one central message or listen from your book, what would that be? >> i could have planted you for that one, couldn't die? he is also the godfather of my children so it could have happened. i would say the fragility and loneliness of leadership and how we tend to think about big decisions about greek men as having arrived at them with little consternation, little uncertainty, making their stab for history when in fact there are a lot of things competing for those choices, and history turns on making the right decision at a moment it could have gone the other way. first and foremost, great men, great women, men and women, and

humanity is the essential element, we share that with them. gives a deeper appreciation of history. take away all the halos and look upon them as real people and we will be inspired by them, i think, much more keenly. thank you all very much. [applause] >> c-span2 providing live coverage of the u.s. senate floor proceedings and keep public policy events and every weekend booktv for 15 years the only television network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. c-span2 created by the cable-tv industry and brought to you as public service by local cable satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. >> how do you acquire a book? >> there are a million ways to do it. one, which is not often talked

about, you really come up with an idea and you try to find the perfect writer, the person whose passion for the idea matches yours, and that is one way you can make a book happen. another way is you make sure to talk to agents as much as possible to see what kind of projects they are enthusiastic about a you raise your hand and hope they will send you a good proposal. sometimes you cultivate -- you plant ideas with them and hope that over time they come up with a project that they want to spend 5, 10 years with, and make a great book at them. >> have you ever read a newspaper or magazine article and said that could be a book?

>> i read an article ten years ago about how very shortly in the 21st century more households in america will be supported by women and that is a giant -- a giant change, and it may explore what the implications of that might be for men and women, marriages, raising children, love, courtships, and i got a great book out of it. >> what was the book? >> the richer sex. 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 time magazine and generated a huge conversation about how do we all need to adjust our lives to this new economic reality and is this good for men and women? we were in the camp of yes, anything that makes couples stronger and give up to their potential is a good thing. >> one of the authors or a pair of authors you worked with were nancy gibbs and michael duffy on the president's club, a book that booktv covered, our q&a covered as well. what was the process working on the president's club? >> i wish i could say i came up with that idea because it was such a brilliant idea but i didn't. nancy and michael had 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 presidents talk to the ex-presidents and how much fat club helped shape the presidency itself and that gave them the idea to explore the president's club into faraway and it was a very modern india -- idea of understanding the president because we had to get to the 21st century for there to be enough longevity and for practical reasons for this to be possible. what they found was presidencies were made stronger. sometimes challenged by people inside this club. what was interesting about it is you had a dozen characters all of whom had relationships with each other going towards the past and towards the future so

the challenge in editing this book was how to structure it and 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, helps to move along chronologically while honoring history and the relationships as they actually happen. >> so they write the president's club, what was your role? what part did you play in that book? >> my role essentially was to help structure the book and give it an architecture that makes it so accessible to the reader, so easy to absorb that they forget that there are all these multiple characters on stage at once, then they could see it and not feel overwhelmed by it. my role was to cut something

that i am a big believer in. if you our board as an editor there's a good chance your readers will be too. my role was to make sure that some of the inside knowledge they had was made completely transparent to the reader so that they knew where things came from and how you knew things but the san chilly when you have authors as talented as nancy and michael, you get up in the morning and skipped work. >> what is your editing process? what do you do when you first get the manuscript? >> it came in a section. the first thing you'd do is leave the office. you can't really do serious editing when you are in an

office. you need to lock yourself somewhere else and completely immersed yourself in the book. there would be times when i would go out and get dinner and still be living in the middle of the nixon administration and run back and get back into it. you want the ability to sort of thing into the story as much as possible so you can see all of its beauty and occasionally, and more beautiful. >> do you take a pencil to it? >> i take a pencil to it. it comes from my days as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor. allows me to to move back and forth easily. it allows me to sort of give it back to them as those they feel they can look at those notes and

absorb them as they would on their own terms. >> another author you are working with that our audience would know is karl rove. did he choose you? did you choose him? how did that relationship begin? >> i had to audition for it. i got a call from my publisher. css me to go down to washington. it was the first book that i was asked to add it. i had been a journalist for 30 years, and he had read up on me and what's boreas i 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 works.

>> is it different working with a personality, and they are not as well-known? >> no. i think every writer has to put themselves on the page so the process is up process by definition that makes writers feel vulnerable. the job of the editor is to ease and chili protect them but also make him feel comfortable with what they are saying. one of the first conversations i had with carl was no, you can start the book on page 30. you have to start the book with a lot of the pain of your childhood including your mother's suicide, your father leaving the home, you finding out later that your father was and your father, wanting to meet your real father.

all of those issues have to be on the page, as difficult as they are to talk about because they are part of what made you you. if this is going to be a biography, then it needs to include that and he told me later that often times when he gets off by readers, they bring up the childhood stuff because they had experiences like his. and i think that is one way you make a personality who seems to be on stage more accessible to people. >> because of your background as a journalist do you work on a lot of non-fiction political books? >> yes i do. i work only on nonfiction and some of the books really are more not so much political as they are journalism.

book on afghanistan. book on veterans. a book on the meat bracket, the industry of meat that has become an oligarchy. a lot of books that involved journalists spending many years of their lives digging into some of the issues we face and trying to make the readable. something someone would want to pay in hard cover $25 for and spend a lot of time with. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here is some of the latest news about the publishing industry. the book review journal turkish reviews announced nominees for the first-ever turkish prizes in fiction, nonfiction and young readers literature. the winners to will receive a $50,000 award will be announced oct. 20 third in austin, texas. authors united, a group formed

to protest amazon's detente over e-book pricing has seen an increase in its membership. the new york times report several lawyers have recently joined the group, many not affiliated with it. ..

♪ ♪ ♪ >> welcome to boulder, colorado, located at the foothills of the rocky mountains near the flatiron range. it is the seat of older county and its most populated city with 100,000 residents. known for its beautiful scenery and outdoor recreation, boulder, colorado, was originally settled by gold seekers in the 1850s. in 1898 he became the home of the colorado chautauqua. one of three remaining in the country. with the help of our comcast cable partners, we will explore in the literary scene with local authors. we begin our special feature with david barron on the increase of downlines in suburban populations.

>> this is a site that few of us want to see when looking out of our windows. to unwavering eyes staring back at you with a couple of friends nearby. but that is exactly what happens in colorado. >> it was a little bit frightening because the only thing that was protecting me was the see-through glass. my book is called "the beast in the garden." it's about a large animal that would've been called a peace, the mountain lion. in what is really a garden. that is boulder, colorado. a big part of what i'm trying to get across in my book is the artificiality of the american landscape and of this wednesday. it is a beautiful seemingly natural place but it has been altered by humankind. when you get this wild animal coming into this landscape, you

can cause changes in the behavior of the animal and that is what we saw is a change in online behavior is the mountain lions adapted to this human creative landscape. the period that i write about in my book is from the late '80s through the early '90s and that was a special time in the history of mountain lions. until that time, there were no lines in this area. historically they were here. but back in the late 1800s and the early 19 hundreds, there was a plan to exterminate them and they were found in very small numbers, but not so much in the boulder area. then they came back into an eco-conscious animal loving community and people were thrilled to see these large, beautiful cat come near this

beautiful open space. whereas 1500 years ago if a lion had been found here it would've been shot. in the late '80s they were thrilled to have lions. unfortunately that cause problems because the lions were not being hassled and they found that older was a great place to live because there was lots of food and there were deer in the open space and you're living in town, the lions got used to living here. i believe and the scientist that i write about in my book leave that the lions change their behavior and they learned that people were no longer going to happen to them. in essence they were welcomed and and that caused some conflict. but in some cases a white scary and one that i write about in

