fascinating talk. please fold up your chairs to help our staff. thank you. [inaudible conversations]

>> i can see after isis has success i can see them ring in a new leader for a qaeda. he's young, he is millennial, he was trained for the last seven or eight years by some of the top commanders and al qaeda. his father did not have access to the council because all of them were together in house arrest in i ran in the same place. he is married to the number two person in al-qaeda's daughter and also wary who had been involved in every attack that happened against us and masterminded the bombings himself. so i think he is going to be the

person honda has about five different messages. the very beginning -- and the last message announcements and the message both referred to him as sheikh which indicates a promotion because you cannot be the leader of al qaeda without having the title sheiks. i think if you listen to his statement and i've been listening to all of his statements, you will see something really interesting. he never attacks. he never mentions the caliphate. that's something zawahiri does. so were here he always does. hamza actually says was happening in iraq and syria and somalia was happening in algeria and. molly: and what's happening everywhere all these guys are mujahideen and they are the followers of osama bin laden.

he said lookee people in the west we used to only be in kandahar now we are everywhere. and he tried to copy his father. he has exactly the tone of osama bin laden and his message to what enlightened as to say is the same. in his last statement, the one before last where he'd gave this commandment for operatives he said look is hard to kill as many people as you can so don't just -- it's hard to do it right. and then he said always leave a message why you did it. i'm telling you why you did it. number one, our lands are occupied. the land of the two places

meaning saudi arabia is occupied read we did not hear that since osama bin ladin died. we haven't heard that since 9/11. he brought it back. palestine. if we don't live in peace in palestine we will never know peace in america. that's something bin laden said himself but also we did not hear that in how long? a long, long, long time ago. and he talked about stealing the wealth of the muslim world. we did not hear that for a long time. he is bringing it back. he only asks one thing that they did not hear his father talked about, what's happening in syria the murders of the assad regime and the russians which he said we are doing it in the west

because you are supporting it. that's the only thing he added and frankly he cannot not mention syria one of the largest affiliates. he's bringing back the original message from osama bin laden. i talk about his character, i talk about his childhood. he was a poster child for a qaeda. in the early days if you look at the old days of al qaeda he's always giving these fiery speeches and poems when he was a kid. he trained with the mujahideen and he told his father, father when i was in jail i learned a lot and you were going to be proud of me. i learned about death but now i'm ready to march with the allegiance of the mujahideen under your command. he wanted only two people to come and join him, his wife who is a ph.d. older than him and she has only one son.

his wife was not just a wife. she was his adviser. she was his wordsmith. he wanted her to come there because he missed his wife after she had been in jail in iraq. he wanted her to come any threatened his commander, if you don't bring her here i will myself go after her and bring her here. they said this guy lost his mind. what do you mean? but then you know why he wanted her to basically work on his statesman on the end -- the tenth anniversary of 9/11. he wanted her and when they could not ring her to him he actually you know was convinced finally. center a letter in said hey hey you know what the tenth anniversary is coming and you

know how important this is. i told the chief of staff to buy you a computer. so she is the son of hamda who pushed hamda more and more to all of between -- behind his father's footsteps. she is the woman behind the father of the son. today we see all qaeda trying to wait until isis has a window and i think a new bin laden will calm and claim, claim that message, claim the ownership of that message. i think they will be successful with that. [applause] >> after all that you saidg everything that i was going to

say so i will just go home. thank you very much. your check will be coming in the mail shortly. ca can everybody hear me okay? first of all thanks everybody for coming out. it's great.a it's very hit or miss when youer come to a bookstore. sometimes there's nobody there and sometimes you, there's a nice full room. nothing is ever happened to a writer friend of mine who came to a bookstore. were 25 chairs set out, i love telling the story because it didn't happen to me.et there were 25 chairs set out in his talk was set for 8:00. he is waiting and he is waiting and 8:00 rolls around ande' there's nobody there.finall finally one woman comes in and she sits in the farthest corner like that guy way over there.

