is this written for lehman brother lawyer's? >> guest: it's a book that comes out by a division of ww norton and designed not for the lawyers. i hope the lawyers find something interesting, but purposely written to reach a broader audience so they can see what corporations have done and understand the impact of this corporate rights movement on the scope of american history and on our own identity as americans. >> host: adam winkler is the author tried to-- "we the corporations". >> guest: thank you. >> book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com. book tv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com. /book tv.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> me i have your attention. please take your seats. the presentation is about to begin. there will be a question and answer time at the end of the presentation. you can go to one of the two microphones and line up for a question for you to begin i like to, tv critic for npr. [applause]. >> how you doing? thanks so much for joining us here. as was said i'm a tv critic for national public radio, so i should be talking to an author. actually, i have written a lot

about races and media and interviewed for the smithsonian so we have a bit in common here. our esteemed guest, the daughter of a nasa scientist and english professor? >> yes. >> virginian native. you worked in investment banking? >> that was my first job out of school. >> and had a magazine inside mexico and started working on hidden figures in 2010 and became a "new york times" number one bestseller, spawned a movie that was oscar-nominated, margot lee shetterly. [cheers and applause] >> so, i heard you gave an amazing speech last night where you talked a bit about charlottesville and race. could you give us a little taste of what you talked about their and how it appears to what you

talk about in the book? >> yeah, you know the thing that we talked a bit about what i started out doing it, which was working in the investment banking out of school and really, when i was growing up that seemed like progress in the future and mary protagonist way, life or career to have like very powerful and history for me was something that always felt as an african-american always so heavy and connected to this past, which is usually taught in schools as slavery, martin luther king and now obama, this very long but extremely narrow arc of history and so during the fourth of writing hidden figures what i really came to understand was how powerful it is to tell a story and to write a story and

to tell your zero this story and to be the protagonist in your own story as oppose to telling a story where you are a passive recipient of history and so i live in charlottesville, virginia. i went to the university of virginia, but recently moved there and this entire, you know, issue of the statues in the white supremacists marches, all of that stuff has been happening since i've moved there and i think for me we are very focused on the presence of the statute and the meaning of the statues, what that come to symbolize, but i think part of the issue also is that those statues also represent an absence of a counter narrative that there is the slavery narrative, these confederate statues, but in

terms of a diversity and richness of african-american stories there are very few and very few in which african-americans are protagonists in these stories in which you are allowed to be a protagonist matter i mean each of us is a protagonist in our own life. we see ourselves with people and i think that's why we love stories about superheroes and kings and, i mean, these stories make us feel powerful and so i think it really is about the presence of the apartheid and the presence of the racial terror and slavery. it's also about the absence of the counter narrative. i really see that one of the jobs of bringing-- bridging some of these divides is bringing forward these stories that have

always been there. that people have been there. in the history is there. the stories are what we need to tell now. >> well, for people who have made been under a rock the last year, "hidden figures" is an amazing book about black women who served as human computers working for that agency that preceded nasa and nasa crunching all of this complex math and numbers used first to develop that aerodynamics warplanes and later to-- for spaceflight. now, i saw the book you said this isn't hidden history, it's unseen history and i know you say everyone asks you why don't we know this. what i'm going to ask you, why don't we know this and why is it unseen? are we afraid to look at it? were we to busy life 19 nasa and john glenn and people like that?

why was it unseen? >> i think the primary reason why this history has been unseen is because this work was women's work and not just at nasa, so there was this contrary of african-american women working at nasa langley. they were part of a much larger cohort of women from all backgrounds doing the work at all of the different nasa centers or do there were women computers working in the army, navy, cell labs which many of you may know as the precursor to at&t and basically founded the communication revolution, cell phones and things like that i mean virtually everywhere you found technological progress that required numbercrunching and reduction of data. there were women, rooms full of women like living self spreadsheet doing math and this

work was considered sub professional work. it was very necessary, but literally the women at nasa were classified as sub professionals which meant they work above clerical employees. of a were not as high in the hierarchy as the men who were engineers who were considered professional employees and so i think that it is a large reason why this work was invisible. they were kind of that equivalent of our computers sitting on our desk doing work today and yet without them all of these advances would not have been possible. >> i'm interested in how you decided to focus on this because i know you were surrounded by people when you were growing up and i done panels where i talk to people in they say i had decided and i say to myself wait