detail. one of the things that i think it is interesting of that mountain lion here in boulder is a concept that we are seeing are not just do to we move where the lines are, but we are luring him and to where we are. and so it's a number of things that are going on. a mountain lion's favorite food is venison and eat about one gear a week. the majority of the diet is mule beers around here. this was created back in the late 1800s and so boulder had surrounded itself with open space largely purchased since the 1960s. is that open space area was turned into ranchland in essence a wildlife refuge, we saw the deer population go up. and then the deer population living on the outskirts of this beautiful and lush city, where we have irrigated gardens and lawns, the city attracted it and so we had a herd of deer living

in downtown boulder. in the late '80s when the lions moved back into the area, they were in an open space area and then they discovered that there were deer in town. so they where the line into town and then they discovered that some lions have really made a habit of eating dogs and they started by eating miniature poodles and work their way up to black labrador is and doberman pinschers being attacked by lions at that time and that is food for them. and so the lions were learning and they have learned that this is where they will find food. there is certainly food up there as well, but there's a lot to eat in town. so we are sending a message to them to come on in. there are quite a few times when lions have encountered each other here. so for the vast majority of people that height, they will

never see a lion. but it's quite likely that lions see them. they want watch us all the time and they have no interest in attacking people. but once in a while he gets it in his head that a person look like potential prey. we've had some scary cases just over my left shoulder. there is flagstaff mountain and back about 10 years ago a 7-year-old boy was holding his father's hand at a trio of near the parking lot. very popular. the lion came out of the bushes and attacked the young boy and carried him off and thank goodness he survived. his jaw was broken, but otherwise he was okay. and back around 1990 there was a 20-year-old medical student in the foothills back here that was going for a job and she encountered two lines and sheila to do. she made herself look big, she

yelled at them, she threw rocks and the lions didn't go away and they pursued her up a tree. she stomped on the head of one of them and knocked it to her to the ground and another came up after her. she broke off a dead branch, fashioned a primitive spear and battled him. she was convinced that she was going to die. she was traumatized by that but he survived. but the central story in my book in the most tragic was the death of a young man named scott lancaster who is 18 years old and a senior in high school and went to high school in idaho springs, about 25 miles away. he was a very athletic young man was training with an olympic cycling coach and everyday after every day after lunch you would go for a job i'm nice cool and one day in january 1991 he ran out and he didn't come back.

in the search party was sent out and it took two days before they found his body. at first they thought that he had been the victim of a risley murder and then they discovered that there was a mountain lion guarding his body and the lion was killed in the forensic evidence showed conclusively that the lion had killed him and consumed him and that was a wake-up call. a wake-up call for boulder, colorado, and for the whole western. because until his death in 1991, of mountain lions were considered virtually harmless and they were thought to be a wilderness species that couldn't live anywhere near where people live. they were thought to be largely nocturnal. and they thought that the only time they would attack a person is if the lion was starving or

rabbit or if there was a young child and this just went against all of that. because you had a healthy 18-year-old young man in the middle of the day right behind his high school killed by what turned out to be a perfectly healthy lion. i believe that what happened to scott lancaster was directly related to what happened here in boulder in those two years immediately prior to his death. so the lion and killed him probably had learned not to fear people, had learned that there's food around human habitation and was primed on that day not to run when it saw a person but to attack and that was the event that really did change the way that wildlife vestiges view mountain lions. and unfortunately scott lancaster's death, it was the

first time in more than a hundred years of an adult had been killed by a mountain lion, except the one person that was killed by a rabid lion in california. scott was the first adult that we know of to be killed and since then, you know, it's still very rare, but once every other year somewhere in the western united enter canada, we have another fatal attack. so people are more cautious. i definitely don't mean to scare people. colorado has far more significant risks and a lot more people die skiing were certainly riding their bikes, there are a lot of terrible things that can happen in colorado. no minds are pretty low on the list. and it's something that i think as a community we need to be smart about.

bolder still loves having lions around. they are thrilled to live in a place that still has these great large carnivores. but if the line is getting too comfortable in town or eating people's dogs, showing itself in the middle of the day in town, a ranger will be called out and the first thing is that it will be scared off and shot with rubber buckshot and bean bags, saying go away, you're not welcome here. if he keeps coming back it will be euthanized and killed. so we haven't gone back to the old days and i hope we never go back to that. but we are also not doing what we did 20 years ago, which was bring them on in and leave them alone. today i think that boulder is trying to strike a balance between preserving the lion and maintaining public safety. striking a balance when it comes to wildlife is never easy. and it's something that led me

to write the book. before i was an environment correspondent for npr. when i took the job, i thought that i would be doing a lot of stories about wild animals. specifically about animals in the face of human development. and what surprised me was the number of stories that i was doing back in the 1990s. about the opposite phenomenon and animals becoming more abundant and moving into human habitat. because of the protection and protection open-space that we have for so many species, what i saw about grizzlies in montana and dear in new england, it was the same dynamic occurring. you have these two communities. one camp is saying, okay, we have too many beavers, they are in our backyard. too many deer. it's time we started hunting

them and moving them out. and then you have an opposite camp saying that this isn't an animal problem but a people problem. and we should leave these beautiful creatures alone. what i saw happening time and again where these communities shouting at the other, and that is a big part that led me to write the book. the what happened here in boulder -- i think it's indicative of what has happened with many species including deer and raccoons and coyotes. but there are a lot of species that have learned to live with us and have been moving into our communities at the same time that our communities are moving to where they are. and if we're ever going to solve these conflicts, i think that we have to get away from that polarizing debate and realize that it is a people problem and an animal problem and we have to deal with both of these problems. we have to deal with the people that change their behavior so we don't encourage the animals to

cause problems. and i think it means managing the animals as well, particularly those individuals that may pose a threat to us. a lot of people tell me that they become paranoid after reading my book about mountain lions. and i don't want to scare people unduly. i don't want to make it so that you won't go hiking. downlines here, i go hiking all the time. i don't go by myself, but i just take a friend with me. and i don't worry that much about encountering a mountain lion. the risk is very low. however, i think there is a danger in seeing them as cute and harmless animals. and when i started to write the book, this is going back 15 years ago now, there really wasn't that much attention being paid to mountain lions. when i would interview people for my reporting for npr, i

interviewed a couple who had an online here in colorado that was in their yard and they walked out there and they took pictures and i said oh, what a beautiful cat. and i think you should be more scared than. i think that a little bit of fear brings respect. a little bit of fear says that it's not okay to have a lion hanging out in their yard, getting so comfortable bed could become a threat. and we respect animals and are cautious about them and what i generally hear from people is that for a few weeks after reading the book and that is where we want to be. taking reasonable precautions and not being so afraid that you won't be able to enjoy disputable land.

>> while visiting colorado, with the help of our local cable partner, we spoke with margaret coel, author of the "chief left hand: southern arapaho." >> chief left hand was one of the indians in the 1800s. he lived here in colorado on the plains of colorado. in the long to the arapaho's and the cheyenne people. and so what made him great, he was a piece indian chief. we know all about the war chiefs and the warriors thundering across the plain fighting the enemies. but we don't hear a lot about indian chiefs that were for peace. but they work very hard to bring all of the newcomers who are

coming on to indian lands, rating them and the tribe together, finding a way to different people of different cultures could live together. and chief left hand was one of those really great piece people great he was also fluent in english and this was highly unusual in the mid-1800s for any indians to be fluent in english or in any other language other than the language that indians spoke. each tribe had its own language. but the common language was the sign language. so everyone communicated with signs. no one had to learn anyone else's language. and here was this man was fluent in english. i'm a writer and i set out to answer the question that i wanted answered and that was how did he become fluent in english. i thought i would write a magazine article on him. and i ended up writing a biography on him and i found out that when he was young, a white

trader married his sister and started living near the village and took him, probably 10 or 11 or something, took him under his wing and taught him english. so he was fluent in english. when the gold rush occurred in 1858 in colorado and the records of people coming across the plains, destroying indian land, running off, slaughtering the arapaho, taking charge of the indian land, that happen. who would be the man who would try to make peace with these people and try to figure out some way that these newcomers and his people in the cheyenne people could work together. and that was the chief because he could speak their language. he wanted to get to know the white people. and there were a lot of spanish people out here and people from

