the nose part, the main selection criteria. what a the other main selection criteria you use to choose the dogs to train and how do you go about doing that? how do you decide which one is better equipped than another one? >> basically we have a end product that is our ideal and we work backwards from that. to give you the four or five most basic different kind of sections, i guess, that i look for, i look for confidence first and foremost. i want to see a dog that walked around like he owns the place no matter where he is, interact with me very confident we. he is social, is paying attention to me, not defaulting to aggression towards me just because i am a stranger in close to him but a happy medium. the don't want him to be aggressive. don't want to be shy or aloof with me either. so he has to be confident and he

has had an enormous level of play drive, just a natural drive to chase and capture things when they're waved in front of his face, throwing the ball and has to have an enormous amount of hunt drive, if i tease him by ball, throw the ball in the thick brush and let him go he will spend minutes using his nose, not his eyes but his nose to find the ball, he can't see it, he will sit there and you can watch, like nose on legs snaking back-and-forth and he will do that ended distractions if there is hot and water nearby or other dogs who have marked in the area, if there's traffic or somebody -- gunfire going of which are all things we may simulate to test dedication of the hunt drive for that dog and i want to make sure under all those circumstances he is still going to hunt which mimics a combat environment. if i take a dog who is distracted by food or a female

or gunfire while asking him to search, when i send the dog over to and austere environment where he will be used to save people's lives and he is surging and there's a hot dog, oh, there's a hot dog, that dog is not of enormous value to us. the sociability in environmental nerve go hand-in-hand. i need a dog that can go anywhere. open stairwells, elevators, escalators, people with wheelchair's, played down the equipment is a good test, the dog will spider monkey his way around, all over playground equipment, usually a good indicator that dog is environmentally pretty sound, taking him into dark rooms, slippery floors i want to see a dog that will do all that. last but not least, i am looking for a dog the one i get in a bright student put pressure on him, mostly mental standpoint and a little from a physical standpoint, i want to see a dog

that when i communicate to him with my body and not only am i here, i am not scared of you but intent on doing you holland and make sure you understand that. when i put all of that into a dog i want the dog that is going to say you want to roll, let's roll. there are very few dogs that act fat way, from experience. most dogs don't have that genetic trait and it stands to reason, it is counterintuitive that a lack of self preservation exists in most animals, cumin beings included. it is an anomaly treat even when breeding for it, it is rand v. elusive but some things that is crucial for the type of work we do. what makes the selection process so difficult is finding a dog that has everyone of those qualities in very high caliber. kind of like the analogy i use a lot is lebron james or michael jordan of dogs, they have to be at their very best level in every aspect of what we are

asking them to do. it is difficult. >> what are your options? >> the question is in terms of inbreeding and line breeding, without getting too into the weeds in genetic theory essentially with breeding programs of any animal we are funneling genetics. there is a desired outcome we are trying to accomplish with the breeding program and you have to double up on these qualities. the thing you have to be careful with is when you double up on good qualities you also double up on the bad ones. this isn't a good idea for people, it has to be absolute textbook consummate examples of what you are trying to accomplish and even then you have to be very careful with it. with again, thank you. that is all the time we have. i appreciate it.

[applause] >> before we close out this session if i could still have your session of like to call bill and diane patterson to the stage, mike ritland has something to present to them. if you words. >> i will come up to the side. >> come on up. >> we will be presenting you with a bag with some memorabilia and souvenirs for this company, for your dog's foundation. [applause] all right, thank you

again to mike ritland. now, if you would like to need mike ritland in person and have him sign your book please allow into quickly exit the church sunny may 5th to the author signing tent at this time. thank you all very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> we just heard from mike ritland about his experiences with the navy seal k9s. more from savannah in just a few minutes. >> women's history for beginners is the booktv book club selection for the month of february. booktv.org, you will see at the top a tab that says book club and you can participate in our discussion at booktv.org. we will be posting video and reviews and articles of to their tomorrow so the discussion will begin tomorrow. we will also be posted on a regular basis discussion questions. i hope you will be able to

participate in. bonnie morris's women's history for beginners is our february of 2014 book club selection on booktv. >> you make an observation about childhood that really struck me. you say children of baby boom children were in control of their own childhood. our parents worked as children, our children worked like maniacs and yet we were a generation, our generation of people who had childhoods. >> get out of the house. it is a beautiful day. it is raining comet it is 30. they said it was a beautiful day, get out of the house. never quite figured out the parenting style. we take a lot of grief for being helicoptered parents but our parents, they were strange. they could be so cautious and so

fearful of things. don't get to know people who are not from europe. that would be scary. on the other hand the fourth of july would come around and dad would hand out dna babies with some explosives, should probably take a license. everybody has uncles. uncle mighty mike. he would give us -- more spectacle, businessman uncle did this. he would give us the firecrackers at his cottage at the lake, blood on the for the july and give us become its cigarette. not to smoke but because that was the safeway to light the fire cracker. cent of course they drank.

they were real strict all day long until about 6:30. i know i am only 10 but can i take the car? >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv live coverage of a savannah book festival in georgia will be back shortly. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to book stevie on c-span2 this weekend, three days of nonfiction books and authors every weekend. today booktv is live from the savannah book festival. check booktv.org for complete

schedule. code name johnny walker:the extraordinary story of the iraqi who risked everything to fight with the new u.s. navy seals. tomorrow booktv interviews a couple professors from catholic university and sandra grimes talks about a hunting down and capture of cia mole aldrich ames. on president's day jeffrey frank on i can and dick. richard reitman talks about fdr and the jews and cokie roberts describes the women who influenced our founding fathers. all this and more on booktv on c-span2. the full schedule available on booktv.org. >> there are a hundred things i want to write about. it is hard work but it is a joy.

i am not mahatma gandhi. i am a capitalist. what drives me is to get my books, my arguments into as many hands as i possibly can because my books are intended to affect people's thinking, to give them ideas, make them think they haven't thought about, and as i say i can't imagine other authors aren't thinking the same way but that is where i am coming from. i had one of the greatest editors in publishing. he really is terrific and he has and i for is this so he might say you might not want to use that sentence or you might want to reorganize this chapter or that chapter, but he is also gracious about how he does it, knowing full well i am a little stubborn like the thing most authors are but i certainly am. he might say may not want to include that and i will say i am, okay, or in a is a my not want to include that and i say you are right. i like to bounce things off him

but in the end i make those decisions and has there ever been head butting? no. have i ever attended a book where they said lord? they have always said there will be thrilled to have the book because i actually hand them a complete book with all the end notes in the book, all the sourcing in the book, all the arguments in the book, all the chapters in the book, i put it together and hand it to them. at the end of this desk, i don't know the other authors zoo that, other conservative others, i don't know but in my case because i have no ghost authors or co writers or anything of this sort, there glad i tournament and the tournament on time. there are things i want to write about, things i want to talk about the life is short. i don't need to miss my deadline, i am excited to get my book in on my deadline and excited to go with my next one.

