about things, when i see issues i can't on see those issues i encounter. i said earlier i still feel guilty i didn't do enough for the children i represented years ago but it's a vulnerable population dealing with these issues who are the heroes. when i see foster kids who can go through the circumstances they go through and come out and find some level of success and happiness and work forward and care about others, i mean, that's aerobic. i'm just trying to report the facts but i do appreciate the comment very much. thank you. >> daniel, thanks one more time for coming out. you. [applause] it's a fascinating conversation, if you want to pick up the book, it's out front of the bookstore and we will be back here after a time, thank you so much. >> thank you everybody.

[inaudible conversation] >> book tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they're reading this summer. >> i hope to finish a couple books, first of all i'm reading freedoms task which was given to me by senator roy blunt and this is a book that is about the dome being put on the capital building pre-civil war but what i found is especially interesting is as i get into the book of focus on the house chamber and senate chamber and how those were added to the original capital building and one of the main proponents of that is jefferson davis so while we are approaching the civil war, we have jefferson davis really helping our country, helping build a capital building which would serve our entire country and we

know later that he became the president of the confederacy so that the book i'm hoping to get through, i started it and i need to finish it. i also want to read about destiny and power which is the book by john meacham on george hw bush. i would like to get that done this summer and every summer i tried to read a book that i've read before.last summer i read to kill a mockingbird, the summer before that i read all the kings men which is one of my favorite books and this summer i'm going to reread dickens tale of two cities. >> book tv wants to know what you're reading this summer, to us your answer at book tv or you can posted on her facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. here's a look at some books that are being published this week. author and filmmaker dinesh desousa says another clinton

presidency will fundamentally change the country for the worse in lori's america. in head in the clouds, william poundstone considers how the ease of finding information on the internet affects how people think. freda collis tells her personal story of being captured and enslaved by isis in 2014 and her escape in the girl who escaped isis.in samples for the love of money he describes his time working in wall street hedge fund and what caused him to decide to leave. the problem with socialism is loyola college economic professor thomas delorenzo's argument against socialist ideology he sees in america today. and in zionism, middle east correspondent for the new yorker milton yours examines the origins of modern-day

israel and its role in middle eastern politics. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on book tv on c-span2. welcome to cleveland on book tv. located in the northeastern part of the state on the shores of lake erie, the search city became a manufacturing hub in the late 19 and earlier plenary centuries during its two location on the water as well as the arrival of the railroads. today it has a population of nearly 400,000 making it the second largest city in the state. with the help of our charter communications partners over the next two hours we will travel the city to talk with local authors about this history of the area as well as national politics including a look at how voters elected officials. >> i started thinking about competitive elections long ago and i started the project thinking that i was writing as the devil's advocate. i saw people assume without question that competitive

elections are intrinsically good and intrinsically healthy and i thought it was important to have somebody make the argument in the other direction. >> later, go inside the cleveland public library special collections to explore the life of harlem renaissance writer langston hughes and his connections to the city. >> during langston hughes time here he lived in about five different residences. he said he lived in a lot of basements. he enrolled incentral high school which was one of the first public high schools in the country , the first in the city. >> first we hear with author john about the about the history of cleveland and how transportation has shaped its identity. >> we are in the auto aviation museum at the cleveland history center of the western reserve historical society on east boulevard in university circle but i wanted to look at history and i've worked on

this with my wife diane to look at the issue of people moving and mobility and to construct the linear story of cleveland ohio from that standpoint. >> the reason i wanted to do a book on cleveland and history in motion is simply the fact that if you're looking at the history of the city, people had to move to get here. so you're looking at a site that was first really begun to be settled 1796 and i'm a historian of immigration and migration. there's people moving back and forth so my question has always been, how do you get from a place that was really a woodlands inhabited by native americans to a place to plus centuries later that has representatives of maybe 120 different identities, nationalities, ethnicities. how does that happen? how does the world come to this site on the shore of lake. ? that's the motion that attracts me. if we're looking at how people got to cleveland over time, this is basically the story of mankind.

it's been 10,000 years a native american settlement at and that movement was largely by foot or by water. when moses and the survey party came here, that would have been wagon and also by water and foot and water was the primary means of transport for many years. that's why the site is so important. cleveland is at the mouth of the cuyahoga on lake erie and when colonial land speculators were looking for a place that could grow water for transportation, that was there. the other thing cleveland had going for it was the fact that george washington had been close to the ohio country in the 1700s. that's at the beginning of what would become the french and indian war and you looked at them off of the ohio country and wondered if there would be a way to create a water route from the river systems from the great lakes down to the ohio river which would then taken to the gulf of mexico. and that route was eventually realized in northeastern wild

with the construction of the ohio and erie canal. when that was created in 1832, cleveland is not just a spot on the land, it's a place on a water route that stretches back to europe via the lake erie canal, the hudson river and the ocean and stretches westward if you will, you go south of the ohio river to the mississippi and gulf of mexico, suddenly what was going to be a little new england village is sitting on a transport route that's to the gulf of mexico and europe. it's just an incredible place and that's what spurs the growth and that's the stories we look at. who comes here. subsequent to that if you're looking at transportation cleveland becomes a railroad hub for the civil war. it's connected to new york, to chicago, to its burden, to st. louis and railroads are faster, they don't freeze in winter, water route trees in winter and cleveland, take

all of that transport and then realized that the community is situated in an area of abundant natural resources. well in pennsylvania, iron or in the upper peninsula of michigan,: the valley, limestone and that's what impels the growth so if you want to take transport, now we have automobiles area when the automobile world comes in we're looking around us at the crawford auto museum, that really changes the fortune, causes cleveland to grow outside its boundaries, drives suburbanization, drives the sprawl today and also allows industries to move different places off of rail water lines. that's what makes it but the thing you know, if you want to look beyond this transport, once you begin to look to europe and begin to look to the american south, you are looking at european immigrants coming on ocean liners to fill industrial jobs, looking at african-americans taking trains and water routes and

later car route to escape jim crow, to try to get jobs in cleveland in the early 1900s so it's the ability to move. it's that motion that makes this community and every other community. if you want to look at people, let's just do the numbers. they can be really boring but in 1820 cleveland population was 606 at the time of the civil war, around 40,000 people and by 1920 cleveland was the fifth largest city in the united states, its population was blurred either foreign parentage or foreign birth and there were 35,000 african americans living here so within a century it had morphed from a small new england village into a cosmopolitan industrial metropolis. if you are looking at cleveland's importance in the aviation and automobile and let's say petroleum refining, what made this occur in the city was ultimately i think it's proximity to the natural

resources that were necessary to produce iron and steel and the natural resources that produce oil and you take somebody like john d rockefeller was a wonder kind, comes in and for better or worse consolidate the industry and create standard oil so that's located here but the oil fields in pennsylvania are not going to last so the oil industry begins to spread. rockefeller eventually will be cleveland for half the year, come back, he had a home on euclid avenue which was billionaires row but ron churned out in his book argues successfully that the reason rockefeller had to go to new york, capped out all the available capital in cleveland so he had to go to the fiscal capital of the united states, new york so that's where he got more capital but they also did a huge export business, about 70 percent of kerosene was going abroad so it may start here but things moving away.