a minute i went to hear about how you had the idea because that to me is the key, deciding i mean there were plenty of other people who grew up around these people and in your neighborhood when you were growing up i'm sure everyone knew these stories. what made you decide it was worth a book? >> it's interesting there is a very specific moments when trying to what would become "hidden figures" them into existence and interestingly it came out of a moment between the two most important men in my life, my father and my husband. my husband and i had gone back to hampton and visiting my parents for christmas seven years ago now and we had run into a woman who had worked at nasa many years as a computer and that sort of start this conversation with my dad sort of you know going into this speech about what she had done and the

other women and kathryn johnson who calculated the launch window for the astronauts. [laughter] >> that moment where the needle flipped off the record. >> yeah, but i didn't have that moment-- i did not hear the needle flip off the record because i had heard a lot of those stories before and i had grown up there and i had known these women as my parents colleagues and friends, but the needle deftly slipped off the record for my husband who was not from hampton and was like wait a minute can you please replay that for me and why haven't i heard that story before so for me it was a moment of looking at the community, the people, nasa, this very extraordinary kind of place that i had grown up and that was also extremely normal and ordinary, but being able to see past what

was so normal to me and say wow, that is pretty remarkable. >> the level of detail that you are able to bring forth about these peoples lives at you like with dorothy thought is lucky to teach at the high school of walking along with her because you are able to describe that journey. how did you get that level of detail? how did you find the research to say what this place smelled like or the landmark she passed when she was walking through the high school? >> doing the research i loved it, i mean, i loved it and i really the kind of book i wanted to write was the kind of book that i had loved reading which was really detailed narrative nonfiction where you are so immersed in this wife that you lose yourself. you going to this time machine and so, i mean, the sources--

there were so many different kinds of sources. first of all, interviews with people. kathryn johnson who had just turned and 99 years old, really amazing. i was-- [inaudible] >> i got to spend a lot of time with her and talk to her, not just about her life, but also dorothy bonds, for example, and the relationship between dorothy vaughn and the one who worked for her. avera were employee newsletter starting in 1942 for the langley research center called the reason-- langley aeronautical laboratory back then. black newspapers, amazing source of information. the description of mary jackson's wedding dress in the book came from an article in the journal and guide, i mean, the level of detail in the black newspapers. >> like telling our own story.

>> absolutely extraordinary. nasa history office and langley center has done a spectacular job in preserving the wind tunnel records, research reports, phone books, seating charts, photos of offices and workgroups, teams of people, so i love that part of it and if i didn't have to eventually turn in a book i'd would probably still be doing that research. [laughter] >> i heard you sold the rights to this to be made into a movie while you were writing it? >> i am scared of you. how did you convince somebody to buy movie rights to a book you had written scenic or that i had not even started writing. [laughter] >> i want her agent. who's your agent? [laughter] >> i will tell you i have a very

good literary agent named mckenzie watson young and she was the one who represented my book proposal and sold it to her -- herbert collins and she was the one who basically facilitated getting it into the hands of donna gelati the producer of "hidden figures" and donna read it and she immediately felt a sense of mission, i think. she really made her job championing this story as a movie like she made her mission and, i mean, it is not a usual or-- it was sort of a lightning strike set of circumstances that happened with the book and the movie. >> what i love about this book in addition to all the great

details we get about these wonderful women is that you are able to talk about 70 different things within the narrative. one example is the way in which we have always had these periods where there has been progress on civil rights in america often because america is threatened, world war i, world war ii, the cold war and then periods of a backlash where black soldiers are coming back from the war in the get beat up in attempt to put people back in their place. put-- talk about how those things work in "hidden figures" and how it was so important that we had a sense of history that way. >> yeah, think again a lot of it came from my interest in my preference for these epic narratives and i wanted-- that these women had that epic narrative. it wasn't enough to either show their lives or simply show the history. i wanted their lives directly

connected to history and the thing about these women is that in so anyways their lives were connected to the big history and not just for them working at nasa starting in world war ii, but like for example kathryn johnson was one of three black students to enter graduate school in west virginia. dorothy vaughn worked at-- as a math teacher before she went to nasa. she worked at a school in farmville, virginia, that filed a lawsuit that was eventually incorporated into the brown versus board of education suit and that school system was shut down by the state of virginia rather than comply with the board's decision and integrate, so it's really was fascinating to me to look at these sweeps of history and to see how this opening for all of these women