mexico as well. the gold rushers who came out who stayed and planted themselves down on indian land, those people were from the eastern states and most of them were of european descent. so the arapaho people, they look at all these people and they said, they saw all the people and they thought they had come to the plains and so here they are and here is left-handed. what's he going to do? he's going to talk to these people and he can speak their language. his brother-in-law was a white man who lived with the people. so he was not put off by that. he could get along with them. he liked to spend the winters in boulder. he would bring his village to boulder in the winter and he would go around and get to know these new sellers and speak with

them. he would spend time on the branches with them talking over what was going on and the conflicts that were occurring, asking their advice about what he should do, what can we do that we can all get along here. and this is a big land. why can't we all get along to he went and met with the governor john adams, he met with the military authorities and he talked to them. he actually -- he ran an article that was very derogatory towards the arapaho people and he went down to the rocky mountain news office in denver and went to see the editor and demanded a retraction. they didn't even call it then, but basically he said this is not what happened. what you wrote is not true and we want to write the truth. now, he couldn't read and there's no evidence that he learn to read english. but he knew so many of the people that spoke english but

somebody told him and he went down and got them to change it. one time he took his lawyers, several of his lawyers, and he went to the theater in denver and he went to a play there. so after the play was over he jumped up on a stage and he gave a talk and it was reported. there was a reporter that said he is just one to give a very good talk. and he said i came here looking for gold and they said take your gold and go home. but that wasn't going to happen. they decided they were going to stay because then they thought they could find more gold. but he would do that. he tried to reach out to people and to the authorities and always saying that we want peace with you.

we don't want to fight you and how could they fight 150,000 people armed? and so he said we want peace and we want to be able to live here and live side by side. that was always his agenda and what he truly work for and he made a very sad mistake of believing what the authorities told him. but of course, they lied. and they lied to the other peace chief as well, who were to cheyenne piste sheaves working together and and so he can translate what the other peace chiefs want to tell the white authorities. so they understand and know uncertain terms. so that was the idea of who he was and he worked very hard and

he gave his life in the quest for peace out here on the plains. and he died at the sand creek massacre which occurred on november 29, 1864, in southeast colorado. and it was the anniversary of the indians. this came about after the authorities in denver told the peace chief, take your people, go down to the creek and wait and we will make an agreement with you. we will make a treaty with you. and so they did. and they ran out and they gathered their people and they brought them here and he believed these people and he brought them here. the cheyenne people came in and

there were more of them than the arapaho is and the rest of them hadn't gotten there yet. but he was tracking them and he knew when they came into a creek and he sent the kernel, who is a military head out here in colorado, and they march down and attacked a sleeping village at dawn on november 29 and slaughtered a lot of the people and most of the people they killed were women and children and old people. and he died a few days later. so he gave his life believing in peace in believing that there was going to be some agreement that was going to be made and that his people would be able to live here on the plane and have

a place to live. they knew that they wouldn't have the whole plains like they were before to move their villages and hunt the buffalo. they knew that. the buffalo were diminishing as more and more newcomers came here. they knew that they were going to have that. but they kept asking for a reserved area where they could live in peace. that is where the term preservation comes from. it is a reserved area of their own land where they could live in safety. and that is what he was hoping for and did not come about. "chief left hand: southern arapaho" was published in 1981 and it has never gone out of print. i think that as time has gone by and people have gotten interested in wanting to know about his life and what happened to him, that has just driven the interest in my book.

so when i wrote the book i just became upset with this topic. i wanted to know who these people were who had lived on the plains before my family came out here. i am a fourth-generation colorado woman. so i wanted to know who are the people here but war and how do they live and where do they live and what became of them? then i found that chief left hand, he was fluent in english. so i thought, okay, i have to write about this guy. and so i became obsessed with the whole subject. at the time i spent five years researching and writing the book and everyone said to me, what are you doing? other writers and historians, there were lots of people who said why are you writing about this? it just wasn't a great interest at that time in the late 70s when the book came out in the

indian people and in the indian chiefs. today there is much more of an interest and there have been wonderful books written about the various indian chiefs, crazy horse and red cow and single and different ones like that that we know about. so i just think that as time has gone by, we have become more aware that we are not the first people that were here on the plains. and there was a whole other culture that live here. and i think that there's more of an interest into rna. more of the same questions like the questions that i asked. where are they and what became of them. and then the whole idea of the peace chiefs, that was truly new. no one ever thought that there were indian chiefs that were trying to make peace. we always thought, okay, they were warriors trying to make war. but in fact it just to time for

something to finally come together and for the interest to develop. but certainly he is very well known today and i'm happy. i think that he should be well known and applauded and honored for the life that he lived and what he did. >> coming up next, we take a tour of juniper books, which creates custom book collections as a way to encourage people to keep books in their homes. booktv visited the store with the help of art cable partner, comcast. >> the concept is to make books that customers want to keep and enjoy for their whole lives. so we do a bunch of different things for making book covers to jane austen and ernest hemingway and we also curate entire

libraries and work with clients with books they might pick out. cookbooks for the kitchen, our books for the living room. really making this look like they fit in as much as they are great books to begin and it started off as a hobby, i started selling those on the internet about 13 years ago. there were a few requests over the years. people that wanted me to help them build a book collection. and the requests were always different and i wondered if there was business in there. over the years, the products got more and more decorative as well as one propagated. so it can be anything from a charles dickens book to an entire household of pink books.

they very and people want to decorate their homes and their shelves with beautiful books. so they might spend a couple of years remodeling their house and repainting their walls and ripping out the upholstery and then they get to the bookshelf and realize that the books that we used to have don't fit in anymore so we'd like to make things look like they belong but we won't have control over her nonfiction and civil war of books for my husband and i want literary classics. so we will work with the clients to get exactly the books that they want and have them delivered and make them look like they want to. this is our showroom in boulder. trying to keep one set of everything that we have made out here including the specific book sets that we made from jd salinger to russian literature, game of thrones, all the way over to the american flag in the

middle. there's the books and cooking classic making great gifts for people, housewarming gifts. on the right we have a lot of cookbooks stuff. i have a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old i love to read and they love to bring home a bunch of different editions of the books they like to read and we recently introduced is water resistant paper and these are great. and they are also great books with various fairy tales and things like that. and so our graphic design area is right here. all of these are created here

and this is comprised of people handling shipping and orders. this is where we tackle the books were they ship out of the library. sort of complex, they have to be packed securely and a ship around the world. we have a graphic design team working on book jacket designs and custom orders and we will sometimes get a customer that says i want a set of our books, i want a photo of the bride and groom across the side and we will lay that out and get it approved and ship it to them. so this is our warehouse and we keep stock of all the books that you saw there so when a customer orders we can get it shipped out right away. it's custom back in the design center we would make various customizations and personalized changes. we try to keep a little bit of inventory in addition to that so

that when a customer says i just spent three years building a house and now i'm having a housewarming party in a week, but my shelves are empty, we can put together a library for them or start them off curating if it's a longer lead time. we have everything like you see here on this card to cookbooks. sometimes customers wanting colors, to sort of gathering some art books, sorting them by subject and color, laying his out and we work with the customer so we know exactly how many books. this is the beginnings of a project for a client who gave us a list of subjects they were interested in and included everything from history of american business leaders to jewish history and our books and

then he wants an image of the brooklyn bridge. so we had a photographer and we sent him to new york. he came back and in a few weeks the entire wall makes up that image that you see right there. they'd have that title's work into the book jacket. it's a beautiful art installation as well as a library. we put a lot of attention to detail with everything that we do try to make it perfect before it ships. one project we had last summer was a hole golf course library. based on one photo of the fairway. took about 10 weeks to produce and went across 900 books. each one we made sure lined up perfectly and made sure that every book is coded and that was probably one of my favorite