it is hard work. i do a radio show and i am not done until 9:00 eastern time and that means i work until 3:00 in the morning and i work every weekend so it does have an affect on your social life. this is what i do. this is what i love. people say what the you do for a hobby? this is what i do. it is wahabi ended is work and i love it. >> cotton avenue serves as a metaphor for making history. when it was first laid out in 1823 they laid out in nice square blocks with alternating, large, wide boulevards, wider than washington d.c. boulevard, said that has its squares, bacon has its linear parks but anyway as they were laying it out of farmer with a load of cotton on his wagon headed towards the

river to market it downstream, rode right through the stakes the engineers had laid out and the engineers simply boils the angle road into the layout. >> this weekend booktv and american history tv look beyond the history and literary life of macon georgia, on c-span2 end c-span3. [inaudible conversations] >> more from savannah in a few minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> which is to say colleges this

year in particular are starting to see fire resistance. people are thinking very hard about what did they want to spend 50, $60,000 a year and up. when people find out what to wish in is i can't believe how expensive it is compared to last year or five years ago. they are not seeing that as good especially when financed by debt. a lot of colleges are dealing with some growth price discrimination, that is what financial aid really is, price discrimination, how much can you afford to pay, that is the price for you because i like you. that is what is going on. you are seeing some schools having their credit rating downgraded by moody's's because moody's look at high tuition and high expenses and doesn't think it is sustainable. you are seeing enrollment drop across the board, lots of schools and within colleges you are seeing humanities on this, kim manatee's departments

unhappy because they're losing their prestige and losing majors and enrollees because people, especially women, don't want to major in humanities because they're concerned about getting a job when they get out and that has ramifications within universities based on how many students take your classes and things like that, fairly dramatic. of sal it can't go on forever and i think it won't. what happens next? there are lots of things people can do. one thing we might see is people just not going to college. 40% of college graduates wind up in jobs they could have gone without a college degree. what is the difference between a starbuck barista and starbucks barista went to college? which one would you rather be? not sure i got it right but when donald trump was in financial trouble he pointed at a homeless

guy in the gutter and said that guy got $500 million more than me. he was broke, not in debt. that is the lesson for some college graduates. and in it in today's world, getting ahead is probably harder than it has ever been, just getting by is probably easier than it has ever been between videogames, internet porn and hookup culture needs college? you have a pretty nice life. many things people used to think they had to exert themselves to make a life for themselves to enjoy are now available much more easily. i will be that at that. one thing there is some evidence men in particular are less likely to go to college because they don't find it sufficiently rewarding but i will leave that to the experts to write on that subject. another possibility is cheaper alternatives and we are seeing growth too. one of the ms. online education and there is a lot of that going

on and is now no longer just the domain of the university of phoenix and a few other for profit schools, georgia tech is offering a master's in computer science online that is a full-service degree. everyone is good at their regular masters except it is supercheap kind of appealing. another thing we are seeing that i would like to see more of and i think we will is certification in place of diploma up. i'm not as optimistic, not as convinced, the harvard business review says people are just going to get certificates to show they know how to do useful things instead of diplomas which no longer do that but i do think that certificates of actual ability, people who think that, because higher education establishment is getting the side third-party certification as a way of proving their degree means something and that is pretty useful. another thing that is starting

to happen is the rise of apprenticeship. i thought was a sad article in the washington post, it was about people who had gone to college and couldn't get a job going back to trade school to learn to be electricians and plumbers and things like that. there is nothing sad about being an electrician or plumber. i was talking to one of my fellow law professors about one of michael lind's articles about the exploitation of the working class and his response was i might find that persuasive and manhattan scene might electrician's house. being an electrician is good work and there is no reason why a smart person can't be an electrician. the story said the sad thing is they had gone to college to run up the debt before deciding to become plumbers or electricians, would have been better off if they had just skipped college entirely. according to the article guidance counselors in high school don't want to tell smart people to pursue a trade.

smart people make better electricians. i don't know if it is a bad. electricians make good money. people in skilled trades make good money, often more than people with be as and in coming years one huge that the judge hands on jobs is they can't be outsourced to bang the lore. back in the 90s of the sun from robert wright and michael lind about growing hegemony of the symbolic analysts and knowledge workers and how they were going to run the world. here is the problem being in knowledge worker. when you a knowledge worker you are in competition with every other smart person on the planet thanks to the internet. when you are a toilet fixer you are only in competition with people within 15, 30 minute drive. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

[inaudible conversations] >> you are looking at the inside of the lutheran church of dissension, the site of this year's savannah book festival. more live coverage and a couple of minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at the top ten best-selling nonfiction books according to the los angeles times. former secretary of defense robert gates tops the list with his memoir duty followed by new york writer malcolm glad well's david and goliath and the fight for women's rights in pakistan in i m malalla. their programs can be viewed on

booktv.org. atlantic editor scott stossel chronicles his struggles with anxiety in my age of anxiety. and fifth, charles krauthammer prevents a collection of his political columns, things that matter, three decades of passions, pastimes and politics. watch the pulitzer prize-winning syndicated columnist program from the george w. bush presidential library at our web site booktv.org. 6 on the best-seller list is stagees followed by a short guide to a long life by david angus. and the internal and external pressures that israel faces today in promisedland. in ninth place is gary's memoir little failure and wrapping up the list is gabriel sherman's profile of fox news president roger ailes in the loudest voice in the room. look for mr. chairman's appearance on booktv ads

offering reprogram after were daring in the near future on booktv on c-span2 and that is the top ten best-selling nonfiction books lists according to the los angeles times. >> one of the concluding sections of the book is in effect on lessons learned about war. and one of the things that you would think people would understand would be how frequently people who advocate going to work and people who make decisions to go to war almost always are convinced the war will be short. this year we will celebrate the centenary of world war i which is a classic example of where everybody thought the war would be over by october and november, 1914. the problem in iraq in particular and it really is true

of iraq and afghanistan, what began as a swift military victory quickly degenerated into a long and grinding wars. in the case of iraq it was always believed that it would be a short-term commitment. i think it would be interesting to ask those who were participants in the decisionmaking, had they known in march of 2003 that the country would be at war in iraq for six or seven more years, whether they would have made the decision they did. but this assumption that the war would be short or that its end was right around the corner afflicted the department of defense as badly as it did the decisionmakers themselves and because everyone assumed that war would be over quickly there was a great reluctance inside

defense to spend significant sums of money on equipment that might be needed to protect the troops but that might be useful only in iraq or afghanistan. as i described it in the book the department of defense is organized to plan for war, not to wage war and so the services dedicate all of their efforts, pretty much all of their efforts to developing their long-range procurement plans and then defending those plans in the budget process regardless of what comes along and so people were reluctant to for example fund development fund pmi resistance ambushed protection vehicles the save so many lives and limbs because that particular kind of vehicle was not in any plan for the army or the marine corps. >> i would like to ask about that.