the auto industry starts here because i think one of the things that we find out, their study is done on inventiveness in cleveland so if you look at the late 19th century and early 20th century and you look at major patent applications granted, you find cleveland ranking seventh or eighth among cities in the united states so there's a lot of this technology that's been created and the auto industry is a burgeoning industry and everybody on board when it starts out in the 1890s, early 1900s so a lot of people in the northeast are trying out the product. what happens eventually and this is my opinion, i think some scholars would back me up on this is henry ford in detroit is creating an automobile but he does

several things. he got an assembly line production. assembly lines had been around before so he doesn't invent it but the thing that's important is that he decides not going to do i and automobiles, he's going to do a reliable,affordable automobile and more important he's going to pay his workers enough to buy that automobile and that's what , that doesn't take all the steam out immediately from northeastern ohio but that what is what moves a lot of this to detroit so detroit really blossoms and providing transportation for the masses is a smart idea. we're looking at some of this battery driven cars right now, that's where he's going so that's why cleveland loses out if you will. automobiles are still here. we have a ford engine plant here, we have assembly plants in the area so we haven't lost them, we just don't have homegrown if youwill. we are going to be taking a short tour and i'm going to stop three spots which happen to be personal favorites of mine . and in many ways they went to some of the themes in the book. were going to stop in an area called little italy just

above university circle and that's a way, we are going to explore not only the italian community but talk about john d rockefeller and his impact on the community and then we move on to the cleveland cultural gardens which is all about diversity and i'm hoping to choose a garden that is maybe one of the newer gardens we can look at and talk about how migration patterns have changed in the city over the years and what's happening now. right now we are on mayhill road in the heart of the little italy district, at the eastern edge of the allegheny escarpment where mayfield road goes. this is a settlement the italians began coming to in the 1880s and right now it is changing neighborhoods to become very popular with the growth of university circle but once upon a time this was the most homogeneous ethnic neighborhood in cleveland, little over 90 percent of the residents were born in italy. this neighborhood is significant in many ways, beyond being an ethnic neighborhood and a very popular now, its history is

somewhat intertwined with the history of john d rockefeller who had his summer estate of mayfield road hill and one of the founders of little italy was a man named joseph a, a skilled stone cutter who worked in lake hill cemetery of the hill so he set up shop and other skilled stonecutters came from northern italy, both came from southern italy province but rockefeller would go up and down this road to his own and the italians at one point needed a day nursery took care of ellie who was well known rockefeller because of his affiliation with the cemetery at rockefeller if he could help and rockefeller family provided the funds for what would become all the house social sentiments named after his daughter so you have this incredible commendation of italian immigrants and the richest man in theunited states in the 1880s . for many years this neighborhood provided workers from the cemetery not only to

build monuments and take care of the ground and if we went down the hill in the other way i can university circle there was a assembly plant there, the railroad tracks were there so there were factories and workers lived there as well. the neighborhood was close and insular and it had its assumption every august 15, that was an internal fee but the last 20 to 30 years it's become one of the biggest parties in cleveland in august and there are no strangers at the feast. when you come to the feast you find a lot of people who are not italian, who are not caucasian beginning to come to the feast and enjoying everything here so the neighborhood has begun to buzz and it's one of these areas in cleveland that is now growing beyond what it used to be so be on the other direction, there are a series of townhouses that have been built and a lot of the new residents coming in by very expensive townhouses are doctors and other professionals employed at the clinic so this is part of university circle really but it's a reminder of cleveland's ethnic roots, a

very italian place at one time, still looks italian. a lot of restaurants, a lot of good food and a lot of history. >> right now we are presently at the cleveland cultural gardens, specifically the german cultural gardens on east boulevard in cleveland went hill district. the gardens are unique in the united states. the chain really began in 1960 so it's tolerating its centennial as we see and their unique in that the city provided land to various ethnic communities to celebrate their cultural heritage . the reason that's important here is because of a variety of reasons but the primary one is when these were beginning to start up in the 1920s the united states had restricted immigration severely in 1921 and 1924. a lot of cities were dealing with 100 percent of americanism and cleveland is going out to these different communities and say tell us

who you are. tell us your cultural heroes are. we will give you land, you can put up statues, you don't have to pay for the construction, you have to decide goes in there and right now there are nearly 30 gardens in place or in process. initially many of the gardens focused on what i call the ellis island groups, the early groups that came to cleveland so the german garden is important here because the germans along with the irish were the first group of immigrants coming and for northeastern ohio, germans were the largest group arriving until the 1880s. if we went down the street we would be looking at the her hebrew garden, the croatian garden, down that way if the check garden. there are newer gardens that have been started including one by the asian indian community. these gardens grew and prospered during the 1930s when the wpa provided funds to assist in their creation so if you look at the garden you find a lot of wpa artwork and sculpture here, it's pretty fantastic area but

what they say is thecommunity came together and said we have a culture that's just as important as the one we come to . i think if you want to look at the gardens and what they can tell as a whole, there are books you can read about every immigrant group in cleveland, but if you want to do it in an afternoon, the gardens are one geographic place you can cruise around and park and begin to look at each culture and all its representatives. they are not all here yet. nor will they ever be, there are so many but it's kind of a full shopping gas. you have a beautiful place in cleveland along rockefeller park, along mlk boulevard that you can come to and get a sense of what the city was, what it has been recently and what it is becoming. if i'm looking at that book that was written some years ago, there's something to take away from it. it isa story about cleveland . but it's a story that should

prompt any reader to look at their own family or their own community history and ask this important question, where do i come from? what brought me here? why did i come here? what happened when i came here? was i changed or did i change the community when i came here? that's the critical story. people moving around and encountering jobs, encountering different people and morphing in between. that's what i want people to take away from it, that fine, you're in immigrants. maybe you should look at yourself as the other stories of other people and see are we the same? it's the same thing that impelled me to move, something that impelled somebody else who came earlier. what do we share and our movements as human beings? not as clevelanders or americans but as human beings. what's it about us? there's a historian named dirk berger, who has written

a book called cultures and contacts. it's a history of global migration over the past 1000 years and herder will argue successfully that that the common phase of us as human beings, to move and be changed in the process and to change other things in that process so it's a cleveland story but it's a universal story. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2. we're in cleveland ohio with the help of our local cable partner charter communications. next we learn about the people who built cleveland's millionaires row and about the cities industrial history. >> i was always fascinated with the gilded age and in particular our euclid avenue that contained over 200 mansions, one more beautiful than the next. and we only have four left and i felt it was kind of vanishing and no one knew

about this. euclid avenue is known throughout the world as the grandest, most beautiful street in the world and most clevelanders even do not know about it. millionaires row was basically the elite of cleveland, about the top 400 families and they all were millionaires. interesting statistic, 1885 cleveland was the home of one half of the world millionaires , a little-known fact that it's a testament to how great our cleveland was and they wanted an exclusive street, when you were successful and became a millionaire and most people on the avenue were known throughout the world, people like rockefeller and mathur so this was a genuine neighborhood of about 200 mansions and a party together, they went to school together, their churches all belonged together, they traveled together over the world and they intermarried so that perpetuated before or five generations that lasted so there was some rivalry,

one bigger house than the next so the mansionskept getting bigger and bigger and bigger . some approaching 50,000 where feet area the beauty of our avenue unlike other avenues is they were on very large lots, sometimes 26 acres so the grandeur of the greenery and gardens made it most magnificent as you watch here. the few families that i focus on were definitely the matters were so influential and the mention of course we are in, samuel mathur and his wife, the first family of cleveland although they did not hold elected office, made his fortune in iron or, was the wealthiest man in ohio after john d rockefeller left. his network was about $100 million. this mansion was built in 1910 the cost of $3 million which was quite significant for the day. sadly, mathur's wife laura died of breast cancer for

they moved in. samuel moved in with his daughter constance and his sons and this would've been the hub of the cleveland entertainment circuit. there was a ballroom on the third floor and they would have 1000 people at any given party. on the rockefeller captivated his attention, especially from the standpoint that clevelanders, many of them feel that rockefeller's home was not cleveland so many of them identify rockefeller with new york and that wasn't the case. it was raised in cleveland as a young boy, went to school here had made his fortune here with his partners, a company called standard oil. and when we went to new york, the reason was that banking was bigger, the corporation was international so shipping out of new york andso on and so forth . the interesting thing enough, he had a wonderful estate here in cleveland call forest hill about 700 acres and it was a country farm and rockefeller would leave his

