community. >> i can imagine. >> so if i don't do well i'll let arch down. >> sure. >> so that was -- that kind of experience. and topping that was the fact that most of my classmates had never heard of morehouse. they were from middleberry, harvard, princeton, am hurt, and et cetera, and they all finished at the top of their classes. so to make a long -- the annot a my exam wag was three weeks later and i did well and i relax sodas far as academic challenges i did well. secondly, my classmates were really very welcoming. i didn't get the hostility i feared i might get or being ignored or marginalized; so, it's really -- was a very positive experience for me and with the faculty. so my experience in medical school, compared with what i

wondered what would happen, was a very positive experience. >> what about boston at that sometime. >> yes. boston was mixed. by and large, going to boston -- i had read about paul revere and his ride some lexington and the concord battles and the boston tea party and also crispus attus was the first black to die in the revolutionary war. so i went to see the memorial for hem on the boston common. so i soaked up the hoyt -- the history of boston, so very positive. so my experience in boston really was very positive, but later in the late '50s -- the year i entered medical school was the year brown versus board of occasion, the supreme court decision, and so as this was implemented around the country, problems of not only in the south but in the north as well. and boston was one of those areas. so, my experience in boston was somewhat different from blacks

who went to boston in the late '50s. they found with the political shenanigans of hicks -- i still remember him from south boston, running to be mayor, became aer hostile community. by that time i had really formed my friendships and relationships in boston with my classmates and with faculty and others, that i really found myself sometimes explaining to black youngsters who were coming to boston in the late '50s, this place isn't really the representation you get from the busing controversy, et cetera. >> you're getting elsewhere. >> so boston really did undergo a change in its environment between the mid-'50s, when i entered, and the late '50s, when the busing controversy started. >> so interesting. what about your relationship with andrew young? did that beginning with -- when did you meet. you have similar histories.

>> yes. >> you're quite -- you're four years eye part, three years apart. >> right. my relationship with andy young didn't begin nil went back to atlanta in 1975, when he was congressman from georgia, and he was the congressman that morehouse college and the medical school was located in. so he took me to washington to introduce me to members of congress to work to get federal funding for the medical schools. >> that was the first time you met. that's interesting. and tell me -- i mean, because you were the founding dean of the morehouse medical school, i was asking you back stage if this could be -- our down the hall, asking you about when you created medical school, what was the philosophy behind it? and how you raised funds with that philosophy and how you got

a lot of people to back this medical school, which -- during the time that it came to pass and everything, it is an interesting story so if you can talk to that. >> i would say this. at the time that morehouse school of medicine was founded there were 80 medical schools in the country. there will two that were predominantly african-american. howard and washington, dc ask opened in 1868 and the hari medical college in nashville, opened in 1881. always has been a shortage of black physicians and other minority physicians in the country. there still is today. so, the rationale for the development of the morehouse school of medicine was as follows. first of all, as a country we had a shortage of physicians. congress passed legislation in the late '50s and '60s to stimulate the development of more medical schools there were

80 medical school inside 1950. we added 47 medical schools to those by 1981, so there was massive period of expansion of medical education between 1956 and 1981. morehouse school of medicine came along during that time, but there's also the civil rights movement that started in the mid-50s. so, the rationale for developing the morehouse school of medicine was to work to train more black and other minority physicians. so the development of morehouse school of medicine was influenced by the two major events, expansion of medical education in general, and the civil rights movement really showing in detail the many deficiencies in terms of the lives of blacks, including having enough doctors and including having minority doctors as well. so that is how that came about. by 197 -- early 1970s a i was

prefer of medicine at boston university and awas a research hematologist and thought i found my niche in medicine because i had loved hematology, loved the research, loved taking care of patients with the blood diseases, et cetera. but morehouse college, my alma mater, decided they wanted to start a medical school to address the shortage of black physicians. so i serve oned as a viery committee of the college and was recruited to head that effort. that's when i met andy young. this was supported by the black physicians and the white physicians as well and that was bus the civil rights activities of the '50s, '6's,'7's,had schoop in stark detail the situation at that time faced so many blacks and other minorities. so we that the support of the state chapter of the american medical association in georgia, as well also the state capital of the national medical association in georgia.

so, a lot of support from the business community and the philanthropic community as well. so that enabled to us start what was in the third black medical school in the country. >> this then began the -- your introduction to politics. didn't you ask ronald reagan to, i guess, cult the ribbon or whatever it is? >> yes. >> open the doors to be at the ceremony. >> yes. >> and it was the vice president, george bush, who came. right? and then he asked you to go on a delegation to africa. am i right? >> right. >> and then -- you were interested -- you became friendly with the bushes at that point, and barbara bush is interested in education and reading and all of that, and then slowly -- then when he became president and trying to

move on to the -- >> right. >> -- you then became involved in the political side of medicine. >> right. >> thank you talk -- because you were really instrumental in making sure that -- the first woman president or head of nih was under your -- >> yes. >> -- command, and then also the surgeon genoas the first latino woman. you were -- when you took over this -- talk about meeting the bushes and then this next stage of your life. >> yes, right. well, what happened was this. we start with our first class at morehouse school of medicine in 1978, in facilities on the campus of morehouse college. the first building we constructed for the medical school was dedicated in july of

1982, when vice president george h.w. bush was the speaker. he came and was scheduled to stay only a few minutes for a reception afterwards but stayed more than an hour help was enjoying himself. then andy young, john lewis, ed macen tire, the black mayor of the city, and all were there getting pictures taken with this republican vice president. so that was a great event. then he left, and two weeks later, he called and asked if i would go with him on a trip he was planning to substar sahara -- africa. i said what would my role be? he said, to be honest with you, we don't have an andy young in our administration, and i don't feel i can go to africa without a prominent african-american any delegation so you would do me favor and do the country a service of you would be willing to do it.

so i appreciated his honesty and went. on that trip was barbara bush. barbara was speaking to groups in zaire, zimbabwe, zambia, literacy groups. on the way back, after two weeks visiting eight countries, i spoke to barbara on the plane and said we're in the same business, different branches. you're in literacy education, anytime medical education. we are a new school and need to have someone like you on our board. would you be willing to consider it? so she accepted. the came on our board in john after '83. then my wife and i were constantly being invited to things at the vice president's home. so with got to know them very well. one motor vehicle -- one of my trustees wanted to be secretary and i was pushing him because i thought why be a great sect, but when bush was elected, rather than him taking my trustee, he asked me to serve. so that's how that happened. when he asked me to serve, i said, well, now, there are things i really would want to

have happen, and i'd like know how you feel about this. we need to have more minority inside positions of authority. we need to have more women. he said, lou, that great itch support you. so when i became secretary, i pushed very hard, and as you mentioned, bernadine heely, the first woman head of nih and the first black to head social security, gwen king, and to increase diversity, as well as programs to benefit the black community. he was very supportive of that. one other thing that most people don't know. the bush family has been involved with the united negro college fund since the beginning, in 1946. george h.w. bush's mother was one of the first directors, has been a member of the bush family on the board continue obviously since that time. so he convinced me, he is supportive of education and diversity.