one of the key themes in that portion of the book it seems to me is that the military planners inside the beltway, civilian leaders inside the beltway simply didn't adjust or respond and you do ride they did not adjust to changing situations on the ground in iraq. >> i also right that after the initial invasion was just a series of stunningly bad decisions and mistakes. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. you are watching c-span2 with politics and public affairs weekdays featuring live coverage of the u.s. senate. weeknights watched the public policy events and every weekend the latest nonfiction authors and books on booktv. you can see past programs and get our schedules that are web site and you conjoin in the conversation on social media

sites. >> we are back with more live coverage from the savannah book festival in georgia. next lily koppel un "the astronaut wives club". [inaudible conversations] >> my name is alex gold and i'm happy to welcome you to the seventh annual savannah book festival presented by georgia power. and to our new venue at the lutheran church of ascension which is made possible by the generosity of fran and john mccain. many of you have already attended our terrific special events with our opening and a keynote addresses. today your work is cut out for you as you choose which shoppers to visit during this day that offers dozens of renowned writers who have published outstanding books in the last year. we would like to extend special

thanks to our presenting sponsor georgia power, our literary members and individual donors who make saturday's free access events possible. if you would like to lend your support we welcome your donations and have provided yellow box for books buckets at the board's you exit. before we get started i have a couple housekeeping announcements. please take this moment to turn off your cellphones. let's all do it together. also i would ask the deeply is to not use flash photography during the talk. immediately following this presentation lily koppel will be signing books over at the book tent. also when it comes time for the question and answer period i ask that you please form an orderly line behind this microphone in front of us and ask your question and please return to

your seat. we have also found a pair of sunglasses so if any of you lost a pair of sunglasses please check with one of the ushers and we will get them back to you. now, please join me in thanking the savannah bank for sponsoring lily koppel's appearance here today. [applause] >> new york times writer lily koppel takes us to the 1950s with her recently published true story "the astronaut wives club". overnight these women were transformed from military spouses into american royalty. the collateral damage done to them during the u.s. race to the moon is the subject of the book. lily koppel is a college graduate, she wrote the lead rather diary address written for new york times magazine, daily beast, huffington post and grammar. she lives in new york with her husband and two rescue dogs.

please welcome lily koppel. [applause] >> good morning. so nice to be here. i heard there was a vicious rumor going around and i didn't make it out of new york city because of the weather's so i am so glad volunteers believe this is actually me and i'm here sharing the story with you this morning. i love great american stories and i love beehives. and a combination of those two sayings as you will learn lead me to tell this amazing but looked over american story of our original astronauts wives. i want to bring you back to 1959. april 9th there is a press conference in washington d.c. and the whole country is riveted and waiting for the announcement of the mercury 7 astronauts. is the height of the cold war

and we are looking to lease seven men, gus grissom, john glenn, allen sheppard, among them, as our cold war warriors, these silver suited spaceman who are going to take us to the stars and beyond. so you have these macho test pilots sitting up on this stage and something peculiar start happening. the reporters are raising their hands and instead of asking tell us about your bravery, about why you wanted to volunteer, the reporters want to hear what does your wife think about this? she is going to let you be catapulted into space, and so there is this immediate attention to the wives of these men. i want to tell you about some of the women.

renee carpenter is sort of the maryland monroe of the space age. she wakes up in garden grove, calif. early in the morning and sees these headlights hovering in her yard. is a the ufo? what is that? they are reporters who have come to interview her about what it is going to be like to be one of the wives of these spacemen. it is almost science fiction. reporters can't believe it. renee wanted to be an actress in high school, she opens the door, offers the reporters coffee. some of them of brought doughnuts and they start taking pictures of her and her family as they are crawling all over her and she is a real dish. jfk would later say he found her the most attractive of all the astronaut wives because of course as they are going to learn, they're going to quickly go through this cinderella like

transformation. in ohio at wright-patterson air force base, and gus grissom's wife betty received a phone call the night before from her husband, he said you might want to straighten up the house of that. some reporters might be coming tomorrow. she looks around, the house is a mess, she is just getting over the flu, she feels terrible but somehow pulls it together, goes to the doctor the next morning and as she is stopping at a grocery store on her way home two reporters from life magazine encounter her in the vegetable aisle and want to know what she thinks about old gusts going into space. she just wants them to leave her alone. they followed her home. she is the shrinking violets of the group, very down-to-earth, folksy, always repeated a quote of gusts's which is we don't give a damn about keeping up with the joneses which is more

along the lines of we don't give a darn about keeping up with the glenns, annie and john glenn, the superstar couple of the space age. you can't get more apple pie than them. they literally met in a playpen as toddlers in ohio. they are just both sprinkled with freckles, john glenn having that mad magazine kid face, annie to go with it and annie was the ultimate astronaut wife. as the women soon learned, it is not only emission about getting their husbands, these great a military test pilots who not only are picked for their piloting skills but as some of the scientists say when they pick the astronauts, there were wild series what we're going to

happen, where their hearts going to stop in space? would they stop urinating? was there blood pressure going to fall to zero, they were picked for being literally human cannonballs. can they withstand it? the why is too were actually investigated by the fbi before the couples were announced. betty remembers investigators coming over to her neighbor's home and asking questions about her. would miss is grissom quote home cooked meal every night? she doesn't drink too much? doesn't have any communist leanings? all of a sudden not only the astronauts but their wives, a r astrowives wives are tisch step to the entire world as examples of the height of american family

values and these wives, the most stressful time to be an american housewife, the late 15s and early 60s, has to hold up the model of perfection. so overnight they are transformed. i think of them as america's first reality stars. life magazine bought the rights. they bought their personal stories, like magazine in 1959, a huge amount of money. in exchange for that, to reporters and photographers into their homes to chronicle their day to day lives. what was it like to have your husband sitting on top of that rocket, about to be blasted into space. the women were caught in this catch-22 which is they are supposed to reveal who they are,

there is acute pressure to keep up the glens to be the modern american housewife, and the book is being turned into television show which is going to air this summer on abc and just looking at some of the story lines it is very funny because one of the other wives of this group, trudy cooper was the only licensed pilot among the group, very adventurous girl, you had to be an adventuress woman to be married to one of these guys who were testing in their early careers these high-performance experimental aircraft, to go where no man has gone, first into space, then to the moon. trudy cooper had had a little too much of this top gun mentality and her husband bordeaux --gordo playing around

on her. before he was picked as an astronaut, he came with his tail between his legs back is like saying trudy, i have this amazing opportunity, i will be picked as an astronaut. the only problem is they are not going to pick me if i don't have a white and we were just separated. they get back together for the sake of the space race. they would later get divorced after gordo's career is over. those of the kind of detail the wives were very skittish about letting out as they are having this incredible public eye and spotlight shined into their lives. the program starts out in langley, va.. all of the families pack up and moved to virginia and the men start training and they are down in cape canaveral, florida and one of the most interesting things i learned just starting out in the book was how the

cape, this sort of incredible men's playgrounds down there where there are working hard but also playing hard, was a no wives zone at first. going to the cape for a wife was totally off-limits. they weren't allowed to go out where the rockets took off from, all the wives would watch the early flights from the beach. at one point deke slayton's wife marge said this is ridiculous. you are going into space. i can't go to the cape. what is going on out there? she tells him that he'd better drive her out there and he hides her under some blankets in the back of his car and they go past military guards and she gets out there and pops up her hat and it is sort of a lonely beach jetties and scrub brush and what not. the whole country is dying for a cigarette. this is the kind of spunk and

irreverence that these women brought to this brave new world of being an astronaut wife. you have seven women, all different walks of life, allen sheppard's wife louise was very highbred. i think of her as the sabrina and audrey have removed character. she drew up as the gardener's daughter at longwould gardens and stayed on the east coast so when she met jackie kennedy she almost treated jackie like she was an old friend, they were two private school girls almost, getting to know each other. you have this band forming, these women are in the public eye and they don't know how to deal with it at first so they start giving each other words of advice. if a reporter asks you, something you don't know anything about, don't worry, just say it is classified.