mansion on euclid and he would summer and his forest hill. eventually when he came back to cleveland from new york he would spend his time exclusively at his estate and spent the time your until his wife died in 1915. there's kind of a false impression that rockefeller abandoned cleveland and left in a half. most of that is not true. he loved cleveland, he summer here as i said until his wife died, he also is buried in cleveland and when his son considered burying him elsewhere he said no son, our home is cleveland ohio, i have been read in our hometown so that was the testament that rockefeller loved the city,gave us several parks, there's a building namedrockefeller so there are some remnants. there was a family by the name of drewry , they also had a mention on euclid but further out . if you number the streets from 1 to 100, drury was on

east 72nd street so that would be further out in the country and he was fascinating for a number of reasons, one of which was he made his fortune building a kerosene stove for john d rockefeller's standard oil. one of things rockefeller doesn't get credit for is he created other industries and this perpetuated the wealth in cleveland. of course if you own standard oil stock you became very wealthy so rockefeller had this kind of multitasking about him . drury had the best kerosene stone and in the world. rockefeller when gasoline was demanded had an abundance of kerosene and didn't know what to do with it. we went to francis drury, a fellow clevelander and he said i'll build by every stove you build and use all your customers use up a kerosene and drury came a multimillionaire, baltimore mentioned but he was fascinating because he built a custom summer estate at a summer and today it's a prep school and i taught at that

prep school called gilmore academy so i was familiar with drury and the mansion and kind of took his character to heart and wanted to know all i could about him. one of the things we have to keep in mind is during the gilded age there were no movie stars. there were no rock stars, there were no sports stars so society became the publics entertainment. and during this sleigh races, thousands would line up to see rockefeller or mathur or hanna or any other characters raise their slaves because they were celebrities, they just wanted to get a glimpse of them and the slaves were a slave, hold as a single person and pull by trotters, beautiful horses. the city was kind during the sleigh races, they would raise the speed limit to 20 miles per hour and they would race over a mile, thousands of people all dressed up in

the winter and it was great excitement and they would party afterwards. a lot of bedding would go on in terms of who had the fastest horse but be trotting industry, a good bit started here in cleveland as these people began to leave their trotters to get the fastest horse and we had world champion after world champion early on. i do a talk called the famous and infamous women of millionaires row and everybody wants to know the most infamous woman and her name was kathy chadwick and she married a doctor, doctor chadwick and had a mansion on euclid avenue. unbeknownst to the doctor she was a swindler and she's written up in history, a lot of people recognize the name. when she came to cleveland even though she was living with a wealthy doctor she wasn't content to she dreamed up a story where she publicized that she was andrew carnegie's illegitimate daughter and that she was

going to inherit $400 million it had oriental rugs because kathy was a world renowned celebrity. sadly she died in prison after only about three years. some say she swindled up to $15 million which better wealthier than most of the millionaires on millionaires row. a chapter i enjoyed more than others pretty much i think the white family. i was particularly close to them because walter white besides being raised on millionaires

row, when he grew up automobiles were invalid. they started building country estates. some of these were only 20 minutes from cleveland which was the beauty of our city. you could leave and be in a country within 20 minutes. walter white built a 1400 a state that was gorgeous. it was a gentleman to working for. he had his own pole vault field and people from spain came to play on that polo field. he had a board that housed 100 horses. it was raising polo ponies which was his passion. i became interested in the whites because later on the estate was broken up at a prep school bought 300 acres. abounds at 1100 acres was subdivided for homes. they were all fighting for lots. i own one of those lots in the middle of the estate. my whole career started because one day i turned to my wife. it was a rainy saturday winter

day and there's nothing to do and i said i'm going to go to the library and see what my lot looked like back in the heyday when it was a form. she was laughing. she said should never been to the library. you are not going to do this. i stop for a cup of coffee and we have a wonderful library, a fireplace and i sat down and started reading a book about the estate which the librarian had given me. after a couple of minutes my recollection was i got a gratuitous tap on the shoulder and the librarian said to me, you seem very interested in this state. i said yes. she said that our wide relatives still in our area? i said i didn't know that. she said i think would be wonderful if you could put a talk together. we have friends of the labor and we will pay you. i thought this was magical. i think it paid for sitting in a chair and doing a talk. we scheduled it and the library promoted it and too much later i had my talk and decided i would

bring in the original pictures. we set up and asked catherine beforehand how many people do we expect it to his room that held about 50 people. she said we have about 50 that site up why do we set up a few extra chairs just in case? i said fine. i left the river and came back in to 100 people, all over 100 people. if you want to see a laborer in a panic, bring in 100 people in a room that exceeded 50. we were packed. afterwards some of the whites asked me questions but what was astounding to me is they were for generations out and i told him stuff about their family that they didn't know. i became a friend and we became socially acquainted and had dinner together. to this day they still come to some of my talk. went i do my talks i talk about greatness. i'm always interested in how greatness starts. it generally starts with a series of events that are not

related that no one would think would lead to greatness. have as an example what about the little candy. people ask, a little candy, how can that lead to greatness? this had a hole in the middle. it was called lifesavers. it was invented by a fellow by the name of clerics claim. he thought a hard candy with a whole would be a wonderful thing. some say it is an ingenuity candy that if a child swallowed they could still breathe. that's folklore that we do not the candy as a whole in the middle. i think we are in agreement that lifesavers day over 100 years later is one of the top brands in the world. it could have significance of what was interesting is clarence graham was enjoying great success. there was a fellow by the name of ed noble who was in new york. ed noble was in the pre-internet business. know one ever heard of the pre-internet. without business was with

postcards. thousands and thousands, millions of postcards went throughout the world. many had a picture of euclid avenue mansion on the front and it had advertising on the back. he was in the advertising business and led the internet the postcards publicized cleveland worldwide. he came to cleveland indicate to the candy and deliberately bought the company for $3900. some feel bad for clarence, but you could buy a house for $3900 in 1990. he said $30 million bonus will candy with all in the middle through the great depression which was quite a feat. any decided to bite another little company, and the would would associate's company with lifesavers or with cleveland. but the little company bought was abc, american broadcasting company. you get an idea of my version of how greatness starts. there are many, many stories like that all in combination led

to cleveland greatness. cleveland, ohio, the greater cleveland area per capita is the most charitable city and all the world. most of that charity started on euclid avenue millionaires row. most of these folks were raised and were very religious. they were allowed to make as much money and be as successful as they possibly could be but once they achieved the pinnacle they had an obligation to get back to society in a big way. cleveland was a great benefactor. we have one of the best orchestras in the world. we one of the best art museums in the world. we have t two hospitals, the cleveland clinic and university hospital, two of the best in the world. we have one of the best historical societies in the world. i could go on and on. so many charities that people are familiar with all had their start in cleveland. it was this cleveland legacy, this beautiful ending to the story that these people had this obligation to read something special for society.