so it was pleasure and honor to serve if women. >> i also mentioned when we were talking, just that i wanted to talk about the current state of things. since you have lived in a segregated society, you were in boston in the late '50s when things were not so easy but you were in until school and they were easier. there seems to me to be a way with gender issues, feminism, and with race issues, that is -- reminds me of 1968. there's an interest with "black lives matter," in what's really happening, and their seems to be a swelling of political and -- political activity. people are protesting. people are angry. people want to talk about it. and i'm wondering how you see this and -- because you have

seen for years you have seen this go up and down, seen this expansion of various things, and will you speak to what you think is really happening now, and why now? >> right. well, good question. let me say one thing, too, as part of the framework. when i finished boston university school of medicine i was the first black intern at new york hospital cornell medical center, 1958. not so many years ago. but the changes that occurred in the'6 sod and '7s so were very encouraging with the leadership of martin luther king, jr. and the other civil rights leaders. attended the march on washington. et cetera. so, i and -- like into many other african-americans, very encouraged by all of the progress that has been made. put what has happened now really is somewhat surprising and a

little discouraging because it shows that the progress is so fragile that it's really -- on thin ice, and what has happened now is not only surprising but disappointing, when we have people being questioned that if you're muslim, you're not eligible to be president. all you have to do, substitute the word black for muslim. that's 20, 30 years ago, that would have been the same. so, we should be better than that as a country. that is, all of us are immigrants. the only true native americans are the american indians. and to have people who forebearers, one or two generallations ago were immigrants, now speakening anti-immigrant and also the racial tones are here. very, very discouraging and disappointing. but i -- i think most minorities, not only african-americans but latinos,

we're not going to accept that. we have a country that is built on the premise that all men are created equal. that there is strength in our diversity. that everybody has michigan to contribute. the culture of this country has been enriched by minority populations here. so this is a phase that is unfortunately, shows we haven't made as much progress as we thought, that progress is maybe just a quarter inch deep, it may be a mile wide. so we need to work on that. people need to know that being different doesn't mean you're an automatic threat. the threat for me when i was growing up was the klan. the klan was lynching people when i was a child. those were the demons. so when you begin to exclude people and judge people as a class, i think that's a serious error and so we need to work to address that. i think the movement, "black

lives matter," is a reaction to that. i think that it is not as focused as the civil rights movement. it's more of a general protest but i think it really is an expression from the black community that we are americans, too much health what misfather was doing back in blakely, in the 30s, with this emancipation day celebration. so we need to learn we can benefit from different cultures, from the different life experience that people have had, and be a better and richer country because of it. the economic situation we have had and the fact we have had a congress that really has not been very active, that added to the frustration. so i think a lot of people are not being rational as they look at this. they're willing to really listen to slogans that have absolutely no depth no meaning to them. but i'm confident we'll get beyond this, but i, as an american, am going to do everything i took counter that, and i'm sure a lot of other people will also.

>> i think you're -- i wanted to hear what you had to say about that because you have had much more history going through all of that, and certainly myself and probably most of the people in this audience. i wanted to ask just two very quick questions, which are very light, coming off of that. when you wrote a memoir, which you'll buy behind me after this is over -- were there memoirs that you loved? were there certain memoirs that made you want to write a memoir or did you feel it was time write your story? >> well, a little of both. i really wanted to write this because the experienced i've indiana my life have taken me from the dark years of terror, from the klan and from lynchings and segregation to what i felt we have come to as a society. when i started, this is four

years ago that we started -- this was the environment. and so i felt that my story, you talk to any african-american my age you get a similar story. i can tell you of many african-americans who have accomplished in business or medicine or physics or being astronauts, et cetera, the tuskegee airmen is a great example. blacks in the in world war ii were not thought to be bright enough to fly planes. that had a black squadron that had a tremendous hoyt in protecting our bombers over europe and ate. so what we have seen is an underring that while we're different in many ways, those differences are minor. that we all have a lot to contribute. so, in that spirit that i wanted to tell my story because while i started off in difficult circumstances, i really was able to accomplish significant things, not only because of hard

work but also because of the support of a lot of people. not only in the black community but also in the white community as well. so, all of those things came together, that enabled me to do the things i have done, and so that is what i wanted to do. >> it is awe-inspiring, i have to say. a book worth reading for many ropes, but you look at your life and what you have done is incredibly impressive. want to ask you, because we're in the library, and it's only appropriate in a library to ask, or you could ask it elsewhere but i have to ask the poock question. there is something you have read recently or its there a book, a classic -- i'll ask it broader than usual -- that you go back to time and time again, or something you read recently that you love that you can tell our audience about briefly? >> i would say -- two books quickly.

one was written by benjamin mays, president of morehouse college, the title was "born to rebel." you look at his life story, even more dramatic. his parents were freed slaves. he was taught to read at age eight by his older sister. he went to bates college and was the only black in this class and was val valedictorian of his class. that was one role model. the other book was written by my friend joe califano. the tragedy and triumphs of lyndon johnson. great book and the cover -- covered my life experiences, too what if happened with kennedy's assassination -- president kennedy's assassination and how lyndon johnson was able to use that period to push through a lot of legislation, not only for health care, medicare, medicaid, but education, et cetera. so that is a fascinating story

of how a master politician was able to use the system to accomplish a hell of at a lot of thing inside contrast to today's congress. >> he was persuasive character. >> that's right. and he used every trick he knew to make changes. >> we actually have a popup exhibit for robert careo here this, power broker stuff. that's an incredible -- i guess it's a trilogy that the johnson biography, isn't it? are there three books -- four. there are four. in the making now. thank you for keeping me straight here. i want to thank you. it's too brief. there's too much to discuss but i'm glad we got this 30 minutes to talk, and i want to go ask the audience and see if there are any questions here for dr. sullivan. i'm sure he would love to answer them.

>> thank you. it was great. a couple months ago, anthony -- [inaudible] -- made a comment about affirmative action and how already -- [inaudible] -- college graduate -- shouldn't have been at my school, i get there because i'm black? i stopped and thought, it's not true. then i thought about all these young people of color applying to colleges and i was wondering, hopefully their reaction was not -- was to ignore him but wondering what you thought of that comment and how you feel

about affirmative action. >> i disagree with that comment. find immigrant condescending because from my perspective, affirmative action is a technique to try to right many of the wrongs that occurred from slavery, in the period of segregation, et cetera, where whites got an advantage because blacks were not allowed to compete. so, the residue of that restraint is still with us today. so that if you are white, and you were a slave opener, -- slae owner and you became wealthy because of the labor of the slaves and were able to pass that on to your family in subsequent generations, that gave them ad aned a sang. so from my perspective affirmative action is a way to try to correct that injustice. and i know that this is always a controversial topic, but i think

that many people have benefited. this is trying to correct a historical wrong, that many people who were admitted to educational institutions because of affirmative action, and who did well, justice sotomayor is one person. she has done well. and in contrast to perhaps justice thomas, who has been very critical of affirmative action, she did well and the fact is she got into princeton because of affirmative action and then did well subsequently. so that is my response. within the medical research arena, for example, even today, study published in the journal of science in 2011, showed that black applicants for nih grands were -- when one cross for level of education, years of experience and all the other variables, still has half the success rate in getting an nih

grant to do research as whites because of unconscious bias in the system. so, that is something we need to address. so it's that kind of thing that still is with us, but often times people in the system are not aware of the bias that does exist. so, we still have a lot to do too work on this. >> i would like to know whether in the new approach being done by science in terms of the fact that there is only one race, and that race was started in africa. you being a doctor, when are we

going to tell all these white people, blonde people, yellow people, whatever, that they are black but just discolored? you know. they were originally black and because of the fact that they moved to different environments, they have different eating habits and different food, and different climates, that's why they change their color. and the only way to finish with the racism is to let them know that they month -- they belong to the same race where we come from. >> right. >> what is your thought about that. >> i think basically what you're saying is that it's not that we know we have dissected the human genome and find that 99 parts of our genes are similar. it's the one percent where there are differences. so from the standpoint of the