one of my favorite stories, because a lot of the inspiration for writing the book came out of these technicolor looking photographs from life magazine because the wives were on the cover of life dozens of times from 1959-1972 at the end of the apollo program. the wives have their first cover shoot and they will be clustered around this mercury capsule, which when you see it today at the smithsonian, this thing looks really flimsy, you can understand why its nickname was the can and you can understand how terrifying it would be to have your spouse ride in that thing especially since many of the early test launches had gone absolutely haywire with explosions and things just not going right until the last minute but the women are told by life and nasa that they are to

where these proper pastel, the epitome of the perfect american housewife, so they set this tradition of the round robin phone call which will last throughout the space race and calling each other, i you going to wear that? what color lipstick you going to where? and they decide to wear pink lipstick and everyone will wear a shirt waist dress except for run a carpenter, scott carpenter's life. usable character, intellectual, a really independent woman who will end up hosting her own feminist talk show in the mid 70s and looking sort of gloria steinem like in the dresses and skirts but she says according to the other wives i am not going to let the government tell me what to wear. we are astronaut wives now. our husbands are civilians, they are no longer military, so she shows up to the photo shoot and

she is wearing this cocktail dress, big red roses and red high heels and of course other wives are sort of aghast. she makes the shot so you have that melding of personalities coming together. stuff of course the men, meanwhile, they are becoming rock stars. everything that goes along with it. they are getting $1 corvettes which they can trade in every year and get a new one. alan shepard get the snazzy white corvette. they're getting $1 a night hotel rooms at the holiday inn. this is down in cocoa beach which is space city, lit up with all sorts of neon signs, moons and stars and intergalactic fanfare. the women actually come down to cocoa beach for a lady's weekend

and jo schirra remembered walking into the lobby of the holiday inn and two women, the astronaut crew piece who come with the adorable name of cape cookies, fall to their knees in front of her astro not, her husband. what is going on here? so you have throughout the space race, having to maintain this semblance of everything is fine at home, of course my husband, i am sure this goes home for the holiday, as soon as he finishes work. meanwhile of course there are all sorts of tabloid headlines coming out and everything. the space program moved to houston in 1962. i had a lot of fun learning

about this whole area known as togethersville. this makes nonfiction writing so tantalizing. this was the space verbs' where all the astronauts and wives moved. it is almost like beverly hills of spacemen. there were tour buses that would wind their way through the streets of these little subdivisions where john and annie glenn lived next to scott carpenter and his wife renee, where betty grissom and jo schirra lived a few streets down, where the media attention on these families was so acute that renee and jo had doorway built in between there two yards which they called the rabbit hole and that they could scurry back and forth between during a flight so the press wouldn't see them. astronaut kids were chased down the halls of the holiday inn when they went to visit and were

always told not to open the door to many reporters because they had this exclusive agreement with life magazine. one anecdote one of the astronaut kids shared with me that i always have fun remembering is daring apollo levon, that flight, the wives first of all, janet armstrong, pat collins, buzz aldrin's wife joan, had to hide in back seats of neighbors cars, go to the beauty parlor, the grocery store, there was a media circus on their suburban lawns. at one point of michael collins's kid opened the door and they were given a present of a panda bear, two journalists from china handing them this caddy bear, oh wow, this is great. turned out there was a microphone hidden inside its stomach. this kind of marx brothers

relationship with cat and mouse game with the press and the wives. as one of the wives put it, she said our lives were composed of highs and lows, and what is so remarkable about this group of women is how down-to-earth they maintained sort of their personalities. they were strongly patriotic. they felt they were given sort of an equal task in supporting their husband's mission into the stars. they were going to do everything they could to support the country's effort to support their husbands even when it meant tucking things in the backs of the worse, emotional things to deal with for later, sweeping things under the rug. as i mentioned they were living in an almost truman show existence, no divorce was

actually allowed within nasa until 1967 when it erupted in the first space divorce. the women had to rely on each other. the men were away at cape canaveral, flying their teeth 38s to florida monday morning, they would not return until friday night when they would fly their planes down low over togethersville and rattle the houses. that was some of the astronauts's way of saying hi, honey, i am home. put the rose in the oven. your astronaut is home. i recently went back to togethersville with some of the women and went into sue bean, alan bean's first wife, looking at the pool and alan bean who was the fourth man to walk in the route moon with pete conrad on apollo 12 did this mosaic bar with the ignacio zamora insignia

and sue was very beautiful, blond, texan, looking out over the pool and said buzz and joan used to live over there and the bass ats were over there. thists were over there. thisets were over there. this was a really swinging place. the wives and 60s for the astronauts' wives club which would meet once a month to support each other and get to know each other. these were monthly tea and coffee events. fabulous scenes that are not reproduced in women's gathering today because times have changed, doubled as and over crowing -- overflowing ashtrays and martini hours and just sort of being there to support each other and going through something very few will ever

experience. the way the wives don't with the pressure was very different. you have the pressure of your husband and the pressure of the media. and the most dreaded moment, even more than the possibility of something going wrong on the launch pad, was opposed flight press conference. this was the moment when all the wives would have to walk out on their suburban lawn, face the cameras and give a statement and receiving very little formal coaching from nasa besides what they heard back in their air force and navy days which was feed your husband a good breakfast of steak and eggs so he doesn't get white headed up in the air. these women were basically just told to act picture-perfect and so they did this send up together and ran a carpenter who

i mentioned, glamorous and outspoken, blond, came up with this 1-woman show and called it released a land that was her send the name of the esteban wives and she was married to squarely stable, her perfect astronaut husband. they had their perfect astronaut children and their dog smiley and she said whenever reporter asks you tell them you are happy, fraud and thrilled, throughout the decade whenever the wives are asked how they are feeling, when their husbands were up there, in space, being blasted into space, they often say, happy, proud and frills. and of course reporters are tearing their hair out. we want to deal -- to hear how you feel but back then it wasn't