john d. rockefeller gave over half of his fortune, all done with the charity after he retired. it was almost mandatory, and to think i enjoyed writing about that. i enjoy talking in front of these charities right now, understanding the roots. i also came up with a definition of charity that a think is applicable for cleveland. and charity as we define it is the extension of the touch of human kindness. and so in promoting cleveland, i point out to folks that although we don't want to toot our own horn, it's interesting to point out that we are the most charitable city in the world. and by the way, we define charity as the extension of the touch of human kindness. and that's how we want our cleveland to be known. >> you are watching tv on c-span2. this weekend when visiting cleveland, ohio, to talk with local authors into the city's literary sites with help of our

local cable partner charter communications. next we hear from justin buchler, political science professor about his research on competitive elections. >> i started thinking about competitive elections long ago, and i start the project thinking that i was writing as the devil's advocate. i saw people assume without question the competitive elections were intrinsically good and intrinsically healthy. i thought it was important to have somebody make the argument in the other direction. so i started the project from the mindset of playing devil's advocate. as i kept working on the project i realized i had issue time constructing arguments against competitive elections than for them. we miss a competitive election,

taking a lot of different things that it can mean elections in which the artist many candidatecandidate s on the ballot as possible. they can mean an election which we are uncertain about the in dash the outcome. in which there are no bears to into. a lot of different meanings of competition you're one of the problems with saying that we should have more competitive elections is that frequentlfrequentl y making elections more competiticompetiti ve by one definition means making them less competitive by another. i think it's important for us to think about exactly what we mean by terms like competitive elections. part of the basic motivation for the book is the observation that at the congressional level very few elections are competitive by most definitions. most incumbents went and most do so by large margins. if you listen to political dialogue, that's described as a bad thing and is described as something that means there is

something wrong in our democracy. however if we think about an election as a decision about whether or not to fire an employee, if employees are being retained deterministically on a regular basis, that would suggest that you've got a well functioning operation. where you see trouble is where you see a company that is regularly firing half of its employees every two years. that's a sign that you've got a badly run company. so where it becomes important to understand the distinct is in terms of whether it is a good or bad thing that most incumbents win reelection by large margin. if you think of an election as a market, then that means something has gone wrong because it means we have not competitive markets but monopolies. on the other hand, if we think about elections as hiring and firing mechanisms, the fact that most incumbents are deterministically rehired might mean that everything is working

okay. it's important in a hiring and firing mechanism is to have a credible threat to fire employees who don't do their job such that they do their job such that your employees are retained. that means there are two ways that things can go wrong. want is firing employees who should have been retained. the other is retaining employees who should have inspired. either way you have a problem. if we want to know whether or not it is a problem, we have incumbents who are being systematically rehired on a regular basis. that's a problem if it is the case that the employees should have been fired. to whether or not there's anything wrong then it's a question of whether or not a specific incumbents who are being rehired should not be rehired. this is where we turn to something that we call in political science paradox. it's an observation made one of

the important scholars in congressional studies who made the observation that while most americans will say they really don't like congress, if you ask them what they think of their own members of congress, they like their own members of congress. so when we look at approval or disapproval of congress over all, we are sort of missing the point. it as if i live in district one and you live in district two, ma my opinion of the income industry to is irrelevant because that can come it doesn't work for me. the only one doing so because the incumbent in district one. it doesn't matter what my opinion is of the income in district two. so if voters are generally happy with their own members of congress, then that suggests what to do things is the case to either voters are being systematically tricked about how well their employees are doing or the system is functioning well.

if the system is functioning well then we should worry about most elections are not competitive. but it's about is that voters are being tricked, he may have a much bigger problem than the lack of competitive elections. any assessment of whether or not an incumbent deserves to keep the job is a little bit subjective. so it's hard to say whether or not voters are being systematically tricked. the our limitations on what voters know. most voters are not particularly well informed about individual members of congress, but the times that voters are best informed about members of congress is when there is a competitive elections resulting from the incumbent usually doing something wrong, usually that means either the was a scandal or that the incumbent is systematic behaving in ways that constituents don't like, and the campaign calls attention to it. so the instances in which we see voters best informed about

incumbents tend to be the instances in which there is a competitive elections as some form of punishment for the incumbent doing something wrong. if you read the federalist papers, the federalist papers were all about checks and balances and trying to keep anyone's faction from getting too much power and trying to keep public opinion and the winds of public opinion as a shift back and forth from your tears to have a dramatic changes on public policy. the purpose of the senate was to serve as a check on the house of representatives. the house of representatives was supposed to be essentially the people's chamber, and the framers expected that the housee would respond to the whims of public opinion. the goal was to the senate place a check on that, and there was a bias in the system, built into the system towards an action

based on the premise that no legislation is preferable to that legislation. if we look at the political system today, the political system today is pretty gridlocked. the framers wrote the constitution with the objective of creating a bias towards gridlock because it was better than public policy shifting too quickly in response to the whims of public opinion. there's a lot of variation in incumbent members of congress. if you think about a group of 435 individuals, any group of 435 individuals is going to have a range of behavior patterns, a range of knowledge and other

factors. one of things that's interesting when you look at congress through c-span, if you watch the one minute speeches, what you're saying is that people who choose to give the one minute speeches, and it's important to understand that the people who choose to give the one minute speeches, while quickly entertaining, are not always the most influential members of congress. it's important to understand that a lot of the important work that's done in congress is not done on camera. so it's hard to get a sense of the full picture from just c-span. it's valuable to watch floor debates and it's important to see what happens in floor

debates, but it's also important to understand that by the time you get to a floor debate, the outcome is pretty much predetermined because so much of the important work on legislation is done in committees, and so much of the important maneuvering is done in the rules committee, that by the time you get to the floor debate, most of the important work has already been done. it's informative to watch but it's not necessarily the real business being done. it's actually not rational for most voters to spend a lot of time in informing themselves about politics, because most voters have complicated lives. and inform yourself about politics takes a lot of time for very little reward. i find it rewarding to study politics because i just find it

fascinating, but the probability of one voter casting a pivotal vote in an election is pretty much less than the probability of getting struck by lightning. so it's not really rational to invest a lot of time learning about politics and let you enjoy learning about politics for its own sake. because it's not rational for individual voters to do that, you wind up with a lot of voters who are relatively poorly informed. the problem is that if the electorate as a whole is poorly informed, then you wind up with the possibility of bad decisions being made, where incumbents who deserve to be fired or retired and those who deserve to be rehired are fired. competitive elections to do what you think they do. if a competitive elections is an election in which we are uncertain about the outcome because it is governed by some sort of random process, then a

competitive election with an income at on the ballot is flipping a coin to decide whether or not to fire somebody which is a bad idea. i think the other main idea of what people to take away from it is that elections are not like markets. i think it's really unhealthy and misleading to draw analogies between elections and markets because they work very differently. >> during a booktv's recent visit to cleveland, ohio, we visited the cleveland public library to learn about the life of harlem renaissance writer langston hughes. [inaudible]

>> today we are at the cleveland public library, and we're in the special collections department also an as the john g. white special collections department. today we're looking at our archives. we collect langston hughes because because langston hughes came to cleveland from 1916 to about 1920. he attended high school here at that time and he developed a relationship with several of the librarians here he stayed connected to the city and to those librarians, and we have correspondents that he gave, wrote to some of them. he came and visited the children's room and composed a poem and wrote in the datebook. we have that. so we had a basis for a

foundation, and then we just have over the years build on that and try to collect materials that relate to his time in cleveland. langston hughes was an african-american poet. he was lifted from 19242 i think 1967. during that time he composed over 60 books, plays, musicals, columns. he was a very prolific and important african-american writer and he developed a lot of the styles and genres of literature, poetry such as spoken words that are popular today. he was influenced by all aspects of african-american culture. when langston came near cleveland was starting to change.

