about is you really come up with an idea and you try to find the perfect writer, the person who passion for the idea matches yours and that's one way you can make a book happen. another way is you make sure to talk to agents as much as possible and see what kind of topics they are and to stick the new raise your hand and hope they will send you a good proposal. sometimes you cultivate authors you adore and the plant ideas with them and you hope that over time they come up with a project that they want to spend five or 10 years with and make a great thing happened. >> have ever read a newspaper article or magazine article that

said that should be a book? >> yes. i read up article 10 years ago about how in a very shortly in the early 21st century more households in america will be supported by women and that's a giant flop, i mean a giant change. it made me want to explore what the implications of that might be for many women, for marriag marriages, for children, for love, for courtship and i got a great book out of it. >> what was the book lacks. >> it was written by a terrific "washington post" reporter who is now at the new america foundation in washington. it generated, it landed on the cover of a magazine and it

generated a huge conversation about how do we all need to adjust our lives to this economic new reality and is this good? i think we were in the camp of yes, anything that makes couples stronger and live up, live up to their potential is a good thing. >> one of the authors or pair of authors that you worked with for nancy gibbs and michael duffy on a book that booktv covered in our q&a program covered it as well. what is the process working on the presidents club with nancy gibbs and michael duffy? >> i wish i could say i came up with that idea because it's such a brilliant idea but i didn't. nancy and michael have been working on that for quite some time and the idea came to them after they had written a very

great book on billy graham and they realize the degree to which the president talked to the ex-presidents and how much that club helped shape the presidency itself. that's what gave them ideas to explore the presidents club in a thorough way. it was a very modern idea of understanding the presidency because obviously we have to get to the 20th century for there to be enough longevity and practical for this to be possible but what we found was that presidencies were they made stronger and actually challenged by people inside this club. what was interesting about it was that we had over a dozen characters all of whom had relationships with each other going towards the path of the

future. the big challenge in editing this book with how to structure it. if you look at how the book is built, we have an introduction to certain key partnerships. all along the way because it helps the reader keep track of who the characters are and it helps them move along chronologically while honoring history and their relationships as they actually happened. >> did they write the presidents club in what was your role? what part did you play? >> my role was essentially to help structure the book and give it an architecture that makes it so accessible to the reader, so easy. they forget that there are all these multiple characters on stage at once and that they can see it and not feel overwhelmed by it. my role with the cuts, something

in a big believer in. if you are bored as an editor then there's a chance your readers will be too and my role was to make sure that some of the inside knowledge they had was made completely transparent to the readers of a new layer he came from and how he did things. essentially when you have authors as talented as nancy and michael you get up in the morning and get to work. >> what is your editing process? what did you do when you first got the manuscript? >> it came in sections and the first thing you do is you read the author.

you leave the office. you can do serious editing when you're in an office. you have to lock yourself some rows and completely immerse yourself in the book and becom become -- i mean they were the times when i would read the book and go out and get dinner and still be living in the middle of the nixon administration want to run back and get back into it. that's what you want. you want the ability to sink into the story as much as possible so you can see all of its beauty and so you can occasionally make it be more beautiful. >> do you take a red pen to it? do you take a pencil to a? >> i take a pencil to it. my days as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, it allows me to move back and forth easily. it allows me to sort of give it back to them so they feel like they can look at those notes and

absorb them as they would on their own terms. >> another author that you worked with and are working with better audience would know is karl rove. did he choose you or did you choose him and how did that relationship began? >> i had to audition for it. i got a call from my publisher. he asked me to to go down to washington. it was the first book that i was asked to edit. i have been a journalist for 30 years and he had read up on me and what stories i had covered. we had politics in common. i had actually covered him as an editor for many decades and basically my argument is you should hire me because this is my first job and i can't screw it up and it worked.