-- they really weren't able to put the feeling into words. they were scared of revealing too much in this highly competitive environment. if i show my fear is like my husband maybe he will be bumped from the flight. marilyn lovell, married to jim lovell, a wonderful couple to this day, he was played by tom hanks and apollo 13. when he was going into space on one of his gemini flights, marilyn found out she was pregnant and she hid her pregnancy from jim for a few months which is pretty remarkable until he finally found out and she said i am sorry, i didn't want you to get bumped from the flight. cheese said good idea, we should keep it secret for a longer. this is just a taste of the astrowives lives. i would like to open up the discussion to questions now

because it is such a rich topic and i could talk a little more about what it was like going into these historic figures's living rooms and what it was like getting to know them as well. if anyone has questions, please do line up. >> in your book, you talk about one of the episodes on one of the lunar landings where the camera didn't work and there was virtually sort of a cover-up because they didn't want to show that. i wonder if you could go into that. >> one of the most exciting things, of course, about walking on the moon, being on the moon for the guys and everybody watching back at home, that was what was so incredible about the

apollo program. even for someone like me who is one of the wives once asked me when i went to interview her, where were you when we landed on the moon? how old were you? i said jo, i think i was moon dust. i wasn't born yet. whenever you become fascinated with this subject, you can go there with the guys. all you have to do is look at the youtube footage, television footage they filmed. the incident you were just talking about was apollo 12, the second mission to the moon. alan bean had this television cameras a burgling to use to chronicle their journey and he by accident turned it into the sun, so it was burned out. the only transmission they were able to share with the public in real-time was the voices of the

astronauts which are going into the wives's homes versus on the squawk boxes which are these baby intercom like space-age device is all the wives had at home but the networks are flipping out. we are not going to get our moon footage and we had big swaths of time allowed for it. what they did was nasa had some mockups of the moon where the guys would practice going through their routines for when they were up there so they outfitted some actors in space suits and had them sort of manic what pete conrad and alan bean or beeano as his friends call him or doing on the moon and it has only fuel the conspiracy theories that anyone who has anything to do with nasa including the wives think are absolutely ludicrous. i would like to tell you all how

i came to write this book and a little bit about getting to know these women today. of course i am a writer, i live in new york with my husband who is also a writer, in the front row. our lives are composed on a daily level of thinking about stories, thinking about ideas for great stories. this isn't something you can manufacture. inspiration has to hit. i have to admit at that time i was quite into the show madmen, we were having a carrot -- a tv marathon watching it and i love the 60s time period, my grandmother used to wear pulitzer dresses, we just bought this big soda book of the moon landings with the norman mailer text of a fire on the moon. and i was looking through these pictures of neil armstrong on

the lunar surface, buzz aldrin and his sort of marshmallow space suit and just having sort of a tomboy moment because these are pretty male heroic images, until i turn a page and i am hit with this burst of color. ..

and a sort of continue to support each other through triumph and tragedy. one of the sweetest things about the connection of the wives is many of them when i met them they wore a little gold bracelets with a tiny golden whistle on it and that's one of their symbols we will be there for you and it was a matter of winning over these women's trust. they were always very protective of nasa, of their husbands even if they were later after their husbands back from the moon divorced because astronauts and their wives did divorce after the apollo program and i see it as a casualty of the incredible amount of pressure that was on these families to come for them and tform andto just work aroune rigorous hours.

out of 30 couples only seven marriages survived. so in many ways as they pointed out, there relationships have endured longer than the marriages. it outlasted them as well. there were people that were more difficult to get to know their mothers. at the beginning everyone was sort of whistling is betty going to talk to you? i don't think that he is going to talk to you. she doesn't come to our meetings and so i was nervous because she was someone important to talk to and sure enough i got a lovely letter from her. she doesn't talk on the phone much because of her hearing that she said when you come to houston please come to my home and it was one of these

interviews that i expected it to be about two hours and when we went back to her house about 10:00 at night i told her i think i should go to the hotel and get some sleep and come back tomorrow morning. and she was just fun loving andd honest and had the kind of memory she would've plucked out conversations that she had back in the day. they were high school sweethearts like many of the astronauts and their wives. her story is a tragic one. of course during the mercury program, his capsule thinks so he is given a bad rap for that position of his and from the early days of course way men always had to deal with the pressure of what if he doesn't come back.

which is you don't talk about the danger especially with your husband coming to don't talk about the danger with your friends because it was seen as a james many of them have superstitions and my favorite woman i got to know during the project had a superstition i think we can all probably relates to which is pete's pillow had to be perfectly smooth on his site of the bed in his closet door had to be closed because if she did it, she felt like something wrong could happen and this is just a reflection of the fear these women had to digest and live with. goss always told betty that he didn't like her wearing black and she felt the only time you should ever wear black was to a funeral and purposefully she didn't end up wearing black to

his funeral people to listen to something happens to me i want you to have a party. so early on she promised him, she said okay i will have a party. he is one of the men that died during the apollo fire, and this was the first large-scale tragedy when the men perish in a capsule it catches fire on the ground and this is a very revealing part of what these men went through because it was excruciating. the way that they reported was relatively new lows in the official man always had to tell the wife her closest friends are always called before tuesday something bad has happened out there. i want you to go to her house right now that the women knew they were not allowed to use say

anything they just had his agent told the official word could arrive, so very difficult. in the case of petty end o betto other wives in the fire, debbie ended up saving nasa's -- sueing nasa's and as a result she was basically ostracized from together as bill by the other astronauts and the astronauts lives for not touting the party line for going against the company organization. pat weitz was a tragic story. she never really got over her husband after apollo one and when they were planning a reunion years later she actually

committed suicide and they saw her as a final tragedy of the apollo one fire. so a lot of heartache in this story. but just incredible american moments that were not seen as necessarily input to report back then because we were not as focused on the fact as behind every great man is a great form in or behind every moonwalk or there is a strong woman waiting on earth and it is just a whole another sort of constellation perspective on what it took to get to the moon. do we have any of your questions? >> it could be your next book

three of how do the children fare in that kind of upbringing? >> as i talked to many of the kids it was sort of growing up in the cradle of the american dream, green lawns, a pool that was shaped like the space capsules like the -- the kids almost remember fondly those were the days our mother would lock us out of the house and they don't come home until dinner. you are giving me a headache and it was great because we would ride our bikes and go to the pool and that is sort of the memory. but i think it's difficult having a father who is a hero but often and absentee father because they wer were a way trag

so often. one of the kids remembered it was sort of strange. it was like a dad wouldn't be home a lot suddenly he would be very end of the magazine would be there and we would be doing a photo shoot out on the swing. we never did this in real life. it's probably at a lot of kids in hollywood at the old place now. their lives were made almost reality shows so there was dealing with that and i will share one more funny anecdote which is the wives were always sort of kidding and complaining they had to drag their kids into watch the space launches, johnny would rather be watching star trek. but within your dad is doing some important stuff. well my best friends dad is an

astronauastronaut and lives acre street, those are engineers over there, and this was the world that was normal to them and the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. >> you kind of you who do to help their lives changed after the program and i was wondering if you could share their thoughts on what was it like when that ended? do they feel like it should continue and like there was a sense among these families at that point? everyone was sad when mixing ended the program and these wives who i see today and i think in history they will continue to be seen and i've told this to them as a sort of pioneer space women. they were the pioneers. their husbands were doing something we had never done before. just the moments of going out in

your backyard as jane conrad remembered when her house .-full-stop there walking around on the moon and she -- the house just cleared out and she had all of the wives over for a party about 5:30 in the morning she wandered out by the pool and just look a looked at the moon t of stared at it and i think we can all think this when we look at the mood like we went up there as a country and as human beings. but she said she remembered when she was a little girl how she used to look forward to man in the moon and she said this is trippy. my husband is the man in the moon and for this one moment she had this mystical feeling of clarity. this is the late 60s. people are into that.

she said it basically vanished in a moment and then she was going back inside to do the dishes. but to get back to justify fallout after the apollo program, i think the most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife. like many they had a hard time coming back from the moon after the families and the crew members into their lives would go on these fabulous tours especially after apollo 11 they went all over the world presenting moon rocks and little cases to the clean of thing cleg going, etc., the heads of state and while they were on this tour she shared her diary with me that she kept and she starts seeing buzz spiraling out of control. he's been outspoken about his own alcoholism and depression he built with after coming back from the moon and that is something that changed her life.