enormity of the similarities, indeed many scientists saying we're just one race, minor differences, just like in a family you'll have some people whoa may by taller than others, et cetera so there's that variation so in a sense, race in many ways is a social construct, but the life experiences that minorities have had, say, in this country, shows that some of those things that really existed before have long-lasting effects. so people make assumptions because of that, that this is because of biological differences rather than sociological differences, similar to the fact that children who come from families where they're college graduates, those children are much more likely to be college graduates than their peers town the street where the parents may not be college graduated. so there's a lot of social factors here that address this. so, indeed, might say there's one race but the important thing

for me is to get beyond that, because frankly, when i was in medical school, by the end of my second month i forth got i was black because i was treated the same way by my classmates. so for the rest of my years in medical school i was lou sullivan. there was my classmate, barry manual, who took me to the mother's home and i at matza ball soup for the first time. so the point is, the differences that we have had in life experiences dish learned a hell of a lot from that. that was quite an interesting experience. so, i think that what we are working on is trying to show that everyone given an opportunity can make a real contribution to society. i was lucky the that i had those opportunities, and i had the support that i needed, but i had many friends and classmates who didn't have the support who were

just as bright, if not brighter, but didn't do well because they didn't have that special support. that the thing we need to do, see that all of our young people get the opportunities to develop their talents and get the support and encouragement. it will be a richer, better society if we succeed in that. >> thank you. so my question is piggy backing on what was just said in our political environment now there's this us versus. the mentality and neither side, if you can say side, really talk to each other. democrats, republicans so on. and so it sounds like your father a was a human activist and seeing injustice and wanted to do something about it. seems like your live is very similar for medicine. what do you say to people now who say i want to move beyond this us and them barrier good bring people together specialliment? what is a man or woman's responsibility to the people around them and society. >> yes.

good question. and frankly, it's a life long experience. first of all, i say we need to be active politically. vote them out of office if they don't do their job. and indeed, don't tolerate someone making a disparaging comment about someone because of their race or religion or their gender, et cetera. so, we can't leave it to our elected officials. so that's what i tell everyone. i get active and i vote. i also provide financial support to the people i want to see elected for office because they represent me, and i am upset, like other people, that congress has really more playing political games rather than working to get things accomplished. my position is, we elect officials to solve problems, and to get things done, not to take their time taking political pot

shots at each other, because the system now where you are considered to be a traitor if you talk to somebody in the other party, that's foolish. once the election is over, it's time to govern. so that's the position i and it used to be that way. the '50s and 60s the republicans and democrats would have a cocktail at the end of the day. wasn't considered you were being disloyal if you talked to somebody in the other party. underneath all of this, all of us are americans. all of us really have a country that has tremendous potential. the precepts that are in the statements of our founding fathers are great. so happened they were for white men in those years, but we have expanded them to be everybody, and including women. so, we really -- i think what animates me and so many people

is, i believe in those precepts. i want our society to live up to them. i am will tolling do the hard work to see they're implemented but i want to be treated fairly so that i can contribute and my children can contribute, et cetera. if we do that, we'll be so much better, fantastic, as a country. so i think that's we all want. so the people who are the hate -- hate mongers we should say that's not who we represent and i'm not going to vote for you because you don't represent me when you make those kind of statements. flash. [applause] >> thank you. behind my is he book store and dr. sullivan will be signing over there so please get his terrific back. thank you very much. see you next book for "books at

noon." >> thank you. >> when i tune into on the weekends its authors sharing new releases. >> watching the nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readerred. >> on c-span they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. >> booktv weekends, they bring you author after awe author after author. fascinating people. >> i love booktv and i'm a c-span fan.

>> good evening, labeling. and welcome to barnes & noble in upper west side. tonight i have the distinct pleasure of introducing author david denby. the author of great books and a claimed account of returning to college and reading the western classics during the curriculum war. he is a staff writer and former film critic nor new yorker, and his reviews and essays have appeared in the new republic, the atlantic and new york magazine, among others. he brings us today his new book, lit up, one reporter, three schools, 24 books, that can change lives. can today's teenagers being turned on to serious reading? what kind of teachers can do and it what books? one of the schools is the beacon school, and we're fundraising for them tonight.

mention the beacon school book fair at the checkout and a portion of your purchase will be donateed. >> he talk beside three books taught the three vert disschools. has proven what teachers have always known. that taught with passion and commitment, literature old and new can inspire any and every student. this is a necessary bulwark against nietzsche jerk cynicism, about the crime of reading among young people. so without further adieu, mess join me in welcoming author david denby. [applause] >> thank you so much. welcome all. good to see you on other -- on a friday night.

i set out five years ago to answer a particular question which seemed to me also an enormous question and that is what in the world would turn 15-year-olds on to reading seriously, serious literature, serious magazines, serious anything, when so much of their time is absorbed in this, and in screen in general. i chose 15 because it seemed the right time in their teenage lived when they're brains were still mallable, their characterr identities were still up in the air, they were making choices, want to go to college, military, what kind of jobs, what kind of work they can't to do. whether they're -- what their sexual identities might be. and i wondered how much are they

reading seriously? the book business, as you may have heard, is doing okay, and thank god for this house, may it long survive. as well as all the independent stores in which we manage to survive as writers and readers. as well as online. but the statistical evidence from pure research and from common sense media and common sense observation would suggest that they weren't reading any books. we're in the middle of an enormous transformation in the way we consume print, and perhaps in the way we relate to one another. it's so pervasive so enveloping that we can't even grab hold of it. i mean, my own magazine, the new yorker, has been going through convulsions for the last 15 years or so. the "the new yorker" has a hard

copy, as you know, is a kind of artifice. it's very carefully written, very much fussed over, to some degree -- sometime's maddening degree, and the editing phase, it's laid out very carefully, and suddenly we're in the middle of this storm of journalism coming from every single angle. communication of words coming from every single angle. sherry terkel has done a lot of work on howl we relate to technology and she was pro tech very much. she thought -- she jumped the fence in the last two poock -- two books alone together, and the recent book, reclaiming conversation. she did a lot of research. she is a professor at m.i.t. psychology and sociology. did a lot of work with teenage iers and discovered to hertive may increasingly they are

avoiding face-to-face confrontation. they want their relationships to be mediated. by tech. by cell phones, including romantic relationships. not just relationships between teachers and students but ordinary friendships and romantic friendships. and she sees that as an enormous damage to the self. that when you engage in confrontation with another person, that is when you grow. that is when you come to terms with who you are and who that person is, and that fantastic recognition of the other. it happens in face-to-face encounter. feel the same way about reading and sherry and i have done a dog and pony show where she talk busy the loss of self in smart phone interaction and i talk about how much you grow as a

person when you read seriously. i've been a moviegoer my whole life and i adore movies, and particularly soothing and important to me bus i have very bad adhd and when guy to the movies i like sitting fairly close and perhaps lose the frame altogether. so that i'm surrounded and send suesly bombarded by the image, and it's a great sensory stimulant, movies, and even to the point of -- where the arousal of one's sense gets the others aroused, and i remember in 1972, i saw the godfather for the firm -- for the firm time. how i felt when i came out on the street, part of the reason i felt that why was that i was

sitting at the screening next to fay dunaway. so that was a sensoria rousal, too. but -- a sensory arousal, too, but i always felt after being measurably wiped out bay movie i had to restore myself, and the way i restore myself apart from reflection, or writing about it, most practical way is reading and reading and immersing myself in literature. and i'm sure i don't hear have to argue here the necessity of producing the next generation of great readers if one at that time be literature to century specification citizenship and i think it would not extravagant to see you're seeing right now the loss of real understanding of character, of person, of rhetoric in the kind of political campaigns that we're seeing in which so many voters seem unable to have perceived what anyone would perceive if