>> is it different working with a personality like that then it is working with a nancy gibbs and michael duffy who are maybe as well-known? >> i think every writer has to put themselves on the page. the process is the process by definition that makes writers feel vulnerable. i think the job of the editor is to essentially protect them but also make them feel comfortable with what they are saying. one of the first conversations i had with carl is no, you can't start the book at age 30. you have to start the book with your childhood including your mother's suicide, your father leaving the home, you finding out later that your father wasn't your father, you going to

meet your real father. those issues have to be on the page as difficult as they are to talk about. it's part of what makes you you and it's an identity -- if it's an identity biography that need to include that. readers bring up the childhood stuff because they have had experiences like his and i think that's one way you make a personality to be on stage more acceptable to you. >> priscilla painton because of your background as a journalist you work on a lot of nonfiction political books read. >> yes, i do. i work only on nonfiction and some of the books are not so much political as they are

journalism. a book on afghanistan, a book on veterans, a book on the industry of meat that has now become an oligarchy. a lot of books that involve journalists spending many years of their lives digging alone into some of the issues we face and trying to make them readable, something that someone would want to pay hardcover $25 for spend a lot of time with. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org.

>> now booktv presents person's coverage of the ninth annual brooklyn book festival in brooklyn new york. for the next few hours he can watch as authors discuss politics nelson mandela voting rights and public education. but first a they panel on city planning.

>> hello everyone. welcome to the brooklyn book festival at brooklyn law school. our dean is here to welcome you. the dean has been a wonderful bridge between the law school and brooklyn and the brooklyn festival so i would like to introduce him to you all. [applause] >> thank you. welcome to all of you. we are proud to be able to host part of the largest literary festivals in new york city and one of the largest in the united states. certainly the hippest and most diverse look festival so we have got that working for us. also welcome to the best law school in brooklyn. some of you know we are the only law school in brooklyn but you know we are the best law school

in the largest and most vibrant borough and the greatest city in the leading state in the most wonderful countries that we have got that working for us. it's pretty good. yesterday marla and i returned from a short trip to russia where i was speaking to scholars and students about why study law and last night on my way to the festival gala eyes on the wall of 25j street and inscription by alexander hamilton that in just a few words captured everything i was trying to say. it read, the instruments by which government enacts or the laws. the first is destroyed then the latter must be used and if the latter becomes ordinary then that's the end of liberty.

now this is the borough of immigrants. it's a borough of churches but it's also very much the borough of books. in true brooklyn style we don't just read them. we think about them. we talk about them. we share them. we devour them like all that great brooklyn -- we don't agree with them or we don't like them it won't surprise you to know that we are shy about saying that. here in the borough of brooklyn even our laws like 25j street speaks volumes in our places, in our spaces and buildings and developments all are about the language of words, the language of books and ideas. ..

>> they have been very instrumental in helping us lower the drawbridges and bringing the community and and we get a lot like giving and we get a lot in return. so it is a wonderful thing to have david on our faculty. the last thing is that i will welcome you all to programs that

we are going to be sponsoring at this time next year in conjunction with the book festival as part of constitution day which happens every year on september 17. and in large part to celebrate the 800th birthday of the magna carta. >> that's right. >> so we are going to be hosting here a traveling exhibit that the aba has sponsored related to the magna carta and we will be hosting authors and books related to that piece of law that has had such an impact from the laws that are evolving. but that is for next year. for now, let's talk about the discussion of public spaces. professor? [applause] >> okay, so we have an exciting panel and what is amazing is that it reflects the topic that

her last speaker is on the way, finishing up posters for the climate change march and he is going to join us. so don't gasp when he comes into the room, we will ignore him when he is here. the title is planning and protesting and cities evolve. there is an exclamation point at the end of the title and i will introduce her speaker briefly and hold up their books and then i'm going to turn it over to them. i have asked each of them to speak for five minutes and then we are going to have a crosstalk on the panel and then open it up to the audience. i ask that if you have a question, please come up to the microphone and i've heard that this one is better. and i'm hoping that we have engaged conversation until about 10:50 p.m. source speakers in order are peter linebaugh. his book is disclosures and resistance and our next speaker is daniel campo, his book is the

accidental playground. and then finally today we have the two co-authors, ben shepherd and greg simon. without further ado, i turn it over to peter. >> okay, thank you so much. thank you, dean, for the reference to magna carta. as well as the quotations from alexander hamilton. i am here to talk about this book and they are the enclosures of our lands and our lives and our citizens. and so magna carta. and there was a big charter and the little charter. the charter of the forest covered on 11th of september, 1217.