happened during world war ii and because of the need for labor and because of that external threat and that we would see these periods of backlash for example when after brown and virginia closed schools. i wanted to understand how the big picture circumstances affected that individual lives of these people and how they responded. >> i also love this idea of looking at for example during the cold war when all of these countries were fighting off their colonial suppression-- pressures and the pressure in america do show we are not that bad and we will strike down segregation, please join us. you were able to integrate that

into the story. >> this time of sputnik, 1957 when the soviets put sputnik there satellite into space i kicked off the space race version of the cold war. that was a fascinating time, i mean, this was a time of mccarthyism, a time of sputnik obviously in the excitement to space, the fear that maybe the russians are spying on us. if the time that little rock happened in 1957, so one of the most mean unbelievable documents that i found that putting the book that sort of connected those two things is that the russians would always publish a timetable of where the sputnik satellite was over flying its orbit around the earth, so i found this "washington post" article that shows that the russians published what it was

flying over little rock, arkansas. so, theory direct connection between the domestic turmoil in the united states and this international global battle between the united states and the soviet union. >> and this idea that because of segregation and because people were oppressed that america was holding itself back like maybe one reason the russians got sputnik up earlier is because they gave women more agency as engineers in the soviet union. >> yeah, there were many many more female engineers in engineering school there than there were here in the us where women were still having problems even getting admitted to engineering programs, so, i mean, one of the things that was very clear during the research into "hidden figures" is that the story is so important, the

stories we tell ourselves, the stories that we disseminate inside the country, outside the country all of these things affect the decisions people made in a very real way on this the government was involved in shaping those both internally and externally. >> now, your book covers white-- [inaudible] >> comes all the way through to the end of the space program. "hidden figures" the movie doesn't do that. now, i went through the whole book looking for kevin costner. [laughter] >> and i know you said you enjoyed the movie and didn't have a problem with that, but were you surprised how they chose to tell the story because it seems like they inflated a lot of things and crunched a lot of circumstances together to make the narrative more

compelling. >> i mean, it was a really interesting experience, this whole hidden figure thing while i was writing my first book and learning how to do that. >> your first book. her first book. [applause]. >> i was also getting a crash course in what it takes to adopt a book for film and how you tell a story through film and how you tell a story sort of the difference between fact and truth, so there are a lot of facts that are completed in the movie, but what i really appreciated about the final product of the movie is that it's very true, true to the nature of the women. very true to the circumstances. it's very true to nasa and that sense of what it was like during those early days in the space race, but it was hard for me because first of all wrote this

book for 1943 to 1969 and i was like my cat you make a movie that goes from 1943 to 1969. >> or tv show. >> i mean, that was hard. i think it was the right decision to make a compacted narrative surrounding this very dramatic moment in catherine johnson's life where she calculates the trajectory for john glenn's flight. it was difficult to see certain elements of the story shifting from one character to the other or see things that were created like i'm short anyone who has seen the movie you probably figured this out, but yes, there was no kevin costner character whose sledge hammered the colored spine in langley, but-- >> i was looking in the index. >> but, there were moments when

i struggled with some of the decisions and-- >> one of the things that struck me for example is that in your book you say things basically ended segregation in nasa in 58. >> basically, yeah-- >> so the time they are portrayed in the movie where they are still seems to be segregation they had already stopped that? >> yes. >> the department was a segregated during that time? >> exactly, but in order to bring the other these two dramatic things, which is don klan's orbital and catherine johnson during the calculation and the end of segregation they were conflated in terms of timeline. >> was very moment when they had to break that to you? >> i have to say i know a lot of people who have written books and have them made into movies and have different opinions, but

i had a very positive experience with this and the producer in particular donna who is the producer really kept me in the loop. every once a while it was like 3:00 a.m. and i'd be up working trying to finish this draft to turn it in and this script would pop up like the latest version of the script and so they really did an amazing job i think of keeping me in the loop of honoring my suggestions, really listening to me and doing all they could to understand and preserve the authenticity of the story of a witch i was very happy with. >> so, the movie comes out and it's very successful. i figure was the highest grossing movie of the next all the movies nominated for best picture the year it came out your gear book was in the "new york times" bestseller and then

a year later we have white supremacists marching through virginia who feel like they have been supported by the president of the united states. what do you think i need on the one hand there is the sense that this story comes out and people are hungry for this history and they are so worried about how people will-- how history is bit impressed and a year later we have people that would be right at home with the birds of holding white supremacy marching down the middle of the streets in a town you live in. what you think about? >> you know, i mean, this is i think is america. i think a lot-- there's been a lot of commentary to charlottesville that both the town and the state and the country that this is not who we are. it is who we are. i mean, america is a confiscated