they ended up getting a divorce and they have three kids. she has an entry in her diary i think our lives will return to normal and he looked at her and said i've been to the moon. nothing is ever going to be the same. and i think that is true for a lot of the families. >> you mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine and a story came to life. if you have a moment at the end of the red leather and i hear -- diary what caused you to flip their? cynic i will save that for the moment and please -- >> i haven't read the book yet but i look forward to reading it. i don't know the ages of the

women that you are referring to but in your research, did the idea come up with a conversation about the commercialization of space travel and would any of them ever consider the galactic would they do that themselves? to ask about going into space back in the six he sispa and lots of time with life magazine of course, if you have these articles about we are going to be putting up a couple of the astronaut had this sort of crackpot scheme and root beer stands when we colonized, so yes someone like a former tough marine said i would have gone up there in a heartbeat and the

early pilot who ended up flying in the powder puff derby she would have been there in a moment but some of them are like are you kidding i want to stay down here with my feet on the ground and of course they all hope we will continue to explore and push the envelope as their husband used to say. i will just mention very deeply the red leather diary, my first book because i think it reflects on how i wanted to talk this kind of story. i grew up in chicago. and it was a new york guy in a city girl. i was in new york with that density of people walking around looking at these old buildings into these windows lit up and i

just sort of naïve, just to be an incredible amount of untold stories but there are and how everybody has a story and somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal some of those distant stars. so very serendipitously i have to say i feel quite lucky. but strange things happen to me or maybe i see the world in a different way. i notice things that seem almost fear a tale -- fairy tale. i came out after i graduated and i was working as a news clerk at "the new york times" which is like the devil wears prada that without the prada with lots of bow ties and the businessmen who would give me bits of advice.

i wanted to be a novelist to which i going to return to for my next project, which is going to be fiction. i came out of the building and there was something too good to resist pus push with the dumpstr and not an ordinary because it was filled with about 50 old trunks into these were the old kinds that were brought on the titanic from paris and the french line. i am not a dumpster diver by trade but i love vintage clothing and a good story so it's eight in the morning and i literally climb on top of that is to and i start -- you are all looking at the very odd. i started going through these dresses in the collections of handbags and among the urban treasure with a red leather

diary kept from a woman from 1921 to 1934 at the height of the depression and a long fairy tale short i ended up tracking down the owner is 90 with the help of a private investigator and befriending her. she wanted to be a writer and she hosted a literary salon, she was a renaissance woman who had love affairs in her story spoke to me so much i ended up telling this story of how this comical made the way back to her and it was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world. telling the forgotten story was very interesting to me. little things i remember from professors the good stories are often little margins were

footnotes. it's not the typical heroic model but it's the other side of the coin and it was that desire and hunger to tell the story that is an untold stor story but there's also this sort of emotional catharsis for the subject that has been under the radar revealed to the world and i know from speaking to the boys not only does this book take them back in time but they feel very gratified that people care about their story. i don't think many of them call themselves heroes because they were so in support of their husbands and would have seen

that as arrogant and inappropriate, but i certainly see them as heroines myself, and i think they have the right stuff. [laughter] [applause] i'm going to end up there. thank you so much. thank you, lily koppel. [applause] if you would like to meet his koppel in person &-and-sign your book please quickly exit the church so she may enter the middle of town square at this time. thank you so much.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] booktv is live this weekend from savannah into the savannah the festival. we just heard from lilly koppel and we are going to be taking a break from our coverage for about an hour. during the break you can watch interviews from the booktv

college series now joining us on the tv is the author of this book on constitutional disobedience is the name of the book. professor louis michael siedman is the person that wrote it. are you saying it is time to throw out the constitution? >> you know what, i am. thank you for having me on. this idea is right that almost everyone i know thinks it is wrong. my wife, my kids, all of my students. it is a little surprising that so many people think it is wrong because when you think about it,

we are thinking about a document that is over 200-years-old. it was written at a time that the united states looks nothing like what it looks like today. it was a small republic along the eastern seaboard depended mostly on slave labor when communications were difficult to travel with treacherous. this was a document written by people who had no compunction about other human beings and both women had no role to play in publicaffairs and that men without property should be allowed to vote. we should decide modern public policy questions.

here's another way to make the point on this thought experime experiment. suppose you are what say the president or the senator or a supreme court justice or just an ordinary american citizen and you have some important matter of public policy, and i'm assuming you are quite a responsible person, so you spent a little time on this and carefully considered the implications of the public policy implications. after you are done on that you decide on balance the right thing to do and then just as you're about to do that, somebody rushes into the room and says that, wait a don't have

it yet. i have something important to tell you, so people 200 years ago who are dead and know nothing about our situation wrote down on a piece of paper and then you say i'm going to throw out everything else i thought and just because it is written down this paper. anybody that did that i think needs their head examined. this is pretty abstract so let me make this specific. let's talk for a minute about guns. most of my friends and family are surprised by this, but i'm actually quite skeptical about gun control. it's not that i like the ones. i don't.

i would never own one but there are 300,000 of them in the united states and i am doubtful that any law that congress could pass could do much about gun violence. >> so 300,000 laws clicks submit items aritems i can't 300,000 gn the united states. >> so 300 million. >> 300 million, thank you. 300 million guns in the united states. now, i understand the position is controversial and i like to talk to people about it and people have different views. here's how not to talk about it. that way not to talk about it is that the second amendment. but as soon as you start talking about the second amendment, to very bad things happened. first is the discussion gets sidetracked on the questions that could not be more relevant.

so instead of talking about whether they are going to control gun violence or whether it is an aspect of natural rights to own guns we start talking about the relationship between the introductory clause of the second amendment and what exactly it was 200 years ago and what precisely the relationship is intimate constitution and the english dub of rights none of this has anything to do with the question. it's hard to imagine that anyone would take seriously the composition that we ought to decide what to do an about guns and the united states. but then as soon as we talk about the constitution, the temperature begins to rise so you have a good-faith disagreement about what the best

thing to do about guns is and we can come away from it disagreeing the performance. to say i disagree about a matter of public policy, you are saying i am disregarding the foundational documents that makes the united states. when it starts talking like that to me it is hard for us to still be friends and there is much too much of that in american politics today and if we constitutionalize it that i thk that our discourse would be more relevant and more meaningful and those are really important chapters. now let me qualify or explain in

one way to avoid misunderstanding the fact that we not obey the constitution doesn't mean that we ought to do the opposite of everything that is in the constitution. there are a lot of things in the constitution that are just really good ideas. so for example freedom of spee speech, those are things we ought to do not because they are in the constitution but because they are the right thing to do. maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong but we have been doing things this way for a long time and it's not good to have arguments about everything all the time so for example i don't know whether a four-year presidential term is exactly the right length. i do know it is a bad idea to be arguing about that every four years so i don't think that we

should argue about it. they are not worth arguing about. so just evil. it's not a good somebody can be electeelected president of the d states when an opponent gets more votes. it's very hard to defend that. it is not good at the three people in wyoming have the same representation in the senate as the 35 million in california. that is something that is hard to defend. it's not good for people like me that within the district of columbia or the folks many would defend those results and yet we are stuck with them because the

constitution. here is what this is ultimately about. we live here and we have a right to have the kind of country that we won't. nobody would say that the united nations has the right and for those reasons nobody thinks that we ought to be ruled by people that have been dead for 250 years and whose country is not any more. ..