the guy guys has look one of you come on down to the front row. come to the front row and we will have a private conversation. she says well, i might want to leave early. [laughter] and if that isn't a nightmare i i o i thought i'd talk tonight a i little bit about how one goesing about doing a book like this and coming up with an idea like this to begin with. i'm not a meteorologist that i am a weather junkie. thank you for that term. i watch the weather channel religiously.t but i want to talk a little bit about the process. wherever i go people want to

know how is it that you wrote of a book about the story that happened in galveston hundreds of years ago? the answer is i really don't know. just kind of happened. like it's the serendipity effect is what i like to call it. i set out to do a book about a that era about 1900 in americanr history. originally set out to do a book about a murder in new york of a man named william marsh ride thad rice university. but at this point he was living in manhattan. i'll tell you a little bit about that story. i promise you there is a hurricane connection coming up. this guy lived in manhattan. he had a valet, and in the middle of their lives came an unscrupulous attorney from houston. of course they instantly began plotting to kill mr. rice and

steal his money by poisoning him with arsenic, faking his along came a hurricane and i only knew it as a hurricane. i didn't know it as the mother of all hurricanes. the reason the hurricane is significant in the merger is because it damaged a lot of the galveston houston area. he got ready to spend a lot of this fall and new york back in texas to reconstruct the plants which meant there was nothing left. they accelerated it and gave him a lethal dose of arsenic. by this time for hurricane has been implicated in the first degree homicide.li i started reading more about this hurricane. as a murder story you look for certain things when you're doing a book and one of them is the as much as i like the story about this murder and as much as

i want to do in 1900 murder it wasn't working. wasn't..sign or a mysterious and that was a bad sign. he was this hurricane and the more i read about it the more alluring it became. i'm a weather junkie. i grew up in long island on the nursing cusp of the hurricane belt.. hurricanes came every single summer.e that can't be the case their but i remember playing in the eye of a hurricane once.hu so i was predisposed to enjoy hurricanes are lisa thought of hurricanes as long as i was a somebody else's house or hotel. here was this hurricane and i was looking through the library of congress and the first headline i saw 3000 to 5000 dead in this hurricane. i was virtually astounded. i had never heard of the storm of this magnitude turned out too be a gross underestimate.

the most conservative death tol0 for the storm in galveston alone was 6000 desperate i would argue 8000 to 10,000 is probably moref accurate. i was instantly drawn into this and began reading more about itw and i thought why not do something with the least the storm as it backgrounds? when you think about it a hurricane or any storm for thate matter with wonderful dark summer thunderstorms but in particular hurricane when you narrat narrative. it begins in a far-off place with a gathering of forces sort of like the start of lonesome dove when everybody is riding you get the thunderstorms and all these forces building. there's this gradual increase in intensity and you even have

thunder and lightning and darknd clouds and gradually building wins. finally as natural climate as you could hope to have is a graduate comes in to shore. i found that very compelling a murder quickly faded to the background.my i also wanted, there were something else that i should also add about the hurricane that i found very compelling. that is in addition to the fall weather i really also grew up on cold war science-fiction films, things like the sting in the giant behemoth in the crawling eye. anybody see the growing i? i'm not the only one in this room that side.ally b

it scared the hell out of me when i was a kid traders isom giant creature walking through arizona. but one of the things i loved about this old movie was the first part was the best part. there were all these strange things that begin to happen in o kind of explained things but not really.ou those of us who watched it don'o go down that basement stairway. i love that sense of mystery and hurricanes embody that. there's that wonderful sense of strangeness of both hurricane. and the second all-time fiction movies they ended in the same w way. it was always the same guy, always the same sheriff driving up in the same car in 1954ck l galaxy. the same guy getting out of the

car looking down at the goat or farmer or what have you. looking down at this if it's a rated goat rolling his toothpick from one side to the other saying tell you what nothing human done this. [laughter] have we all been there? o versus science-fiction element, kind of the mystery. i was her thought -- was all that was going to do this. i don't see it as a hurricaneait book. i see it as a portrait of the time through the lens of a storm i thought if i was going to do a book with this hurricane as part of the narrative framework i was going to do it in a way that would provide what i call emotional attraction rated there is some books for example, and

he or fred walter lewis the night to remember about the titanic sinking? how many of fred jones town flood at david mccullough? it's an excellent look.otiona they are sequences of stories and first-hand accounts but no one character or no one trio ofm characters moving through the book where you can actually hold hands and get to know and therefore when they become -- you care. i was going to build emotional attraction. i couldn't find the right characters so i set out to find the characters. serendipity again and giving me the plot.vesto the chief weatherman in galveston and the chief weatherman in texas and i namedb my luck isaac's storm because as

