unalienable rights, so it is true what the army chief of staff said. the constitution is not a really good document to create security in the age of terrorism but it is a damn good document to keep everyone equal. i like the fact that i live in a country in which we don't look at muslims just because they are muslims. i dislike the fact that i live in a country where we look at muslims anyhow and just do it in secret. and that is the bigger problem, because i am less worried about the promiscuous presumption of guilt than i am about the systemic presumption of guilt and there are all sorts of specific secret programs within the intelligence community that

look specifically at muslim americans and they are just secret. so we can say we abide by the constitution, but we do it anyhow. that is what the more important matter to me in the book. okay? >> thank you very much. >> you are expected to buy books now and you are going to bring them up here and i am going to sign them for you. if you want to use an alias i am ok with that. thank you for coming out tonight. [applause] >> have you ever talked about -- >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here on line. type the offer or book title in

the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> scientology was really created as a religion, it was using celebrities. when it was set up it was established in los angeles in 1954 and there was a reason for that. l. ron hubbard, the founder of scientology, realized americans really do worship one thing for sure and that is celebrity. so scientology has become one of the major landlords in hollywood and early on, they set out to

recruit celebrities. there was a church publication put out shortly after the founding of the church with a roster of prospect of celebrities that included people like bob hope, walt disney, marlena dietrich, howard hughes, the most famous people in the world. those are the kinds of people that they sought to use as pitch men for their new religion. celebrities did come to the church. they built a celebrity center so celebrities would feel at home there, and some of the early people that came into the church where rock hudson passed through, apparently he got very upset when he was in the middle of an auditing session and needed to put more money into the parking meter and they wouldn't let him out of the room. so he stormed out and never came back. gloria swanson who was the sort of faded movie star of silent

movies later, people like leonard cohen and even elvis presley made a stop. he didn't stay in the church but his widow and daughter are prominent members so the idea was that celebrities are useful. they become megaphones for advertising the church and its benefit and if you look at the people who have been their spokespeople like john travolta and tom cruise, each of these guys at one time or another was the number-1 movie star in the world and that is a powerful lure to young people who have gone to hollywood and i solicited by the church to come to the celebrity center to see how to get an agent for get ahead of the business, if you

look at who is in the church they think maybe i can be a star as well. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> welcome to bellingham, washington on puget sound, 20 miles south of the canadian border. bellingham is known for its rich maritime history and is the largest city and watkins county. >> ella higginson was an american author in the 1910 early 20th century, the reason everyone knew what the pacific northwest was like at the time. it was a very remote ariane and ella higginson translated the region for the area. >> people read all kinds of books in bellingham. the biggest difference between here and some big cities is in places perhaps like l.a. and new york, people feel an obligation to read certain books so they can talk about the cocktail parties. the kind of books people talk

about at cocktail parties aren't the things eyes extremely popular. >> with the help of comcast cable partners for the next hour we will explore the literary life of the area beginning with bison bookbinding and letterpress. >> booktv's most recent stop on our cities tour was bellingham, washington. we visited the area with the help of comcast to bring the city's rich literary culture and history. our tour started with a visit to bison bookbinding and letterpress where koner kevin nelson explained the operations of his nineteenth century letterpress.

[machinery running] >> my name is kevin nelson and we are in bellingham, washington at bison bookbinding and letterpress, the business we run from our home. we have been business for nine years. we started in 2004. my wife is an artist and she went to the college of art and craft to study bookbinding and letterpress printing and when she got out, she saw that there was no letterpress shops in bellingham and it was the perfect opportunity to open one and take over the world. she does the design work on a computer and then we have film made from the design and then we use photopolymer plates to do our printing. primarily we use heidelberg windmills which is a letterpress found in most commercial print

shops. they use it for die cutting and oil stamping, scoring cards but we use it for printing. not that many people in modern times use heidelbergs for printing because they are slower, a lot of print shops use these 40 ft. long, 6 power presses which you can send out tens of thousands of prints and our. this is more for meticulous hand work doing artistic sort of printing. we print all of our cards call all of our book covers, most of our jobs. this press is the heart of our business. we have the number of other letterpresses. they have different sizes, some are really large so we do large format printing but our hand crank printing presss but if we are doing a short run, they are perfect for that. this press right here is an old

vander cook. they only made 2,000 of this particular model so we feel fortunate that we got one. this is from 1947 originally owned by sun set magazine. very simple operation. you pressed this foot pedal down here and lift up these grippers which grab the paper and run it through the press, take paper off. right now it is set up to die cut so die cutting is taking a piece of flat paper and turning it into an object. on the heidelberg we have a top sheet which is a piece of paper that has a very specific size and full lines we used to print against and we make those here

by taking a piece of flat paper, running it through this guy and then popped out of here. easier to pop out when you pop out whole stack at once and then put these fold lines in here. a very important piece of that

press. so now i take that piece of paper that i just cut and put it into the heidelberg. lock in with these buyers. ready to print. we got this from a lovely couple in d.c. who's spent a lifetime printing hot foil stamping and took immaculate care of it so it is the nicest that we have ever seen anywhere. this one has the original shrine to the paint on it so try my best to keep it in the best shape i can. we feel like we are stewards of

these presses. they outlive people's lifetimes, so in the time that you have it, it is your responsibility to keep it in great shape so it gets passed on to the next generation. before the heidelberg existed there was the letterpress, they started building these. the original one was built by a guy named gordon and he had a dream, he said ben franklin came to him in a dream and told him how to construct a press, briefly what he started working on and revolutionized printing industry. before this type of press existed all letter presses were printing one print per minute. when there was a wooden handle,

create -- and this press changed everything but one impression of minute, 12 or 16. 1918 has the original motor. still runs great. we use it for most jobs when they are done, they get the cover stored on this press. and at 3,000 pounds it really is overbuild for what it needs to do. built to last forever. some of the presses i had to take apart and figure out some people ask me what do you do when these things break. the short answer is they never break. there's a reason they're being used the hundred years later

because they just run so efficiently. keep them lubricated and clean and they will run seemingly indefinitely. it is fun to work with equipment that is you can only imagine how many jobs in the hundred year life. when you are buying something made with so much attention, it has more presence like if you are sending a card to someone that hasn't been mass-produced but handled by an individual, and i would hope that it would have more meaning for the person on the receiving end that it is made with love. as the world becomes more virtual there is a swing in any other direction balancing it out a bit where people want to have some sort of tangible connection. everyone loves getting a letter in the mail but no one ever says

i will never forget the e-mail, i hung on to every piece of correspondence i have never gotten, when the power goes out you don't have access to your e-mail or if your battery is dead you can't read your phone messages but you can always lighted candle and write a letter, there is going to be a place in the future for people to want to write letters and feel the deep connection. >> during our visit to bellingham, washington booktv visited with western washington university professor laura laffrado to discuss the life of the late author and put ella higginson who resided in bellingham and said much of her writing in the pacific