projects and one of the most labor intensive as well. sometimes we get criticism for being superficial and i've heard a lot of that over the years and i think that people, if they really look at what we do and combine great books with great aesthetics, giving people a reason to keep these books on their shelves, it's much deeper than people originally thing. in the age of e-books you have to give people a reason to own a printed book and to keep it on their shelf. what i have seen is that the publishers who have really invested in making these beautiful books that people want to keep art great editions and literary classics. so if you make the book better than it was before it can be wonderful. especially if you make it durable and wonderful and when we add our value, i think people really have a reason to add to

their shelves. >> this weekend, booktv is in boulder, colorado with the help of our local cable partner. next, increased consumptions of processed food is seen as a negative consequence in "pandora's lunchbox." >> you think of food as something that comes from the ground and something that a farmer was involved in producing. we obviously still have farmers, but the story that i think that is important to really know about food is what happens when food leaves the farm and when it goes to the factories and the lads in the food industry is and before it reaches our place. the title is "pandora's

lunchbox", how processed food have taken over the american mule, it's an inside look at the industry. my definition that i like to use is that if it is a food or product than its a processed food. this actually applies to a lot of what we find in the middle aisles at your markets and things that appear on the menu is. i started covering the food industry almost about a decade ago. at that time i was coming into it as a business reporter and i covered business for about seven years. then i started covering the food and beverage industry for me. and pretty soon right away i became fascinated by the things i was learning as i talk to people that are food scientists. big food manufacturers, they make the food in the grocery store at restaurants and they

make these ingredients are going to processed foods. i started talking to these people and i was very curious about what scientists do and i started going to trade shows, learning what food is to them, it was very different from how i thought of food in the whole conception of what food is in the we should do with food and how it is made and what can happen. i became fascinated with the technology and science that had been applied to it over the last century. but particularly accelerated by the last four decades. so i started going to this one tradeshow and it's one of the food industry's largest and i was going or than they were all of these companies that sell ingredients that go into processed foods and they have these huge conventions, about

1500 companies with all of their various products. a lot of them were completely foreign to me and it was an inscrutable beige and white powder. and this is something for a meet application or a cheese application. this is a type of software to be coded and put together. so it's really just a different way of thinking about food. they take something from the ground, comes from an animal and they dissected and disassemble it almost odd woman molecular component to create this ingredient that they've been reassemble or reengineer into a fully formed a food product sold at the supermarket.

the model across the food industries to take food for commodity ingredients or crops, soy and wheat and corn and milk. to take those foods apart and create a milk protein concentrate or whey protein concentrate. no powders that can be put back into food. with corn you make all kinds of different starches and you modify the starches and all kinds of different ways. you create these starches in a high-tech process that happen in these big factories with soy and you make soybean oil out of it, out of the concentrate. and these are some of the processed food and if you go look at products that you will probably find one or more of those food ingredients in the food. so you're taking all of those ingredients that are prevalent

in your putting them together and mixing them with other things and making a food ingredient out of them. toaster strudel is a great example. you can look at a box of toaster strudel and look at the ingredients and you almost can't find an actual real food ingredient, something that has not been completely broken down and highly processed, it is assembled ingredient that has been added back together with a bunch of things put back together, and it's called a toaster strudel. you can also see strange ingredients and other preservatives, flavorings and things you have no idea what they are and where they come from and only a food chemist can tell you. the problem with this and the reason it's important for people to understand that and the reason i wanted to write about it is because of what happens during those processes.

one of the things is that sometimes it is intentional and other times unintentional when nutrition get destroyed. and so you lose vitamins and sometimes minerals and fiber and antioxidants. when you take food apart, one of the things is that you lose all of this synergy of nutrition that is present in real food or fresh fruit when it comes off the farm or out of the ground. the first processed foods started around the turn of the 20th century and started with something like breakfast cereals and something we think of as basic today which was novel at the time, the you can get your breakfast out of a box and i was ready to go when you pour milk on it. those are some of the more convenient food. at the time they were an incredible novelty and exciting for people. then you had things like processed cheese that started around 1915.

in that first it was just things that people had at home in their pantry in addition to the meals they were cooking. it started accelerating after the second world war and the food industry started ramping up efforts to try to help making cakes at home, make dinners at home, buy frozen root, put them in the oven. it took a while before the food industry was successful. they weren't truly successful until women started going back to the work force and it's been a slow gradual creep ever sends. the real acceleration really picked up speed in the 80s. thinking of it now, the fast food industry really just started in the 50s and even in the 70s there was a fraction of the numbers of mcdonald's and taco bell's and kfc chains that there are today. so it's been a gradual

infiltration of cultural notions of eating. where we should eat. a lot of these benefits of processed foods were convenience. consumer products, buy her products, it will save you time for cooking. a lot of these were old after the food industry put out, and some of them were really funny and humorous. get out of the steamy kitchen, don't bother to cook, it's so much easier just to eat our food. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> dinnertime, too late to make dessert enact it's not too late now because now the jell-o family brings you new jell-o

instant pudding. >> it was appealing. people are busy and it it's easo not have to cook in the kitchen. some people think that cooking is a hassle and they perceive it that way in part because at the message that the food industry has been presenting. so the big cell was really convenience and also pays. that kind of sells itself. the food is designed to taste amazing and a ramp it up with lots of salt and sugar which triggers our taste buds and fires nerves up in our brains. and the other appeal was coke and pepsi and soda, gatorade, they make it seem like a ton of fun, especially for kids. but it has a big fun aspect to

it. just in the u.s. it's roughly at $128 for the industry. so it is an incredible amount of product volume. unfortunately a lot of the processed food items have a lot of higher profit margins than non-items. select one of the highest margin food products is soda and gatorade and essentially that is sugar water, it has huge profit margins in the sea food and beverage companies pushing these things all the time. because those are the things that boost the bottom line and the thing that they need to show to investors that they continue to increase sales and profit margin and move forward and generate more value for the shareholders which is what companies are supposed to do. also most of them are publicly traded companies and i think it's one of the reasons why

people, it's really good reason why people need to think skeptically about who is making their food and what they are outsourcing. they are outsourcing their food preparation to. that's not to say that they are evil and they have horrible intentions where the people are malicious and they're trying to make someone sick, but they need to continue to increase this and the way to do it is to sell more food and a lot of the junky stuff. the average american eats about 70% of their calories from processed foods. the most obvious ramification is obesity. and then there's all kinds of other things that goes along with it. type two diabetes, things like that, that comes from the abundance of sugar and a white flower. it also reeks metabolic havoc. and there's all kinds of other

autoimmune diseases and other things that are links to linked to our diet and other aspects of our lifestyle. so it's hard to piece about sometimes, but there's a lot of evidence that when people do cut back on processed food or give it up entirely, which is hard to do, cutting back is a huge benefit and they have problems clear up end result have been in the evidence. i talked to so many people from everything went skin tags to constipation, all kinds of things. there is a concern for eating these additives are not really food and never meant to be consumed by human beings and there's a staggering number of these additives made with chemicals in our food, about 5000 and nobody knows how many are actually going into the system of regulation -- it's extremely porous. there are a number of things to be concerned about.

removing a number of these and there are certain things and i look for in a package and a five via, i don't buy it. something like dha, which is classified as a probable carcinogen by the government and you still find it in food and there's another chemical that's used in food and bread as an oxidizing agent to give it a nice texture and that is something in the plastics industry. it's probably a carcinogen when subjected to high temperatures and so that's something that we try to avoid as well. and i could go on and on. something to be concerned about in the general rule from is not to consume anything that you really don't know where it's coming from or what it is. look at products, read the

ingredients, look for things that have ingredients in them that you recognize and that you might have in your home kitchen or have some sense of what this says. and a lot of people think that eating well is a luxury of the rich. do you have to have a lot of money and you hear this from the processed food industry. not in those particular words, they say it more subtly. but they basically say that in order for people to eat on a budget committee to have processed foods and it's unrealistic to eat fresh foods if you have limited means. but when you really look at it and go into the supermarket, provided that you have a supermarket in your neighborhood, most people do, you can find an incredible number of things in the fresh version is actually cheaper than the processed version. one example of that is chicken.