part of the problem with the institution is that it's not only the oldest written institution in the world, it's also the most difficult to amend in the world. amending the constitution requires a two-thirds vote of each house of congress followed by ratification by three-fourthses of the state legislatures. that means that a tiny number of citizens from one-fourth of the least populist states in the country can block an amendment. and as a practical matter, it means for many of the issues i've just mentioned the constitution's impossible to amend. for example, there is just no way that the senate would permit an amendment that would

substantially reapportion the senate. the constitution has not been amended since 1971, if we don't count the last amendment which was ratification of a provision that was part of the original bill of rights. it's not likely to be amended again anytime soon. the amendment process itself, article v, is part of the constitution that we ought to start disregarding. >> host: what would you replace it with, anything? >> guest: so i think that we have a set of customs, traditions, ways of doing things and ways of thinking about things that would perfectly adequately structure our politics, and we don't have to just sort of imagine what a world would be like if we did

that. we have some examples in other parts of the world. so the two most prominent examples are the united kingdom and new zealand. they don't have written constitutions like our constitution, and last time i looked they were pretty successful countries. there wasn't rioting in the streets, the leaders of those countries weren't arresting their political opponents. things work pretty well there, and i think they would work pretty well here as well. >> host: doesn't the constitution protect the american people from the tyranny that it originally was protecting us from? if we just had a series of laws, those could change every year. >> guest: well, yes, laws can change, although given our situation in washington now, laws don't seem to change very much either. but, sure, laws change. there's nothing wrong with that. circumstances change, people's

opinions change. now, there are some things that ought to be pretty much fixed. for example, freedom of religion, freedom of press and speech, rights to equality and liberty. but i think you're really kidding yourself if you think that a piece of paper in the national archives is what's protecting those things. you know, madison had it righting at least about this several hundred years ago, he referred to the piece of paper as a parchment barrier. and what he pointed out was that if, as he put it, men were angels, constitutions would not be necessary. but because men aren't angels, they're not effective. men are not angels, they're not effective. anybody who's evil enough to want to trample on the rights of the american people is also

going to be evil enough to trample on what's written in a document which, after all, the document itself has no guns, it has no power. it's just sitting there. so if you ask a question what is it that protects civil liberties in the united states, no, it's not a piece of paper. it is an informed, an aroused and active american citizenry. and if that doesn't exist, then we're just killing ourselves if we -- kidding ourselves if we think the constitution is going to protect our civil liberties. >> host: professor seidman, how did you come to this view? >> guest: well, i came to it from teaching constitutional law for a very long time but also from just watching the way that american politics works and the way that the constitution is used in american politics. one of things you begin to notice after a while is the way

in which the constitution, the content of constitutional law is determined by politics, by the political views of people on both sides of our political divide. so let's talk about guns again. is it really just a coincidence that all the justices appointed by democratic presidents thought that the second amendment did not bar gun control while all the justices appointed by republican presidents thought that it did? what a coincidence, right? all these people are looking at the same language. are we really supposed to believe that their political commitments had nothing to do with that? and you can -- that's not just about guns. in case after case where the stakes are high and where the politics are salient, the

justices are just reading into the constitution their own public policy views. and that's just bad. and i think the american people are smart enough to understand that that's what's going on, that the constitution is being used for cynical, political purposes and that if -- it's not bad that we disagree about these matters, but it is bad that one side is trying to shut up the other side by saying i don't have to tell you why your policies are wrong, you're just not allowed to believe that because the constitution takes it off the table. >> host: don't we as a nation need a unifying touchstone such as the constitution? >> guest: well, we may need a unifying touchstone, and i think that, interestingly, the constitution could be such a

touchstone if we understood it not as a legal document, but as the answered -- that answered questions, but as a way of framing questions and a way of providing us with a kind of emotional way of urging us to try to behave in a certain way. so the great promises of the constitution -- liberty, justice, freedom -- those are things that all americans can agree on. and i do think it's appropriate for us to take the preamble that we the people are determined to form a more perfect union as a starting point. it's something we can all agree on. one way to think about this is instead of thinking of the constitution as a legal document, you might think about

it as a symphony or a poem or a work of art, and one can be inspired by a symphony or a poem or a work of art. one can even try to in one's own life replicate the values in such a work. but it would be very odd to say one was obeying a poem, right? you don't obey a poem. and so, too, these great causes in the constitution like the equal protection clause, due process clause, they're not things that we obey. they are, instead, things that inspire us. and when things are working really well, they might fill us with a sense of wonder that you and i, say, could both be moved by that same language and come to very different conclusions about how the world ought to be structured.

and if we could see that, that might actually be the beginnings on which we could build political community. the democrats -- that democrats and republicans are both inspired by these same goals,al hoe they see the -- although they see the way to implement t them as being -- different. >> host: you statemented at the beginning, your wife, your kids, your colleagues, your students all think your idea is a little off. >> guest: go beyond that. [laughter] >> host: is this a growing idea in legal scholar circles? >> guest: well, i think it's actually more prevalent than you might imagine. so first of all, i do think many, many not just legal scholars, but many americans are coming to see that when the supreme court or when political figures insist that something is unconstitutional, that they are reading their own political

values into the constitution. i think a lot of people understand that that's the way the game works. i also think that a growing number of scholars have expressed real reservations about the role that the supreme court is playing in our culture and in our law and about some of the dysfunctional attributes of our current constitution and things that are very hard to change within the four corners of the document. but, look, there's no doubt this is an uphill fight. it's not going to happen all at once. i'm not daft enough to think the supreme court tomorrow is just going to announce that they're going to disobey the constitution from now on or that congress is going to pass some law saying that. what this requires, more than

anything else, is cultural change. and cultural change happens one conversation at a time. and, you know, sometimes it happens much quicker than anybody imagines. just look at what's happened in a very short time with regard to gay rights or a little while back although continuing today with regard to the rights of women and their changing role this be society. in society. those are things where the culture changed and the law followed. and i think something like that has to happen here as well. >> host: 1973, roe v. wade, do you consider that to be a constitutional question? >> guest: so roe v wade is a really good example. you know, if you actually read the opinion, there's almost no talk at all in roe about the constitution itself. you have to read the opinion very, very carefully to see

which provision of the constitution justice blackman is relying on. he says in an offhand way, oh, by the way, this has something to do with the due process clause. roe v. wade isn't about the constitution, roe v. wade is about moral and political judgments concerning the fetus and the autonomy of women. and by the way, i'm not necessarily saying that the supreme court should go out of the business of making those judgments. there is something to be said for an elite institution that's somewhat removed from ordinary politics making judgments about political morality that maybe hold us to some higher standard of political morality, something like that. of course, there's something to be said against it also. i'm, for these purposes at least, agnostic about that. but if we have such a body, what i would really want to insist on