northwest. >> i know a place where the sun is like gold and cherry blossoms burst with snow and down underneath is the loveliest know where the four leaf clovers grow. one wheat is for hope and one is for faith and one is for love, you know, and god put another in for luck. if you search you will find where they grow but you must have hope and you must have faith, you must love and be strong and so if you work, if you wait you will find the place where the four leaf clovers grow. this is ella higginson's:four beef clover, published in 1890 and was an immediate hit. it was popular all over the place and remained popular throughout her lifetime and is the only work of ella higginson's to david you can readily access. ella higginson was an american author in the late nineteenth and early 20th century in the united states, she was

celebrated nationally for fiction and nonfiction and the reason everyone knew what the pacific northwest was like and she translated the region. is born in 1862 in kansas and she moved to oregon with her family where she grew up and in her early 20s she got married and she and her husband moved north to bellingham, washington where she spent the next 52 years of her life until her death and where she quickly established a national literary reputation. she had been born in kansas, considered herself to the pacific northwest turner through and through. one of her poems called am i not for pity which she had engraved on a burial monuments, in that poem the poem had two parts and the first part she talks about how she will never go to europe,

she will never see all the statues and paintings, she will never see rome or venice but in the second part of the poem she talks about the pacific northwest and says where things in europe are wonderful, but human made, things in the pacific northwest are god made. she writes an essay titled i am a mossback which was a name for a pacific northwestern. to my very fingertips. ella higginson was famous in the pacific northwest because it was a very underpopulated region at the time and in addition to being underpopulated in that underpopulation there were more men than women and almost no authors, no publishing centers so she was really out in the field by herself. the pacific northwest was extremely proud of her because she was the great ella higginson. she brought international attention to the pacific northwest. in the nineteenth and early 20th centuries the only way the rest

of the world knew about the pacific northwest region and its cultures was through the poetry and fiction of ella higginson. people outside pacific northwest new of the pacific northwest at the time, that it was beautiful and considered to be extremely remote. even in 2013 it is the seattle seahawks who have to travel farthest of any nfl team. the remoteness was considered to be a place that was so difficult to get to and so difficult to live in because it was beautiful but very wild. so ella higginson in writing fiction and poetry about this place that became so popular introduce the people of the pacific northwest, the towns and in particular the women of the pacific northwest to the larger world. is important to keep in mind pacific northwest was so underpopulated compared to the rest of the country at the end of the nineteenth century and there were many more white men than white women sell for

instance in new england after the civil war when so many young men are either dead due to the war or of gone west many women do not have the opportunity to marry. there are many more white women in new england at the time than men. pacific northwest woman can mario whoever she wants there are so many men so that skews things in a certain way so the pacific northwest is underpopulated at the time, there are many, many more men than women and numbers 3, pretty crucially, the pacific northwest is much more inclined toward the political enfranchisement of women fans arrest of the country is so women finally get the right to vote in the united states in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the constitution but women get the right to vote in washington state of full ten years earlier in 1910 and as a matter of fact as early as 1854, there is a measure to give women the right

to vote in the washington territory and it failed by a single vote, so ella higginson is writing from a place that is underpopulated has more white men than women and is inclined toward the enfranchisement of women. what that means is when you read ella higginson's writing you see these fictional pacific northwest women who are very independent, very hard working and who are very rural. many of them choose not to marry, many of them when they do marry if they find themselves in a restrictive or oppressive marriage they choose to leave that marriage so the pacific northwest that she presents to the world is one that is extremely specific in terms of how its women are presented and how those women are presented tells us how the culture was at the time. what she wanted to convey about the pacific northwest is it was not at all a loss to spend your life in what was viewed as such

a remote place. indeed it could be considered a blessing to be in such a wildly beautiful place. would not have urban areas, you would not be able to go to the opera all the time. what you would be able to do is live in this breathtakingly beautiful place which for her was very spiritual so she was very careful to present the pacific northwest to the larger world as a place where it was a privilege to live and a place with privilege for an interval part of the united states and not something that should be pushed off to the side and glossed over. it was a real problem for writers who were not in the northeast where publication centers were. or real problem for writers particularly women writers to have access to publication methods. ella higginson happened to the board and the right time. at the end of the nineteenth century in the united states there is an explosion in periodical publications. the numbers are just staggering.

as you get more and more periodicals, more and more magazines, more and more literary journal you have a need for more and more material. at the same time suddenly now that the civil war is over with some leaf there is a drive to get felices -- once she sent out her writing this is exactly the writing they were looking for. in 1914 she won a national prize for her short story, $2,500 which is decent money that and

now. the roosevelts -- ella higginson translated the pacific northwest for the rest of the world. her impact was unique at the time. by the time she died in 1940 all her books were out of print, she was virtually forgotten outside of bellingham and she has remained virtually unknown, virtually uncovered since then. a lot of women writers tended to be forgotten or neglected once you made the turn into the 20th century. women writers some of whom had been so famous, alice walker goes looking in 1975 she could hardly find out anything about her. no one thought would never be forgotten was almost entirely forgotten. a little bit harder for ella higginson, she had no children to protect her reputation or keep her books in print, no close family members who would

have been able to do the same thing. she was very far from northeastern publication centers which meant her papers would be archived here at the center for pacific northwest studies which is wonderful that they are here but wonderful -- far from the papers of other writers at her time so she disappeared from sight. some of those other women writers come back and come back strongly with the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s. that is not something that has happened with ella higginson though i am hoping to change that. i started researching her, she published -- these are the numbers i have right now. i suspect there are more. she published over 100 short stories and over 300 poems. now that we are able to google so much in so many different ways i have been able to access a lot of the reviews at the time, many reviews that ella higginson never saw. a huge range of refuse all extremely positive comparing her to other writers of the day wore

earlier writers like jane austen, charles dickens, leo tolstoy, emile zola, to the point that is how prolific she was surprised me, the amount of refuse surprise me. the very celebratory nature of those reviews surprised me too. even though intellectually and theoretically i know women writers are for get and every single day, this blew my mind. she was so big and so important and she has disappeared without a trace. i think it is important, almost more important that people outside washington state know about ella higginson than people with in washington state. in terms of the diversity of american literature you have people like william faulkner or flannery o'connor or mark twain who put certain regions of the united states on the literary map. that is what ella higginson did for the pacific northwest. people knew her through her

writing. as long as writing isn't recovered a crucial piece of the diversity of american literature remains missing so it is important in terms of state pride that people remember ella higginson but in terms of national pride when you are talking american literature you want the whole country represented because if you don't have the whole country represented you can make the mistake of thinking american literature is one monolithic voice. that is not what it is at all. we want all the literary voice is involved. it is a real pleasure to read ella higginson's work today because suddenly you see this remote frontier location come to life in this very dramatic way. >> on our recent visit to bellingham, washington booktv stopped at village books to talk to the bookstore's owner chuck robinson about bellingham's literary scene. >> chuck robinson at village

books in bellingham. my wife and i opened the. books in 1980, june of 1980. we have been around 34 years. the bookstore has been terrific. we knew when we picked bellingham that it had great connection to books already. one of the things we checked out with library circulation was among the highest per-capita circulation in the country at that time and that was 34 years ago and i assume it stayed there as well. the connection with the university, a lot of people having chosen bellingham as a place to live. i tell people all the time our commercial fishermen here, many of them are people who were going to college and here at the university and fished in the summertime and ended up before they go on their boats they get a stack of books. it is a reading community. people read all kinds of books in bellingham.