they had simply read huckleberry finn and noticed the duke and the king and other con men who huck has to deal with. and in any case, what civilization are we going to have? what kind of literature are re going to have? how are we going to develop three-dim mentional people? those are the large issues. the best way is to start reading to them when they're infants, six weeks, eight weeks, the first time the baby smiles. whether in your arms, turn pages, you all know this. they're not going to remember anything that they read but may have an active memory of having been held and associate that pleasure with the pleasure of reading itself. this is one of the big differences which you also know, between upper middle class kids and poor kids. they don't often get that kind

of treatment. there isn't time. a single mother may have to get food on the table for three and four people. they may not read much themselves. both conversations, those immersions in the world, what objects are in the world, what forces are playing around the house, as kids get older and you can have conversation with them. if you spend some time with working class kids, poor kid, as i did in the course of writing this book, you see that the lack of that habit of what i'd have to call -- a kind of nonstop curiosity to take in everything around you -- i refuse to believe the game is over at six. if i did believe that i would not have written this. wanted to see what kind of intervention could be made in the normal way of teaching and

so at 15. teachers are in the position of authority to dictate certain books to the kid the think will do them good or change them or get them excited about literature. didn't want to write a teaching handbook. i'm not equipped to do that. don't have into to do it. i'm nonknot an education researcher. i'm a reporter and critic, and i am sick of education writing utter reliance on enumerating everything. statistics, scores, the kind of metric fallacy by which we don't allow ourselves to know anything about education until it's been established statistically. the latest folly in this kind of metric obsession -- you have seen the kind of semi collapse of "no child left behind" and race to the top which tied school assessment to how kids

scored on tests to the point where the schools were doing denuded of normal interests in creating three dimensional human beings and were engaged in test prep all the time. the latest folly is something called grip and there's a book coming out by angela duckworth from the university of pennsylvania that is getting a lot of attention and what it does is set up a kind of numerical rubric by which character can be measured in children. such thing as perseverance, which makes sense. zest. positiveness. my guess is that mel brooks displayed a great deal of zest but woody allen and larry david, none whatsoever. i find all of this absurd. you have to find way of measuring it, grading it, and of teaching it.

now, also i would say just -- all sorts of -- should be about developing character, and certainly reading literature is about developing character, but to have in other words, we're trying to find some numeric that will alert us to what the deficiencies are in our children, just as the reading and math tests in "no child left behind" alerted us to what the deficiencies were inned of indication in those areas but without telling us how to overcome the deficiencies. in desperation that continues throughout american education because we don't want to face, cannot face, will not face, the real problem, which is poverty. that is the real problem. anyway, i was sick of the -- what i would call the pornography of educational failure, so often tied this enewman lative fallacy, and i wanted to see what kind of literary education worked. so i had done something like

this before, the book that was mentioned in the kind introduction. great books in which i went back to columbia and read the western classics, required courses at columbia, which lasts through two long classes, and it waste at the time of the curriculum debate 25 years ago, should children who are of african descent be asked to read western classics, dead white males simple went back to columbia and sat in on the classes and read everything and listened to the skids and wrote it up as a middle aged adventure. so i had a model. i would sit in class, keep my mouth shut, and is not easy, and listen, and read. did everything, listen to everything that was said, take notes and then try to shape it into a narrative of the year. was having all these thoughts in

a kind of -- and a guy came up to me on the street on the upper west side -- sounds like a joke. guy koles up to you on the street and tells you about a school. his name is samuel abrams, an ex-teacher at beacon school, then at 61st street. behind lincoln center. and he told me about the school which he described as interesting place, a progressive school but not a soft, feel-good, slack kind of place. everybody worked hard. they believed in writing and speaking more than testing. the teachers had great freedom to write their own curriculum to choose their own books, we agreement from the principal, and were able to attract intellectually distinguished teachers and give them free rein. physically it was -- miserable,

the school. was never intended to be a school. it was cramped, an old building, you couldn't get off a jump shot in the gym without scraping the ceiling, which prove to me that you don't need a good physical plant in order to have a good school. what you need is teachers-students, computers, and a library. good library. they have now left. they're now down at 44th 44th street in a much, much larger place, and i even feel a kind of nostalgia for the kind of closed-in, tight soulfulness, everyone on top of everybody elves at the old place. anyway i settled into a class taught by a single teacher named shawn leon and stayed there for the year, i think i went to every actual class of english 10a. and shawn leon has an irish

mother, american navy father, he grew up in louisiana, near new orleans. is a lapsed catholic which i mention only because it was an element in the way he taught the class him was in a state of some distress himself about his open life, and he allowed himself -- to kids read athletes books in other classes at beacon, they read stories buy faulkner and hemingway, orwell and came after

it. and some of these books were hard and disturbing and the kids were flatteredded by the difficulty, i think, of the assignment. they were -- i didn't notice anyone buckling under. let's put it that way. and mr. leon gave them an enormous amount of support and he had interesting ways of organizing the classes. one thing he did was to introduce the issues raided by the texts and bring them into their -- the kid's lives. i don't mean that it evolved into confessional sunday afternoon in the church basement, around the camp fire, sumper camp. much more rigorous than that. personal involvement and it

calls came back to literature and halt he effect of pulling out of kids questions he wanted them to answer, which is what do you live for? what does matter in your life? what are you relation another your parents and transcripts to each other. how much time are you spending on screens and he even forced them into a 48-hour digital fast which most of them failed, which i would have, which they were not allowed to go on screens for two days, and i discovered, as we went over the results in class, and the kids rote a lot of letters about what happened to them and only three out of 32 students actually filled the down time by reading a book. and a lot of them were seriously upset about their daily contact through the internet or with constant music, or the television set constantly on or something electronic constantly on. they were seriously upset. they were not just unplugged.

they were unstrung, a lot of them. these were good students. these were good kids. so, he turn that into a kind of challenging lesson. he did all the english teacher stuff, and we did elaborate structural discussions of the book, and metaphor and symbol and so on, and he dade lot of sin tax and grammar, which i love -- syntax and grammar which i love hearing them talk about and try to play with and it have fun with it, and taking my cue from mr. leon, show how syntaxical issues and grammatic cal issues play into questions of character. how you friend yourself in protest is the way you're shaping your soul. some of the interesting classroom ways of teaching lilt tour was, well, they read poems and the kid wrote their own

versions anonymously and read them. don't know who wrote what but it allowed them to vent in extraordinary ways. when we greatto -- the hero do -- is this self-hating, perverse intellectual who screws him up at every possible world and yet feels superior to the world by persivetiveness and insight into what other people live for. and kids found him fascinating. because they had their own problems in fitting in, wondering where they're going to fit into society. they have the most negative notions of what grownup society is going to do to them. one reason for the incredible success of -- they were placed in violent opposition to each other for the pleasure of -- that's the text for this period. anyway when they got to serious text, they saw what was the kind

of narcissism imbedded in that degree of pride, but they also saw glory in it, which is what was intended' and he had them take the groel of the undergroundman, one student at a time, and someone else take the role of questioning this guy's way of life and then add students on each side of the issue and sometimes they would switch, so what we head -- had there was a mad russian musical chairs, and allowed the students to, by means of using this character, to step into their own characters to ten into themselves. think that's what i was able to do. as i say the point is not to do a report, but to do a dramatic narrative that i showed some of the students. yaw can't do it with all of them. too many. but some of the students coming out of their shell and becoming themselves. becoming more of themselves.

