i just started reading "born to run," by bruce springsteen. one of my all-time favorite musicians and philosophers. who i have loved for 40 years now. i'm also in the middle of the fredricksburg campaign, the campaign of marry's heights and the crossing of the river in virginia, civil war book. the last book that i intend to read is, last book i will about criminal justice reform here in the united states. >> what sparked your interest in the bruce springsteen story? >> i've been a springsteen fan since roughly 1978. i have, my, one of my first concerts was the concert, thanksgiving eve in 1980, one of the most memorable nights of my life. brings me to back to my cousin

john moran, who was killed in 9/11. we learned a lot of springsteen songs. learning about his life, what went on to shaping and molding that mind that created such great musical lyrics and music. i look forward to finishing that. >> booktv wants to know what you're reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter @booktv, or instagram, at book underscore tv. or facebook page,/booktv. booktv, television for serious readers. >> atlanta started as a transportation hub for railroads. it got really crowded in the middle. by the late 1880s they began to built belt line railroads to go outside of that center. there were four different ones. ryan's idea to connect them was unusual because they never were connected.

they were owned by four different railroads and there were industry built up around them. people began to live around them. then the streetcars came in the late 1800s. there was this magnificent network of streetcars in atlanta and in their infinite wisdom one year after i was born in 1948 they destroyed all of the streetcars in atlanta. why? because they were old-fashioned. why? because starting around 1915 atlanta really began to switch to automobiles and trucks. there is a picture in the book of downtown atlanta in 1914. it had a few streetcars. it had a lot of pedestrians just walking across the street at five points of atlanta and there were some horses and buggies. there were a couple of cars.

there is a picture on the next page from 1924, 10 years later, and it was all cars with some streetcars packed in. so people began to complain the streetcars were in the way of the cars. there were traffic jams. they ended up building streets over the middle of town. that is how downtown, how underground atlanta came to be. in the process of cars and trucks taking over, these belt line railroads died. the industries moved further out because it was cheaper land. they could be serviced by trucks. so, by the 1990s when ryan was writing this master's thesis, it was mostly a corridor of kudzu. i have a picture in the book that is just covered with vines and weeds, and there were homeless encampments along it. so ryan wrote this thing, said

we should, people are beginning to come back into town. we should turn this into this vital network. take advantage of the infrastructure that we already have instead of trying to make up some brand new thing which atlanta tend to do and he saw it as something that could really change the city. it was very well-written and it is actually online. you can find his thesis. let me say ryan wrote a book himself called, "where we want to live." came out last year. it is a very good book. our books are kind of complimentary. his book is a big picture look what we should do with cities. my is really nitty-gritty book, down on the streets and meeting people there, a different approach. and mine is much more about atlanta, specifically. so, he wrote this brilliant thesis. he put it on the shelf he. he thought nothing would ever

come of it, like most masters theses. he went to work for a architectural firm. one day a few weeks later at lunch, he and his colleagues were talking about what he had written his master's thesis on. he explained his and they said, wow, that is fantastic. bring it in. let us look at it. they read it. they said, you've got to do something about it. they sent a letter, sent it to every georgia politician and planner and environmental people. they all wrote back and said that is terrific idea. good luck with that. and except one person who was cathy willard, running for mayor right now along with eight other people in the city of atlanta. kathy championed this idea and so did ryan and they built a grassroots organization in a few

years. in 2:00, mayor shirley franklin took it on. it developed into a bureaucracy which is what it is now. she found ray weeks, semiretired and could donate his time, which he did for four years in this project. i've gotten to know all of these people. i interviewed like 400 people for this book in the last six years since i began to work on it in 2011. and so they tried to figure out how could they fund it. oh, in the process i should say ryan's original idea of running streetcars around morphed, very quickly, his friend said, why don't we put a trail by it, people could ride their bikes on it? and why don't we have, you know, people be able to walk you along it? and then guy named jim langford, who was at the time in charge

for the trust for public lands, somebody approached him and said they wanted help turning the sort of derelict land south of this big ol' derelict sears building on response -- on ponce deleon avenue, and you could relief flooding, building a retention pond there. he thought that was great idea. the belt line was all in the news, the idea of it. look at the map, it goes up to piedmont park, it goes through piedmont park. if we build this part down here and, oh, look, this other little park down here in this neighborhood. he realized it connected a bunch of parks. why not make it a greenaway? make it a linear park that connected parks? he hired alexander garvin, a

world famous city planner, who i also got to know through this, to come down here to try to figure out what kind of parks you could have. and atlanta is severely underparked. we have a lot of trees in this city, beautiful trees, but most of them are in people's backyards. most of them are not in public places. in metro atlanta, which is this huge sprawling mess of six million people now, they're losing land at an alarming rate and losing trees at an alarming rate. >> watch this and other problems online at booktv.org. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to barnes & noble upper west side. tonight i have the distinct pleasure of introducing auth