you go to the meat section and the fresh chicken breast, it's less expects to the processed frozen stuff, whatever it is in the frozen section. and so there's an incredible number of ways to eat healthy by shopping at the supermarket and looking for the right things, it's a little bit of an education issue because people need to know what to look for and how to prepare it at home. i do see the tide shifting where people are starting to think more skeptically about what is in the suit? what is this box and who put this product together and what is in it? what are these ingredients? where did this come from? there's a lot more skepticism and critical thinking. but i think it is a full build and i think a lot of people are starting to open their eyes a little bit more. but there's more work to be done

and i think there are certain areas of the country where people are a little bit slower to think critically about the food industry and the food that they are eating. for a lot of people it can be really difficult because it does require some additional effort and if you're busy trying to make ends meet, it is a huge challenge. and it's a challenge for people to try and reach those people and make them understand how much better their life would be if they made simple changes to their diet and how they would feel better on a day-to-day basis. the kids help would improve, their health would improve, just a higher all the of live with even some small changes.

>> this weekend, booktv is in boulder, colorado. with the help of our local cable partner comcast. coming up next, we sit down with thomas andrews whose book takes a look at a mask of a massacre that left 19 dead. >> for me what is so important about the centennial's massacre is that this is an opportunity for how important the labor movement has been in think about the sacrifices that previous generations have made. the ludlow massacre was something that happened in april

april 1914. about 20 people were killed on that day, 18 of them were strikers and there was one bystander was killed that day. in the 19 hundreds was dominated by three companies. they started off as a colorado company but in 1903 the rockefeller family became the majority shareholder and that was actually during the worst of an earlier strike that lasted from 1903 21904. by that time they controlled one of the 20 largest industrial worms in the united states. this massive company had dozens of coal mines and ironed all minds. and that was an enormous company. as it was known it was really intent on controlling its

workers. one of the main ways that it tried to do that, you know, it was an effective way to suppress labor militancy. in particular controlling the mine workers of america and the larger scene in the united states. so when the strike began, most of the coal miners by that point, one of the sort of consequences is that if you went on strike you have problems in short order. it begins in september and almost instantly, upwards of 10,000 coal miners went to pennants numbering around 60,000 who are out of their homes. and so the union had plans to set up this situation. very early on it was outside a

little junction town in a town where all there was was the railroad detail in a few houses. so most of the people that lived there were evicted from company housing and then it was a refugee camp of sorts. but it was one with a purpose in the strikers were there on that particular stretch of ground because from that position they could harass and try to stop companies from employing workers to replace them. they knew that if they could get strikebreakers into the minds, the cost would be lost. there were two important consequences that would have important implications for the massacre. the first of these is that because of the shooting that was so common by october of 1913, many strikers decided that they should dig cellars underneath their 10 and part of this was

that they were digging in for the winter and these sellers were to store food and these cellar's were also supposed to be defensive structures. and they wanted to have a place where women and children could be safeguarded. and the other important consequence of the shooting and of the violence around them is that the state militia was called out. at the behest of local law enforcement officials, the governor sent to the state militia. at this point they had a bad reputation among the labor movement. the militia had been used repeatedly to break previous strikes in the mining region and in the gold and silver areas. so they didn't have a good reputation in colorado.

but this is a democratic administration in colorado that had been elected with heavy support what the labor movement and they decided essentially to cut the bullish as some slack. so the militia was actually welcomed with open arms by most strikers. most believe that the militia would come and be a peacemaking force. or a peacekeeping force. and so the strikers, there were about 1200 of them and they had a parade with state militia when they showed up and the tragedy that would become apparent six months later. the militia really changes of character over the winter of 1913 and 1914. two big things happen in the first was that most of the militia who had been in the national guard at the beginning of the strike were on 90 day tours of duty and this was a really unpleasant job and the horrible winter. the farm boys and clerks were

defending them at the beginning of the strike but they didn't want to reenlist. so the militia becomes increasingly populated by men who had worked at iron companies. and the other thing is that colorado had a treasurer that was sympathetic to the labor movement and he distrusted the militia and thought he could control them if you refuse to pay their bills. and so the irony of this is that what the militia did in response was going to the coal operators and they organized a set of meetings with the other large industrial is in the bankers and the railroad companies and coal mine operators. essentially they started funding the state militia. so the state militia by the spring of 1914 populated mostly by a mine guard and so the

conflict, tensions mount over the winter of 1913 and 1914. and there's more violence and controversy, and it's from beginning to end. ..

>> mostof the evidence suggests tht there have been all sorts of -- a lot of trash talking on the day before, on april 19th. both militiamen and strikeers at ludlow believed that their opponents were getting ready to start something. both groups were actually sort of ready to go. they were fearing for their lives. they both feared their opponents were going to attack them on the next day. on the morning of april 20th, the head of the militia at ludlow ordered one of the strike leaders, a guy named louie who was a greek, he was known as louie the greek, often referred to as the captain of the ludlow colony, the local militia commander orders him to come in and, you know, there was a woman looking for her husband, she was claiming that her husband was being held by the strikers against his will. and this seemingly minor

incident would actually set the stage for the violence that happened later on. one thing led to another. it's impossible to tell at this point, i think, who shot first, but gunfire began. both sides were really ready for a fight. both sides believed that the other, that their opponent was about to, was about to try to wipe them away. and so the fighting got very heated very quickly. and the next stage in the fighting then is that the strikers tried to get -- the strikers tried to save the tank colony. so they used the cellars they had dug the previous winter. most of the women and children were put underground for their own protection. and then the male strikers tried to divert the militia's fire away from the tank colony. so they tried to get out of there. they went into an arroyo, sort

of a dry creek bed, and tried to get the militiamen to shoot at them instead of shooting at the colony. the problem with this strategy is that the militiamen now basically had the tank colony at their disposal. so by the afternoon of april 20th, the militia takes over the tank colony and under very suspicious circumstances, the tank colony caught on fire. you know, it's a little tough to say how it caught on fire. this is one of the many things that remains somewhat controversial about the ludlow massacre. you know, strikers would accuse the militiamen of deliberately setting the tents on fire, militiamen would say, no, they were using exploding bullets. i think they may well have set the tents on fire. some of tents burned very, very hotly and above one, above one cellar in particular, there was a cellar that was being used as

an infirmary, and the people in there were mostly young children and women. the fire burned so hot that it began to suck all the oxygen out of the cellar, and most of the people within the cellar -- not all of them, but most of them -- were asphyxiated. a few people made it out alive, but, you know, it was really this event. it was the deaths of these women and children in this cellar that elevated something that was more, i mean, it's unclear whether we call in the ludlow massacre today without that large amount of killing in that particular cellar. as the day was ending on april 20th, strikers throughout southern colorado learned of what had happened at ludlow. they didn't quite know what the body count was. there was a lot of crazy rumors. people were saying 60 people were killed, 100 people were killed. the body count wouldn't be clear for several days, but they knew

that a lot of the dead or were women and children, and so strikers throughout the region uncached weapons that they had hidden against the governor's orders. the national guard was supposed to disarm the strikers, but the strikers didn't trust the national guard. and so they had guns cached throughout southern colorado. the strikers got out their weapons, they actually formed themselves into small military brigades. a lot of them were military veterans, and they knew how to fight. they actually were better at small group tactics than the state militia turned out to be. and they waged what people at the time called the ten days' war, really a sort of guerrilla war. you could even think of it as an uprising. it was a kind of rebellion. and by the time they laid down their arms ten days later when woodrow wilson sent federal troops out, they'd killed about 30 people, they'd dynamited a couple of mines, they'd destroyed a couple of company

