and asteroids. he discusses likelihood of impact in the near future and what, if anything, can be done to defend against it. this program is about one hour. >> host: today i'm talking with william burrows about this enjoyable book, "the asteroid threat." i wouldn't characterize it as a story about astronomers, planetary sciences, engineers might someday save the world. well, how would you characterize your book treachery i think you did it very well. i characterize it by saying that my point is that we don't have to be the hapless, hopeless victims of a nature. my friends in nasa and elsewhere in the space committee like to say the dinosaurs had a space program they would still be a. we've got the wherewithal to save ourselves. the book, there was an important point of the book is that it

explains that and comes up with a plan. and a plan was not invented by me but it is pretty universally accepted within the community. >> host: so my impression at least you are advocating as spent quite a lot more on this problem, on planetary defense, is that right? >> guest: this. the cold war is over. peace alaska has broken out. what i like to tell people who say it will cost an astronomical amount of money, pardon the pun, to do this, i say where is your collective life as a civilization with? the dinosaurs got blown away. it can happen again. chances are it's not going to happen very soon, but doomsday is always a possibility. so what i'm saying is protect your cells but that is a very good use of money. >> host: so what are you advocating able to do? site if you have a few billion dollars or your king of the

world, what do you think is the right thing to do? >> guest: well, i would set up a permanent planetary defense system, and again within the community, just acknowledged having three parts. part one is you've got to have the sensors on the planet, infrared sensors on the planet and off the planet to spot any so-called earth crosser, any potential impactor that is coming this way and it looks like it's going to hit. part two is you've got to be able, with 20 or more years notice, you've got to be able to send a spacecraft out that will nudge it off course on before it gets here. and given the distance, nudging it off course, that's just a tiny amount will do it. it will pass far wide of the planet. the third part of the strategy is last ditch, and that is being

able to stop the violently probably with a nuke if everything else fails and it looks like it's going to be an impact. >> host: so they put a lot of efforts to find these things. congress passed a bill. they put up some money. there are these programs you talk about notably the linear program and catalina observato observatory, things like that. i suppose there's another one that will come online in a few years that alice as the, or a telescope. are those going to do deal in terms of finding the asteroids or do we need to build more? >> well, they should pretty well do it, but there's also as i mentioned in the book, sentinel, which is infrared telescope,

they're planning on putting it in a venus like over it from where it will watch the neighborhood as i call it, and pick up anything i can that looks threatening. you can't have too many eyes in the community is agreement on the. so yes, everything you mentioned is in play, and sentinel should be in play. >> so sentinel funded, it's a concern it would be up there in 2017 as far as we know? >> guest: that is the plan. it is being funded by a company in colorado, ball aerospace and technologies corp. and the b6 foundation. for restaurant -- astronaut rusty start with other people. they're going to build and it would be put into space. as i say i think in 2017. that's the plan.

so it's the private sector. >> host: so the money we don't have and that we do need to protect the planet than is for the spacecraft would go out and actually meet the beast, right? >> guest: exactly. >> host: there is no plan to build those things right now, is that correct? >> guest: well, it's being thought about but is it concrete? no. it is all theory. >> host: but for order of magnitude and amount and what would those costume if you think? >> guest: as far as i know that has not been determined but it is obviously multiple billions. again, what is your life worth? >> host: yeah, right. so how probable is it? what chance to people listening to this half of getting killed by an asteroid or whatever else would come along? how does that compare to whatever else would come along?

>> guest: good question. the chances of getting knocked off by an asteroid or very, very, very slim. there is an inverse law, and that is earth gets pelted all the time as you know by everything from pebbles to boulders to larger rocks and someone. we are constantly being hit by any of the so-called near-earth objects. the chances of the big one coming along, which would be a planet killer, are very remote. they think that the next time will be in about 100 years, and by the time we should be prepared to do something about it. but as i say, it is a smaller ones that will ruin your day. they can take out large tracks of area. and it has happened judging by the number of impact craters on this planet and it's happened well over 130 times.