mitch mentioned people didn't do navy storms until the 50s. before that there was an informal habit of naming storms after their primary victim in a metaphoric sense. i declined with the primary victim of the storm. isaac at the ways the official ice storm this year so it could get really freaky. keep that science-fiction element in mine.e. think of me when i'm in galveston september 8 when the ice storm is coming to the a coast. i had known about the isaac from the beginning and i'd known about isaac kline which he helped to endorse which was that he had himself written down and save some 6000 people and by his own later estimate 12,000. there was something about the legend. if i were coming up to boston to

write about something thatppenei happened in the storm that't happened in paul revere's time i would necessarily write about well-known.kn isaac kline, everybody knows this. i want to find characters withtf diamond. so i went looking elsewhere into things happen when you are a writer. serendipity takes her hand and so does this pursuit of the giant narrative that moves youn. along. i'm going to more and moreries obscure libraries and pleading for information about the storm and hurricanes and i wound up at this point for a move to seattle five years ago.v i was living in falkland and i wound up at this wonderful library of the south side of washington. wonderful library one of these a

terrific pocket libraries that america should love. a single focus library, whether. how many watch the weathereathe channel? oh come on. thank you.k how many watch the weather channel when there is no storm? good, good my kind of people.e this is the kind of place whereu you guys should go. it is fantastic like a museum. it's so one used by outsiders that things stand on the shelves that should be in a museum like ox is of records from old polar expeditions. wonderful stuff.wan somebody else might walk in there want to shoot themselves but i'm not that kind of the guy. i was in there looking for

things at that the card catalog indicated would be about hurricanes. it probably would have taken me an hour but i spent 10 hours in the library. on it was lucky because suddenly on one shelf there was no reason for me to look at this. wasn't in the card catalog. there was about this tall weather finder that holds about one document. i thought i've got time i will look inside. i look inside and there's an article from the galveston news. who wrote it? isaac kline. it's one of those moments where the hair on the back of your neck stands up. i read this thing and i wasac transfixed. isaac kline talked about how no tropical cyclone, he said tropical cyclone. hurricane was too unscientific of the word for him. no tropical cyclone could do

serious damage in the city of galveston and went out with thil elaborate explanation which i don't understand. finished the article with a deeper saying that this not only was, anybody who believeddy otherwise as the victim as he put it of unnecessary worry.su it was one of those moments where high anxiety. there's that scene where mel brooks is driving to the institute very very nervous and talking about something sinister that happen. all around them their sinister orchestral music and they areun looking around the car.the th philharmonic orchestra playingt their instruments.me t suddenly the legend could be

wrong. maybe this guy actually blew it at great cost to galveston and great cost to his family. there's an old saying show me he ronnell show your tragedy and suddenly there was more nuance.g i began looking more and more into what i could find. there was a real fundamental problem. here's a guy literally whose every written possession washed away on september 8, 1920. everything he ever wrote.is? how do you reconstruct the life of a guy like this? everything is gone.don't h i don't have an answer to that so i'm going to go home. what happened then was there was a mortgage and there was a book here. and i found myself going to more and more obscure libraries and

at places like the national archives looking for things. i finally went into the national archives annex.b i don't know if anybody's been here but it's this modern glass thing containing world war ii records, kennedy of frustration records weather bureau records,n you have to deal with the strip-search to get in there. you have to scratch things into your own pad. it's a wonderful place and there, i just sat down and started in 1880 went day by dayl through thousands of them. isaac kline begins to emerge in a way that i had not expected. he was everywhere, every -- every fifth document was isaac kline.her i didn't know he was such a big player in the weather. that moment form the central

core about what i knew about isaac kline. there was a memoir by his a brother, a very dry reading. i had to go through it a couple of times but there was a skeleton of information. there were other people talking about isaac kline about the hero of people who knew him so it really began to come alive. there was one particular moment where i knew beyond a doubt that it would be my central character. there were still other care -- candidates at that point that this is why came across the national archives. isaac kline official report to the weather bureau written as only isaac kline could do it. though he himself had suffered this unbearable loss. and he describes september 1900 maybe i will just walk you