the biggest difference between here and some big cities is in places perhaps like l.a. and new york people somehow feel an obligation to read certain books so they can talk about them at cocktail parties and the kind of books people talk about at cocktail parties here aren't those things that are extremely popular. they are something unusual so people tend to read all kinds of things. literature certainly -- i would say very well written books, both fiction and nonfiction, not necessarily what you would call high literature, but things that are very well written. people have very strong taste in that way. history and politics are very important and very popular. i think things about the northwest and the environment, things about outdoor living is

of big thing in bellingham, constantly rates as one of the highest places for al gore regulation and that is reflected in what people read. nw authors sell here very well. people are interested in knowing what people around them are riding, not only people who live here in bellingham but all over the northwest. anybody in the northwest who has written a book has a better chance of selling here than some other places. four years ago village books started, we had an espresso book machines that was on demand printing machine that we could print books here and print and bind them in a way that they look like any book that would come off of major press. we did that for several reasons, we wanted to help local people self published their books, there are a lot of books that

would never get into major publication but people would have interest locally and they didn't have a lot of them when you had an on demand printing press and binder and we wanted to publish books of our own, things that had real local interest and value write him in our communities that we knew wouldn't have distribution or interest outside the community. we launch into that. we had a lot of success with that, held a lot of people get their books and to print, we have almost a dozen books of our own in print that we call check them out editions. they are right outside bellingham. they have been referred to -- people think that sometimes. publishing in general is a very interesting piece of our entire business and bookstores have been involved in publishing almost forever. it goes back to the old days of dickens and others in england

when bookstores published books and authors self published at that point. always some piece of business but what has changed most recently is the technology that allows that to happen. it wasn't possible until a few years ago for that to happen inside the bookstore and now that has changed over time. is a very interesting business. if you control on a low level, for instance the books that we have published, all of those had some financial success. they at least grow even. major publishers would love to have a record like that. the latest thing i heard was major publishers are fortunate if they are profitable three of ten books they publish. we were very careful about what books we peck, we have a very targeted audience so we were not publishing for the masses and hoping marketing would reach

them. we thought there was built in interest. the important thing about bellingham is bellingham works really hard to build and maintain that sense of community. if there is an important message for people who live elsewhere is not necessarily you should move to bellingham although we would welcome you. the important message is the community is incredibly important anything you can do from business or community service groups or whatever, that is a really important thing and it makes it a place, a wonderful place to live. >> on our recent visit to bellingham, washington, booktv talk to david christensen, author of "the red umbrella: danish resistance and johna's escape from nazi occupation" about a sister's escape from nazi occupied denmark in 1943. >> she is my older sister but she is 16 years older than i am. unfortunately she passed away

ten years ago and she had written her memoir of her time when the nazis occupied copenhagen, denmark in 1943 until 1945 at the end of the war. in the ear of the parts of the war too denmark was a protectorate country from nazi germany. they wanted their supplies and left them alone, the government runs things but in 1943 the word started going out that nazi germany wasn't quite as friendly. i can remember the complications here and the historians, she and my mother and father, my mother was orthodox jew and her family. my dad was pretty much an atheist. there is the danish side, she lived between two world's. my grandmother, my father's mother owned a tavern and brothel in copenhagen and she was making a lot of money. the germans were coming in

spending money on food and booze and it was pretty good for the economy initially so people didn't believe a lot of the early reports and a lot of the world didn't understand how bad nazi germany was. .. >> germany had been there for several years, and they kind of got some danish friends, and they were kind of sympathetic to the cause. so that's kind of what was going

on in denmark at that time. and one thing that's unique about denmark during this whole time is that i don't think people realize that denmark saved over 99% of the jews. there was a kind of solidarity in this. they said if you're a jew, we're danes. doesn't matter be you're a gypsy, a jew, an atheist, doesn't matter. we're all danes. we're all integrated into the society, and they all helped each other. and they pulled together to save all the jews in that country because because they thought what nazi germany was doing was unfair. jonna, my sister, first of all, she's -- so she's half jewish, half danish. she was also born with a birth defect. her left arm came down to a little stub with five little nubs on it. she had glasses, she didn't see really well.

she had black curly hair, and she was made fun of a lot. her best friend, hannah hanson, was this blond, blue-eyed little girl. and as it started going that jews are bad and nazis are going to come after them, all of a sudden her mother wouldn't let her play with her best friend. she was confused, why is that? you know? she's just very confused about all this stuff. she had, i was counting as i read the book again, she had like 16 secrets she had to keep, things from my father who was trying to make my mother be danish. and he would make her cook pork, which is against jewish law, of course. and she had to keep the secret that she could not tell the jewish part of the family about that. she found -- my dad was go away to secret meetings, and she saw a gun in his pant pocket, and that's a secret she had to keep.

my dad, apparently, was having an affair. she was very hurt and very confused. she had all these secrets to keep, and she had two different lives. she had the fun, danish side and the more conservative jewish side. and her reaction was of massive confusion. her whole world was upside down. she didn't know why, why all of a sudden being jewish was bad. she didn't understand that. and, actually, my father told her, from now on you're not jewish. don't tell anybody. and she was confused, why is that a problem? what's wrong nazis? my father had some sympathetic nazis that helped them, and why are some good and some bad? she was totally confused. what was really interesting was this memoir's written from her perspective, in the first person. and you can see her confusion about this, all these secrets she had to keep s and there were some very bad things and how they had to take away my mother.