now, at the end of the year, i knew that it was -- this was interesting and i think i could shape it but it wasn't enough, and i went to 11th grade classes at beacon just because i want teed see what would happen to a representative group of tenth graders, the year after. these were not mr. leon roz -- leon's students because this was at the same time mitt i visited a teacher who taught what is now very difficult to teach american high schools "the scarlet letter." difficult -- because it's written in 1850 and set 200 years earlier and the language is archaic and formal and the moral issue at the center of the novel it's a woman who is married and whose husband has -- is away, as an fair with a handsome young minister and conceives a child and the whole town is obsessed with her.

hester. the kids found it hard to understand why that was so important an issue. married women hat a child out of wedlock. so what. and the way that mary hawthorne debt with this was to dramatize the issues directly. that is, they read a lot. she handed out scripts and the students took different versions and sometimes different characters. and for four weeks she alternated in increasingly detailed discussion of character, atmosphere and motive, and additional performance in the reading theater. after a while it became more familiar, the difficulty of the prose easier to handle. when she caught a student reading -- weekly she says what does that mean?

what tide you just say? died you know what you just did? let me think, the reader said shyly. a few minutes later he said i just made a lot of excuses and contradicted myself which caused confusion. a tall pail, intellectual boy, bry, earnest, bony nose, seemed more like dimsdale every time he made a comment. lowers his voice. the girl who spoke a great deal, who normally as thick of likes and sort of's, red hester's refusal to relinquish her child child. she read it with anger and her classroom comments were more to the point and less self-conscious. hawthorn's defining strength cleared they're adolescent vagueness.

as the students went on theyed a admit they'd were surprised by the tower of the fable. she made them see the fable shamed around certain chineses, conditions, and changes in character, and kept shifting the classroom routine, even the shape of the room, rearranging the table ford debate. she kempt the apparatus of reading constantly in motion show to students could never settle or allow the book to fall away from them. she made the book possess them so that they would possess the book. so, the key here to successful high school, teach -- if iing would in the came've shaken -- if you want the students to give of yourself you have to give off yourself. you have to break up the classroom routine. you heave to times even risk revealing moving yourself. if you're trying to get a lot out of them you have to give a lot.

also, at the end of the "the scarlet letter" classes, after many kind offered exercises, she showed up on the last day in a cher wig and sat up on a high table and said she was hester prison -- hester and would answer any questions the students had about her life, and i said, wasn't your time in the woods the best moment your life? and she didn't answer that. but it was the way they prepared for the exam. which i thought was marvelous. i also attended other classes. they read one of the great books of american literature, which i pray never disappears, "invisible man," ralph ellison and they did a structure reading.

... i think it works particularly well and there's, does it scale, you describe something that works well but doesn't scale? could it be perpetuated elsewhere well, there are comparable schools all over the country.

there's no one like sean leon but there are aspects of what he does that could be imitated or adapted, used in the same. i felt where else. i had to get out of new york. i was very eager to get out of new york to the next year i went up to new haven 14 or 15 times and went to another single tenth grade class. not a good school this time. the principal himself described it as a dumping ground. mainly low skill kids. there were two comprehensive high schools in new haven. they have to take everybody. esl learners, kids who have been incarcerated and pushed out of

charter schools. these total schools that are public institutions push kids out all the time. i hope you all know that. when you see the higher scores and increase college interest rates, i hope you know they remove low performing kids even though they're not supposed to. those kids that were thrown out in new haven were at this place. jessica zielinski was a local woman and at first the kids didn't want to read at all. novels, poems, essays, how is that going to help me get anywhere question how is that important to my life? so she started reading in class allowed in the got them to read aloud.

they read to kill a mockingbird which may seem like an odd choice because this is a book in 1930, georgia, and they are black students reading about white heroin and also a woman who gets beaten and brings an accusation of rate. they studied the book as they read it around the class and discussed in great detail. physical elements of that life, what was the structure of money in town question what was the ratio, julio owned property and didn't. how the law work. where do people eat how did they get around? what is the purpose of all this in that study of 1930? the purpose was to get them to ask the same question about their own life. as i said before, poor kids don't have, haven't learned and

grasped that avid desire for information. i'm not talking about race here. i'm talking about income. to grasp the world to make one's way through it, they they know a lot about their family and neighbors could and how to be safe in their neighborhood but what they don't know is what is the social and economic conditions around everything that's happening to me in a poor neighborhood in new haven. she was trying to get them to ask themselves those questions about their own life. they started to read more is that you went on. was a very funny, abrupt, loud, joyous woman who mixed it up with them and she told me several times that white teachers were polite with working-class and ghetto kids and tried to use established a corm in the classroom and shake hands in and out every day, bomb

at the school like this. you have to open yourself up to get them to open themselves up. mostly they loved her. they wanted to perform her. it was also very touching. we read shakespeare and hemingway and they began to read with some real pleasure. at the end of the year, she asked them to choose one of four books, the one they liked the best they had to read and write a report on it and it was ishmael bay long way god. he was a boy warrior in sierra leone. he was kept high on cocaine most of the time and was eventually rescued and came to the united

states and was adopted by an american woman and he had a good writing teacher and he wrote this excellent narrative. the kids were very alive to that kind of stress in anyone's life. both the violence of it and the release from violence of it. at the end of the year a mini miracle happened which was that ishmael bay showed up. not because of me, not because of the teacher but just a total coincidence. he gave a talk at the university in new haven so miss zielinski was able to take kids to see him and meet him. they had read his book and saw an actual author and for the first time literature seemed real to them. i want to tell you very briefly about third high school, and upper middle closed high school

on the coast of long island with largely wealthy white kids per the school found out a few years ago that a lot of the kids, particularly the boys, were simply not doing the reading. not doing it. they went on the internet and read which were sometimes competent summaries of the great gatsby and macbeth on spark notes or some other online study guide or they were wealthy enough families to have tutors who took them through the books and they never really did the reading and brazen their way through papers and exam and even boast about it. what did they do? instead of a scolding or read mediation they tried something different. there only about the only school in the country doing it but it's

unusual for a school like this. they allowed them to choose books of their own to read. not entirely, they didn't give up on great gatsby and macbeth and robert frost and emily dickinson, but they had to have a book of their own going at all times. a book that they chose per they could choose it from the school library, the classroom library, a wealthy school has a library in each classroom. they could use it from the garbage can. it doesn't matter if it wasn't adult literature. it could be anything. the point here as i'm sure you can see is with grudging readers to get them booked initially by reading stuff that they really enjoyed. the teachers would even do a hollywood pitch session like hold up a book and describe what was in it. the teacher had read read some of it and would sell it.

the kids didn't have to read that book in particular, they could read whatever they wanted but they had to have something going and another book going after that and another after that. they had to login every week and so on. that's the first part of the exercise. suppose there reading the same damn book over and over again or suppose there reading nothing about young adult fiction or for books. okay we see that you like that genre. the horror genre survives because of teenage girls, they seem to like that. the teacher would say, that's fine, let me point you toward some books by steven king who's a pretty good writer. some of these early book, the shining, the carrie they're very well-written very well written. let me tell you about this guy edgar allan poe who is an alcoholic genius or robert louis

stevenson. in other words, the point was allow them their pleasures and passions them and try to take those and elevate them. i have a lot of good stories about laddering up exercises like that that worked as well as a few that didn't, but the other part of it is that the school tried to establish a whole culture of reading. the teachers had to keep a new book going all the time and had to posted on the outside the door what they were reading at that moment so there was a constant conversation of books in the school. what i've been trying to describe is how do you force those links that create a lifetime reader? there are many variations on this, but you have to either appeal to what students need emotionally at that point in their life or what gives them a particular kind of pleasure they can't get anywhere else. those are the two things.

