capitol hill to ask senators what they were reading: >> i just finished a book about the leader of the young ireland movement who escaped to america and was a general in the civil war and was the first tallitarian government of montana. it is an intriguing book. i just started reading "born to run" by bruce springsteen. someone i have loved for 40 years now. i am in the middle of the campaign of mary heights and the crossing of the river down in virginia's civil war book. and the last book that i intend to read this summer is the legion crow about criminal justice reform in the united states. >> what sparked your interest in

the springsteen story? >> i have been a fan since 1978. one of my first concerts was thanksgiving eve, 1980. one of the most memorable nights of my life. it brings me back to my cousin woo was killed in 9/11 and we played songs together on the guitar. but what went through his mind to create his creative music. >> booktv wants to know what you are reading. send us your summer reading list on twitter or post it to our facebook page. booktv on c-span2. television for serious readers. >> what can we learn when we look at these searches?

if you remember in the 2008 presidential election, barack obama was elected president, he defeated john mccain and there was a big question after this election did race matter in the voting. did people care that obama cause black when decided whether to vote for him and this is kind of a classic question that could be complicated by asking americans the overwhelming majority of americans, 99-99 percent of americans say they didn't care obama was black in the election. that is why a lot of people concluded we lived in a post-racial society. back in the day, there was this idea that voters voted for obama and they said they didn't care he was black. could you use google searches because people are so honest and tell google things they might not tell anybody else,

unsocially, unacceptable attitudes, could you use google search to get the real answer on the effect race made on people's voting decisions. i made a map of racist search volumes on google. this is the percent of google searches that include a very charged racist word that i will not say outloud but you can guess what it is. the first thing that struck me about this data first was how common the search was. in the time period i was using, people were makes these racist searches about the same frequency they were searching lakers, migraine, daily show and ec economist. they are mostly jokes mocking african-americans. that is the big theme of the searches. the other thing that struck me about this map is it looked very different from the map i would have expected of racism.

if you would have asked nowhere racism is high in the united states i would have guessed it is predominantly concentrated in the south. the civil war, slavery, we think of racism as having a strong north-south divide. and definitely racism is highest in the deep south like southern mississippi and southern louisiana but you can see in the map with darker red meaning a higher frequency of searches that it also higher in the north in western pennsylvania and eastern ohio and industrial michigan and upstate new york or rural illinois. i think the real divide this search data revealed is not north versus south but east versus west. you see it is much higher east of the mississippi river and drops pretty substantially west of the mississippi river. so once i had this map, i wanted

to see because people are so honest here, could you use this data to measure how much obama really lost in the 2008 election and you can't just compare racist searches to votes for obama because it might be places with high race searches would have opposed any democratic candidate in 2008 and that would not be a fair comparison. i compared obama's total to previous democratic candidates such as john kerry in the previous election who was a white man ranked civically liberal. you can read the paper or read it in the book but you see a strong significant relationship that had highesterase -- high racist search values support obama much less. you can start controlling for

education, demographics, political views, or culture views and nothing changes the relationship and that was a big factor.