although the one most recently as ""the art of the deal" by our president. >> book tv wants to know what you're reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter by book -underscore tv or posted to her facebook page book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> know about tv i want to introduce you to english professor at the university of minnesota. it's called -- in america on freedom. what is your goal of this book? >> my goal was to figure out the set of stories that i found circulating in american culture.

it ends the war on terror just after 911. we captured an american john walker who happened to be fighting for the taliban. he had all of these front covers a new stories and he kept getting referred to as brainwashed. serious expert, serious newspapers were writing about the sky. but having been brainwashed. my first reaction was, can people really seriously be using this kind of science fiction turn to be talking about a real person. and that i kept wondering into work that story and that kind of metaphor describing the decision to be against american this moment as unthinkable, as something a thinking person couldn't fathom we do.

in the years after that story we kept versions of a brainwashing story in america, the manchurian candidate got to be made, then invasion of the body snatchers get remade. homeland, the showtime show that has a lot of strong resemblance so my book what i'm trying to do is think about that story and why we want to tell it. . .

>> >> and the kinds of ways that day talk about coercive persuasion of brainwashing and propaganda. >> are they accurate or inaccurate to?. >> they are pretty inaccurate it is a fantasy story in also a way of telling a story of something that really happens at some point john walker changed his point of what he wanted to do a and patty hearst

changed her mind but when we tell stories about the process to value what other ordinary americans value and then what is radically different like the army or the taliban or a fundamentalist colt, we wind up telling the story in a certain form with this moment and that is the brainwashing moment that we imagine in technology is responsible for with the spread of decades and describe that through different technologies a computer chip implanted the remaking of the manchurian candidate from the '60s when the original sow is

imagining the technology might be about two you race what we call freedom and that is one of the big idea is that the brainwashing stories are asking about we cannot see freedom in the abstract sense to act out what the difference might be between freedom and and non freedom and the american democratic freedom and the totalitarian or fundamentalist freedom. >> so explain the term of brainwashing. >> it happens in china when an american journalist goes over to new type and to investigate how now runs the

state and is convincing large numbers of people to join the communist party may have been our allies in world war ii so he starts to investigate and comes up with the term brainwash. and attributes to the chinese but documents show that so that floats around a little bit so that the end of the korean war 7,000 american pows come back. and "the new york times" reported that almost one-third of those 7,000 were convinced to cooperate

with the enemy in some form or fashion. so it is a puerto rico disaster in and nightmare and in fact, there are 22 american soldiers that decided not to even come home and are supposedly indoctrinated and decided to stay in korea so the term just explodes to explain what the communists were doing then to the course of the fifties the way to explain what the communist want to do want to come to america to be infiltrating through the several tactics of these technologies to become communist to rob

americans of their freedoms. and from there the term explodes on the political left and right to describe how those victims of indoctrination they no longer have free choice but they are the human robots. and the story ends up continuing we get a fictional stories and we keep having news media and other culture. >> where does this psychiatric community fall when it comes to the term brainwashing?. >> it is very controversial obviously. the knifing coercive persuasion is an official

way to talk about brainwashing seriously. and absolutely there are techniques that people used successfully to course of lee persuade people in the 1970's scare or the end of the '70s with the jonestown massacre but young people running away from home to join these religious movements. but those were groups that were sleep depriving or having them do a chance or cutting them off from their own communities. so the technique does exist and absolutely psychologists and psychiatrists use study them and hope to make those

people who were doing those techniques to be held accountable to undermine people's autonomy. >> what is the word automaton?. >> is of precursor to the robot to and is a statue that is made to move in the 17 and 18 hundreds making automatons could write and draw things if you have seen the movie they use the historical automaton and 19 20s that i use the term automaton because of an

american immigrant psychologist who is in talking about totalitarianism and what that does to your mental state that people get turned into human automatons or two living robots so that helps to describe a cinematic and technological history of the idea of a freed moving thing in the 17 and 18 hundreds of the stories about like the

story of this sandman is a story of a woman who is the automaton. so i use that word because about free will and freedom but then in the postwar american in scenario about the question of what freedom is what it means to be an american in a democracy to have citizens to check -- to choose something freely so what is totalitarian these - - totalitarianism? to

turn them into human automatons? so with this very abstract sense. >> you started talking about this certain air of so was it before the of korean war? >> i think the korean war or the cold war or the struggle against totalitarianism is the major motivator. there is also a kind of propaganda with world war ii and during the cold war warrior we have an enemy that is not a certain kind of person we have an

animated is a nebulous of communist or fascism to be merged the two of the totalitarianism and the weighty to describe the the bad guys are to let america to fall to communism is that's we will be robbed of our freedom in the wave that is a presentable by that achieve special effects of having someone to walk around looking like a robot or the automaton. >> as a literary historian what do you teach?. >> i teach american literature really handle so -- and all sole machines

through a literary and philosophical history going back to ufa of greek myth of pygmalion who falls in love with a statue where the people are puppets trapped in caves and going through those through the greek antiquity of science fiction so that is that the latter end of that. so then the other things about client and technology. >> will then become a big best seller again?. >> not all. i talk about that but rarely

is an amazing catalog of propaganda and disinformation and persuasion in the way that makes a useful book nowadays to think about the big problem of fake news but that was his job that he was the guy he went through the newspapers to change things when they did not fit the orthodoxy of that has a certain kind of the fact - - defect with the news feed with these other ways to change people's minds for grosso orwell was prussian to to understand the variety of ways people might be persuaded course of plea --

course of least the american university arizona and author of this perk human programming. booktv on c-span2. meredith wadman talks about the race to create vaccinations. . >> hello everyone welcome to the of book festival i am sarah jackson i am a proud residents and epidemiologist at the university of maryland. read from the support the arts and humanities and their pleas to bring the fabulous event to the generous support of our volunteers. i have a few announcements