i think i will stop at this point thank you all for listening. if there are any questions. >> i have a question and answer migrate here and just raise your hand and i will come here. >> it seems like a lot of what you are talking about is great unusual teaching. how do you separate that out? >> it sounds like a great teacher could do what you're talking about in any subject. >> yes, i think we have to raise the pay and the status of the teachers in this country. the way we treat them in the way the republican party treats union teachers is disgraceful. of course there are terrible teachers and mediocre teachers and i'm in favor of principles having somewhat greater power to remove mediocre teachers but it

has been demoralizing the past ten or 15 years. tying test prep to teacher tenure is a disaster. >> we don't need to talk about finland but i would just say that the teachers are recruited from the top of the undergraduate class rather than the bottom and they make 115% of their peers income where's the income where is the united states the make 65 or 70% of their peers. i think the recent failure of the common core has deterred because developing the common core, it may not be a bad idea but we need to build into teacher training. what we did is to increase the

test difficulty which resulted in people getting low scores and to tie the experience whether not a teacher is good or not is completely innate to me. how do you develop a country of great teachers is to begin by upgrading their status and pay. >> i loved your book. it was so terrific to read about all the great teaching. i have a teaching or thought about the books that are being chosen for kids to read, it just seems to be so much of the same old same old. middleground stuff like kill a mockingbird from half a century ago which i think that teacher did great things with. i would love to see people

reading more books of their own century like pulitzer prize and national book. do you have any thoughts about that? >> i think to kill a mockingbird is very good actually. it's beautifully composed and for different aspects of social life and life in this south and small-town. i'm not going to knock to kill a mockingbird. latino students particularly enjoy junot diaz, the short wondrous life of oscar wilde. i know jessica zelinski has been reading with her 11th graders, an essay that is a tremendous success called between the world and me. yes, i think you're right but i don't see see anything wrong

with to kill a mockingbird among grudging readers who at the beginning of the year weren't willing to read at all. >> i have a follow-up to that. i was going to ask something similar. just in terms of broadening the literary canon, is that not one of the ways to keep kids reading ? not only for latino kids but to broaden it in that sense as well. >> let's get them started first. what this book is about is beginnings. it's awakening hunger and necessity. then it can be taken in a lot of different directions. i didn't even get into the whole issue of the latino population around here but of course in

california in the southwest. that would be great book for someone else to write. i don't see why there can't be other reports like mine, that his subjective reports in which someone is writing out of his own impressions of life. i don't do a lot of writings about the book themselves because i meant this to be for readers. not a handbook for teachers but as an introduction to books and the excitement of reading. i'm an elderly white guy going into different schools and that's just one book, i don't know why there can't be black reporter going into black schools or white schools, how does it work, how does it benefit students? i would love to read that book. anyway. >> yes or.

i just wondered if you have any plans to follow up with any of the students you met and whether you think there is any risk that having an extraordinary teacher for year is a temporary phenomenon and years later their interest might fade away if it's not reinforced. >> there is that danger always. i don't know about you but i had some extraordinary teachers and said mediocre ones after that and i survived. you tried to take into yourself whatever it is, the sense that you get from the extraordinary teachers and to carry forward even when the teacher is not that good. there is always going to be that variability. as for following up, i have stayed in touch with some of the beaking kids and others who are

getting their college stuff together. actually the getting into school. >> one of the things that's awful is the whole part of the places to get everyone into college and there's no college office. there isn't the resources from new haven to pay for a college office. so the kids have no help whatsoever. their parents cannot help them get through the maze of applications and the whole financial stuff. yale does pay tuition for those who graduate at new haven high school with a b average and go to a local college but what yell doesn't do would be to staff a college office at schools like this. keep someone there maybe four days a week and help get the kids through this. yes, i keep keep up with some of the kids. not all of them.

>> working in the schools, one of the things that has been pushed a lot, maybe it's going away, is the whole idea of nonfiction and the role that it plays in an english classroom. i was wondering if the teachers you covered, with a focus on good nonfiction? >> class was all nonfiction you're going like this because god knows how much of it he made up. who knows what he was thinking years before he was writing it. the common core is pushing kids

away from fiction toward nonfiction. the designer of the common core said to me, whoever had to read a novel on the job. >> i said no one except book reviewers. that isn't the point. i'm one of those people who think that reading fiction is the way you know about yourself. when your home the process goes inward as well is outward and you compare yourself to characters there's a complex interaction of activities and settings and extranet detail and complete immersion which invariably brings you back to yourself and how you would act in certain ways and so forth. i think it's essential that people read fiction because they can read other people by reading fiction.

they can develop all those qualities, empathy, perceptiveness, understanding of how other societies work and other kinds of people work that we don't get from the media necessarily. we may get bits of it. i'm against shifting, the nonfiction that the reading may be very good. >> that's a hair-raising book that's extraordinarily well written. i don't agree with a lot of it but this is between the world and me. the book that ms. zelinski is reading with her loving graders right now. >> yes, because he writes with metaphorical power.

it's written with a circular composition where he returns to certain themes and figures over and over again. it's a real literary work. >> i have an accidental experience with my son who was terrible in high school and ended up going off with friends and drinking a lot and ended up in a mental institution in australia and i said just send him home. when he got home he was on medication and he was a wreck. because i love literature, i said let's read. i figured it's factual and beautifully written and he doesn't have to understand. he would just read to me out loud and we would talk. he read the whole book any cap thing i can't do this. it's too long, it's too much.

he kept doing it. i said it doesn't matter. we'll talk about it. he kept doing it and then the second thing he read was notes from the underground and then he started talking about himself. we developed the most incredible relationship. then he read moby dick and good lord, i'm trying to think now. he couldn't stop. he just kept reading out loud to me. then we talked about everything. and before i knew it he brought me conrad and said he liked that. then he brought me celine which i had never read. >> was he not a big-time reader prior to the breakdown? >> no, before that he failed things in high school. he was just awful. >> this is a very happy story. >> it developed and then he

ended up teaching kids at city college to read and write. he had no college. then he started writing himself and now he writes a lot. >> that's a great story. i know what to times in my adult life i was saved by reading because some of the stories are so egotistical that it gave me strength. we will let it go at that, but a bellow is great if you are feeling low, if your you're a man, i don't know. his upper west side book is bilious and angry and funny all at once.

he lived around here a long time ago. anybody else? >> thank you all very much for coming. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause. [applause] >> do you want to tell them again this is part of. >> this is part of the beacon book fair which is one of the three schools we discussed tonight in the book. we can donate a portion of your proceeds directly to them. please grab a coffee or book over here if you don't already have one and line up at the end of the stage for a just give us a minute to up and we will be signing books. thank you very much everyone, you've been fantastic.

you're watching tv on c-span to with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. book tv, serious television for serious readers. if you look up the definition of the word liberal in the dictionary, you will find it means many different things. the word broad-minded comes up. the word open-minded comes up. a liberal is supposed to be somebody, according to the definition that is tolerant of different points of view. the idea being that you may disagree with me but you have every right to your opinion. above all no one has the right to deny you and me our freedoms of expression. in a marketplace of ideas, competition must be kept open. there is no subtle science. the ends of history are open-ended.