this was the charter that introduced a principal at alexander hamilton ignored. we have learned from him here at brooklyn law school and there are two principles of government. force and law. the charter before us is 11th of september at 1217 that introduces a third principle it is our duty and task to recover and that is the principle of direct democracy and assembly for principal snyder of coercion or law and that is neither the state nor the market or the military and a principal by which we govern our affairs. and this principle has fallen under the onslaught of neoliberalism as our prisons

become greater and our city becomes more walled and as the lands and the forests and the seas have become sewers for the dumping of the trash of the 1%. in the book is an attempt to show that we have common ground as we search in our future for the recovery of this principle of commenting. where the earth and so-called natural resources are not seen as commodities, but our means in which we, by which we form our communities. and that is the alpha and omega

of this. thanks to the dean, he mentioned alexander hamilton and magna carta and i wanted to introduce the subject through them. and i believe that the principle of this in the past was one of custom rather than law. so the book recovers those customs and recovers those practices of self-management and of actual democracy and of direct democracy, whether it is our food, whether it is our habitat or clothing. these are part of the charter of

the forest. the big charter and the little charter. these are the two charters of english liberty that william blackstone wrote about it he taught to alexander hamilton and the others. two charters of liberty. a big one and a little one. a little one consists of the common. but if you look at the big one, magna carta, chapter seven, it says that the widow she'll have her access to the common. and she shall have this which is arcane language and doesn't take much to recover its meaning. meaning that she could go to the forest to access fossil fuels for subsistence purposes. we now live not with oil or

woods, but with oil. and how are we going to rebuild our planet? and this book provides some background to that. it is hidden and it is unknown to us. as a people, we must recover that. >> peter, on that note that is five minutes. what continue the conversation to turn it over to our next speaker. >> i so look forward to hearing them we met our next speaker coming up to the podium today is daniel campo. >> i just have to say that i love the shape of this book. >> thank you. >> thank you, david. >> it's great to be here and so great to be part of the brooklyn book festival here at the law

school and it's wonderful on sunday morning to be up and awake and alert and ready for some discussions. my book is about commons as well, but it's kind of inadvertent commons. my book looks at the williamsburg waterfront in the period before the condominiums and the fairy and therefore all of this stuff that we read about in "the new york times" and new york magazine, it is like everyday. and the story that i tell is actually several stories, but it is a store of nations. it is a reclamation of nations and art landscape but it is one that was made without money and without professional assistance and no architects and no politicians.

it was a reclamation without permission and a reclamation without intent. and it was a place, thinking about this and we can just take the ferry there and walked down from bedford avenue to where it needs to be at the river and you can see what is there now and you can think about what was there and what was their was a common place where people could do what they wanted with very few constraints and definitely an anarchic place where people use that opportunity to do different things that they couldn't do elsewhere in the city. building a skate park, one that was written up in all this skateboarding magazines.

a punk rock band which is probably right now getting ready for the protest, every sunday afternoon, creating actually the soundtrack of this anarchist waterfront, performers getting ready to go to burning man at the end of august every year, where we practice there on sunday night. and there are all kinds of land artist and installation artist and performance artists to have different things with this industrialized landscape. the very matter of what made the williamsburg williamsburg and industrial fabric of this place, reconstructing it and rearranging it an interesting and provocative ways. so some think that this is all about hipsters and cool artist and keyboarders, but this serves