because she was pregnant during this time, and she couldn't have a baby during this time. so she had to have an abortion. and she was very upset, it's why she took them away, she didn't understand why she was being taken away. why is it called the red umbrella? jonna always wanted the red umbrella. she always wanted it, and my father thought it was ridiculous. you got a black umbrella, you can use that. but she wanted it. and she always wanted, it was just one thing she wanted to have. and as they're going to escape, what happened here is really amazing. so the word went out in one night in all the synagogues and all the churches that the nazis were coming the next day to gather all the jews. in one night the word went out, and all the jews went into hiding with friends, family, out in farms, everywhere. and for the next two weeks they went out to farms, other places and snuck out to get into small

boats and get across the sound over to neutral sweden to be saved. so as they were escaping into these areas over by the coast, the nazis kind of knew some of this was going on, and they had checkpoints, so they were trying to sneak through with an ambulance, but they stopped at a nazi checkpoint, and jonna is very young and full of questions, talking all the time, and my parents made her be totally quiet. and they're in a, the back crammed with a lot of people in this ambulance. and my dad took a pillow down, and he said i'm going to shove your face into this pillow. i don't want you to say one word. and he told my mom that if there's shooting, i don't want her to see us getting killed. and he said you just be quiet, hold your breath and don't come up until i say. she goes i don't think i can do it. he says, if you do this, i'll buy you a red umbrella.

she did it. there was one shot, but they made it through. there was a little bribery going on. they got to the shore, they got in the boat, and they escaped over to neutral sweden. they were processed there, which is a whole traumatic experience because sweden didn't know who they were getting, and they were trying to process them. so here they are, they paid off people. they've used all their money. money was hidden in doorways and sewn into her coat. she'd lost a lot of the stuff, they lost everything going across. everyone had to pay people in boats and ships to get across. here they are in sweden, fair finally processed and walking in sweden. one of the nurses was taking them in temporarily. and they go by a little store, and my sister sees a red umbrella. and by dad reaches in his pocket, a few coins -- that's all they have. he goes inside, and he comes back out and says close your eyes, and he brings out a red

umbrella. i was born in 1953. my apartments came over to america in -- parents came over to america in 1948. so there was 16 years -- my parents didn't think they could have a baby again, she didn't think she could have the traumatic experience if copenhagen. so i was born in 1953, and then i had another little sister younger than me. when my parents came over after the war, they didn't speak danish. the only time i heard them speak danish was when they were having a fight, they didn't want me to understand. i knew a few things. they never talked about the war, so i never learned anything about it. one day, so i'm an architect, graphic designer, i like those kinds of things. i saw the symbol of the swastika, i thought it was an interesting symbol, and i brought it home on a piece of paper. my mother saw that and went nuclear. she couldn't -- she ripped it

up, shredded it, put it in the trash, just went crazy. i had no idea what was going on. i'm 10 years, 11 years old. and that's when i started learning a little bit about what was going on during nazi germany during this time. i didn't have any idea how it affected my mom or her family. and so what happened after this is when my parents died and i went to go live with jonna, she was telling me this story because she had memories of this time. and when she told me the story, basically, of the red umbrella, i thought it was an amazing time and story. and i actually wrote it down. i'm in seventh grade, and i wrote the story -- it's like five or six pages, and i submit it to the school. i called it the red umbrella, because it seems like there's this thread from the beginning to the end, and got an a on the paper. i told my sister, jonna, you really should write more of this down someday. so this is mid '60s p she's

gone through multiple husbands, six husbands since that time. and when she finally got rid of the last one, so she's like 60 years old, she said i'm going to do this. and when she first started, she got some help from a local high school teacher, english teacher, but it ended up being kind of a historical novel, nonfiction novel, and it almost read like a textbook. it wasn't very exciting. and she was in a group called the would-be writers' group, and they said you should write this with your own voice, it'd be a better story. how this came into the public is when we got rejections from normal publishers, the self-publishing industry was starting to come around at this time. and so i contacted -- there's several national subpublishing companies, and they are relentless marketers. once i'm online with them, they were calling me all the time. and it became very complicated about they really just wanted to

publish it. they didn't care what condition it was, they just want to publish it, get your money and go. and at this time chuck robinson, who's the president -- or owns village books here in bellingham, installed one of the first self-publishing machines here, it's called an espresso machine. and they would actually do small versions of just a very limited run here of books right in the store. i thought, this is really great. theyed had a little system here where you could work with somebody locally with the graphics, for editing, for getting all of the isbn numbers, library of congress numbers, and it was nice to work with somebody locally to kind of ask questions and go back and forth. it was extremely valuable to have independent bookstores help with that aspect. without that i don't know -- it would have taken a lot longer to do. that's what really made it happen. once that happened and starts picking up steam here and it's a little more publishing needed to happen so i have to go to a

bigger source for publishing now as a little more people are wanting this thing, it's starting to branch out here as people hear about it, friends and family. and it's like the social networking thing. it just starts branching off. and i'm going to be sending this now to, there's holocaust museums and danish museums and different associations who are interested in this story. it is kind of an interesting story. but it's really intended for friends and family and the process that i learned about my family. and i think it's something that's really important for more people to do. everyone's got a story, and i think it's really important to dig into that. the value in learning the story of your family is something that people should learn from this, that there are a lot of things that tell you about who you are. now, if your story has murder and sabotage and family conflict and religious conflict and nazis, i mean, all the better. it's more interesting. [laughter] i think that's the value here

that you come away with. and it's a touching story. even though there's a lot of mayhem going on here, it ends on a happy note. >> booktv took a trip to bellingham, washington, to explore the literary sites of the city with the help of our local cable partner, comcast. during our visit, we met science historian george dyson who discussed his book about the history of technology: darwin among the machines. >> this book, "darwin among the machines," is, first of all, it was sort of to update for the 20th century this essay that a very eccentric, brilliant, young man wrote in the 1850s, samuel butler wrote an essay called "darwin among the machines," it was about how machines were going to become intelligent and take over the world. here we are when i started

writing that book, it was in the 1990s, and everything that samuel butler imagined was coming true. all these computers are starting to speak to each other in their own language in a way we think we're teaching the world of computers to speak our language, but in truth, it's the computers are teaching us to speak their language. we're sort of meeting halfway. and so i decided, you know, i decided to write the book that put this in a very deep historical context, going back to samuel butler and even the people that he got his ideas from and how did we get from there to the world of today. where might it be going. his essay was written and -- in answer to charles darwin who had presented this marvelous theory, of course which we except now as beyond a theory, of evolution and how this applies to the world of organisms. what samuel butler did was take darwin's theory and apply it to the world of technology,

machines. machines would likewise evolve through a process of selection and mutation and that no one could say where the world of machines would go except that it was going much faster than biological evolutions, and that's true. and, of course, now it's faster and faster yet was now -- because now we have not only evolution of machines which was something that samuel butler clearly envisioned, but we have an evolution of software, of codes, which is something that samuel butler did not quite imagine. so it's a good story. it starts in the 17th century, in the 1600s, with people like thomas hobbs and godfried -- [inaudible] a german philosopher. he imagined building a digital computer that wrap. he didn't -- that ran.

