don't believe mr. milton penetrated it at all but bounced off of and about 15 feet, limbs
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suddenly very loose and then lay on top of it still like an autumn leaf spinning gently. he was dragged ashore by two testing fishermen in a rowboat to a grassy area by half a dozen onlookers who carefully set him down on a blanket. then he spent a rest of the afternoon on his back, and legs elevated, every frontal surface area of his body from his thinning hair line to his toenails had a raw abrasive look as if he had suffered an unimaginable misfortune involving an industrial and. small drops of water but otherwise much too traumatized to speak. later that same afternoon milton jr. himself with a hatchet he was told not to touch so he was bleeding, in pain and in trouble all at the same time. it was the best day of my life.
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thank you. [applause] >> thank you. i am in a slightly awkward position. i wrote two different kinds of books. it is meant to be amusing as we just heard. sometimes i write more serious books that are very entertaining but are meant to convey information in a more conventional and reliable way. to be actually factual and i take some care to make them completely accurate as i can and that is the case, why my publishers brought me here at great expense to decatur, ga. to talk about "1 summer: america, 1927". i don't like to talk too much about that new book but
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especially this one because it just seems there's a danger of spoiling it. especially feel that way about this one because summer of 1927 was amazingly eventful and magical, memorable summer. i think the most memorable and eventful summer any nation has ever had certainly in peace time. for me it was just a whole bunch of discoveries. i didn't know all that had been happening. i hope the reader will be as amazed as i was to discover them. i don't like to talk about it too much but the foundation that got me started on this was i have always been fascinated by the fact that we do things happened in the same summer that happened in tandem. one was charles lindbergh flew the atlantic and the other was babe ruth hit 60 home runs. i was vaguely fascinated by the idea of these two events completely contrasting human
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beings happened in parallel at the same time. i had it in mind that might be interesting to do a dual biography of these two remarkable figures, meeting in summer of 1927, coming together when they had the most memorable summer and then i found as i started doing a research babe ruth and charles lindbergh were only part of this amazing summer. the great mississippi flood which was the great disaster in history in terms of extent, the filming of the jazz singer, the first talking picture which completely transformed popular entertainment, climbing mount rushmore, executed the notorious anarchist, a huge story which is completely for gone now. it goes on and on, one thing
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after another. it became the book, it was called one summer because all of these remarkable events happened in this one summer but lindbergh is the big store. always thought he had somehow gotten into his head that he was going to fly the atlantic and dividend became famous and was as simple as that. i didn't realize that, there were lots of teams that were all trying to be the first to win this prestigious award. eight or ten teams in europe and america were poised to go. and 5 between those two cities and that was an epic achievement with the technology in 1927. barely ready and intensely capable of doing that. all of these teams were better
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funded and more experienced, multiple engines, multiple man crews, usually three or four people and out of nowhere before these teams could get away this kid from minnesota only flying four years, in a single engine tank and proposing to fly the ocean alone without a navigator or co-pilot anyone, not even a radio. the world was entranced by this nice, personable, suicidally foolish young man. everybody, particularly other aviators thought he was bound to fail but of egos and he made it. the interesting thing i had thought about was once he disappeared over the horizon he just vanished from everyone's consciousness and nobody knew what had become of him. for that 16 hours he was completely out of touch. the only person on the planet who knew where charles lindbergh
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was was charles lindbergh. everyone else was on the edge of their seats, almost consumed with tension and worried for this poor kid whether he was going to make it and when he appeared in ireland the next day over the coast of ireland, the joy was global. they hugged strangers and were embracing each other filled with exaltation. the interesting thing is lindbergh had no idea during the course of his flight he had come to be almost completely anonymous to being the most famous man on earth. he had no idea what was awaiting him on the ground below. that is the background to this passage i want to read to you. as lindbergh covered the last leg of his trip he had no idea he was about to experience fame on a scale and intensity unlike any experienced by any human being before. it never occurred to him many
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people would be waiting for him on the ground. he wondered if anyone at the airfield with even speak english and he would be in trouble for not having a french visa. this is not -- i have to lower it. sorry. his plan was at first he would seek to would that his plane was stowed securely, then he would table his mother to give her the news he had arrived. he supposed that would be one or two press interviews ascending reporters worked in france and he would have to find a hotel, he would need to buy clothes and personal items because he hadn't packed anything at all, not even a toothbrush. o more immediate problem was his map to not show the region air field. he knew was seven miles northeast of the city and was reportedly bid. after circling the eiffel tower he headed in that direction but the only thing he could see was ringed with bright lights as if
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it were a magnificent industrial complex. with long tentacles of additional for it like stretching from it in all directions. this was nothing like the airport he had expected to find. what wind greg didn't realize was all the activity below was for him. the tentacles of flights were the headlights of tens of thousands of cars spontaneously drawn and park in the greatest traffic jam in history. cars were abandoned along the roads to the airport in every direction. at 10:22 p.m. paris time, 33 hours and 30 minutes and 29.8 seconds after taking to the air the spirit of st. louis touchdown on a grassy spaciousness and in that instance joy swept around the earth. within minutes the whole of america knew he was safe. this was a scene of exultant pandemonium as tens of thousands of people rushed across the airfield to lindbergh's plane.