as a place where residents could just go and pitch a blanket and have a picnic or they could fish or get their feet wet in the river that everyone said was dirty beyond belief. but somehow it was this pleasing and beautiful place and people went there and they made it their own. i got to know people. in addition to my training as a city planner, i'm looking at it through many different lenses and i got to share some of the stories in the book and i befriended a bunch of blue-collar guys from the neighborhood and they would get together every day and they would drink beer and smoke pot in a little corner of this waterfront that no one else

seems to want to be a part of. there were also homeless immigrant laborers, many of them from mexico and from el salvador, and they were working on construction sites in the late '90s and early 2000 in south williamsburg. and they lived there, they lived near their work, they didn't have enough money or documentation to have a regular apartment. and the neighbors change as time goes on. anyway, i'm going to wrap it up and i do invite your questions and i thank you. [applause] >> so our first co-author is going to talk to us and ben shepperd is here as well. >> so we looked at this and it is really two parts, repression and resistance.

i do oppression and he does resistance. i think that my job is more fun, but i think that his is the one that everyone looks to read. so when we talk about this and the way that i define it is maybe a little bit unusual. it is the location where we negotiate conflicts with other people. and this is where we work it out and we sort of bump into someone and say i'm sorry, excuse me, to the big marches and protests. some ways i figure this is another warm of the type of example that peter was talking about where we substitute publicly owned public spaces and spaces are privately owned and if you want them to build it skyscraper, you can build it if you provide this at the street

level and that did not work out very well. one of the things that was very interesting was the kinds of things that get built by elite developers in what i call as a leading indicator. so you get an advance look at what is going to happen. and what you see is the ones like you might think of, unreasonable, nobody's there, and it's not by coincidence but it's by design and the architects were given pretty clear instructions. and so what that reflects as a retreat from the city. which is interesting because this is before you have a lot of the unrest of the later 1960s

and by 1975, they kind of wake up to the conflicts that we have in new york city. and strangely by that point, developers have changed this to filtered spaces, citibank is actually the institution that triggers the financial crisis and they say business is no longer sustainable and i can't go on, but then there is that tower and the public space and they wanted to be used. but the idea that you can design spaces that are used an attractive to a select group of people, this is early gentrification of the city. but again, most of them understand that this is not happening. and many have a sense of what

it's going to look like. so then by the year 2000, the researchers start to figure out that there's a a lot of policing going on and i remember looking at stuff in 2000 and, realizing that there'd been another shift in what we had was suburban iced spaces. they were very open and you can see this outside of office buildings. and they are using difference distance to keep people away that they didn't want in certain spaces and so you start to see this around the edges of the city so if you work in those office buildings, it feels like you're getting to know this. and so what we see today in terms of these cities? and you can ask that about the climate march.

and these are things you may want to look at. the questions of we find is who controls it and who does not. when you look at that way, what you are hoping for is a popular public space. and we can engage in public activity we want here. and so there's always some activity with the police. users and activities are to start to be very restrictive and we see that in a lot of different betting. the one of the most interesting things that you see happen where people take over a space and you see this in large protests where the state is no longer in control. or the control is in the hands of the people and we call that

autonomous. and you feel it in your gut because there is something very exciting and you feel like something neat might happen and it's frightening because you realize that this could come back and start cracking heads. so looking for those, i will leave you with the shape of the city beyond today. i would ask what kind of thing that represents and what are we seeing their and i will observe, although this is not an observation, they tend not to work very well. pierce has an elevated railway. and then you get these white elephants. i think this is an important question. and then we can ask what kind of

faces we are going to say in response to the most important activity last couple of years, thinking about occupy wall street. which is sort of a weird thing of putting sleeping bags outside, not the daytime we have more opportunity and we give a talk about occupy broadway, and it's like, great, you should do that, i will show up. but they actually did it and they said, i know the drill, you can use this for as long as you want. and that was not the case before occupy wall street. and so you can imagine that things got more restrictive as well. and i would also say that you need to talk about gentrification in a city with a 12% poverty rate. i love to show you this that