he imagined it working with gravity and and black and white marbles running down tracks which is exactly what a modern microprocessor does, except instead of gravity you have a voltage gradient. but all the essential principles were there 300 years ago. we just sort of, reality just sort of had to catch up. you know, where writing this particular book was placed in -- it was very interesting. i think of darwin among the machines as the last book about the internet that was written without the internet. i mean, i wrote that book in the beer cooler of this bar, this sort of walk-in cooler right there. with no internet connection. getting most of my sources through the library alone. it was a very different world then. google didn't exist. there was a search engine called

alta vision that i could use through a text interface called pine. so the internet existed, but it wasn't something you used day-to-day unless you were in a university or, you know, in a military lab or so on. it was, it was a very different world. and then in that book, for instance, there's a chapter that's probably the craziest chapter that talks about wireless and how, ultimately, all processers will be connected wirelessly. and, of course, that's -- we take that completely for granted today. the dangering with writing books about technology now is that technology changes so fast is that even by the time your book is published, it may be obsolete. so it's, it's a good strategy to write about the 17th century, because you, you know, it's not going to go out of date next year. when i began writing this book, i hadn't even read samuel

butler's essay, and the fact that it was so prophetic surprised me. and then i had these views about digital codes as sort of evolving organisms x then i discovered this, again, one of the heroes of the book is this norwegian-italian mathematical yes nettist, nils bar chelly, who the moment our first computer in america, our first high-speed computer became running, he shows up asking to use it at night between midnight and 8 a.m. when the engineers come back to run experiments, creating an artificial digital universe. i could never in my wildest imagination have, you know, have dreamed up that this had actually happened and that i would be able to find these documents and sort of make a story out of it. so no end of -- and another character in the book who is louis richardson who was a

british new marichal meteorologist, sort of my neared the idea of simulating the weather using computing. and he was also a quaker, had gone into world war i to work in the ambulance unit. and then there was a british science fiction writer, olaf stapleton, who believed in sort of the first people to write about distributed mind, how alien organisms might actually have their mind distributed through a wireless network of processers. and it turns out they were in the same ambulance unit. they were in the trenches in france together, you know, they had nothing to do with battles because nobody was getting injured. and they sat around and talked about all this stuff. that was unknown, that they had -- so lots of surprises. i'm always asked this question sort of who -- because i write about these people like johnny von nowman or alan turing, and people want to know who's the

nextal an turing. you have to remember that alan, you know, alan turing did his great work when he was 23 years old. and the same with johnny von nowman. these people did their great work in their 20s. so if you're looking for the next genius, it'll be somebody in their 20s who, you know, he's probably in another country, may not now even be be able to get a visa to come to the united states. so it's impossible to pick these things out except to sort of wait 50 years and see who changed things. but the world is ripe for young, new ideas to change the way we do computing. we -- i think one of the tragedies that we are still doing computing, we're completely locked into the world that was established in the 1950s. we haven't changed the fundamental way we do computation. and somebody could. some of the greatest work in this story was done by someone

who was, you know, rescuing people out of the trenches in world war i and had these thoughts on their days off. you know, they were not in an academic, you know, job. and i think that's true of, you know, einstein did his greatest work at the patent office. so my view is remember the sort of ordinary people who had the extraordinary ideas with, you know, without a great deal of support, yet persevered and their ideas came true. >> while in bellingham, washington, we started by the old citial to learn about businessman j.j. donovan's role from restoring bellingham from brian griffin. >> our community of bellingham, perched on the eastern edge of the -- sea, tucked into the very northwest corner of our nation -- is not very old when compared to much of our world.

but belling hamm's history is rich and varied. it wasn't very long ago that right here where this grand old building stands was the edge of a great wilderness forest of giant cedars, sitka spruce and douglas fir, trees so old and so large that some of them were seed lippings at the time of christ -- seedlings at the time of christ. the primeval forest stretched from the saltwater where we are now to the high alpine meadows surrounding the perennial snows of mount baker's volcanic peak to the east. it covered all of the present farmland that stretches north to the canadian border and beyond. and the early settlers thought that the timber would last forever. gone now. it's gone now, sacrificed for what we have called progress. but a second and even a third growth is growing in our

foothills, and if -- in a sense the pioneers were right, the timber is lasting forever. the samish, the lummy, those be first nations were the common tradition. they're still here. now recapturing their old culture and and working to protect this land and their treaty rights to benefit us all. the once-forested wilderness that is now the city of bellingham wasn't even a bona fide part of the united states until 1846. that was just 14 years before civil war. the british fur-trading hudson bay company on the columbia river was the closest thing to civilization that this area could boast. all of the wild land north of california was, by treaty, jointly -- and i should say

uneasily -- shared by great britain and the united states. but finally in that year, 1846, the stalemate was ended. the two nations peacefully signed a treaty and agreed to divide this part of the world at the 49th parallel, 20 miles north of where i stand today. now for the first time, this area became a part of the united states, a part of the newly-created oregon territory. that was just 14 years before the great war between the states. oh, the bay was called bellingham bay, all right, because late in the previous century a few spaniards and an englishman or two had sailed through here looking for the fabled northwest passage. and one of them, george vancouver, had charted the bay and named it after a parish admiral who had provisioned his expedition, lord william bellingham. that year was 1792, and there were no white men living here

then. nor were there any when the oregon treaty was signed in 1846. it would be 61 years after vancouver's visit and six years after the land was divided that two white men were paddled into the baby two lummie indians in a dug out ca knee. that he is to havic event is -- historic event is celebrated on a carving that stands in front of our courthouse today. our federal government sought to encourage settlement of this, their new territory, by enacting the oregon land act of 1850. it offered almost free land to homesteaders, 160 acres to a single man and twice that if you were married. the act achieved its purpose. homesteaders began to come to bellingham bay. the first of them came in december of 1852 in that indian canoe. their names were henry roeder

and russell peabody. they came to build a saw mill at the mouth of the creek, attracted by the water fall that still drops to the sea at the creek mouth. 1852, only 161 years ago. a few months later they recruited edgar eldridge and his wife teresa to join them, and she became the first white woman to settle on the bay. since that landing in 1852 through repeated cycles of boom and bust, of exuberant eras, of lumber mills and logging, of coal mining and salmon canning and shipbuilding and pulp and paper mills, the bellingham of today has grown and prospered and changed to become the regional center for medical care, higher education, finance and technology production for the considerable population

between two great cities; seattle, 90 miles to the south, and vancouver, canada, 45 miles to the north. all city grow and prosper because of visionary, hard-working, committed citizens. and over the years bellingham has surely had its share. and that brings us to the man that i would argue is the most important man in bellingham history. 1888 was the year that he came to bellingham bay. and his is a great american story. a horatio alger sort of story. a story of the son of poor irish immigrants who rose to great heights through determination, hard work and sterling character. his is also a wonderful love story. a poor but hard working irish catholic boy who fell in love with a new england protestant whose prominent family had come to america in the 1600s.