we don't know where we are going. checks and balances must be maintained in the government to make sure no one single party or one partisan point of view ever prevails forever. the rule of law is sacrosanct and the same rules should apply to everybody. that is the general idea of what a liberal minded person should be. but today's liberals have a problem. safe spaces are used on campuses to stifle dissent and shutdown debate. progressive attorneys general are issuing subpoenas again so called planet change deniers. some activists actually want to charge them as war criminals. the united states has targeted the political opponents while the president has abused his authority. those who question same-sex marriage are called bigots and worse. some are threatened with boycott find them worse.

universities where progressivism is places of stifling intellectual conformity. all across the america whether it's in our neighborhood, schools or local government, there is a zero tolerance of anything that may offend or disturb whatever the orthodox happens to be in that particular institution at that particular time. now it's time to see that progressive liberals today have become the opposite of the liberal minded person as i did scribed here. they become intolerant in the name of tolerance, they become close minded and they even become liberal which is the opposite of the liberal minded close person. too often they use public shaming rituals in the universities and even coercion through the law to stifle dissent and shutdown debate. i wrote this book because i wanted to tell the story of how this happened and it's a long

story. it's actually a historical story. it's not just what happened in the last eight years. it's been going on for a long time. so unfortunately, there are a lot of miss understandings and myth that i want to tackle. i must set the outset, it will not do if you are conservative and simply argue that progressives have always been this way. this is the response i've gotten on twitter as i've been trying to promote the book. a lot of people come back with what's new under the sun. i think even though they've held long, strong held views, i think their war against dissent and their desire to control has never been as intense as they are today. i think there is some something different and new. >> you can watch this and other programs online apple tv.org. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2.

television for serious readers. here's what's coming up in prime time. we kick off evening with the history of the genetic code with pulitzer prize winning author siddhartha mukherjee. then kareem abdul-jabbar weighs in on social and political issues. coming up at 830 it's a roundtable discussion of donald trump's book, the the art of the deal. then at ten at "after words", they give a history of isis. we finish up our prime time programming at 11 with virginia congressman who discusses the books that have influenced his life and career. that all happens tonight on c-span to book tv. we begin with siddhartha mukherjee.

>> on behalf of everybody here, welcome we really enjoy hosting author talks in this truly wonderful venue and the staff deserve lots of credit and recognition for turning this place over in the past decade and turning this into such a center of cultural life. let's give them all around of applause in a minute we will

hear a lot about human dna but i just want to take a minute to say something about community dna. an important element of community dna is having an independent bookstore. many still exist. in fact our numbers have been growing in the past few years, recovering from years of decline thanks in large part to support from many people like you who continue to value neighborhood bookstores. please, when you feel the urge to buy a book, please shop local. you can get the full books store experience by coming to politics and prose and by full bookstore experience i mean personalized service and advice from expert booksellers as well as a sense of discovery that comes from browsing physical shelves. or, if you want to order online, you can go straight to our website and click on the book

that you would like. now to human dna and are this evening siddhartha mukherjee. back in 2001 when they awarded him the pulitzer prize, at once clinical and personal, he's done it again in his new book the gene which tells the story of the development of genetics by weaving science and social history with some personal narrative about his own relatives. as he recalls in the acknowledgments, he was actually so physically, mentally exhausted after emperor that he hadn't thought about writing another book. the change turned out to be a natural pairing with emperor. sort of a prequel he calls it that he focuses on dialogical normalcy before things get distorted into them in the malignancy of cancer.

if you have ever wondered how much of our lives as determined by our genes versus how much depends on external environmental factors you need to read his new book. but don't expect a simple answer. as you will hear from him, it's complicated. a word about his own past as far back as his student days which were just a couple of decades or so ago. he was already distinguishing himself. he attended stanford, oxford and went to harvard medical school. today he's an assistant professor at met of medicine at columbia university and a staff cancer physician at columbia's medical center. he is going to be in conversation this evening with someone who is obviously made excellent use of her own gene, the coanchor and manager of the cbs news hour in one of the most

accomplished journalism today. [applause] >> thank you for that very gracious, nobody's introduced me by saying good genes, unless they were talking about my blue jeans. thank you. if you are captivated by the emperor of all maladies you will be more than captivated by the gene an intimate history. i feel like my mike is a little bit loud. i'll speak softly. said, there are so many ways i would like to begin, but i think hearing your personal story about why, after you had

completed the years you worked on the book about cancer and as we just heard from brad, you are exhausted by that. then something else was going on in your mind about your own family and you write about that in a way that just pulls every reader in in the very beginning of the book. what happened? what was going on in your life that caused you to even think about writing this? >> so interestingly, i conceived of the gene although i didn't think of it that as the name of the book, but i thought about it for long time. as i was growing up i had this mental illness in my family. i had two uncles with bipolar disease. they actually died having lived with that for many years. one of the uncles lived with my family's when i was growing up it was very much part of my family.

then, sometime in my childhood my cousin, again for my father's side was also diagnosed. he was institutionalized. that elephant in the room could not go away or would not go away i guess like most families, my parents had elevated, but they couldn't deny anymore, especially my father, the idea that this was very much a part of his life, mental illness and the heredity component of mental illness. that's when we began to talk about it. so while i was in medical school and while i was treating patients, this story was constantly in the back. he was like a buzz in the back of your head.

and my exposed, who else is, what what does it look like, is it a trigger that's that's missing or present, et cetera. this story was my story long before cancer was my story. in fact, when i finished writing emperor, i thought to myself maybe i won't write another book, i'll be done per but then then i kept coming back to this idea and as i said, it was like star wars, is is like a prequel to the sequel. >> you dedicate the book to two people and will get to one of them in the minute but one of them was her grandmother because she was involved very much and taking care of your uncles who were, as you say, mentally ill. so there's a powerful story there. there's also a story, i want you you to read a little bit from the start of the book where you were with your father and you went to visit your cousin. >> yes. >> yes i'll read a little bit

from that. this is where their story really begins. >> this is actually the very first prologue of the book. it's entitled family. >> the blood of your parents is not lost in you. >> in the winter 2012, i traveled from delhi to visit my father. my father accompanying me as a companion. he was lost in the anguish i could only sense befly. since 2004, he had been confined for an institution is for the mentally ill with schizophrenia. he's kept medicated.

awash in a sea of psychotics and sedatives and he has to be walked bathed and fed throughout the day. my father has never accepted his diagnosis. he has waste a campaign against a psychiatrist charged with his care hoping to convince them that the diagnosis was sometime an error or that his broken psyche would somehow magically mend itself. my father has visited the institution in calcutta twice. once without warning hoping to see him living a normal life behind the bar gave. but my father knew them i knew there was more than just love that stake for him. he's not the only member of the family with mental illness. of my father's four brothers, two suffered from various unraveling's of the mine.