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an 8 foot chain-link fence was flattened and several bicycles were crushed under the massive charging feet. a measure of the pandemonium is the next day cleaners would gather up more than a ton of lost property including six sets of dentures. for lindbergh this was an entirely alarming circumstance. he was trapped in actual danger of being pulled to pieces. they called him from the cockpit and began to carry him off like prized bucci. lying in prostate position on top of the crowd, an ocean of heads the extended as far to the darkness as i could see, he wrote later. it was like drowning in a human see. someone yanked his flight helmet from his head and others began to pull at his clothing. behind him to his greater alarm his beloved plane was being ruined by the swarms' climbing over. i heard the crack of wood behind me when someone been too heavily against the fairing strip.
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the second strip snapped and the third and there was the sound of us tearing fabric. somehow in the confusion he found himself on his feet and the crowd moving past him. miraculously in the 4 light their focus which to a hapless american bystander who bore a passing resemblance to lindbergh. they carried him off, protesting vehemently. a few minutes later a few officials in the airport were startled by the sound of breaking glass and the site of the unfortunate new victim being passed through the window to them. the new are rival was missing his coat, his belt, his necktie, one shoe and half of his shirt. a good deal of the rest of his clothing hung from him in shreds. select like the survivor of a mining disaster. he told the news officials his name was harry wheeler and he was a furrier from the bronx. he had come to paris to buy rabbit pelts and been drawn here by the same impulse that
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attracted much of the rest of paris. now he just wanted to go home. i will leave it there, thank you. [applause] >> two stories very quickly. one is the bear story i promised to tell. i always tell this story wherever i go. i love the bear story. it is an outgrowth of an experience i had many years ago now when i tried to hike the appalachian trail in the company of a challenging companion named stephen katz in the book. the appalachian trail starts in the spring mountains north of the state, 22 miles to main and it is hard. if you read the bill you know i grew genuinely preoccupied with the dangers of bear at tax when hiking in the eastern woods. berries in the eastern united
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states don't attack very often but with respect to any individual italy has to happen once. i tried most genuinely a little concerned about the dangers and gratified to discover after the book came out that lots and lots of people all over north america share these concerns because i got letters from people on how to avoid bear attacks when hiking and the basic advice used to be go hiking with someone who can't run as fast as you can. there was one letter i got from a lady in new hampshire that pleased me and she told me when you are hiking out west in grizzly bear country and grizzly bears are very dangerous creatures, you should do wherever you go, first of all you should wear a little belt on your clothing because this alerts the bury your coming and you don't take them by surprise and a second thing they tell you you should do everywhere you go is look out on the ground in
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front of you for grizzly bear dunk and the way you can recognize it is it has little bells and it. [laughter and applause] >> one other story. it is much on my mind. when i say i am happy to be back in america i am happy for all kinds of reasons. one of them is it is the world series. that is a slightly touchy issue. i will tell you whoever gets that i am excited, living in england based on one experience that cannot be replicated abroad, it doesn't work over there. to be here and i am here through the whole of the world series got me excited and hoping i will be able to watch some of the world series games, whoever is in it it will be very exciting for me. the other person who was
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extremely influential to me for obvious reasons was my father. i was also very close to my dad. he was a sports writer for the des moines register and although a minor league city, one of his treats was 40 years they sent him to the world series. .. san francisco or new york or los angeles, wherever he happened to

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