they can be great places to watch them and keep your eyes open. thank you. >> thank you so much, greg. we will hear now from ben shepperd who is a co-author for new york city's public spaces. >> thank you so much, it's such an honor to be here. thank you guys for coming. i apologize for this suit. later i am going to be a bp british petroleum representative. in an suv limo. and so what a great day to talk about this. if you look at it, we had a great talk and what is the state of this? i have talked about it last couple of months. we have started to talk about this, the gentleman was arrested for public rudeness. i have done this bike ride every

year and he was arrested and went to jail for that. and another woman during a rally this summer was standing on the sidewalk waiting for her son and she was arrested. fortunately she is a law professor and she will litigate and that is her right. so the march today will end on 11th avenue, i think that we have to think about the commons and that is really what we have to think about for this conversation. greg and i have had so much conversation fun about the dialect between resistance and repression, which is part of the conversation. and over and over again, the dance of the dialectic is one step up, to step back, one step up, to two steps towards depression and there is the tension of this and that's part of what is fun about new york. and -octane fun and good times od times

and it's joyous but it's highly contested and in some ways we have created so much with our temporary autonomous zone in and i we have also lost a little bit. this summer we had a great trip and i just rumor the sun going down and everyone was drinking wine. there were a bunch of musicians playing salsa and i was looking around and i didn't see anyone, i thought, this is in the legal performance of them in public states and they were just playing and enjoying being together and it wasn't for a big audience but for themselves. and i thought about the night before in new york, we finished a dance party and the security guard told us to move and we were told that you have to move. and i love new york and i love the energy and i think there's nothing like it. so the access to this is

increasingly filtered and i think the question is, how do we push back two because if you think about this, questions about democracy are basically out the door at and i think that is kind of what is at stake. if we don't have the space for deliberations, how do people solve problems together and build something together? those are the questions that we have to think about. but there's something else which is a question about the imagination. and so i think that if we lose access to the kinds of public safety that we are talking about, and we win some and lose some, i still love this state, it may not be what it was 50 years ago. >> so i. >> and i feel like you do as well. i know that you do. but just imagine what kind of

imagination we have and that. where is the public imagination for this thought? and i love this between exclusion and inclusion that we see in new york city and i think you'll continue to be joyous. but these are joyous movement and it's an important and joyous situation. and i hope that the regime as we move from this in new york city, when i think it was bloomberg or mayor rudy giuliani, and then bill de blasio, andrew cuomo, hopefully there is more room for public states and the question is still out. anyway, i would love to hear from you about this and thank you so much for having me. [applause] >> the irony is really great.

especially when we get everyone from across the panel. starting off with wanting things up with a question. two minutes in an elevator, u.n. mayor bill de blasio, what you tell him? let's go down the line. >> what floor are you going to. [laughter] >> you're spinnaker at the freedom tower, the bottom floor. security detail, unfortunately, left on the first floor. >> i tend to mind my own business in an elevator and expect others to do the same. and i think that purport of this question is to speak the power and speak to sovereignty. for me, this panel raises the question of what is sovereignty and what is power and where does it reside. and i think that it resides with

us. it doesn't reside with representation. and i think that if we are present in our own lives of their own imagination in building our own communities. we don't need to be re-presented by representatives of us. and so i would mind my own business in the elevator. >> it's funny. havarti communicated as some of this to the mayor, but he doesn't seem to have listened. [laughter] and i would use the opportunity to tell him that there is no way in heck that we will solve the affordable housing program by the building bigger and bigger on the waterfront or elsewhere that any sensible big picture looks at what the city is today and where that money is coming

from and it's a global market where the normal middle-class people of this city can't really compete with people who are paying 1.3 or $1.5 million from 5000 miles per lie. >> so we need a rethink around affordability and housing rather than high have the private sector provide a set-aside or we have to pull a few more units out in gentrify the units as they do that, thinking about dominant developments in williamsburg among others, let's think about the public potential that we can actually expand this