because you had ways of eastern european migrants here, immigrants coming here for factory work for the war. and you had the wave of african-americans who were coming here also seeking employment. prior to that there was a small african-american population in cleveland. i merely successful. cleveland was always an integrated city, but with that second migration path when you started to see a shift in the racial relations in the city. during langston hughes time here he lived in about five different residences. he said he lived in a lot of basements. he enrolled in central high school which was one of the first of public high schools in the country, first in the city. and he wrote for the belfry owl which was a student newspaper

there, and in 1928 they did a compilation of some of the poetry that students had written while at central. and this is a book of verse. he wrote the introduction to it, and he also contributed two of his early poems. and it was at central that he developed his love of writing, and he wanted -- you introduced to the work of karl sandburg and walt whitman to his teacher, ms. weimer. he also composed a poem while they are at that's kind of famous, when susanna jones wears red. that was the poem he wrote about a young lady that he saw, i believe he saw her at either central or somewhere else at a dance, but that was one of his

first poems that he composed. during that period when langston hughes was year from 1916-1920, one of the things he did is he met a couple, russell and growing a -- and they started a settlement house called the playhouse which was the forerunner to what today is not as the caribou house. it was based on jane addams and it was a place for young african-americans to come and learn art, drama and writing. they became friends. hughes would go to their house and read books and talk with them to they really liked them. he later became one of the first art teachers there. one of the things he learned at central was art. he had concluded that you consider become address them. he really liked art, and dessert

the process and had to be meticulous and how to finish things. so we took all these skills and taught the children. throughout his life when he would come to cleveland, he would stay in contact with them and help raise funds. he was the first artist in residence, and he created several original plays for the house. it is significant because it was a place for local and prominent nationally known artists to hone their craft. they were exposed to not only langston hughes but very well-known local artists. many local african-american

artists who became prominent started here. and then they went to cleveland institute of art, someone such as smith was the first african-american to graduate from the school with a traveling scholarship. so they got a lot of people started. this is a photograph of him looking at the architecture drawing for what was the house. one of the plays that he composed there was a musical called a great day, and he wanted to do a play based on the nativity, a gospel play based upon the nativity. it is best known as black nativity. it is performed all over, and he created that especially for the

house. after langston hughes left cleveland, one of the places he went to was new york. he became involved with the movement known as the harlem renaissance. that was also a time when he was being published. he and others got together and created a magazine that was devoted younger negro artists. this is a facsimile of the magazine, fire. langston was working as, he was supposed to be going to columbia university when he was in new york, but he ended up spending a lot of time in harlem. his career at columbia was short. so he later attended lincoln university and traveled a bit.

he wrote his first book of poetry which was the weary blues. this is a copy of it. and whenever langston would write books, when he would come to visit, he would always find a copy of the books and donate them to the library. so this is a signed copy. and this is from 1931. he was in cleveland during 1931 for a good amount of time. his mother had relocated, and he came to the library frequently during that time. this is just a photograph from our collection. when he was working in washington as a bus boy in a hotel, and that's when he met lindsay, and lindsay's kindest of the word about langston hughes and guiding known to mainstream audiences.

one thing that is very interesting that we have in this collection is one year langston hughes, this is from 1959. this was his christmas card that he set out. and as you can see he was a pioneer in photoshop. he was doing this before there was photoshop. he can do this by hand, edited it's interesting because it shows not only is artistic skills but they get a good sense of humor. this is a letter that langston hughes wrote to a mr. wesley hartley in los angeles, california, in 1957. basically it is a letter summarizing his life when he first wrote poetry. he references writing his first

poems in the belfry owl, the school magazine at central high school. and in his autobiography he talks about central high school, his english teacher who was a great influence upon her students, guiding us to good poetry and helping those who wanted to write. many of her pupils went into their field of writing such as journalism, creative writing and publishing. so he always referenced central high school and his time in cleveland at how it was important to him. this is a broadside which is printed item, printed on one side, if this is a broadside from 1966 of a poem called the backlash blues. it's from his last work which was called the panther on the leash, and that was his last

book of protest poetry. uphold the backlash blues is about the state of african-americans in the 60s at that time. he makes reference to the vietnam war and being treated as a second class citizen. he says you give me second class housing, second class schools, and whenever i try to do something, all i get back is the mean old backlash, which is a reference to slavery and being lashed, being that. at the end of the palm he said that the world is full of folks like me who are black, yellow, beige and brown, and that it's a big that the population of the world is changing. he had written this poem and he

was friends with the singer nina simone. he had met her in the 50s when she was a student at the alex school. assisted she arranged for him to come and speak to all the children in the town, and then the school which was a premier african-american boarding school for girls at that time hosted the event. so that was the first time she'd ever met langston hughes. she took the palm and they made it into a song. it's one of the most famous renditions of the songs was on her enough said, nina simone album. but this is a track. at that time, we langston hughes died, she put in the song, when

langston hughes died and she talked about how he encouraged her to be the best artist that she could be. so from then on she would encourage them, and and she even would, you know, talk about him when she would perform the song. she would at length about him a little bit. i think that mr. white would be pleased with what we've done here. highlighting a citizen of, a person who lived in cleveland for a number of years, and he is not only contributions to the world but his occupations that to the city of cleveland. ♪ ♪ ♪

>> now a booktv a literary tour of cleveland, ohio, with help of our local cable partner charter communications. next we speak with professor kathryn lavelle about her book "money and banks in the american political system." >> the title of the book is money and banks in the american political system. i decided to write it because i was living in washington and i was working on another book about the imf and world bank and the american congress. financial crisis happened. what i found as a result of that was that it was a pretty big gap in the literature is for anyone who is educated and wanted to follow the crisis about how and why different institutions were responding. so why was the federal reserve doing this, why was congress involved with the tarp? why was the president involved are not involved? we had an election and things

changed again. because of that expense i decided to try to put it all and draw a map in one accessible place where people could understand looking to the future how the political system works in this area and now the agencies do what they do. so much of the book is about how our american political culture infuses this system with good and bad things tha have made it possible to have a vibrant dynamic financial services sector that we have. but it seemed on the political system has been a source of crises. there's a good side and a bad site. the book starts with historical review of the developing of the american financial system going back to the american revolution and paying off the debt of the revolution and in our very interesting history with central banks. i see interesting relative to other advanced international democracy. that's the first segment but then during the civil war the government had to pay for the

cost of the war with the financial system that was pretty unsophisticated relative to what else exists. we started to have a national banking system in the civil war that exists alongside the state banking system. so the point is that the same things that few american politics in other areas, what does this take you to do versus what does the federal government get to do? the big question was slavery but the other questions will about who would issue money, who would regulate banks? all of these same questions were present in american politics and just like the issue of slavery haven't gone away and the residual effect of the civil war hasn't gone away. they haven't gone away when it comes to thank stephen. what happened in the american experience is that the united states industrialized in such a way that the major american corporations were out there before the regulatory agency a.

you think about major corporations, united fruit, even standard oil and the major banks, citibank being one of them. they existed before the regulatory reforms of the great depression. in many countries, our advanced industrial peers, they were much more when it is a. we've always had a lack of comfort with the centralization of power in our governing govert institutions but also in our banking institutions. as everything else in the united states is contested between the state and the federal government, it's not different in thanking. in some areas of the united states were much more comfortable with large banks that operate internationally. that would be new york state being the example and then in the south there was much more hesitant in reluctance about the role of banks and even more reluctance out with. some western states outlawed banking entirely. the reserve fractional banking

system. when the federal reserve was created it was a compromise between people who want the government to control the central banks and every board of governors in washington, if the people who wanted to more control by bankers out in the region. we have a system of regional federal reserve banks. which we have one here in cleveland. there's one in atlanta and so on, chicago, so on and so on. this was a couple mice that the time but a couple that didn't work very well because everybody was making -- during the great depression that system was altered and we now have a centralized monetary policy system, the fomc that's located in washington. until that time the federal reserve have reflected these different characteristics. the sec is a creature of a different era. the great depression and the collapse of the stockmarket. at that moment in american

history it was perceived we need to regulate security's marcus picked up until that time they'd only been regulate at the state level. creating a whole system of securities regulator with a completely different notion of how to regulate. the idea with the security's market, let the buyer beware. give people transparent information other than decide whether not they want to buy this stock that if you lose your shirt which all fall. that's a different philosophy than bank regulation which is to try to prevent a catastrophe for agree. they with other agencies like the office of the comptroller of the currency. that's a part of the treasury department that regulates banks. that's a product of the civil war. the whol homelessness of regulag banks, the perception when we established a national system of banks your so these different agencies have always responded to different constituencies and regulate different banks. the additional agency that come

you can see why you need a map. so the additional agency that is very important is the fdic, the federal deposit insurance corporation which also a creature of the great depression, if the notion that people need to deposit insurance so that will not be a round of debate because they know their money will be there. the fdic has different entered in the political system because it regulates different banks. also if the banks that are regulated by the end of reserve fail, the fdic has to pay out on those. it tends to be a much more conservative regulator because it doesn't want to have to spend its entire insurance funds bailing out the banks that are regulated by other regulators. these different agencies come from different errors but they have different purposes based on what role they from also what makes the regulate. i don't know if it's helpful but i think of it like it go to think that analogy to a person, this might be overly simple by but you say i can write checks.