towns. and their target was very deliberate. they were trying to hit the companies at the places where they had felt most oppressed which was in the mines and the company towns. the massacre and the ten days that followed it would have lasting reverberations. it would take weeks, months you can in some ways -- in some cases even years for all of the loose ends of this tragedy to sort of play themselves out. the ludlow massacre, each to this day -- even to this day, is quite controversial. i think it's only been in the last few decades that people have been comfortable talking about it. in a lot of ways, this was a, it was a kind of civil war in that part of the state. there were a lot of families that had people on both sides. and these communities were, these are fairly small, tight-knit communities, and people often, you know, sort of had family members or friends on the other side. so this continued to be a really

divisive history. it wasn't something that people readily talked about in most of the, in most of the former communities of the coal fields. i mean, ludlow was part of a series of struggles, a series of very violent conflicts by which american workers managed to achieve significant gains. and, you know, even though ludlow and the coal field strike of 1914 themselves were in a lot of ways massive defeats to the union, they played a small but important part in paving the way for new deal era labor relations. and new deal policies in turn, i think, were really responsible in a lot of ways for creating the american middle class. and, you know, i mean, thanks to the labor movement american workers by the mid 20th century or were enjoying unprecedented standards of living, working conditions improved significantly in coal mining and in a lot of other industries.

and i think at this point in the, you know, in the early 21st century the labor movement in the united states has gotten so small, it's so besieged by the so-called right to work movement and larger shifts in the economy that i think it's easy for many people to forget just how important work and working people are to our democracy and to our prosperity. >> during our recent visit to boulder, colorado, we talked with hammond norhouse, author of "the beekeeper's lament." >> my name's john miller. i keep honeybees. it's what i do. it's what i always did. my dad was a bee guy, his dad was a bee guy, his dad was a bee guy. it's what we do. >> john miller is a migratory beekeeper. he keeps 10,000 beehives, and he takes them between california and north dakota. so he's a commercial beekeeper.

he sells honey and pollinates crops. i had no idea that the honeybee was so important to the american diet, to everybody's diet when i started this project. i just thought bees were fuzzy and cute and made honey, and i like sweet stuff, so i always loved honey. pretty quickly i learned that honeybees actually pollinate one in every three bites of food we eat, including the really good stuff like cherries, berries, all the pit fruits, peaches, legumes. so we would be able to eat -- we wouldn't be able -- we would be able to eat, but our diet would be a lot less interesting and a lot less fun for us. and the way modern agriculture works now, you can't count on the local bees to pollinate these crops because, you know, there are miles and miles of crops as far as the eye can see, and they all bloom at once, and you need a lot of bees when they bloom, and then all the petals fall off, and bees can't survive

in that environment. so the way modern agriculture works, it really requires these guys like john miller to haul their bees in while the crops are blooming to pollinate them m and get them out as quickly as possible afterwards. i first met john miller in 2004, and right when i met him, he lost about half his bees that year. and a lot of his friends lost even more. and at the time it didn't get a lot of attention. and then i i followed him around and kept in touch with him, and two years later, in 2006-2007, a beekeeper named dave hackenberg discovered a bunch of his bees had flown off and disappeared. the queen was still there, it was basically a healthy colony except for all of the foragers had disappeared. this became known as colony collapse disorder which got a lot of media attention because it was mysterious. nobody knew what was causing it, and the bees just disappeared.

but in reality, honeybees have been dying and have been in trouble for a while. especially since the early '90s when this nasty little mite arrived in the u.s. it arrived in 1987, by the early '90s it sort of blanketed the country, and it's really hard to keep your bees healthy without treating for these mites. the managed hives are surviving, but at great cost. they're putting medicines in there that aren't very good for the bees. so there's this mite problem, and in 2004 john miller, when he lost all those bees, he assumed it was something, some virus that was a result of the mites, some sort of event. and then the honeybees started dying again in 2006 and 2007, and suddenly people started paying attention to it. that's called colony collapse disorder, but i think people tend to confuse the larger honeybee dieoffs which were

because of a number of things. the mites, nutrition, the stresses that these bees are undergoing, they're dying for lots of reasons, and colony collapse disorder was a specific event that happened in 2006 to 2009 about, and we really haven't seen much of it lately, but bees are still dying. right now the beekeepers are hanging in there. they're getting paid more for their pollination work. their biggest sort of cash cow is almond pollination. almonds are incredibly reliant on honeybee pollination. for an acre of almonds if it's not pollinated, it'll produce about 40 pounds of almonds. if it's pollinated by honeybees or other bees, it'll produce over a thousand. so it's a huge x almonds are a huge profit center for farmers right now. so they're making lots of money, and they're paying beekeepers lots of money right now to bring their bees in and pollinate the

crops. but, and right now almond prices are high enough to sustain that. other produce does not pay as well for bees to go in there. they go into apples and cherries, and they're not paid as well. and so if honeybees -- if beekeepers can't keep their bees healthy and have to put so much money into, like, restocking and growing their bees back, we could see produce crops, produce prices, sorry, going up. it's not really happening right now, but that's something that we need to keep an eye on. even though these guys are losing, you know, the numbers they're saying it's about a third of the bee population has been dying each year. it's a little better this year, there's some years it's a little worse, but that's not really a number they consider sustainable. they consider 10-15% losses sustainable. even though they're losing all these bees each year, the number of hives and colonies in the country has not gone down because they are filling their hives and restocking.

there are more and more backyard beekeepers these days, and it's really become quite popular in the last few years as all this urban agriculture has become more trendy. i think a lot of people have responded to what's happened with all the honeybee losses by getting hives in their yards. it's actually a wonderful development because these big commercial beekeepers really can't afford to, they can't afford to lose all their bees. this is their livelihood. they have tons of employees who depend on them. so they have to treat their bees for these mites, they have to feed them supplemental feed, all the things that a lot of people -- and they have to haul them around to pollinate crops which none of those things are great for honeybees, but this is what they need to do. they love what they do, they love their bees, and they want to keep them alive. backyard beekeepers really have the opportunity to -- they have the freedom to fail. they're just doing it for fun, and so a lot of local backyard

beekeepers have, they experiment with genetics, they're not getting the same good, strong, productive bees that the commercial beekeepers are getting. they're getting local bees, and they're not treating for mites, they're not giving sugar water, and they're just letting their bees sink or swim. and that's, it's really, you know, people are hoping that their experiments will filter up into the commercial environment if they can build stronger bees and find ways to take care of their bees without these, you know, big industrial treatments and without hurting their bees and perhaps that'll ultimately build a stronger national herd as well. i think the public is more and more aware of how important honeybees are to us because of things like colony collapse disorder and the 30 % of honeybees that are dieing each year. and one of the things -- dying

each year. one of the things i conclude in my book is in some ways it may be one of the best things that's happened to the honeybee. as i mentioned, they were dying in large numbers even before colony collapse disorder hit. and they, nobody knew about it. nobody knew how important they were. it was just something these beekeepers had to suck it up, and there wasn't a lot of money and research. and now there's, you know, a lot more money going into research, and people are really concerned, and they realize how important bees are. you know, you go into your whole foods, and they all have little pins, the checkers, that say give bees a chance. so in some ways the horrendous few years that these beekeepers have had may, ultimately, help them and help us be aware of what the honeybee means to all of us. >> on booktv's recent visit to boulder, colorado, we took a tour of several historic sites

with the author of "boulder, colorado: a sense of time and a place revisited." >> my book is "boulder: a sense of time and place revisited." it's a collection of history columns that i've written for the boulder daily camera. my book starts with the gold prospectors who came here in 1859 and settled boulder as a supply town for mining up in the mountains. there were a small group of prospectors who were headed toward the denver area. they took a detour, and they came to boulder. i don't know if it was the mountain backdrop of what lured them here, but they came here, they settled here, and then they prospected in the streams and that led them up into the mountains. boulder is here because of those prospectors and because of mining. when we discuss mining in boulder, there's a lot of different minerals that were mined. gold is the one that most people think of, but there was also silver, there was tungsten, out on the plains it was coal, there