and we can restart this program from the 1950s and the 1960s so that we have affordable housing rather than just 20%. and let's unleash the public power to do something about a critical problem. >> if i was in the elevator were walking down the street, i would echo what the mayor said in terms of affordable housing. but i think about how it's gotten very widespread. will where will that money come from? if we don't do that in the respt public safety, you're never

going to have real public safety . also on the design side, and i think it's interesting to think about the way that those differences are that you see. it's a surprising potential for people with different positions to work out. but in terms of the planning, i have spent some time looking at this and i would point out that we are facing a problem where we are done if we do and darned if we don't. the city does nothing, then hundreds of thousands of people get displaced. but we know that when he displays whole communities, these carefully structured communities get torn up and the

kids do badly in school and quality of life deteriorates. and so even if we do a good job in preparing, and right now if you are unemployed, even if we do a good job in preparing for this, we are still looking at this and what those engineers don't think about is what happens to communities that get displaced and preparation. so i think that that is our challenging situation and i'm very worried about how we will make the changes either before or later in a way that is protective of other people. >> i agree with everything and it's hard to follow that. three things. i would say that just to please

everyone, but non-taxing lans, i joke about that but it could help us to be more sustainable city making sure there is more room for people family uses and it's really important. getting cars out of biplanes is really important. and so to that extent, we think about downtown brooklyn for people family purposes. there's a lot of racism that is used to push certain people -- if you drink a 40-ounce or, you're going to get arrested and i think that we really need to challenge on a that people should be able to hang out. people have a cuppa coffee, whatever else you want, if you're going to miss behaved, that's a whole different conversation. but i think we just need to open up the quality of life for people being out in public.

twenty years ago everyone was just out and so what else are you going to be. so there's a lot of life in that and i think that we can get back to that. >> thank you. >> i welcome people to come up to the microphone as people are making their way up. i would ask if the panel has any questions for each other. >> fair not. >> pleased to say your name and ask your question. [inaudible question] >> i'm sorry, we have a technical issue. >> okay, we are ready. >> my question is 30 years ago if you said where's bohemia in new york, someone with a greenwich village and it was there. and then it moved to soho to the lower east side, to williamsburg

and it keeps getting pushed out. is there ever going to be a physical location of bohemia in new york city in the future, and if so, where? >> i will take a shot at that question. the next neighborhood would be philadelphia or baltimore or buffalo. [laughter] so these are -- we lack about it -- we laugh about it but it connects back to the idea of 10 people actually live here and in in a way new york has become a more interesting place because little bits of bohemia exist in every neighborhood whether you are in brooklyn, staten island, manhattan or queens. but this is not a trivial concern and it's not going to be solved by building more 40 or 50

story towers. >> many people think that the opportunity to re-create this is always there. >> please give us your name. >> my name is margaret. my concern, i would like to hear some discussion of the difference in speaking with creative anarchy using creative spaces. how does it work out when different groups want to use public spaces in different ways at the same time, ashley when it has to do with different ethnicities and cultures and some people like peace and quiet verses some who amplify this in the park at night and how does that get sorted out without storm troopers? as well as interethnic issues.

>> i always thought that it's funny. i've seen people in conflict with each other, but jacobs is saying we were all going to be friends and those are not really compatible for folks to have an extra semester's owner shall read i got interest when i was living in san francisco and there was one park that was about two square blocks. and you had a playground and off leash dogs and 24 hour drug dealings. soccer games, basketball games, political protest. and all of that. and you get these little micro negotiations and you end up sort of claiming space. so if the soccer ball flies and everything goes wrong -- i mean, one of the things that is so interesting to me is that there

is this tension down to the individual level between integration and you are seeing this space a little bit by yourself. and on the other hand that's while you're there. so i think the funny thing is that it has people work this stuff out. there are disputes and i think sometimes the longer the list of rules, the better the public space. if you have a a a conflict, you figure it out and you write an extra rule on the board. if that happens in a democratic way, we are going to make that more useful and that is what happened. >> a question from this microphone if you can give us your name. >> hello. how do we teach the public to tax themselves in order to fill