that's the treasure to the treasury is the part of the system that pays out for the company. it takes money and. the federal reserve is the bank. that would be like around here huntington keybank, chase, one of the banks where you would keep the money on deposit. the treasury can't do anything unless congress tells them it's okay. so you can't write the check without congress tells me. if you think about this relationship, the head of the federal reserve has some functions as the head of the bank that would naturally tend to conflict with the treasury department. because these institutions have been worked out at different moments in american history, some of the relationships are not very clear. a lot of it comes down to politics. the politics depends on the individuals who hold the jobs that they have. one thing i find fascinating is that it doesn't necessarily

reflect their political parties. you had incredible positive relationships between republican appointees everything the famous example is alan greenspan at the federal reserve having a great relationship with robert rubin at the treasury and the democratic clinton administration. and alan greenspan in his own account with a he didn't have the same good working relationship with some of the republican appointees that had preceded secretary rubin. you don't necessarily have come here to relationships with paul volcker at the federal reserve was some republicans and not so much with some democrats and vice versa. because paul volcker's policies really put the economy into a recession which was damaging for some democrats. it isn't necessarily a partisan relationship. i think what people appointed to since ben bernanke was at the head of the fed is that some of the researchers are very critically upon the hill and talking to people and making clear to the american public, i know that's been ben bernanke's

income could open up and demystified event and let him understand why it does what it does and opened it up but they've all had their own style and all of the beleaguered some people are better at working with others and it depends on whether or not they think monetary policy is the appropriate way to handle whatever the crisis is with a sector of the treasure might think fiscal policy is or is not. you have a shift in policy in the american government between the federal government wanting to control the economy through tax and spending policy, shifting to federal reserve a larger and larger role in monitoring the economy. if we go back to previous recessions there have been this sense that in the george w. bush administration we had almost mastered the recession, the business cycle, the we've gotten so good at it at the federal reserve was so able to handle

things that we really were not going to a major collapse begin. interest rates are low. so they would argue the federal reserve kept interest rates too low for too long but people into housing markets for a friday of reasons. and again you're going to get a variety of explanations from across the political divide about what was going on but there was an undue press emphasis on housing. people were looking for high rates of return on their deposit accounts and other investments come in housing provided higher and higher rates of return as housing markets move to people who at worst and worst credit history. he can to pay a high rate of interest when you have a worst credit rating. the financial services industry, again depending on what your view of the industry is to either responded to consumer need or actin acting responsibln it did on where you sit on the political spectrum, but the

financial services industry responded by providing products that provide higher interest rates and some of these were highly risky. when they collapsed they were so collocated that it was not clear who was responsible for the mortgage that was openly at the endpoint. when you had a massive collapse of such an important segment of the american financial services market, you had a threat to the whole system will come down to you started the season hedge funds are we on collapse, the bear stearns and then he started, unit runs on the commercial paper market leading up to september 2008 event and then in september 2008 you started to have massive collapses of major institutions. the major reform legislation that came out of 2008 was a dodd-frank reform act that tried to change the worst practices of the system so we would not have another financial crisis. one of the more obvious result

was the creation of the consumer financial protection bureau. we have an agency that was created and the idea was that it would be an emphasis on the consumer in the financial services marketplace. when people go out to make a home loan, they have a good understanding of what they are actually borrowing or what their obligations are. when they go into the financial services market place they understand when they are taking on risk, with an engaging volatility because sometimes we want more risk and volatility but his support for the consumer to understand when they are taking a risk on unmitigated with retirement money into don't want it to understand when they are not. has been one area that's opened up. even in areas like home loans can't excuse me, student loans and some of the things we've seen important initiatives that have come out of the agency. the other the kerry has to do with the volcker rule. so trying to rein in some of the people perceived to be the most

risky practices of some of the major banks in terms of trading securities on their own books or are they providing services for customers, trying to bring back the spirit of the old last eagle where banks to a banks to end the investment banking industry does what they do. my goal in writing the book was not to place emphasis on any one policy prescription for the future. my goal was to give people an understanding of the entirety of the system so that they could understand the components, as they relate to each other and they could make up their own minds about whether or not they think the emphasis should be put on stopping campaign contributions from wall street or should emphasis be on the comment period when agencies are making rules? should that be the area where they should make their mark? should they join an interest group, should political parties? where do they think the most effective place to press a real change and not just expressed frustration with the system but

be able to understand who is it when we say the government does something? the government doesn't do anything. agency or some part or a presidential administration, it is a component of the government that is acting, that is helping or harming you, identified and come up with solutions because that's the only way, that's the way banks operate and that's what financial services industries operate. so the only way you could address those issues is by working to the same channel. i hope the take with for people to understand himself when they see the prom and be able to go forward and work within those constraints. ..

>> so my book is called "white out: the secret life of heroin". and the reason i decided to write it was i been, it's been my experience as a heroin addict in graduate school, at john hopkins university in the late 90s and early 2000 and i decided to write it because i wasn't happy with the way the books i was aware of were representing the disease of addiction. so when i went back and began to write it, and i looked at my memories, when i came to believe is that addiction is what i call a memory disease. in other words, lots of people when they think about addiction and they think

about drugs, they think the addict is someone who they take the drug and they like the way it makes them feel. going back over my story when i realized was for almost the entire time of my addiction i did not like the way the drug made me feel. as soon as i would use the drug, all i could think about was how to stop using, how to get clean and soon as the drug war off, all i could think about was where to get some more so to me that, that's not about having fun and that's not about enjoying what the drug was doing to me. what was a form of mental slavery of slavery so as i look back into my experience and my history what i discovered was what really kept me coming back was this phantom image of the first time i ever use my drug of choice, heroine and when i began to write this book that image was vivid it was on a rooftop in new york city in the summertime. with a couple). and that image, that memory was so intense and so

powerful that i couldn't shake it andevery time i thought about the drug , every time i used the drugs, every time i saw the drug, all i could think about was that first time ended through me like a magnet. the first time i used that drug was when i was 22 years old. and i write about it in the book how i came to that point because lots of folks now believe you hear people talk about a drug like heroin and there's a certain image in their head of what a heroin addict would look like. one thing that my story, my generation that spoke to them unfortunately is lots of people who come addicted to the strong come from middle-class backgrounds, are well-educated, don't resemble the stereotypical image of what a drug addict is like. the way i came to it and i, you know, i had an alcohol

problem, i was a heavy drinker. i developed an ulcer. i wasn't able to drink for a while and for me that experience was onof , it felt like death. it felt like i couldn't speak with my friends. i couldn't hang out with people, i couldn't do anything. i was paralyzed so i was looking for something to replace that and i finally found this drug and i took it that first time and it was like magic and i believe that very first time at age 22 that was the moment i became a heroin addict and this is the moment when the insanity of addiction starts to take hold. i became a slave to getting more and more of the drug to have it, do what used to do for me. my tolerance goes up enough, the money i got to spend goes up enough so i write in the book i was living at in baltimore at the time and letting this double life. on the one hand as a graduate student in this prestigious university and on the other

hand living in the underworld , the drug underworld selling drugs , stealing, living a lifestyle to support the habit which is the height was $150 a day and that's not easy to come up with when you're on a graduate student's budget so i did what i had to do to get that money. my spiritual sense of the world he gave, my ability to appreciate the normal, right now sitting outside at this beautiful summer's day this would be something i was unable to experience as an addict . it destroyed and erodes all of my senses. and it's a doubling of my entire life and by the end of it i was continually obsessed with suicidal thoughts.