it took 12 years for their love to overcome the vast social and religious gaps that separated them. his name was john joseph donovan, but he was known by one and all as j.j. his story is told in the museum exhibit now showing on the galleries just below us, it's called the treasures from the trunk: the j.j. donovan story. i had the privilege of cure rating that exebt exhibit, and i'd like to share some of the story with you now. well, the donovan story begins in 1845 when a terrible blight struck the potato crop of northern europe. the potato had become the staple food that sustained the poor of europe, especially the poor catholic population of ireland. failure of the potato crop resulted in the deaths of a million irish from starvation

and disease, another million emigrated, fleeing the horror. and no town in ireland was harder hit than the home of patrick and julia donovan and their 11 children. desperately, the donovans saved their pennies, and by 1848 were able to buy a ticket on one of the emigration ships dubbed famine ships more their son peter, age 23. peter donovan landed in boston and soon had a job as laborer building the boston, concord and montreal railroad up the western valley of new hampshire. in two years he saved enough money to buy passage for two of his siblings, margaret -- 19, and patrick, age 20. they arrived in boston in 1850. patrick also got a job on the railroad, and patrick eventually

married a julia o'sullivan. and with her, moved to rumny, new hampshire. in 1858, their first child was born. they named him john joseph. john joseph donovan, a young man destined for payment and fortune, who would come to have a profound influence on our city of bellingham. young j.j. began writing diaries at the age of 13. they tell a fascinating story of an intelligent, hard working boy growing up in the post-civil war years, chopping wood for the fire, tending the family cattle, fishing in the rivers and ponds, berry picking in the woods. he excelled in his studies, and by age 19 had graduated from the plymouth normal school certified as a teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of of rural new hampshire. three years as a teacher convinced him that his long-held

desire to become a civil engineer was a better life choice. and so with savings from summer work as a waiter at a summer resort in the mountains and with some help from the family, j.j. enrolled in worcester polytechnic institute of worcester, massachusetts. my east coast friends tell me that i should pronounce that worcester. in 1882 he graduated, a civil engineer and valedictorian of his class. he and a friend, billy barlow, were immediately hired by the northern pacific railroad, at the time building their railroad across the continent through the northern tier of states. they had started at both ends of the line,@paul, minnesota on the -- st. paul, minnesota, on the east, washington territory on the west. they'd been working at it for years. there was still a 400-mile uncompleted gap.

donovan and barlow boarded the train in the east and rode to the end of track in montana. they then got off the train, boarded a stagecoach and rode the final, to ride the final 400 miles across the continental divide to missoula. there they took up jobs surveying and engineering the final 400 miles of the railroad across montana. well, the transcontinental line was finally completed and celebrated at a grand ceremony on september 8, 1883. now the northern pacific decided to shorten its line by a hundred miles by cutting their rail directly across the cascade mountains, thus avoiding the long journey down the columbia river to portland and then up to puget sound. young donovan did much of the engineering on that huge project. it took four years to build the rail from the columbia river up

and through the crest of the cascades through a two-mile tunnel and down the west side to tacoma and piewj jet sound. for -- puget sound. for most of those miles and years, he worked with the railroad's prime contractor, a man named nelson bennett. the cascade division was completed in 1887, and donovan went home to new hampshire to end his 12-year courtship by marrying his clara. in the meantime, nelson bennett, the contractor, had heard that a third transcontinental, the great northern, would be b crossing the cascades at sock pass coming down on the river. he decided to become a city builder. he came to fair haven, the closest deepwater port, and he bought the town.

he and his partner also bought bellingham. bennett then hired our man, donovan, to build a railroad from seedrow to fair haven and to be the chief engineer and planner of their new and larger town. j.j. came to fair haven as he used to like to say with a pack on his back, hiking the future railroad route from the damage et river. it was july of 1888, and he'd left his bride, clara, in a rented room in tacoma as he surveyed the swamps and thes that the railroad would traverse. that route is essentially the route now followed by the i-5 freeway. his letters to clara state that there were 140 people in fair haven, perhaps 400 in aggregate in the towns around the bay. two years later the population of fair haven had soared to 7,000. the boom was on.

j.j. and clara soon moved to fair haven, '89, actually. he merged himself in the life of the surging new city. he completed the railroad, the fair haven and the southern railroad. he established bennett's coal mine near seedrow. he planted the now-enlarged city of fair haven. he served two terms on first city council of fair haven. he designed the sewer system. he was an active stockholder in the water company that brought city water and built the coal-operated electric poland. and he -- plant. and he built a reputation of competence, energy and good character that would bring him many further opportunities. in 1890 the sisters of st. joseph of peace, a new jersey catholic order, sent two young nuns to bellingham with orders to build a hospital. without funds, armed only with

their faith, sister teresa moran and sister assistance laws tie hi turned to donovan. he persuaded his employer, the fair haven land company, to give the sisters an entire city block high on the south hill at 17th and adams, and he helped them raise the money to build the hospital. and within a year, the first st. joseph hospital opened its doors to serve the community. that fledgling hospital has gown be over the years into bellingham's second largest employer. st. jost medical center, a first class medical organization that serves the entire region. finish donovan remained on its advisory board for rest of his life, raising money for frequent b expansions, using his growing

influence and means to assure the hospital's success. in 1889 a young man named julius blowdell had moved to the booming fair haven and taken a job with jim warner's blue canyon coal mine at the southern end of the lake. soon the men started the fair haven national bank, and blowdell shifted to the banking business and became its president. donovan was hired as general manager of the mine. donovan and blowdell had an opportunity to buy the mine, and they turned to a man that donovan had known in his northern pacific days in montana. peter larson was quite a bit older than donovan and blowdell and a great deal wealthier. the three bought the mine and formed a bond that would carry them into several more ventures crucial in the history of this city. as equal partners, they owned the coal mine. then in 1891 inspired by the

virgin timber around the lake, the partners formed the lake wattcomb mining -- lumber company. and they built rail to their coal and log bunker on bay. that old railroad bed along the lake is now called the kenhertz trail, a part of the county park system. their coal bunker stuck out into the bay just north of where boulevard park ends now. realizing that it was more profitable to sell saw and lumber than logs, they decided in 1902 to build a saw mill. the result was the huge lumber mill at the north end of the lake, larson mill. the mill would operate until the early 1960s and become a