were a lot of stone quarries that built many of buildings here. so the economy was fueled by all this different types of mining. and the gold mining, it had three different periods of mining activity. there was that initial boom in the beginning, and then things kind of quieted down during the civil war years. and it didn't start up again until 1872 when the discovery of telluride brought in a new influx of people. at that time the miners brought their families, they brought their wives, they built roads and schools and churches and brought civilization to the west. one of the things that distinguishes boulder from other frontier communities, particularly in colorado, is its emphasis on higher education. boulder was founded in 1859, but as early as 1861, one of the territorial legislatures spoke up and asked that the university be in boulder n. 1876 it was

founded after boulder residents came together and donated land and donated money. and it started in just one building. they called it old main. it's still there. but it had everything. it had classrooms, it had the chemistry lab, and the only thing it didn't have that first year were college students because nobody could pass the exam to get in. so they had 44 college preparatory students make up the first class, and ten of them went on the next year, and they became the first graduating class four years later. it remained fairly small for many years. it didn't really boom, so to speak, until after world war ii. but it did bring in a steady income and a steady supply of people to work there, buy housing, to bring in students. so it was considered a college town pretty much from when the university was founded.

the emphasis on education in boulder has certainly been a huge drawing card, and it still is today. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to boulder, colorado, and the many other cities visited by our local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/local content. >> booktv continues now with an interview from our college series. professor jacqueline maria hagen sat down with booktv to discuss her book, "migration miracle." she looks at the role that religion and the church play in helping migrants survive their difficult journeys to the north. this is about 30 minutes. >> host: unc professor jacqueline maria hagen, what's this picture on the cover of your newest book, "migration miracle"? >> guest: it's a cross. and it's a cross on top of a

mountain, and the mountain is situated along the u.s./mexico border. and it's symbolic of the many migrants who have died in their attempts to cross the border into the united states, doing so without papers, without authorization. and as we know in -- as you may know and the media's told us, the numbers of fatalities, migrant fatalities, are increasing, and i think this year there were 400 deaths incurred to central americans and mexicans crossing into the united states. so that cross symbolizes their crossing experience, and the title of the book, "migration miracle," is basically taken from the words of the migrants who often described their successful journey as a miracle. >> host: how did those 400 die? what were the causes? >> guest: the causes range from

being killed by a smuggler to suffocating in the back of a car to, um, asphyxiation, to drowning in the american canal or the gulf of mexico. many die in the desert, you know, not being able to reach food or water, being left behind. not really -- i mean, many of the migrants who travel here without papers are uncertain about their journey, and so it's organized increasingly by multiple coyotes, and it's become much more organized, and it's much more difficult for migrants to rely, for example, on a single person that they may know who has migration experience to take them across the border. so as the borders become heavily militarized and there's more campaigns along the border to prevent migration, it means that

migrants have had to find more dangerous ways, basically, to reach the united states and rely increasing hi on organized trafficking -- increasingly on organized trafficking to get here. >> host: professor hagen, is there an average cost that these migrants are paying to get across the border? >> guest: yes, and it's skyrocketed. if you're on the mexican side of the u.s. border and maybe in one of the border cities, it might cost you $800 or $900. but if you're traveling from a small hamlet in the highlands of galt guatemala, it could be upwards of $8,000, and it often involves then having your family's home put on hold in ransom, and they're often taken. so it's an enormous amount of money. most of it's paid up front, some of it -- well, half in most cases and then half upon

arrival. and throughout that time the coyote carries all the papers that would document that person like passports, birth certificates, etc. so they're really at the mercy of the persons bringing them. now, there's many good coyotes or smugglers, but there's also many unscrupulous smugglers. so it's a mixed bag there, because i have many stories from migrants who smugglers came across them and found them in the desert and helped them. and then other cases where they were told that they were left behind. >> host: how much time have you spent on the border in your work? >> guest: oh, gosh, i've been doing my field work for "migration miracle" since 2009. but i spent time on the border before that because the project that really motivated this was a study on death on the border. and it was about trying to enumerate for the first time the actual fatalities that occur to migrants. so i had visited a number of

coroners' offices and talked to religious leaders along the border and hospitality homes, safehouses to get an idea of what was gown on. and that kind of -- what was going on. and that kind of motivated this larger project, was to understand how they manage and survive and place meaning on the migration journey itself. >> host: did you meet with coyotes? >> guest: yes, i met with coyotes. but not -- i met with the coyotes when i had to go pick up some migrants at a safehouse, and the -- i had to bring extra money so they could be released. so often what you find is a situation where you arrive at a safehouse, and then they call a family member in the states and ask for additional funds even though they've paid the amount. and in this case i knew the

young man personally, and so then i was able to secure the funds and able to go meet with them and the coyotes. >> host: "migration miracle," one of the first things you say is that this is organized into six parts. leave taking, dangerous journey, churches crossing the border, miracle in the desert and la pomesa. what is leaf taking? >> guest: leaf taking is the first stage of the migration process, the decision making that goes into whether or not to leave and once the decision is made to leave, when to leave. so it's about thinking about the costs of the migration, it's about leaving one's family, one's community, all that one holds dear. and in most of the my grants in my study -- migrants in my study, they leave because they

have no alternative. and it's a very difficult choice. many of these migrants had never even been to the capital city or a large city in their own countries, but they were migrating across thousands of miles and multiple fortified borders. so leave taking is about decision making, making that decision. and often, excuse me, migrants will turn to family, of course, to discuss leave taking, and it's often a household strategy migration, to send one member of the family up to earn wages to send back to support the family left behind. but migrants also increasingly turn to religion both at a personal and institutional level. it's basically religion is the institution that they trust. it's the one institution they can identify with mostly. and it's expressed in numerous ways.

but often and very often through blessings. so one of the interesting findings through all of the religious faiths was, in fact, was this reliance on blessings before they left. they found them very powerful. almost an unofficial passport, spiritual passport, something that carries so much significance for the migrant themselves. so that's about leave taking. >> host: when these young people -- and mostly young people? -- in guatemala, mexico, wherever, mostly male? >> guest: no, we -- no. increasingly more and more women are coming. >> host: solo? >> guest: and that's not surprising. solo, a lot of women coming solo. i can recall one incidence, it

was in the border town right on the border of mexico where i encountered a young woman with her baby, baby must have been about 1, maybe 2 years of age, and she was pray anything a church to the black christ -- praying in a church to the black christ which is a very important religious icon in guatemala and, well, it's the patron of guatemala. and when i talked to her, she was praying to locate someone to travel with her across the border. because she recognized it was too dangerous to travel alone. so, yes, increasingly women, some of them coming to join their husbands, some of them coming for work. most of the time the women are going to be escorted by coyotes and do not attempt the travel alone. and if a family has savings prepared for the migration journey, they're more likely to provide them to the woman because of the dangers, the

extra dangers she might face such as rape or -- >> host: what are their impressions or what do they think the u.s. is like in during this stage? >> guest: i don't think they think of it as the american dream as they did when i started my migration research maybe 20 years ago, which was a common expression. i think now they recognize that there's serious risks, and in in many of the interviews their thinking more about the journey, the fear of the undertaking, the leaving, the possibility they might not ever see their family again is very real. and so that's, i think, what has really changed since -- especially after 9/11 with the buildup at the border. that it's becoming so dangerous that religion has taken on an increasingly important role. and so that, you know, when we