through that. a traded picture this and thinkt about your own house.ere' about lunchtime isaac kline figures there's nothing else tob do.' it's 1:00 and is finally realizing the true magnitudek it's bringing to galveston.h i argue in the book he didn't recognize it until about that point. the city is completely cut off at this point.legrap the telegraph lines are down. the telephone lines are down and there were long-distance lines to houston. the three row roads have beend t not doubt and the one wagon crew was knocked out all by the same event, by the same oceanlinern that have been torn loose by high winds in blown through all these bridges and 20 miles inhi length the same story. the city is completely cut off and nobody had left. everybody stayed there.

everybody thought this was something to celebrate. there were no warnings or no signs, just absolute surprise.hg he's going to his house live blocks from the beach. he is on 50-foot stilts he built this house to a stand anything. of course we know he had a very odd sense of how powerful storm could be. by the time he gets home the water is up to his waist. in the house is his pregnant wife, his three daughters and 50 other people from and m house figuring this is thesa weatherman's house. if any house stands it's going's to be isaac lines. he an hour or so later to see a set of 15-foot love for -- level

his house is on 15-foot stilts. the wind is blowing from behind the house and he monitors the progress of the storm. shut your eyes and imagine youru own neighborhood looking out that back door and seeing instead of the house next door and shrubs and a playset and soa forth you seen the open sea punctuated by an occasional open for or a tree or that kind of thing. it was just a horrendous night. then something really sinister happen.m this was the moment that bad things happen throughout galveston. he is standing there at the door looking out, the sea rises.s t this is the storm surge coming in in earnest. he rises -- the sea rises 4 feet and four seconds when i first

read this i had an epiphany. i was on a train in washington and i realized the moment i rean that, i have three daughters and i felt a certain sympathy for isaac as a parent.ught my own three daughters each under 4 feet tall. think about what that meant.fams families were big ben, five kids, eight kids. in many cases women remained calm and were alone with theru kids where they has been true t. to -- if you are in a one-story house its life and death for some members.aa isaac's house likely they could climb the next four but in a complete panic but the water began to rise. the water was still rising so the storm surge was 25 feet.

the highest ground in galveston at that time was 8.7 feet. you do the math. for some unknown period of time all of galveston was under the sea during that storm. what happened to isaac and his family i'm not going to tell you i'll let you read the book but on that note i would in brevitys stop and take questions since it's my favorite part part anyway predictably has theh questions i have a question forf you.galv >> and wonder how much time you spent in galveston a couple of years ago and it seems to be the major tourist attraction in galveston right now. maybe with the beaches and the naval base coming in and i don't see much else going on there. everybody talks about the hurricane still and the whole chamber of commerce. you learn a lot just spending a

day there and taking a tour. you see all this residue which remains in i wonder if you spend a lot of time on the ground andu learned much from being there and if galveston is unusual or unique in the impact that hasla remained unlike san francisco where you don't see the earthquake or self order where you don't see a. d >> you was the defining event in many ways for galveston's because so much got stolen by the storm. they are future was eclipsed by the fact that the storm destroyed so much of the city and the economy thereby giving houston a competition to dominate the gulf. i did spend a fair amount of time there. i went down there maybe sixther. times and did a lot of research and the rosenberg library there.

who has been to galveston? i went to galveston expecting kind of a weatherworn old place. i was really surprised when you go there in the heart of thes city today you can't get a sense of what it was like that day on september 8. something fundamental changed after the storm. the city builds an 18-foot a seawall and it elevates the entire city. erase entire cathedral and filled it in the soil underneath. something very fundamental was missing. until somebody finally cued me in.sc when you are an outsider certain things escape you.u the most fundamental element of the writers perception was missing and that his death. you couldn't get a sense when

you walked out of his office that morning because of theste elevation.i when he walked out of his office that morning he would have been able to see the tops of the highest swells. that really surprised me but also liberated me because it forced me to really try totoimag imagine not make up an imagine using historical documents andwt sources and what that would have been like and what it would havf felt like to be in the city at that elevation as it came toon shore. i don't know that answered your question but there it is. >> are there other memoirs written about survivor's?ow? >> a ton. the only reason i did this book was because in galveston the rosenberg library were in the storm archives. people didn't necessarily want to talk about the storm afterwards but they wanted to write about it.ies f