>> host: and, of course, it could be happening in the next minute and we wouldn't know necessarily. >> guest: that's right. >> host: so i read in the book killed by an asteroid is a little less probable than died in airplane crash. is that a fair statement? >> guest: absolute right. as i say it is the inverse law. the chances are for remote, but if it happens it can be devastating. >> host: so i would guess that would result of this program so far, finding all these asteroids, we found a lot of asteroids, the marketing programs that would actually now know that out of a lot of asteroids that are not going to hit us and we haven't found any that will, so we can probably not that probably down some, right?

we are a little can we know we're a little safer and when you before. is that a fair statement? >> guest: i think we are a lot safer. there's another element to this, and that is the little prince who loved the asteroid lived on had a point. asteroids are not all bad. asteroids have got some potentially very, very useful qualities. one is a lot of them are loaded with precious metals that can be mined. another is a very big ones can be lived on, and that's in preparation for a lunar colony which is in the book, lunar colony being something i believe very strongly and. so the point is asteroids are a mixed bag. they could do terrible damage. it happened last year and russia, the town where one blew up over the town and sent 14

other people to the hospital, who were injured. so there are pluses and minuses. >> host: fortunately it didn't kill anybody, right? there was a lot of flying and broken glass and people being thrown around. >> guest: they were lucky where a blue affordable of because had it exploded over the city at a lower altitude they could have been tremendous death and destruction. >> host: i remember in some way while asteroids early in his you of the earth may have sterilized the planet over and over several times, but maybe actually they were sort of like our planetary life lifeboat, that a big asteroid will throw things out into space and some of these rocks may be infected i the early bacteria and such that were on the planet and then were sterilized, but some of these bacteria can remain alive in

space capable of getting going again and reproducing. and those rocks, a lot of them ended back on earth. you have had a really big asteroid to do the project basically open up a vacuum cavity in the yesterday to those rocks to fly out. they are the destroyers and the creators perhaps, but you said something also about people's ideas about asteroids and comets bringing in organic materials from outside. >> guest: well, that's a theory. it out of my head now, but if comets in fact did, in fact, bring life to this planet, which has not been disproven. >> host: it's not a theory that people talk about as much maybe, but yes. so how why do you think the audience is for this?

just a candid question. what fraction of the populace do you think, knows the difference between an asteroid versus a comment versus a major planet or whatever? do you have any feel for that? >> my guess is. >> guest: my guess is it's a very small percentage of the population. when i taught journalism at nyu i sent my reporting students i wanted to interview the proverbial man on the street about what he or she thinks about the space program. and they came back and once said, professor burrows, the lady i talked to said that she's more interested in educating her children. a man said, i shall buy more interested in paying the mortgage. someone else said putting food on the table. so the answer to your very good question is, a very small percentage. people are worried about keeping their roof on. i don't mean the roof that protects us against -- i'm

illiterate the roof on the house and that's where it is. >> host: but it seems to me at least in the recent past congress has been motivated throughout this question. so that's important. but are you thinking of how to get the word out about this threat and how we need to spend more money than we are no? >> that's why i wrote the book. i was privileged to be picked as the only nonscientist on a 14 member panel by the national research council which is of course the national academy of sciences to be on a near-earth object survey and mitigation panel a few years back. we took testimony in washington, tucson, and santa fe from scientific and that's how i got interested in this because they said that it's a serious problem.

again, doomsday ain't around the corner but i got interested in purchasing in the. i was very privileged to have been picked for a. it's a real problem as you well know. >> host: so do you think they picked you because you knew he would write a book like this? >> guest: yes, but it was an act of faith. >> host: so, you know, sitting here being somewhat depressive i could imagine all sorts of things that might wipe out the human race. people now think that what, 71,000 years ago we were almost wiped out by a giant volcano in indonesia, other volcanoes wiped out almost all life a quarter billion years ago. i can imagine some really bad virus or something like that. so is the asteroid threat really the worst thing we've got to

steal our sols for bugs or is it one of the top ones? have you thought about that? >> guest: the minus thing about asteroids, big ones can do a lot of damage. the good news is they can be stopped. as the late gene shoemaker, a geologist and de facto planetary scientist, as you pointed out, asteroids can be stopped. hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes can't. so that's the difference. the bad news is of course, if you're a dinosaur, watch out. the good news is they can, in fact, be deflected or stopped. and that's part of, again, why i wrote the book. i should also say to get back to question, that also advocating a permanent colony on the moon and

mars. buzz aldrin co-authored a book called rendezvous, and which the heroine is an interlock take space commander, she says, she justifies an intergalactic multi-generational mission by saying no place on this planet is safe for ever. the universe is telling us, spread out our weight around and die. that's the point. spread out. >> host: that's right. i mean, if you're on the moon, a giant volcano on earth isn't going to get you. it might get the people you work with and might leave you in a bad situation, but hopefully you figure out how to get along. so yes, you have a chapter on how to survive all of this stuff.