but again, i didn't know anything about recovery. i didn't know there was a way, i didn't even know i was addicted to be honest with you. i didn't know what addiction was, that's how clueless i was and how little information there was an unfortunately what remains about what this addiction is about. i thought , i was in health class in high school they told me there's physical addiction and psychological addiction. and i thought to myself, heroine, my only problem with it is i get sick if i don't take it for a few days, right? i thought i could handle that, it's no worse than the flu, i can take that. we understand now that it's really a brain disease as many of us think about it and the withdrawal, physical withdrawal symptoms are the smallest part of that disease, the real core of it is that endless freshness of the first time i used and the endless desire to try to get that back, evenwhen everything in my life also part because of it . and even when i'm unable to experience that feeling. there's one story i tell early in the book, i was out

involved in a drug deal and got in a north altercation in the process and ended up getting a black eye and letting it and immediately afterwards i had to go to class at johns hopkins as part of my duty as a graduate instructor so i call showed up with my face like a blue and let buddy and i told the students this made up story that i had heroically rescued woman who was being assaulted and i felt great about myself and then i went over afterwards down to the east side of baltimore where one of my friends had just been released temporarily from jail on a homicide charge, on a large bond and he had this idea where he was going to be able to get this large sum of money and we were going to be able to solve all our problems. and the entire time i'm using drugs, the entire time of one

step ahead of the law, the entire time under the current of my thoughts is the sensation that the police are going to pick me up at any moment, i could overdose again which i did many times at any moment and the whole of my life had become and there was an observatory to it, there's a lot of humor also. i'm looking back and when i was writing it from the perspective of recovery, when you get at the absurdity of the attic's existence, so the other thing i'd like to, i would want to say about this is the recovery piece about howi got clean . i got arrested in chicago and charged with a felony due to drugs. and the officers arrested me and they were going to let me go because they wanted the bigger dealer. and when i saw the cops coming i had to drop a packet of drugs on the ground and it was my last night of drugs, i

had no more money so when they let me go they were right next to me, i dropped it maybe 20 feet away red interview as i walked away i was so caught up in the compulsion, i went down and picked up drugs right in front of them, they saw that and they said you're going to jail now. that was the best thing that ever happened to me because as soon as i got to jail i thought you know what? the struggle is over. i am, i can't keep doing this,i'm going to have to do something else. i don't know what i was going to do . but i have that sense that something else has to happen and what happened was i went to a treatment facility as part of my court deal and that my lawyer arrange and i'll never forget, as i walked in, it was alcoholic and thomas on the wall and at first said we are powerless over alcohol, i have a problem with alcohol, i can never drink again and i saw that and i said i didn't have a problem with alcohol, my

problem was with carolyn and the guy next to me said you know, were going to ask you to not drink alcohol anymore because as an addict, you can't use any form of my dorm mood altering substance and at that moment you said i know what, i'm going to do whatever they say. i will be getting for sure if i keep going on this way. and at that moment, everything became easy. at that moment when i surrendered, my whole life since then, that was 14 and a half years ago. i can honestly say i challenge in my way but nothing compares to that endless struggle to try to get high and stay high and recapture that first time that would never come back. for me, recovery is all about habits. i believe that we are essentially, who my personality is is in accumulation of hats of overtime. it's like taking a walk, and it's like meditating, actually pay my bills on time, eating regularly. that had all been destroyed and eroded by addiction.

building up these habits put me into a new person, habits put me in touch with people and in touch with the world, in touch with processes that move me from a state of abject addiction to being a functional member of society and a happy one also. some very grateful for recovery and recovery really does work. it's challenging, it's, a lot of people realize but there is i think this is an issue that is finally getting some attention at the national level. i'm hopeful, i know there's been legislative movement to make suboxone for the state and at the national level to remove some of those obstacles to currently prevent doctors and treatment centers from reaching as many people as they need to reach, i'm hard by this and more of this needs to happen. i don't think legalization is the answer, right? certainly not for anything like helen or opiates.

cocaine, and the reason i say that is because this is a disease that people become addicted to heroin and to opiates not because there's certain kinds of people but because they haveaccess to heroin and opiates . if you have access you can generate a certain number of addicts and people say well, we can legalize drugs and put the money into treatment. unfortunately treatment is not even close to being 100 percent successful. manylives are lost as a result of this disease . especially in very disturbed by the people i'm meeting coming off the streets who are getting access to heroin in high schools which was not the case when i was growing up and i think prevention, and enforcement has got to be a big part of that puzzle.i don't have the controversial position but that's the way i feel about it. i wondered if i was going to

write about this with the strong back? with this reawakened that desire, that craving, that of session so i was nervous about it. i was nervous about the process of writing and what i found was through writing, through the artistic process of going back and trying to capture inlanguage these emotions, these experiences , i was able to see the beauty and the sadness and in some cases the hilarity of those experiences but they didn't reawaken that session, i was able to have a kind of control and the distance and gave me a real power over the disease and in some ways i tell people how this might sound strange but for me in many ways my recovery i believe came full-circle when i was able to write this book, when i was able to delve into it, go through my memory with the light of recovery and to eliminate the reality of addiction and not the fantasy disease image of addiction that i had in my mind.

during the tds recent visit to cleveland we spoke with political science professor karen beckwith about the growth of women's participation in american politics. >> the title of the book is "political women and american democracy" area that project was led by christina walbridge who's a professor of political science at the university of notre dame and she invited us and others to convene at notre dame to talk about political women and american democracy which was the focus of the program that she cared that time. at notre dame but it was also interesting to think about the ways in which american democracy might be informed by political women by which we met at that point, women and all of their political representation in terms of activism as voters, community organizers, active in political movement particularly tennis movements and also women who were active as candidates and seeking representation through one running for

office so that the state level and also at the congressional level. we wanted to focus on public opinion, we wanted to focus on mass political participation and wanted to focus also on electoral representation where it exists so even in 2008 the numbers were big enough that we could make some statements about that and we had a body of research we could summarize so the book in many ways is the synthetic work that looks at a wide range of research that scholars have done in terms of gender politics in the united states. again with a focus on what does this mean for you as a democracy? because the numbers are available and the data available at least at that point and still obviously today we were curious about the diversity of women in political participation. we focus primarily on anything by jane and nadia brown at racial and ethnic diversity, asking citizens both in political preferences and also differences in representation, one of the

things that interesting however is despite all the diversity among women, women are everywhere, everyone related to a woman, most of us at some point have lived with a woman in our lives, that makes women and men by distinctive group so you may know that women participate in politics just about as much as men do at the mass level and in just about every capacity and women actually are more active as voters in the electorate than are men overall and this pattern of women voting advantage cell we say a cruise to every ethnic and racial grouping for which we have data so since 2004, asian american women have been more present in the electorate, turned out to vote at high rates, not usually higher rates are higher rates than their male counterparts. black women have been outputting black men in terms of turnout since 1996, i believe the data is and since , excuse me, since 1984, that's also the case for white women and since 1996