they are wonderful detailed reports done from memory and there are hundreds of them. it's a triangulation and you can was wrong in what was an artifact. y >> you said you wanted to get yourself into isaac cline's mind as he looked up at back door and it was like being on stilts inor the drilling platform. was there some sort of indication as to what other people felt when this is happening? the mos >> guests. one of the things about the account is how much like us how we think they were all taken and how they felt panic and fear for their parents in fear for their children and husbands and wivesf

te terror is the storm advanced and also terror based on the storm. a very emotional account of some very fragmentary. >> most of this was in the middle of the night in the dark. >> it was all in the dark, no light. although there was an effort after the storm had a gun to land people began puttingandl candles in the windows if they had candles and if the windows had survived the power of theths wind this was after the winds have begun to fall in the water began to fall.av it was a single light in the window. must it in a very chilling thing

essentially people saying we ar still here and we are alive and also saying we need the kinships now because the city has been destroyed. that l the archives are terrific. interestingly that libra had very little on the isaac clinene and a fact almost nothing. >> was there much photographic record to look at?ing >> are you asking me why there are no photographs in my book?ct [laughter]obably there is a terrific archive of photographs probably 4000 photographs black and white andu i actually use those as a first-hand resource. i spent hours in the library with a magnifying glass using the photographs just as a way of mining artifacts about how life looked.

in one case for example i was astonished to find the ship that had come into the harbor had survived at that point was that the death barges. they began to bring them by the hundreds and dumping them. this was one of those death barges with 900 corpses and i was looking at this thing. it's another one of those things where the hair on the back of your neck, i was looking at this through a magnifying glass and i hadn't made the connection. this ship was the same ship that survived on the sea. i saw the name of the ship on the whole i didn't even know that was the ship. there was the guy that was embedded in the story i tell about the ship.

it was just one of those momenta there they are, these are the guys in here they are standinghe on the bow looking down into this barge absolutely piled with corpses. it's bizarre but anyway there tons of photographs.og i didn't put photographs in this book because again my main goal was not to write about hurricane but a weather book, was to allow people to think during a period of time and at the end of the book emerge from that area. i want didn't want to be bored or a stick.really d also after the corpses were dumped in the sea and after the bodies came back the decision was made in the city to burn the bodies. a photograph of that shows a pile of wood with smoke coming

off the top. i assure you it's not then experience of people in galveston. the experience of people in galveston's walking out the backdoor and seeing this pile their neighbors. there were hundreds of these fires is sprang up overnight. so bodies could be burned in- place. and you look out your backdoor backdoor and there are the joneses in this fire and then you have 95-degree heat and 95%e humidity. you have a sense of future vacation that lay over the town like a blanket. photographs just don't make it.c okay, coffee, tea. [laughter]odel >> were you the model for your book cover? cli >> no. this is actually isaac cline.ust

>> i wondered whether they don't have -- there? >> we do have the exploding mountains. [laughter] it's the first place i've ever lived where there are some i it's perfect for me but i'm sort of a dark scandinavian. >> to the federal government put in place any nuke ideas for future as a consequence of this? >> after the storm he actually became one of the foremost hurricane experts in the country. he threw aside all of his previous fundamental interestso and medical climatology. he put all that aside and became one of the nation's hurricaneau

isaa we now know which today the thing that kills in a hurricane is a storm surge and a hurricane was a danger to cities on land. not that it was necessarily acknowledged by the weather bureau in the 19th century. hurricanes were seaborne threat to shipping. shipping was the main concern io the back is stumbled across this in the archives.af after the storm left galveston lost power and regain power to the point by a the time it meet meet -- reached michigan that had 75-mile an hour winds,cate category 1 hurricane and it was generating 66-mile an hour winds in manhattan. this was gigantic and one poorti guy had to be keeping company in the middle of the country.the he wrote the head of the weather bureau and he said could you

possibly have warned us that these devastating winds were coming? my company was destroyed. he replied saying well it's not the -- of the weather prayer to send high wind warnings in lent. hurricanes were not a land threat. they were shipping threat but it was a storm that taught usth otherwise and that's why now we watch the weather channel and they tell you that the storm about the most. it's a fairly contentious thing to argue but the category forret designation is a prettyhi conservative i think criteria and also the fact that no's all incidents were extrapolated.