especially aliens. if there's an alien invasion they might know about the moon, anyway. i would say one of the major points of the book is that planetary defense has got to by definition be international. and i'm advocating that we have a planetary defense agency, or mass as a planetary defense partner. but the point is it's international, and that's good. if we all work together, the bottom line is on some level are no longer americans embraced and russians and chinese and japanese. we are earthlings. >> host: the virus or the vulcan or the asteroid isn't going to know the difference. let me get a little bit technical about some things here. one thing i was little bit surprised at, people talk about,

a good way to lay out the threads on probabilities of clothing. i don't know, is that like not used so much anymore? can you -- should we all even be getting a reading on the scale of asteroid threats? >> guest: as far as i know, it's just not talked about much anymore. for reasons i do know but the kindred he does not get into the torino scale. but a lot of them have been measured, and that's out there. >> host: yeah. one thing i was wondering reading about all these asteroids, you've done this wonderful job of finding hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and many of them are near earth asteroids.

and one thing i was wondering, it's really much easier to find them around the plane of the solar system where most things orbit. have people actually been searching the whole sky, including above and below the earth's orbit, around the sun as thoroughly? or are we sort of missing parts of the sky? >> guest: not early. you being an astronomer, of course you know about this cloud of rocks and things that surrounds the entire solar system. a lot of these things are in there, and we can pretty will monitor the main asteroid belt which is between mars and jupiter. there are untold, hundreds of thousands or millions of rocks of all sizes in the main built

-- belt. we can see them coming or because a lot of them coming because of telescopes, because we're equipped to do that. the ones that drop out of the cloud which is above us we don't see coming. that's a whole separate category and that is truly dangerous. there are not many that come, but again if you can't see it, you can't defend against and that's a potential problem. >> host: what i was thinking of was the fact that rocks that of almost hit us might actually be the ones that are going to attend to drop out, above or below the plane and come at us again. you know, if there's a near miss, these things are going to tend to get thrown away from earth orbital plane but they will come back and hit earth's orbit.

that's newtonian mechanics. they were returned to the scene of the crime. and if we are there, then it's bad news for us. those are the ones that are frequently going to be is coming out of the north or coming out of the south without maybe much warning. i was wondering if those have been covered by some of the survey's? >> guest: not many. and again you're absolutely right. they will come out of nowhere with virtually no warning, and it's a real problem. >> host: that's the one that worries me, because it almost seems like, you know, well, it's a lot better to say you've discovered 100,000 asteroids than to say you've discovered 10,000, but hey, i have covered the whole sky. so yeah, it was my impression, things like that are not covered yet.

first you have to look where you're going to find things, but eventually you're looking under a light post for the keys that you've lost summer else in the parking lot. >> guest: that's right. >> host: so that was one thing i was worried about and it sounds like i should be a litte worried about that. maybe we're missing some of the ones that will surprise us someday. >> guest: as you know being an astronomer, every buddy in the community as far as i know believes that, it's up to the true. the other thing i was going to say was, in terms of a near miss by a main belt asteroid, it will come around again. in that regard, earth's gravity is bad because an earth crosser will swing way out and because of earth's gravity it will come back and cross your path again. the deal is, as you know, is

that all things being equal, every time he comes by it comes by closer. earth's gravity will tend to do that. >> host: i don't understand that. i become if it's going to come back to earth's orbit, but how does it know that earth is there? >> guest: i don't know. [laughter] i'm not an asteroid, but the chances are it will keep getting closer and that's a problem. >> host: i don't understand that when. we will let that one go. so what about all these mitigation techniques? what about, dinner, you are talking about three stages depending on how big the thing is and how close it is to hitting earth. why don't you tell us a little bit more about those plans at lee's, or those proposals? >> guest: well, that's the standard plan, and again, it

depends totally on seeing this thing at least two decades and hopefully more before it gets year. once it has been spotted and tracked and it has been determined that it is a potential impact a company want to try to nudge it off course over a very long distance and if that doesn't work, again, blow it up. i should sit in that regard, as you know having read the book that i've coined a term called the bruce willis defense. and that comes from the movie armageddon, which i think eight is out he lands on a comet and nukes it and saves the world. if you were to nuke a comet or an asteroid, a meteor eight days out, you would turn a tenable into a great chunk and each chunk could take out jersey city or chicago or nairobi.