this public space and housing and without the private partnership instead of planning building by building or neighborhood by neighborhood on a march like today, saying that it is time to tax ourselves, all of us, depending on your income to support this. >> i don't want to dominate the microphone. but as was pointed out, there is a condo complex or one apartment recently sold for something like a billion dollars in the property taxes are about the same as those in brooklyn. and i think you can address inequities from education on public space. >> send your letters to andrew

cuomo. [applause] >> he is blocking all of this and we do need some redistribution. it is this noble as that. and no one can afford to live here so it is time to tax some of the people that are coming in and buying these 2,000,059-dollar apartment and take a big chunk of that back. >> i think that if you are talking about green sustainable programs, look no further than germany. this is an industrial economy that is doing just fine. and it's very feasible to build sustainable cities and it's actually cost-effective, i would argue. but i think that it is cost-effective to make transportation that people can use. it's going to be better for the city in the long term. >> we have time for one last question if you can introduce

yourself. >> hello, i grew up in manhattan. i have a question for mr. campo. a big fan of the williamsburg waterfront. and i'm curious about what you see as a trade-off between having an informal public space like that for the people choose to use it and get whatever benefits versus how it is now where it is a formalized space and maybe is an improvement about that. >> this is a great question and i struggle with it, although at times it will seem that i'm not struggling at all. but when you get to the end of my book i try to take some of this informal experience that i document and pull those stories into a way where we have ideas

going forward about how this can be incorporated informal design and development practices i mean, what is there now is -- there are many things there that were not there we can say is wonderful. right? there is the ferry service and that is great. there are more people using it than ever. that is great. and so spaces evolve. and we can't just try to hold onto something from 15 years ago about this anarchic landscape area but the things that are happening there now are quite different than what happened 15 years ago. including the neighborhood guy come out in the open. where can people without training in art or lots of training in art go and shave the

land. marching band practice, there's no skateboarding in those parks anymore. so there has been this ongoing negotiation through development and the control of public space about what you can and can't do better, which continues to play out. but sometimes it is not the amount of people or the volume, but the variety and the juxtaposition and all of these different people and different groups and the homeless guys that were living there are a part of carnival, for a lack of better terms, that is gone. and we need to think about how we look at that experience and pull some lessons out and i hate to use the word lessons, but for building and governing public space. >> we need to come to an end of the program because in the program is coming in on behalf

of the book festival. thank you to our authors. [applause] >> they will be downstairs signing books. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] sumac max on the book festival, a pair on politics. >> good morning, everyone.

welcome to our panel entitled america disillusioned. my name is scott and i will be moderating the panel. and we'll be talking about these books today. so there is a bit of formal introduction here. before we begin the program, i would like to let you know that books by authors can be purchased from books on call new york city downstairs, just by the entrance to the building and immediately following this program, authors will be signing books at that location. and so my plan for the next 50 minutes is to introduce her panelists and then to pose some questions to them that i hope will generate some conversation among the four of us.

immediately to my left, we have our cardiologist and director at the jewish medical center in long island. he writes regularly for the york times and his first book was published in 2008 and has been reprinted in several countries. his latest book was released in august and he lives with his wife and their son and daughter on long island. jim percy is the author of the nonfiction book which is a arnzen noble discover great new writers pick and a recipient of the national endowment for the arts grant and an iowa arts fellowship or the nonfiction writing program and the truman capote writer's workshop.

and next to her is in our panel, she is founder of jezebel.com, anna holmes, best commentary for her column in "the new york times" and "the washington post" area she's the editor of two books, including the book of jezebel and now works as a columnist for the book review and is an editor at fusion. and i should note that they are going to be about 10 minutes as we wrap up for question and answer as questions come to us. please take note of them. okay. and so the announcement that may have drawn some of you here

suggested that you would be given answers to this question. how do these writers experience and challenge their frustration in a changing country. that is part of what i like to do, to get an answer to that question. the first to set the stage, i would like to ask each panelist to describe their most recent work and what brings them here. i want to talk a few minutes about what they are most focused on the terms of the commentary. were woody thinking about? what he writing about in light of what we promised everyone here to deal with. >> thank you very much for that introduction. and so the book is about what i would call the midlife crisis of american medicine.