used to think about understanding international migration and undocumented migration, scholars have long relied on economic and social explanations. and i think that reflects the types of questions they ask. so if you ask a migrant why did you leave or why are you coming to the states, they will tell you for economic reasons. but if you ask them why are they going to philadelphia versus washington, d.c., they're going because they have family networks. but if you ask them how they survived, how they made sense of the experience, how they managed to leave community and family, they will respond with god's help, with faith. and so it's really been the, this book is about the unexplored role of institutional and personal religion. >> host: and here is chapter three of your book: churches crossing borders. what does that mean? >> guest: yeah. the theme of churches crossing

borders is about the growth of a new sanctuary movement. we think about old sanctuary, we think about the central american, salvadorans who fled in the '80 and came and sought sack chew ware in -- sanctuary in churches in the united states. we have an informal network of religious organizations and churches that stretch from guatemala through southern united states that care about, that serve migrants by providing them shelter, food, blessings, counsel. but also advocate on their behalf. so among the religious leaders and churches in central america and increasingly in the united states, they've become very public, as we know, about the immigration, about immigration matters. and they're very concerned about

the dangers that migrants face in crossing the borders. and for many religious leaders, migrants have a right to migrate. to feed their family. and so this is about defending that right and providing them with a safe journey. so that's churches crossing borders. >> host: do the churches have an opinion on the fact that president obama's administration has had more deportations than any other administration? >> guest: yes. yeah. that's, basically, denying the rights from the churches' perspective. yes. now, my understanding is, you know, obama meets regularly with church leaders. i know he's met regularly with protestant leaders and catholic leaders, the bishop toes' conference. bishops' conference. the argument from the religious, the religious perspective's argument is that the policies are not humane, they're not fair. migrants aren't treated fairly.

the state has the right to deport somebody, but it's often the way it is done, like family separation. somebody picked up at a worksite and their children are left at home x those children are put into foster care. and that's another increasingly important phenomena. these separated family. so i think the churches' concerns are the conditions under which they travel, that they are provided with fair treatment, due process and, you know, if somebody arrives and works and earns citizenship, then they should be provided that opportunity. to naturalize and become a citizen. >> host: jacqueline maria hagen, how did you get involved in this work? >> guest: particular project or migration? >> host: in general. you said you been doing it for 20 years. >> guest: well, for 20 years,

well, my father was in foreign service, so i migrated a lot. and my mother's from costa rica, so i spend a lot of time in latin america. >> host: are you fluent in spanish? >> guest: yes. and i enjoy, i love central america, the people, the culture, the food. and i stumbled into this project. it was a very interesting experience. i was in the highlands of guatemala writing my dissertation, and i met a young pastor who invited me to what he called an ayuna which is a fast, a fast celebration. and we journeyed up mountains. it was a trek that took us several hours. and at the top of this mountain, sacred grounds was a group of mayan women and men sitting on cold stones and deep in prayer. and in front of them was a

evangelical pastor speaking in tongues. and it was at that moment and that experience that i heard migrants, i mean, people stand up and request assistance and god's help with the journey. and i realized that there was migration counseling going on. and that's something very new in latin america. so this clergy's always been there to serve the poor, to meet their needs about jobs or poverty. but the migration counseling aspect is new. >> host: another section of your book, "miracles in the desert." >> guest: when churches aren't available, migrants create their own shrines. they bring their own religious companions with them. so in certain areas of the desert you will actually see humble shrines created out of stones, out of sticks. some of these are markers of graves, but others are places they stop to pray. they wear medallions with their

saints, they carry holy cards with images of their saints, and those are their companions on the journey. we went under trellises of freeways throughout the border where they had engraved stones. god help me, dios. favor. >> host: did you personally sneak across the border? >> guest: no, i didn't. >> host: so you would walk along? >> guest: yes. i've been to migrant camps where aye seen the artifacts -- i've seen the artifacts, the objects, the possessions that they're forced to leave -- >> host: on the mexican side. >> guest: on the mexican side, and there you also see crosses, lots of crosses, prayer books. but they're told they cannot bring nick with them at that -- anything with them at that last stage. >> host: what's la promesa?

>> guest: the promise. if i make it, in return i promise to offer something to god or to my religious icon. and that's expressed in numerous ways. it's expressed upon arrival by going to the closest church you can find. it doesn't matter if you're protestant and you go to a catholic church, denomination does not matter, but it's right away giving thanks. it could be, i mean, the extreme case is returning home to provide thanks at some point. the first place that a migrant would come, and they often make that journey without papers as well. it's to go back and give thanks to your icon. it may be by sending tithes to your church at home. in some cases, some really beautiful cases it involved mothers lighting candles, white candles to illuminate the way for their children, and when their children arrived, they lit

a candle and called their mother or father, and then the candle was blown out at the other end. so it was a way of connecting across borders spiritually. >> host: professor hagen, what's the significance of what you've written in "migration miracle"? >> guest: from a theoretical bear spective, it's about -- perspective, it's about recognizing, you know, we live in -- the academies for a very long time treated migration as a totally secular kind of process, socioeconomic kind of process. and i really wanted to bring the human face to the migration picture and try to understand migration through their lived experiences which then took me to faith and to organized religion. and it's also for them, so many of the -- there's three or four

key people that are reintroduced in each chapter. and these are women. and i've kept in touch with them, and they have now read the this book to their children. >> host: are they all over the u.s.? >> guest: yeah, they're all over the u.s. one is here in north carolina, several in texas, one in new york -- >> host: and still illegal or undocumented? >> guest: one is documented, and the first thing she did when she got her papers was fly back to her hometown to give thanks. >> host: and she's back up here now? >> guest: she's back up here now. she's done very well. she and her husband both own businesses, aboveboard. she's very involved in the local church. her children are doing well in school. >> host: professor hagen, what in all your years of studying migration, what do we not know about it and the effect of it? in your view?

>> guest: i think we don't know enough about the context in which migrants leave, that we don't understand it. that we treat it as something so voluntary and do not recognize it's in desperation often. so i think most of what we study in migration we do so once the my grants have arrived -- migrants have arrived. and so we really don't understand the context in which they leave and the context in which they travel. when i talk to people about the actual journey, they're amazed. when you talk to people about how many people actually die crossing border, people are surprised. but i think the academies' concern and policymakers' concern has been with their experience here in the united states and the costs to our economy. rather than looking at the human side of migration.

>> host: have you interviewed the border patrol? >> guest: yes. >> host: what's your opinion? >> guest: well, it's mixed. interestingly, the migrants interviewed who have been picked up by border patrol generally speak very favorably about them. so, you know, i -- when i went and interviewed them, many of them felt that this wasn't the job that they thought it was going to be and that it's an impossible job. it is impossible. i mean, how can you -- you'd have to have every border patrol agent standing, you know, hand to hand along the border to really control the border. and they recognize that it's led to increased crime, increased smuggling along the border and that they're trying to do the job, it's an impossible job. and from the migrants'

perspective, there's not really the negative expression that you would expect. they feel that generally when they're picked up, they're picked up because they often need to be treated and go to a hospital, but also they've been treated quite well and sent back. >> host: professor hagen, when you were on the mexican side doing your work, were you ever fearful for your life? >> guest: no. i would be now. >> host: why? >> guest: because i think organized crime so interplayed with migration. so right now what you find increasingly is migrants are relying on coyotes who are relying, renting space from traffickers, traffickers who are smuggling people and arms and drugs. and so it's much more dangerous. it's not the game that was played when i was down doing my research.

it's become very dangerous. and so migrants are not only confronting the dangers of the coyotes, but are also co-opted often into drug smuggling and human smuggling and arms smuggling. >> host: has the catholic church or other churches moved into the border areas, that last stage as you called it? >> guest: no. no. their usually located in well established crossing towns and urban areas, and there's lots of desert, and there's lots of unfamiliar, arid, desolate territory throughout central america, especially i'm thinking in guatemala where you have a lot of, you know, drug trafficking going on now. you know, as we came down on mexico and we came down on colombia, we've just really redirected much of this into central america. >> host: what do you teach here at the university? >> guest: what do