>> were there any accounts of animals surviving for any animal he rose? >> and animal hero? there were snakes they would spiral up into the trees and caused many deaths. that was one of the more popular. no, this poison snakes seeking shelter in trees and was a very serious problem. the snakes would come up and fall from the tree and drowned in that kind of thing but there's a charming story about a -- in somebody's dresser and survived but people didn't spend a lot of time writing about animals that survived. there were a lot of other things to think about. >> with all of the hurricanes that have come ashore in central

america and find it hard to believe that they didn't know that hurricanes did cross the gulf. >> well they know now. did they know it back then? >> part of this book is a biography that existed in the 1900s and why we find so compelling that we as a nation particularly as a fast-growing city within texas within the proud and prideful country it was his attitude we could do anything. that was the curious thing about taking on the panama canal, the friendship at the cost of thousands of lives. go do it was the attitude at the time. digging the first subway system is a monumental thing to do. some wise soul had written

everything that had been intended had. that's what i think the book is really about is technological hubris versus the last great uncontrollable force and if anything that conflict is more acutely felt today. wanted to write a book about the millennium. i have a question for you guys. here's my question. in the quest of my research i talked to the top six hurricane knowledge is in the country with the idea that essentially asking isn't it true that this could not happen again and? the days of a hurricane causing hundreds or thousands of deaths is over, right? as if i had them all in the same

room with me they'll have the same response that's technically untrue. i asked which storm was the one that came close and they all came up with the same storm. the same storm in the last 20 years and those of you who've read the book my question for you all is which storm over the last 20 years which was the one that most scared the nation's top hurricane knowledges? no. no. [laughter] >> would the to say?

it's not the perfect storm but thank you for mentioning his book. >> wasn't a monster storm that was literally a hundred miles wide that would have the entire eastern seaboard? >> that's not the one. two more guesses. c andrew? >> not andrew. >> would the old comparison to the threat posed by this. it was opal. it was the last five years or so. you never heard about it but the recent opal is so significant i was astonished. the reason is as the head of the hurricane research division told me hurricanes act predictably. they hurricane models are pretty good and the other good handle on what it is going to do.

and the storm has the power and the something that they also want to drive home. opal began heading toward the florida coast pensacola area initially as a category 1 storm moving at 10 miles an hour. you take it seriously but the evacuation officials figured they have some time. couple of other interesting elements there. for some strange reason the entire i-10 corridor around pensacola was under heavy construction which is not something you want to have in a hurricane. also the night when things begin to get harry was the night of the o.j. simpson verdict. a lot of things suddenly came into play. that bush officials figured category 110 miles an hour we have got time. we don't want to have a nighttime evacuation.

we are going to this tomorrow and in orderly way. in a matter of hours it went from a category 1 to a high category for at times a category 5. not only that it went from 10 miles an hour to 20 miles an hour. suddenly you have half the time to evacuate for a storm of monumental magnitude of troop catastrophic hurricane. people stay because they want to see the o.j. version. they are going to leave the next day. morning time everybody leads at the same time. the roads are so jammed that nothing is moving. meanwhile the meter i'll just end djs everybody the warning systems are activated. people are sitting in their cars hearing the most dire news. they are hearing category 5 hurricane is coming and they are not going anywhere.

got so bad that people began fleeing their cars for high ground and began running from their cars for high ground. they lost most of their power and it took an interesting turn. i don't believe a single person got killed but that was the one where the hurricane expert says says -- there by the grace of god i guess. that's about it for time so thank you all for coming. [applause] booktv takes hundreds of other programs around the country all year long. here's a look at some of the events we are covering this week tuesday where the american enterprise institute in washington to hear law professor john u explain how military to knowledge he is changing the way we fight wars and defend ourselves against threats. wednesday paul hollander or kesser emeritus of sociology at

the university of massachusetts is at the cato institute in the nations capital to weigh in on western intellectuals and political dictators.