the bruce willis defense doesn't work. again, it does stop it decades ahead of time. >> host: we're going to take a break for a minute here and we'll come back. we have more things to discuss about the asteroid threat. >> host: we were talking before the break about sort of the spacecraft, the space-based mode of attacking the asteroid or changing the asteroid, not just looking for asteroids. so they are sort of deflecting

itself, deflecting it with a big blast or something, deflecting it genetically and then just nuking it. the first thing i think would be very intriguing to people. what's that all about. how are you going to deflected softly? is what you're going to make good use of the butterfly effect. >> guest: the big story here is that yes, thanks to a strong and we can spot the danger. the other side of that coin is there is nothing in hand that will actually stop one of them. we don't have it. as a former newsman, the balloon over my head says, that's a very good story. we can spot them. we can't stop it. yes, you're supposed to be able to deflected.

that's the plan, for out. do we have a rocket that can do that? no. and if we had a rocket that could do that, would it work with a cotton clothes and look like is going to impact, could we blow it away? to have a mechanism for doing that? no. we certainly have nukes, but how do you get that nuke to go out there and meet this thing several years out and blow it up? that technology is not there. so the big deal there is, we are defenseless. yes, we can spot them that we cannot stop them. if we see when it is whittemore, we better get our act together very, very quickly to try to get the technology in hand. >> host: what is the proposal for how we would deflect something just a little bit if we thought way ahead of time. so we have 20 years, something

like that? >> guest: would send a rocket out far ahead of time to meet it and to nudge it off course. and then again getting in closer you would use nukes. i should say in this regard that as i mentioned in the book there is a so-called star wars technology. i am very proud to say that i was among the first people in this country to come out against that stuff. president reagan made his speech in march 1983 based on what he was told about stopping russian missiles with this defensive system. and as i was in at the time, that was supposed to be stabilizing. the point i made clear in foreign affairs in 1994 within a few months of the speech is that it was not going to be stabilizing but it was going to be destabilizing because if you are the only defensive system that works, you're going to try

to knock off your enemies head. the point is that technology, which was very, very dangerous in a cold war, is not going to be dangerous in terms of planetary defense. the asteroid, i.e., did not have ballistic missiles that can use to destroy us. so the point is dust off that technology, nuclear pumped x-ray lasers and all sorts of things to try and stop them. that technology would be very useful. >> host: like a nuclear powered laser, you would deem onto the asteroid and that would heat up stuff and this material blown out by being heated up would cause the thing to rocket away and into a different orbit, right? is that what you're talking about? >> guest: that's right.

>> host: you were talking in the book about not even having to touch the asteroid with the spacecraft or with anything from the spacecraft and bridges using the gravity of the spacecraft, like a gravitational tractor. and that's something that may be practical if you have a couple decades leadtime, right transfer yes. they are calling it a gravity tracker. and again, 5612 foundation, rusty schweikert and ed lu and other people, and clark chapman southwest research institute who is an aerospace guy, they've talked about this for years and that's exactly right. you can deflect it by touching it or not by touching it. because it's so far out. again, at those distances if you move it a couple of yards where

it is 20 years out, it will miss the planet by many, many, many miles. so distance is on your side. >> host: i mean, the earth is only 4000 miles in radius so you don't have to move much more than that and you're missing the planet altogether, right? and gesticulate that over decades, you don't have to move it too much while you are there for that to just continue. >> guest: that's right. ..

the. >> guest: unless, of course, you were an art major. you might like that. seriously, no. it is unnecessary. just imagine it off course and worst comes to worst, but away. painting and colors is senseless . >> host: the sorts of things to affect asteroids but over thousands and millions of years. do the math. do we know enough about * to be blowing them -- exploding things on them? do you have a picture in the book of the asteroid and i guess eugene shoemaker said it looks like a roll pile. a bunch of rock.

and, you know, what if all we managed to do is sort of blow a hole in it or blow to pieces that are pretty much on the same trajectory? do we know enough about * -- i mean, the good thing about the gravity tractor is that will work on anything because gravity works the same on everything. we have known that. you know, when it comes to expecting an asteroid to react a certain way what do we know? >> guest: it depends upon the asteroid. * come in a lot of different compositions. some of them are almost entirely of iron, i mean almost pure metal. others are rocks, the popular image of the rock. i should say all of them carry small craters or scars from impacts with others.