it turns out that they have been there for two generations and part of my father's reluctance to accept the diagnosis lies in the grim recognition that it might be buried in himself. >> so it's in your family. you sought when you were growing up. you heard stories about it. as we said your grandmother was very much an influential figure in your life and you saw how she was toward your uncles. >> she came to live with us because he was no longer able to take care of himself. in this nuclear family, growing up with the aspirations of a nuclear family in delhi was also present and both of them had moved in with us by then. >> years later, as a scientist, you had found just the idea that in your family you were constantly thinking about this

and in your family it was one generation and then the next but it wasn't everybody in the family. it wasn't every cousin. >> certainly not you. that was the impetus that brought you to think, we need, you wanted to spend more time looking at the genes in the genetic mystery. there's a connection to cancer in the first book, but will you really were embarking on a different and ambitious story that you wanted to tell. >> i published a small extra in the new yorker on schizophrenia. that was really the first thing i ever wrote. that was many years and i didn't publish it or do anything with it. it was the first thing that i wrote once i finished emperor. i didn't give it out to anyone. it was part of my healing or writing process. what's interesting, i went back to it and genetics doesn't

really rear its full head in that little thing that i wrote back then. it's about family which is why the prologue is called family. the idea of genetics doesn't come, it's a reminder that we think of this word gene and it seems to be a concept that lies outside our self, but family, genes have to do with family. it has to do with us and how you and i are made. who in this room doesn't have a relative who's affected by some illness that you can ultimately track back to some interaction between genes and environment. all of a sudden when i look back at that little thing, it's more than six or seven pages, i think this book is really about family

it's about ourselves as living organisms that emanate out of these jeans and that's the conception of the book. >> you wrote this and before i ask you about some of the history here and some of the amazing figures you write about, you write this with a sense, i get a sense of real urgency from you that you thought it was important to get this down now because there's a lot going on in science and we talked about this earlier today. you had a sense that it's really important for people to begin to understand themselves and not just leave this up to the expert. >> let me just give you a sense of what's going on in science and it may help us have this conversation as we move forward. were trying, were learning to read and write and i'm saying this very flatly because let me explain what this means. by reading, i mean that

obviously, you know that in 2001, 2002 we obtain the gene out. what's let's define what the genome is. it's the entire depository of genetic information that's in your cells from an embryo. it's written in just four codes. but here's what's interesting about it. it goes on in humans with 3 billion letters. if you imagine it as an encyclopedia, this encyclopedia would be 66 full sets of the encyclopaedia britannica. it would line up all the edges and if you picked up 66, it

would be indisputable to you and me. in the end, out of that four letter code is you and me and everyone else in that room. it's an astonishing fact that that code becomes you and becomes me. small variations of that code are responsible in some parts to the difference between you and me. going back now to understand what the technologies allow us to do, number one we are beginning to read that code and beginning to understand very clearly, be able to predict what might be or what might happen in your future for some part of the genome. just to give you an example, it's not 100% chance that you're going to have breast cancer but

your risk of breast cancer might be ten times higher than women who don't have that particular mutation. if you have the six stick systems fibrosis gene, i can tell you from your embryonic cell that the chances that you will have that disease is a hundred%, et cetera. so that's beating reading the genome. people explore not just illness but complicated things about our identity. that is already entering territory that we should have some moral concerns about. that's one.

and of writing the genome means that i can not just read it but i can go now and make directional changes, intentional changes in the human genome using a whole set of technologies that we hijacked from bacteria and learn to use and these technologies allow us to go into that 66 volume encyclopedia and take out one volume, erase one word in that encyclopedia and put it back in leaving, we think all the other 66 volumes untouched. so, it seems to me that once we've acquired these technologies, we need to talk about them. you need to learn about them i need to learn about them and we cannot let this happen in the laboratory. last week there was a closed-door meeting at harvard where they proposed synthesizing the entire human genome by

stitching together a little bead on a string. in other words it could sympathize and technologies would soon be available. >> reporter: could take the entire genome and make it from scratch. not a science fiction and fantasy. were not there but all the technologies that allow us to get there by being assembled. this is the time to think about mental illness and whatever other illness that you may be interested in per this is the time to think about it. if you don't, we will give this unbelievably important piece of our history and our future to people that we might not want to give it to. >> you in the book, among other things, you write about a. not so long ago when the study of genetics was heading off in a

really terrible direction and we know it led to some horrible things on this planet. i want to go back to a little bit of the history. so much of what you just described, it happened in the last ten or 15 years or maybe even in the last month, but you also, it's humbling to know that aristotle was thinking about this and that the information kind of sat there and then it was another couple of thousand years, or almost a thousand years before charles darwin started doing his work and then after that some other interesting characters and there are almost these signposts along the way of people who worked on genetics or worked on what they may not have even known was genetics but it all came together later to be critical. talk a little bit about some of the early work that was done. people know charles darwin.

>> what's interesting about it is that of course these are questions. since the dawn of human history, you can imagine one of the first questions we asked ourselves as wide when we look like our parents. why do we not look like our parents? the ying and yang, the 22 strands as it were of these questions have been part of our dna forever. who hasn't asked that question. when an illness strikes a family, we ask ourselves why didn't not strike my father or my mother. why is it mine? when two identical twins are born we say wider they look the same and so forth. aristotle had a theory about this and we began to about it very seriously. it's an astonishing fact that you know aristotle was a very good philosopher but he was a very good biologist.

>> i don't think most people realize that. >> yes, it's interesting. i see him as a biologist completely and only of philosophers secondarily. it came as a way to divide his world up into different forms. he realized where he made the argument that was really moving and what was really being transmitted across generations was message, some sort of message. he said, it's a little bit like carpenter shaping a piece of wood. the carpenter, when the carpenter shapes a piece of wood, he was talking about how human beings are formed. when a carpenter a carpenter shapes a piece of wood, he doesn't shape it in a material way. what he does as he transmits the

information through his or her handiwork work into that piece of wood and that's what's happened. he is transmitting information, a message into a a piece of wood and that's what made that piece of wood acquire. >> this was back in, i don't remember exactly and that point of time where he writes this but this was back in the day when people were debating about how god gave us forms. >> them is a long silence after that. for a while people thought in fact this was so complicated, they say will how on earth could a philly formed human being, an embryo develop when a woman conceives. how can that possibly happen? they made the argument in the 1600s that it was a tiny

miniature human being that was sitting inside sperm, wrapped up like this and they drew pictures of it. he thought about it carefully and it had to be the case that since that would also generate its own children, another had to be sitting inside there. and, so forth and so on. >> infinitely. infinitely miniaturized which is a lovely idea and a little crazy if you think about it like russian dolls. but this was one of the most popular ideas about how we transmitted which was the center of the gene. >> so, the information, what he had figured out what he thought about and shared really kind of sat there as we said for a couple thousand years.

charles darwin did some important work in all this, but then there is some others that came along who were really were not appreciated at the time. one of them was a monk who you spend some interesting pages on. >> yes, it's a fascinating story >> he really launches the book and the modern history of genes. because he realizes, it's very interesting that oath of them are monks. it's instructive about our times that there was a time that people with spiritual i found no contradiction between boring the universe in its natural form and being spiritual.

i suppose the capacity and compassion that they brought to their individual scientific field was incredible. but the fascinating character who was a monk and he began to do extremely simplified experience with experiments. that was his trick. he was a great gardener. his trick, his main insight was to simplify this idea around genetics and he said i want to forget all about that and on going to do is study with monastic concentration and i'm going to study what happens to one or two individual features across multiple generations of peas. here were people talking about hugely complex experiments about

how we were born and there he was sitting in a small monastery where he said all i want to do is study and map, he had no idea they were called genes but that's the end of it. just by mathematical reasoning he realized that there have got to be something, units of information going back that must be passing between the parent and the child offspring. >> he wanted to work with mice but they wouldn't let him. >> that's right because mice was a little bit too risqué. peas are far enough away from -- but mice are too close. it's a fascinating place. i spent some time there and you can get to it easily from vienna but it's a little bit of a schlep.

i traveled over to the monastery and i arrived there and there is a woman at the front desk and i said i've come all this way and i want to go and see this, it's a birthplace of biology. it's like a pilgrimage to me. >> she said i'm sorry it's) i pleaded and i begged and i said i've come all this way and all i want to do is be inside and see the library. she said no you have to summon an application i said who do i apply to and she said to me pilg

and they went on about