-- >> you can apply for that. [applause]. >> ,i mean, it's a complicated place and has been a complicated place from the beginning. we have some of the most admired and beautiful and worthy ideals, you know we hold these truths to be self evident that all men and people are created equal, i mean, this is something we navigated by ad that we believe in here fundamentally and we are always at war with it the ideal and the reality of the implementation and that and when i say this is america, that struggle, that is the struggle that we are always facing and so it is-- i think that we are--

this is a part of that struggle for living up to those ideals and saying what does it take to really support and allow everyone into those ideals and believing in those ideals, doing what we can to enforce them and to spread them and for me, i live 12 minutes driving from monticello and i think monticello is a fascinating place, i mean, thomas jefferson was a riveting person who owned the people, humans, something that today we find objectionable and who wrote some of the most amazing and insightful and beautiful words about the nature of human freedom. so, that dichotomy is sort of the core, i think, in a lot of ways and that struggle of america and i think particularly for me anyway as an african-american, really trying

to unite those two things to say both i acknowledge the circumstances of slavery in the past and all of the heaviness that comes with that and i also embrace and love the beautiful parts of those ideals of our country and the facts of our country, so that-- complicated. humans are complicated and this is a complicated place, but i think the fact that we are living in a moment that feels like we are living in history right now. it's terrifying, it's fascinating and all of these things at the same time and i think it's a moment where the american ideals are calling to us and it's sort of like saying can we take these ideals and put them in practice in our everyday

lives. >> now, we will take a few questions. i will ask if you have a question to light up at one of these two microphones and i will point to you and ask you to say your question and please make it a question. please. i always feel like the stories of black folks and especially black women in the south get out what you just talked about, so effectively. you know, the wonderful things about our country and also the things that we struggle with, the duality of these positive figures. we live that. do you think? >> yeah, you know what i'm a native virginian. i'm a native of the south. i love the south. it's a complicated place and i think people from a lot of these issues that exist everywhere in america are maybe closer to the

surface in the south, so i do-- southerners have i guess a reputation of being great lovers of history and i think embracing even the hard things like really trying to face those hard things and make them also part of who we are as a country and who we are as individuals and maybe it's the individual. i think for me like trying to do that work as an individual and embrace all of those things, even the painful things as part of my heritage is american. i think within me that sort of like the fusing of all of these conflicts. i want those things to be able to coexist even as they are difficult things. >> let's start over here and if

you could tell a sure name and your question. >> hello my name is debbie greenberg. i watched your movie and it gave me insight into my cousins who grew up in hampton and worked at langley. never understood why he lived there back at that era, but now i understand. >> you should read the book. >> my question to you as someone who grew up there a few years after what you portray, what was the cultural environment, racial environments, the interfaith environment and how has that influenced you and your outlook? >> i consider myself as having grown up in a very interesting place at a very wonderful time. until i started doing research for this book i didn't realize just how close i was too kind of

the tail end of this period of desegregation of the schools in virginia because virginia really drag its feet for a long time, but when i was in school i went to integrated schools, black kids and why kids and actually a lot of vietnamese people who lived in the community, so we are heavily military area, defense industry so in addition to nasa there are any number of army, navy bases, air force base so it really does get a lot of people from a lot of different places and i think it was a period, you know the space thing had just happened like people were still very optimistic about that and so i feel like i grew up in what to me was like sort of still writing a lot of the optimism for progress and change from the civil rights movement,

from the space race there in hampton and i went to a very kind of normal, i don't know american normal whatever that is in the popular imagination public school with kids from a lot of different backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, i mean, i think this is something that hasn't changed since i was in school that i which a school with kids who were on public assistance and i went to school with kids whose parents were quite affluent and i think growing up with this very diverse and not just ethnicity, but, i mean, in terms of economics, nationality even was a real privilege and so i feel very very fortunate to have gone to the hampton public schools, got a great education and very much love my hometown. [applause]. >> over here.