latinos have been outputting deals in terms of turning out to vote so when we think about political women in the united states, political women are active in terms of voting more active than men. in terms of public opinion and i'm speaking probably, this is generally the case for all women but only generally so and again this is generally the case across racial and ethnic groups but obviously there will be divergences as well but the way the differences are, tend to be around issues of social welfare policy and by this i mean really large so education policy, healthcare policy, policy that have to do with children, policies that have to do with the elderly. men are more willing to see the government as a positive force in terms of these particular issue arenas, more so than are men so we can think then about women what sometimes we might think of it stereotypical a little more sophisticated than that. more positive attitudes

toward state involvement in providing for healthcare, supporting education, 40 childcare, supporting maternal health and other health issues as well. the other arena seems to be around issues of foreign policy and peace, again these are not necessarily stereotypical differences between men and women but women are much less, women are more reluctant to see the national government involved, the united states and conflicts, in military conflicts abroad. women are less likely to support the use of force by the military or by the us political system, women are more likely to be supportive of issues that might lead to peace so these are the two major arenas that we can think of. in terms of public opinion differences and these differences to inform obviously political parties and can sometimes inform political parties in terms of elected officials and what they might do in congress or

even at a lesser level by which i mean not involved with foreign-policy, at the level of the state so if states don't have independent foreign policy, thank you u.s. constitution it gives all that power to congress but even at the state level there are differences in terms of public policy. so when we think about the way in which one might run for public office, in the united states there's not a clear fixed path through parties nomination. there's not for example the requirements that if you are a democrat woman, ambitious and helping to run for the house that you do lots of work for the party, campaign for other people, that you follow the rules, that you make your way up through the party until you reach the level of candidates at which point instead of party elites, they nominate and

support you. that might be the case for the labour party for example in great britain or even the conservative party in great britain but the pattern the united states is one of informal practices and understanding . independent individual choice to run so you can walk straight into a democratic or republican primary and if you're successful, you can be the nominee of the party and we've been seeing that at the presidential level obviously in 2016. one of the findings is related to what i said about the informal ways that one might come to candidacy so one of the things that teresa valdez talked about her chapter which is the comparative chapter, is that the structures for nominating and advancing women at least at the electoral level are very different in many countries so it's the case that several political parties and some countries across all parties legislation or even constitutional yacht have required gender quotas where a party or where a party to

nominate candidates for office, it's required to nominate people numbers of men and for national elections. gender quotas especially structured party and tortured nomination systems are the fastest way to increase the numbers of women in national legislatures. it's a fast way to nomination and then once nominated again, women tend to do as well as men in their own parties regardless. you don't have that in the united states and don't have clear structures within parties that would permit . in addition, the symbol member for a rally nature of our electoral system creates disincentives for parties to nominate women in the sense that the nomination can't be shared for example in proportional representation of electoral systems, parties commit and this is particularly true for systems where there are six party lists, that are close, where

voters only vote for the list of candidates and don't choose among and can't move from party to party and casting votes. in a single member around the district, only one candidate can be nominated by the party that had nominated it's all the office so even if that candidate in a three-way race or example and up with only 35 percent of the vote, that candidate gets 100 percent of the office and begins to get 100 percent of the incumbency advantage is that candidate moving forward. it makes it much more competitive at the level of nomination and it makes it harder for political parties to insist upon nominations across men and women that would increase women's numbers so one of the things we found was that other clinical systems have different structures which are intended to positively gender electoral success for women. at the same time obviously electing men as well. so the question about the

fact that united states has never had a female president, and every political system has had email chief executives is an interesting one. we don't address it in the book but i'm addressing it now in some research i'm doing with colleagues in canada and great britain and also support that i thought on women's access to party leadership and this has to do with the difference between color mentally and presidential systems so if we think about sharing political party power, the presidency of the united states is not a position that shares power. the presidency in the united states is elected from a specific electorate and is not the same electorate that uses congress. the president is elected by voters indirectly through the mechanism of the electoral college and is at least in theory accountable only to voters. the president is not accountable to congress. if the congress can't work with the president, don't like the president, was to remove him or her address can't do that for political reasons. congress has to get along with the president that

congress may not like. this is not the case in parliamentary systems. prime minister is the first among equals in a cabinet government and is selected not by voters but is selected by his or her party that sits in the national legislature in the lower house so for example margaret thatcher was elected by the conservative party to be party leader and you let that party to elections in 1979 and having won the election,she became prime minister of great britain . she was selected as party leader by her party and she was removed from her position as party leader in 1990 without a national election and john nature became party leader and has automatically prime minister so there are two mechanisms that make it easier for women to be selected so to speak as prime minister that is for president. the power is shared by the cabinet, party power is

shared with the party that can select and remove the prime minister as party leader and the nature of this combination of having to share power and being dependent upon one's party allows the party so to speak to select a woman as prime minister with the knowledge that she can be removed. i think there are at least two things if not more that we have people that will come away with an understanding a book about political women and american democracy. the first is the extent to which we can think of ourselves as democratic republican political system with small the and smart art. canwe think of ourselves as a political system compared to other democracies , to advance will be democracies in the united states, to what extent can we think of ourselves as seriously democratic and inclusive when we have such a low level of women's representation in elective office and in our judiciary as well and even within the state legislatures

where the numbers have stagnated. so that i think is a serious question. can we position ourselves as a nation as a leader in terms of being cracked and inclusive when women's representation is so low despite the participatory advantage that women have at the mass politics level. the other thing i think i would want people to take away from the book is to think again about women in all of our diversity in terms of age, in terms of employment, in terms of social class andcertainly in terms of race and at the city . we are very diverse as a large group of people. and nonetheless within that diverse leaders and strong shared preferences and participation and so that means again that politically, women especially for us democratic purposes as a democratic little school system have to be taken very seriously.

for more information on book tv's recent visit to cleveland and the many other destinations on our cities tour, go to c-span.org/cities tour. >> tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. >> i am a multiple reader so i read a lot of books all at the same time so sometimes i'll finish a book all in one sitting but more often than not i read different parts of the book but for example, on book that i've already finished reading relatively a short time ago is this book that i understand you did a full segment on and it's the millionaire and the bar. i'm a big fan of shakespeare and to know that the library is right down the street from where i live and when i found this book i put it up and it is a terrific book about folder who went on a spree, really to buy shakespeare's

folios and he amassed a huge collection of not just folios but enough materials on shakespeare that he created the folder library and it's a fascinating story of how it ended up in washington dc. but i'm also reading, i'm rereading the righteousmind . it's a book about communicating, how we communicate in a more offensive way and if you picture an elephant and there's a ride on the elephant, the elephant is making the decisions go left, right, forward backward. the writer merely sees what the elephant is doing and a lot of times you talk to the rider who is not making the decisions and they ought to be talking to the elephant. so it's a really good way to remember that you should be talking to the elephant making the decision, not the person explaining the decisions and i think in a time of a political situation arena, it's important that we

keep in mind who we ought to be talking to so it's a book that i'm rereading. i'm also reading a book that i picked up at the national gallery week or so ago, it's called the accidental masterpiece and it is about how you see art and really to me, because i am a great lover of art that you can see beauty in art and everyday objects and everywhere you look but this is also another really interesting book i picked up. as you can see i'm by my office that i like color, i like art, i also do my own art. i do ceramics although i tend to keep my day job here and reading, i just want to mention is the foundational because i was not born in this country, english is not my first language and i credit a librarian when i was in elementary school for

awakening my love of reading. i still remember the book she read to us , of little kids who would sit at her feet at the library and she read us mary poppins. and that really brought out the love of reading for me which as i said is foundational. i think in order to be a good writer you should be our reader. and i'm a pretty voracious reader. >> is there anything else you are reading this summer? >> well, let's see. i also picked up h is for hawk and i also read the new yorker, the compilations of short stories that i have on my ipad and those are things that i can read and when i have time, as i said i have a number of those kinds of books on my ipad. one other thing i want to mention is that often when you think about the books