is that the justices start telling us the truth instead of pretending that decisions like roe rest on the constitution of the united states. and if they started telling us the truth, then the american people could make an informed judgment about whether they want such an institution or not. >> host: and we have been talking on booktv with georgetown law professor louis michael seidman about his book, "on constitutional disobedience," and you are watching booktv on c-span2. >> the new c-span.org web site gives you access to an incredible library of political events with more added each day through c spank's nonstop coverage of politics, history and nonfiction books. find c-span's daily coverage of official washington or access more than 200,000 hours of

archived c-span video. everything c-span has covered since 1987. and our video is all searchable and i viewable on your desktop computer, tablet or smartphone. just look for the prominent search bar at the top of each page. the new c-span.org makes it easy to watch what's happening today in washington and find people and events from the past 25 years. it's the most comprehensive video library in politics. >> we are not in a post-feminist era. i am very concerned about the, quote, war on women. we are rolling back access to reproductive rights. there is no end to the regret bl statistics on violence against women. we have not stopped shaming girls about their bodies. we have so much sexism in the media which implies you have to have a certain shape to be loved or popular.

the problem in terms of defining feminism is it's true that what unifies a lot of women globally is what is done to women. and i don't want to identify feminism as about victimhood. that's a very important critique. you don't want victim feminism. empowered feminism says that women should be equal if in their rights and -- in their rights and opportunities, period. where we don't see that, we want to push forward to headache that possible. to make that possible. end of statement. but, no, there is so much work to do, and globally the statistics are really frightening in terms of women's lack of access, again, to everything from education to health and information about their options. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> women's history for beginners is the booktv book club

selection for the month of february. if you go to booktv.org, you'll see right up there at the top there's a tab that says book club, and you can participate in our discussion at booktv.org. we'll be posting vid -- video and reviews and articles up there tomorrow, so the discussion will begin tomorrow. we'll also be posting on a regular basis discussion questions. so i hope you'll be able to participate. bonnie morris' women's history for beginners, is our february 2014 book club selection on booktv. >> here's a look at some of the books being published this week.

>> look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> that in 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 of doubtful merit. and we have a tried and true method of civilizing boys through, you know, good sportsmanship they can get from their coaches and kind of moral guidance, certainly from parents, most of all from parents, but reinforced by teachers. and i just find 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 the 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 and socioeconomic groups, and you find the 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 and make it into the middle class. and some educators at harvard said the passport to the middle class used to be the high school diploma. not anymore. there's a new economy, and it involves education beyond high school. and girls seem to be getting it and boys less and less. so 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. >> host: christina hoff summers, you write that women in the u.s. now earn 62%over associate's degrees, 57% of bachelor's degrees, 60% of master's degrees, 52% of doctorates. admissions officers were at first baffled, concerned and finally panicked over the dearth of male applicants. if male enrollment falls below 40% or below, female students begin to flee. officials at schools at or near the tipping point are helplessly watching as their campuses

become like retirement fill villages with a surfeit of women competing for a handful of surviving men. >> guest: yes. there are campuses that admissions officers are looking at, you know, 60% female, 62%, 65. it seems to get worse each year. and they are, yes, i would say panicked. there was an administrator at the college of william and mary said, you know, we have to do something about attracting more men. we're the college of william and mary, not the college of mary and mary. [laughter] well, there's one statistician, education alstadt sticks who said that 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 is that it's quite a mystery why the girls would be 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 poorer kids, or it's, you know, manifest in the working class. it's across classes that you see the girls outperforming the boys. and just the this year there's a new study that shows girls not only get far more as and a+s, but they are more ambitious, a higher percentage aspire to go to graduate school and law school. now, again, i celebrate this, 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 just wish that when they discovered that there were gender differences in education, what i wish had happened instead of becoming like 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, and we've managed to close that gap. and, 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 be 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. one of the saddest comments i ever read was a group of researchers interviewed boys about why did you leave school, and one little boy said i just thought nobody wanted me there. and there are a lot of boys who feel that way. someone should make it clear to him that they want him there. but there's so much going on in our schools that is girl-friendly and not so friendly towards boys. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

>> we'll be returning to savannah for the savannah book festival live on booktv shortly. while we wait for the next author's presentation to start, here's another interview from booktv's college series. >> host: and you're watching booktv on c-span2. we are on location at the catholic university of america in washington, d.c. where we're meeting some of the professors who have also written books. joining us now is professor math threw green who has written this book, "the speaker of the house: a study of leadership." professor green, what's the speaker of the house responsible for? >> guest: well, the speaker of the house has a number of responsibilities. he or she is the top officer of the house of representatives

and, in fact, the only one named in the constitution. and so there's an expectation that speakers are there to represent the house of representatives with the senate and to the american people. a practical matter, the speaker is responsible for insuring that the house operates correctly, insuring that legislation is enacted, helping to develop the agenda, interacting with the president, interacting with the american people and insuring that, in general, that the house is working the will of the people. >> host: could anyone be the speaker of the house? do you have to be a member of the house to be speaker? >> guest: technically, you do not. all that the constitution says that the house shall choose its speaker. and so in theory, anyone can run for speaker of the house. as a practical matter, it's always been a member of the house of representatives. but that is not a limitation that the constitution imposes on the selection of the speaker. >> host: how partisan is the post? >> guest: that's a great

question, and i would say this, that the partisanship of the office of speaker has changed over time. from the very beginning, the office of speaker had both partisan and nonpartisan responsibilities. in other words, to some extent the speaker was expected to represent the majority party in the house, but also to some extent the speaker has parliamentary responsibilities, insuring that the rules are followed, that every member has the same rights and is treated fairly and to preside over the day-to-day operations of the house and the house floor. over time the position of the speaker has become more partisan, and i would say reached the height of contemporary partisanship around the 1990s and 2000s with speaker gingrich and speaker pelosi. speaker boehner has pulled away to some extent from that and, i think, has tried to reintroduce

some of the less partisan aspects of the speakership, but it's still a very partisan position, and the majority party in the house expects the speaker to carry out the will of the majority party. >> host: when you look back at the history of the speakers, who have been some of the more effective ones or well known ones? >> guest: well, the first that comes to mind is sam rayburn who was speaker from 1940 until the early 1960s. and he was a prominent speaker in part because he lasted so long. he served off and on for 20 years, and it's very rare to have a speaker last as long as that, certainly not more than two or three terms. but he also was a rare speaker in that he understood the house in which he served, and he understood what it was that motivated members of the house of representatives. he had what you might say is a feel for the chamber, and that made it possible for him to get a lot done as speaker because he knew what was possible. he understood the art of the

possible in congressional politics. and some of the, some major legislation that was enacted during that time period was enacted during his speakership whether it was transportation legislation, some early civil rights legislation, legislation related to world war ii. so he was in many ways one of the most effective and best known speakers of the house of representatives. we've also had recent speakers who have demonstrated considerable effectiveness. newt gingrich in his early years, particularly the first 100 days, really turned the house into a real machine, just producing major, major legislation under his leadership relatively swiftly which was very impressive. nancy pelosi, in particular the enactment of health care legislation which was a huge feat and sort of a last minute outcome in large part because of her leadership. so we'ved had speakers -- we've had ke