eugene shoemaker is a hail of bullets as he called the universe in terms of what is going on out there. the point is * come in all shapes and sizes. robo piles of part of it. so it varies according to which one you are talking about. the answer is we don't know enough. that is why arrows, that mission a few years ago worked. and the japanese did the same thing. to try and get as much information as possible about our neighbors. >> host: so does that mean that if we see one coming at us the first thing we have to do is send a mission to to find that what is like? >> guest: it depends upon how close it is. it is 11:00. no. then you go any way that you

can. if it is far away that would be a smart thing to do, find out what it is. in addition to everything else the science builds up. plantings. that is what is important. again, it is a matter of how close it is. >> host: right. how big and how close to something have to be when the only thing left? >> guest: that is a good question, too. depends not only on its size by what it is made of. my suspicion is that within five or six years that is close enough. you have to allow for the fact that making it the first time may not work. the safety margin is as much time as possible. what they are saying in the community is five, six, seven years to go out there and, again, blow it up.

if you're going to blow it up blow it up far ahead of time. do not turn a cannonball into shrapnel. >> host: let me ask a little bit about the history of this idea. now, trying to figure it out rocks falling out of space. the end of the 1700's or something of that order. a famous quote that apparently thomas jefferson never said. he would rather believe that a yankee professor could live and rocks could fall out of space. apparently he never actually said that. but when did we first encountered the idea that our rock of fallout of space and actually kill somebody or kill a bunch of people? how long has this notion been around?

>> guest: basically says the 18th century to the 19th. he began spotting these things. and is again you do a little bit of homework and will see that the sky is full of them flying around in all directions. so it is a couple hundred years. before that it was all miraculous. things were falling out of the sky, of course, when the cave men wore round. they put it down to gotten there was nothing you could do about it like the faces of the month. >> host: astronomers were talking about dangerous meteorites from the beginning. i -- what is a science fiction? >> guest: welcome a much later. he put together the first telescope. they trained it on the moon. and every telescope that has ever been trained on the

moon including his cs traders. it is rough, jagged, obviously it. that goes back to $0.16. we build on that. their exploration program. voyager. i am here. mariner. sensational the four planets , jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune. every one of the moons that it passed had craters. again, nobody talked about it at the meetings because the science was so wonderful

that science was so wonderful that that is what they want to talk, not about cal tech, not about the damage, but the pictures were there. stars and craters, every solid object. >> host: it is an amazing thing, such a universal process. obviously if you have a very thick atmosphere that keeps graders from being formed. and there are some places that are just, you know, a volcano world's. that is the minority. most places are getting help to buy these objects all the time. in fact, it is an amazing tool. things get hit and a certain rate. once we figure whatever it was the apollo program, you

could extend that. had the look at the surface of the planet? picking of the sample and dating the rock. so you have your volcano world, your impact world. you know, the moon has gone back and forth. a volcano's for a while. and then the teeth of convincing people that it was impact oral than in shoemaker. >> guest: the crater of the other camp.

>> host: that reminds me that, you know, leon more of a volcano world. most of the surface of our planet is resurfaced, you know. the ocean bottoms have been resurfaced 50 times since the beginning of the planet. the impact, are routed away on the continents. we have a lot of volcanoes. they are dangerous. you know, the theory is at least the whole human race almost died because a volcano buried you know, we are entering the 21st century. who knows what we will cook often the way of dangerous things that kill us all. so return back to this issue that you raised. the survival imperative, the name of your chapter. along with protecting ourselves from the asteroid

we have to protect ourselves from everything else. so one thing you are advocating is let's get some people out of here. and so once you -- why don't you tell me more about that speech to spread and out or die. there is safety in spreading have, and that is why we should have a lunar colony. it is not for adventure, although it would be certainly an interesting thing to do. spread out or die. that is why we need to do that. in terms of volcanoes, again, getting back to it gene shoemaker, the good news about asteroids is that they can be defended against. we cannot defend against volcanos. as he pointed out, or earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes. there is no defense against that. i am an optimist in that regard. if you have the will you can

defend the plan and against *. you cannot defend it against exploding volcanoes. you just can't. so in a way we are sitting on a powder keg. >> host: have you thought about? we put neil and buzz on the moon. a volcano and gone off while they were there they would have been in really bad shape. they may have been able to make it back to the pacific ocean but maybe there would not have been an aircraft carrier to pick them up or something like that. and so camino, saving the earth from astronaut, how megaprojects do you think is keeping an epic of live on the moon? by the way, this is something that i am willing to entertain because this is what i wrote about. you know, what do you think? >> guest: in terms of a colony on the moon? it is a no-brainer.

