>> this is book tv on c-span 2, for serious readers. former senior state department advisor david phillips takes a critical look between turkey and the united states. 8:30 p.m., peggy grande former assistant to president ronald reagan recalls her ten years working for the 40th president after he left the white house. on book tv afterwards, silvia perry discusses the history and science behind body fat. and wraps up prime time with chelsea clinton, the public-private partnerships

working on global health care initiatives. that is tonight on c-span's book tv. . my book is about writers and their work and working with them. it's an editor's notes on writing and writers as it said in the sub-head. when i'm honest about this book, i say that out of a kind of vanity, i wanted to show myself as a writer and i thought the best way to do that is to write about the great writers that i edited and what i earned editing them. not just about writing, but abwriting life. things like how jim salter never talked about being a fighter pilot, but he loved to play touch football and he kept meticulous records of these meaningless football games, meaningless pickup games, well, which made the games a lot more fun, of course.

and how he and peter matheson would dive into the freezing surf on the first day of november in amganset every year and have iced martinis on the beach with their lives. and jim harrison used to hang up on me when we were working on the phone over editing i had made. hang up relentlessly on me, we had'd talk about what we were going to have dinner or how he had dinner with mario vitali. >> i wrote about working with pj o'rourke like going over anthropology field notes. his reporting so intricate and careful. and richard price would riff like lenny bruce when we would pitch, when he was pitching movies or tv shows like we sometimes did together.

in the end, it was all practice for his novels. tom used to call it having a long reach. which in his case, which meant being minated to are a national book award in fiction the same year he won teen roping at the small rodeo in gardner, montana. so, book is full of stories like this, but there are interstitial chapters that are about the tricks of editing. editing is about ideas, of course, but it's mechanical as well. and you have to get under the hood, so to speak, if you're making magazines as we used to say, or websites or swimsuit issues, as i did for ten years. and the things that you learn in those exercises, like if you can-- if you can rewrite headlines on deadline.

if you can get good at that, it's a kick like those looney tune characters that produce a stick of lit dynamite behind their back, there's nothing more fun than that. one tool that i used in the book, is i left at the top of each chapter, i left a word count. so you know how many words are in that chapter. i did this because i when i was an editor, i always wanted to know how much i was going to read and allowed me to judge the pacing of the piece or lack of pacing and evaluate how the piece moved. i'm told by people who read the book they make it that i put those there for their own reasons, but i would add right now in the spirit of transparency, i'm going to speak for probably another 22 minutes. [laughte [laughter] >> you can watch thisnd other programs on-line at book

tv.org. sunday night on afterwards. biochemi biochemist silvia terra looks at body fat. she's interviewed by a medical reporter for the new york times. >> you told there's a set point and your brain sets how much your weight is, does it change when you get older, what happens to it? >> that's the age and almost a force of nature that we accumulate fat and as we age we lose a lot of fat busting hormones, the stuff that helps rebuild tissue and kept our fat metabolizing. and testosterone, men and women, you can't eat like you did with 22 it's going to make you fat as you get older. it's not just the level of fat, it's the distribution affected as well.