foundation industry for this community. in 1913 blowdell and donovan, recognizing the opportunities created by the opening of the panama canal, decided that they needed access to saltwater. larson had died this 1907 -- in 1907, and the surviving part hers formed a new company, blowdell donovan lumber mills. they purchased the old lumber mill of the improvement company on the saltwater at the foot of cornwall avenue x by 1928 they had grown it into the world's largest producing saw mill. they were sawing logs from blowdell donovan lumber company's timber holdings in the cascade foot hills and on to olympic peninsula and from logs purchased from the robust logging industry of this region. so for many years the larson mill at the lake and the blowdell donovan mill on the

waterfront led the community in economic importance. as important as donovan was to the economic and industrial life of this community, he was equally important as a community builder. he was one of the major proponents of the 1904 merger of the towns around the bay into the consolidated city that we now call bellingham. after the citizens had voted to merge, donovan spent countless hours on the citizens committee to develop the city's charter. it was donovan who in an op-ed article in a bellingham -- in the bellingham herald encouraged the city to purchase the land that would become the falls park. his thesis? great cities need great parks. it was donovan who urged the city to build the boulevard around the state street hill that horse and wagons had difficulty climbing even in good

weather. it was donovan who served for eight years as a trustee of the then-very young bellingham normal school which would become the great cultural and economic engine of bellingham of today, western washington university. it was donovan who stood almost alone in opposition to the ku klux klan's strength in this community during the 1920s. he was simply a man of incredible energy, vision and community spirit who did much to establish the cultural and economic base from which this community has grown into the remarkable city that it is today. donovan died in 1937 at the age of 78. the bellingham herald eulogized him by saying that bellingham had lost its first citizen. from the 400 people when donovan arrived, the city has grown to a population of 82,000 with another 120,000 souls in the

former forestlands to the north and east. much of our success as a community can be attributed to our quality of life. we enjoy rich p cultural opportunities and remarkable beauty of mountains and sea. living here is an ongoing pleasure. this community is proud of its historic past, pleased with its p present and determined to maintain our quality and livability for the future. [applause] >> for more information about booktv's visit to bellingham, washington, or about the other cities visited by our local content vehicles, visit c-span.org/localdon't. >> this our schools there's been a decline of character education and moral education, kind of a move to replacing it with things

like self-esteem programs or various therapeutic approaches that are of doubtful merit. and we have a tried and true method of civilizing boys. through, you know, good sports hanship -- sportsmanship and kind of moral guidance from parents, but then reinforced by teachers. and we've kind of moved away from that. second problem with boys, and -- there are problems with girls too but i'm right now talking about boys, is just i believe now that boys have become second class citizens in our schools. and their problems are severely neglected. a young man today is far less likely to go to college than his sister. and you look across all ethnic groups and racial groups ask socioeconomic groups, and you find that boys are behind their female counterparts.

they are far less literate, the average 15-year-old boy has the writing skills of a 13-year-old girl. he's reading about a year and a half behind her. and most importantly, boys like school a lot less than girls. they're more disengaged. now, there may have been a time where this wasn't a big problem. we had an economy where you could get a high school degree and go out there and work hard or and make it into the middle class. and some educators at the harvard graduate school of education, they said the passport to the middle class used to be the high school diploma. not anymore. there's a new economy. and the new passport to the middle class is education beyond high school. and girls seem to be getting it and boys less and less. but i feel that that problem, there's -- i can't find major organizations or government groups. the department of education is still talking about the shortchanged girl, because they were deeply, i think, influenced by the early research that said

girls were shortchanged in the 1990s. and so they haven't adjusted or adapted to the times. so we have a white house council on women and girls that's concerned about the education of girls and that girls don't fall behind, and when it's boys that are by every significant -- almost every significant metric -- significantly behind girls. so i think we need a white house council on boys as well. >> christina love summers, in a recent atlantic article you write that women in the u.s. now earn 62% of associates degrees, 57% of bachelors degrees, 60% of masters degrees, admissions officers are finally panicked over the dearth of male enrollment. officials at schools at or near the tipping point are helplessly watching as their campuses

become like retirement villages with a sur fite of women competing for a handful of surviving men. >> we're the college of william and mary, not the college of mary and mary. well, there's one statistician, education alstadt sticks who said if current trends continue, by the year 2068, the last male will graduate from college. he was being facetious, but there's a grain of truth. there's -- it's quite a mystery why the girls would be so, so much more aware of the importance of education. and girls now even have higher

aspirations. and some people will say, oh, no, this is only among poor kids or it's, you know, manifest in the working class. it's across classes that you see the girls outperforming the boys. just this year there's a new study that shows among the highest performers the girls not only get far more as and a+s, but they are more ambitious with. a higher percentage aspire to go to graduate school and law school. now, we celebrate what has happened with girls. it is inspiring. and, you know, some of it may be because of the initiatives of the shortchanged girl movement. i don't say that everything they did was wrong. i is just wish when they discovered there were gender differences, i wish instead of becoming a girl partisan movement, it had become a movement to improve the educational prospects of all children and help girls where

they were behind and help boys where they were falling behind the girls. and that would have meant, yes, more support for girls in math and science because they were not doing as well as boys at one time, is and we've managed to close that gap. but that would have meant helping boys in just about everything else; reading, writing, school engagement, just in general, classroom comportment, we have pretty good research that shows even -- i don't blame the teachers for this, but teachers have a bias against unruly students. it's understandable. but these students can be 5 or 6 years old. so i don't know if it's something we want to blame the boys for or punish them for. i think we want to find a way to make the classroom a happy place for them and room for their personalities and their high spiritedness. so i just feel that we haven't done a good enough, a good enough job with that. >> host: is there a shortage of male teachers, and does this have an effect, if there is?

>> guest: there are very few male teachers in elementary school. you have slightly more in high school, but still this may be a slight exaggeration, but one critic of the current school system said it's as if schools are run by women for girls. now again, an overstatement, but not by too much. and a lot of boys feel that way. a lot of the saddest comments i ever read is a group of educators, of edger rlers -- researchers interviewed boys about why did you drop out, and there was this one little boy that said i just thought nobody wanted me there. and there are a lot of little boys that feel that way. it's heartbreaking. someone should make clear to him that he's wanted there, but there's so much going on at our schools that is girl-friendly and not so friendly towards boys. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at some books

that are being published this week. republican strategist mary madeleine and her husband, former clinton campaign manager james carville, reflect on their marital life in "love and war." in "burr cas, baseball and apple pie," ranya tabari. uncovering j. edgar hoover's secret investigations of american citizens and upended the bureau in "the burglary: the discovery of j. edgar hoover's secret fbi." fox news business host lou bobs opines on current political and social issues in "upheaval." in "company man: 30 years of controversy and crisis in the