spread out or die. again, it would cost a huge amount of money. yes. >> host: you don't have any sort of sale or proposal and minder something like that? uses have to keep people alive that can come back to earth. >> guest: arthur c. clarke of coor's road about this in a book called the exploration of space which is a bible in the community. and he has got -- he mentions a lunar colony in the mars colony. he has got the mars colony under a kossel plexiglass don't. and if you look in that you can see all of that vegetation and all sorts of things. that dome would also have to keep radiation which on mars is terrible. but, again, what was to you have? one really bad head and

earth is gone. and we just evaporate. what i care? and grandchildren. >> host: than it is not just the volcanoes and the *. any number of things getting enough and. it is lucky we made it through the cold war. >> guest: and tara side and global warming and climate change. absolutely. that all line, we have met the enemy and it is us. >> host: you would have to have a lot of people maintain a society such that when the threat is gone and the earth has settled back down into something like normal -- get of bonds backed chair so that they could start the place going again in terms of

civilization. you would have to have a lot of people on the moon, you know, you can talk about the numbers but it is in the many thousands, maybe hundred thousand of something like that. we are going to build housing for 100,000 people on the moon. that sounds -- the thing that is so cool is that on the moon and on mars we have discovered recently that there are actually basically caverns underneath the surface. that is where you have to go every million years or something some horrible impact occurs on earth. well, there are any members of @booktv a number of things on the money would kill you every day. the way to get away from them is to go underground a little bit. you don't have to worry about the radiation from the sun and the galaxy. you cannot have to worry

about the temperature going up and down by 500 degrees fahrenheit. all of these things done not make it below the surface. but pool of the surface there are giant spaces. if you do the math -- if you ask them many people you could put in the spaces and, you know, keep them alive, the heat, and set truck, it is in the millions. it is not so crazy and that he had. do not have to build a city of 100,000 out in a vacuum. we already have the superstructure sitting below the none. so it gets people there. you have to give them the tools to sort of makes things themselves.

they will take care of it. people are pretty good at making love of conditions, especially if they are increasing in number and what their children to live somewhere decent and stuff like that. the fascinating things, these same kind of caverns are on mars. maybe it is not such a crazy idea. it would certainly be very, very expensive, but it is not as expensive as when you first think about how much it might cost. >> guest: there is another element that should be mentioned. some friends of mine and i call an archive. the record of our collective civilization also ought to be preserved. we do not want to -- if they're is a calamity on earth we do not want to happen to the planet would happen to the great library of alexandria with a record

of civilization was lost and a fire. we need an archive of our civilization which is constantly updated. either of the polls our planet to make sure that if the worst happens and we are on the moon, on mars we have not lost the record our civilization. >> host: we already have this arctic in the -- i cannot pronounce it. we are keeping all of the important crop cranes and things like that. the amazing thing is that there are these places that are at almost absolute zero and sit there for a billion years. it is like if he wanted to store something or somebody, billion years from now you could actually do that.

it is unfathomable. you cannot do that anywhere. everything on our exchanges in a billion years. so that was and little bit of a tangent. let's get back to your book. i would give you an opportunity to sum up what you think are the important points that we have not covered here. convince people that they should buy your book. >> guest: we have covered the important parts. to reiterate again planetary defense is what is important here. again, because we have access to space we have the wherewithal to protect ourselves one way or another either on the planet or elsewhere access to space has given us that and we ought to use it.

>> host: all right. well, thank you. the opportunity to read your book and talk to you. >> guest: you ask wonderful questions. appreciate it. >> that was after words, it book tv signature programs.

tune humanitarian spirited. >> host: what do you remember about your father? >> guest: i wrote in my first book, my father coming home. six vote five. great presence. i remember the way he called my name with lots of authority just things like that. sharing cookies together. the rocking chair.