and it is about the total demoralization of the physician and patient community that has developed over the last couple of decades old three personal story and my turns always wanted me to become a doctor when i was growing up. my mother would say i want you to become a doctor so people will stand when you walk into a room. and so i eventually sort of followed her and vice and i went to medical school and i then went to graduate school. ali family at college. so by the time i was done with my medical training, it was 19 years after i had graduated from high school. and this is totally unusual for doctors. many of us go through a very

protracted training process. and so by the time i was done, i was looking forward to taking a my first job, my first real job. so i joined an academic teaching hospital in queens, long island. and what i found was that colleagues were incredibly demoralized about the practice of medicine. and i also found that patients were really unhappy. i'm willing to bet that if i ask anyone in this room if you are happy with america's health care i'm, very few people would say yes. very few of them. and patients know it. they know when they are not being treated well. and they know when the doctors are not listening to them and they know when they are being shunted back and forth with specialist or going for tests that don't make sense or are

redundant. doctors also know what they are doing. i think that apart from the obvious stresses and medical practice in dealing with insurance companies and so on, i think the major driver of the demoralization of physicians is that we know that we're not taking care of our patients well. we feel it and when you have that sense, it leads to crisis and disillusionment. and so that is what my book is about. but it is a personal story that starts with my first job and what i've learned in the first three years of my first job as an attending physician.

>> thank you all for coming. this follows the story of a soldier's homecoming from afghanistan. and he returns to his home with severe postmatch stress disorder and you rebate he feels like his friends have abandoned him. the book follows his journey with his language and narratives and i started the book after i read an article about a soldier who was talking to an individual about this. and i was individually

interested that it has to be so present in the room after the war and what that means now. so i was interested between past and present and how is our culture making stress of post-somatic stress disorder, which is a term that i think that okay, this problem is solved. but the experiments if we individualize it is varied and one guy ended up giving -- getting an exorcism. and that ended up being a commentary in the book with the

vocabulary and the language that we rely upon to make sense of it, and how it is always having a lot of subterfuge going on. so we rely heavily on symbolic meanings or practical meanings and looking at the bush administration that we use and religious vocabulary as well. and so we are trying to analyze something in the war on terror and how about language has been breaking apart and how we deal with that reality with civilians and soldiers and what that means for us and how we can accept our capacity for violence it may be an uncivilized manner.

>> thank you for having me. >> that topic disillusionment is something that i don't know but i thought deeply about until i was invited to be on the panel. and i realized that my life was one in which i felt mostly the solution. and i think that sometimes it is the normal way that the child feels disillusioned. but more broadly a person of color in the united states and i think that a lot of these were formed by the solution and is expressed by my parents and i think that that motivates people to change around them.

until it comes to books that we are working on, the first book that i did was a cultural history of the female breakup letter. which had not been done before and the recollections of love letters at or around the end of the relationship that was inspired by one guy that i dated and i found that this is actually a vibrant genre throughout history and there was catharsis to be found in putting down words on a keyboard to explain to an individual what he had meant. and how maybe he had perhaps heard her. so i felt it was very broad and

shared by a lot of women. i can't speak for men. the second book was one that i had ran which was soulless, i believe. i think the book was an expression. ..

was the kind of bringing in a gender and racial politics into the analysis of pop culture. there was an acknowledgment that women were more interested in politics and by that i mean electoral politics but i think it's hard for me to say about it now because i don't run the site anymore but there was an ongoing feeling -- there was an undercurrent of anger and a lot of the stuff that was being published which i didn't have a problem with. i had a problem with anger.