cia," john rizzo, a former lawyer for the cia, provides an in-depth look inside the central intelligence agency. a firsthand account of the 2011 revolution in egypt in "cairo." look for these titles in bookstores coming this week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> okay. can you tell me what, essentially, what part you played in -- [inaudible] >> i played no part but was an observer. i've been traveling and writing in india with cathy in south asia, southeast asia for 18, 20 years and spent time reporting as a foreign correspondent for the guardian and then for the times newspaper, and now we write books and we make documentary films in that part of the world. and we've been passing through mumbai two days before the attacks happened in 2008 when the whole city was basically

held hostage by ten gunmen. and unlike 9/11 where lots of great books were promulgated, like "looming tower" by lawrence wright and books by other great writers, mumbai really didn't see the book that summed up the terror that that attack conjured. and cathy and i were determined to do justice to what happened in 2008 and put together what we hoped was a tribute to the heroes of mumbai and an explanation for what that kind of terror really means. so did you return while the siege was going on, or did you come back several weeks later? how did you cover this? >> we always wait until the story has died down. we're the last people to the story. so we came back a long time after to visit with these people and saw the hotel, and we went to pakistan and spoke to the families of the attackers and also to the security agencies there and the organization that

planned the attack. so, and the idea of kind of coming up with the story is you wait for the dust to settle, and then you get more information. we wanted to get into why this -- [inaudible] the reason for it, what they were trying to achieve and also to get the human stories. >> so what were some of the key findings? >> the key find beings were that like -- findings were like many terrorist attacks like 9/11 and 7/7 in the u.k. that there were lots of missed opportunities before the attack happened, lots of warnings it was going to happen. the hotel was warned on several occasions that they had been targeted and there was an islamist group in pakistan that was coming over with the intention of holding the hotel siege and other key locations in mumbai. the police in mumbai tried to put together security measures. also the intelligence agencies

in india, they kind of brushed it under the carpet and said it'll never happen, too crazy an idea, multiple attackers launching themselves from a beginninggy on -- dinghy onto the streets of mumbai, it's not going to happen. sadly, they were wrong. it did happen. >> did you come to any conclusions about, um, preventive measures or anything that could help, i guess, determine ahead of time if something's going to happen? >> it's very hard to do that kind of crystal ball gazing. i think the one thing you can be certain is the reason that we're particularly interested in. it's still a powder keg in that there's a hot border between india and pakistan. and, of course, with afghanistan with the u.s. forces withdrawing, there's a power vacuum there. so our interest still lies in both fault lines of the region. it's sort of human stories, and, you know, for us having worked

in the region for 18, 20 years, we're interested not in objectifying any characters, but pulling real stories from the inside. so all of these people, 90 percent of them are pakistani and indian contribute is who -- contributors who we hope that we've drawn real lives that reflect how today live and what they did. and they overcame extreme danger and extreme fear, many of them poorly-paid wage employees for the five-star luxury establishment. and if it hadn't been for them, it would have been an absolute massacre. so, you know, that's one of the great lessons that the humblest people overcame. >> was there anything about the -- [inaudible] over kashmir that played a part? >> i mean, it kind of is a base note to everything. we do a lot of work in kashmir, we began there at the height of the insurgency and the endless dispute over the contested state provides very often the mesa.

so the group that masterminded mumbai, they were conceived of and funded by the pakistani intelligence service in the 1990s, early 1990s. specifically to make indian kashmir bleed. and their idea was to send over a covert army of jihadis to trigger a war in kashmir. and they then subsequently after 9/11, an element within the group wanted to broaden out to be more like an al-qaeda outfit, attacking american targets, pro-western jews, and that's why -- >> grabbed the headlines. because kashmir is -- everybody in south asia is -- [inaudible] outside of south asia no one really cares. there was a big dispute within the organization that planned this operation that they add to get back the news from al-qaeda that was getting all the headlines, and they'd lost out. so that was a big reason behind why this was planned and executed. >> nearly everything. and it's one of the most poorly

reported stories in the west. it's quite shocking. and, you know, when you come back to it, the continuing grinding human rights abuses which completely outstrip those of pinochet in chile would astound people if they actually became familiar with them. i mean, there are more people, there are three times the number that have disappeared in kashmir than ever in chile. upwards of 8-10,000 people who vanished in the custody of the security services. a field was p recently dug up in which there were 2500 corpses whose death couldn't be ascribed to any one agency. it's part of what lies beattacks like these -- behind attacks like these. that's something we write about within the indian establishment and from the perspective of interest groups who we've made contact with in pakistan and in kashmir too. >> so what originally sparked your interest in this area of

world? >> oh, wow. >> [inaudible] for 25 years -- >> 20 years. >> 20 years. we were based out there for the times and then for the guardian, and we just love it out there. it's a great part of the world. there's so much happening in both countries, pakistan and india. we love working there equally. [inaudible] >> yeah, i mean, asia is, you know, particularly india is recreating itself every day, they have thousands of years of history that go way before stories like -- [inaudible] but there's a tremendous feeling of energy there in terms of new rising. stunning new writers, stunning film makers, cartoonists and artists. and you really get that feeling of drive. there is no complacency. sometimes i go back to london, and, you know, or france b where we were working for a while, and the complacency is just staggering, you know? people assume stuff will come to

them, and india they're making opportunities in every sense. and, you know, i think that is a tremendous privilege to be able to report, travel freely and make films in that culture, in pakistan and across south asia. it's been 20 years of repeated sort of present-giving to us. i'm really glad that we've had the opportunity to do it. hope we continue to anyhow. >> have you lined up your next project yet. >> >> yes. >> yes! >> it's a secret. >> we cannot tell you. >> it's in the same part of the world. >> work on a book -- [inaudible] no, it's -- we'll return to the same area with a similar theme of people. as cathy said, we are very influenced by the polish journalist, and at a time when poland had that money at all -- had no money at all, he argued to come by bus with. you know, we want to come by bus and then we're going to stay

until the end. and, you know, that's always been -- [inaudible] with the story. we don't come quickly, and we don't leave quickly. i think it's worth always giving the last interview and going the last kilometer. that has been our philosophy. >> thanks. >> recently, nielsen bookscan, which tracks over 85% of the print book market, released their list of this year's nonfiction bestsellers. the list reflects sales from december be 1, 2012, to december 8, 2013. "proof of heaven," followed by bill o'reilly and martin due guard's count of the life and death of jesus of nazareth in "killing jesus." in third is sara young's "jesus calling." and at number four, facebook's ceo sheryl sandberg in "lean in: women, work and the will to lead." coming in at number five in the nielsen bookscan's list for 2013

is phil robertson's happy, happy, happy, followed by "strengths finder 2.0. cy robertson's book and willie robertson's the duck commander family in at seven and eight respectively. rounding out the nonfiction bestsellers, gary chapman's "the five love languages," and at number ten, the late chris kyle's recount of "american sniper: the autobiography of the most lethal sniper in u.s. military history." that's a list of 2013's top ten nonfiction bestsellers according to nielsen bookscan. ..