your name in question. >> hello, i was wondering if you considered writing sort of a follow-up following the story of ed dwight or mercury 13? >> yeah, so mercury 13 was a group of women who were being recruited with the idea that they could also be part of the astronaut corps and ed dwight is an african-american who was also recruited into the astronaut corps. those are amazing the stories, i mean, the thing about "hidden figures" is that there were so many different fascinating stories and people involved. those where i think someone-- those are very worthy. i am actually working on the next but that doesn't have to do with nasa, but i spend so much time even now reading about

people who were in some way involved with this spine of the head and figure, so i don't have those plans, but, i mean, those are stories that we definitely could have more of student perhaps, you could write that and you did mention ed in the book. your name and your question. >> my name is stephen-- excuse me, i'm a little nervous, thomas. i saw the movie in an audience like this, it diverse like this, predominantly white, but when it was over people applauded and people were crying. my wife was crying. the white man next to her was crying. [laughter] >> the asian woman next to him was crying and i was wondering what he felt about what he votes that deep emotion, tears of joy,

tears of hope, tears of sadness? what is your thinking of the global impact of that story? >> you know, that's a great question. i have seen the movie like 10 times in different settings, very different settings and it has been the same. i've seen it in hampton where everyone knows the people. i have seen it with the people who made-- somebody different settings settings and it has been that. i think that it is-- there are these ideals, you know that there are things we want to believe about who we are, about who we can be and i think that maybe what that movie does is it shows us an instance of closing the gap between who we are when

we fall short in who we are when we stand up and go up to our highest level and it's optimistic. it doesn't shy away from the difficult things, but it doesn't take away the hope and you need to look the difficult things squarely in the eye, but you can never take away the hope and you can't deny the progress and even in a moment like now where we are saying there are many challenges facing this country, well there have always been challenges facing this country. we have made a lot of progress and i feel like we need to acknowledge that and even as we look squarely at very difficult things, we are humans that we need hope and happy stories to get up in the morning and give us meaning and i think that is maybe it's. it shows the hard things. we have to see those things and acknowledge them, but we need the help as well and it's a very

hopeful movie. it's a movie about people who love what they are doing and who -- for whom that becomes a bond. of a come from all these different backgrounds, but these people are passionate about the space program in numbers and math and that is to to view these people are and it enabled them to transcend to become very close and i think that's also very positive. [applause]. >> to my question because i am also nervous. at the beginning of this talk you talked about how history was not hidden, but unseen in the book you wrote, the movie that was produced was one way of

making this story scene and a visible to much of the american and international public. what are other ways you see unseen or counter narratives being brought to light and how do you think the awareness of these stories will have an effect on the action that we as americans take in on the global community? >> of growing up always thought of history as the history of politics and presidents and, i mean, this sort of very big picture history, but history is what all of us, each of us does and history is about communities, people and how our lives fit into this great course of human events and i think that's maybe sort of in the same way that i think science is

always seen as the great individual scientists, einstein and all of these great people who have been mostly men in the past, but we don't see that how much of that science project-- product and work is based on the teamwork and people coming together to create something, a giant leap. i think in the same way we see these great individuals and we don't look at the people around us and i think that, i mean, it sounds really simplistic but i think just looking at people around us, grandparents, people who lived down the street, you know, why is this monument here and it's been there for so long and how did it get there. i mean, asking these questions about things in our surroundings and saying that we are going to start looking at the history from the ground up as opposed to

the history from the top down, i mean, i love those of stories. think those are very human level stories and i think that that very human level view of why things happen is something people are really hungry for, i mean, i was dying to go and see the presentation of jd fans who i think is also writing about people in our country from a point of view that we don't always get and that people are hungry for and i think there's a lot of similar energy between why people are very interested in hidden figures and very interested in hillbilly elegy and i think people maybe see that as a contradiction, but there is quite a lot of similarities between what people are looking for, so i think may

be looking from the bottom up as opposed to the top down in terms of history is a great starts. >> this will be our last question. better be good. >> my name is alan weinstein. >> now you are really raising the bar. >> in my own way alike to think think i made a contribution to the emergence of technology in science in my field in particular, so i would like to thank you for your contribution from the vantage point of a white male, not an african-american female, but my question is how did the book differ from the movie in any significant way and what was your role in that if there was a difference between the book and the movie, what was your role in that difference? >> so, whether biggest

difference between the book and the movie, the book starts in 1943 and end in 1969 and the movie is just a sliver basically takes place from 1957 until 1962. because of that as we talked about, and a lot of the timelines and things work conflated so i was a consultant on the movie. they would ask me questions. i would give them a lot of research and-- one sort of to speak a bit to the math and computer part of it, so the book nasa is an engineering organization and a lot of this was about building planes and spaceships and the book "hidden figures" is very much about that , but because catherine johnson as a mathematician in that whole hierarchy was a central character they really created a plot in the movie that hinged on math and her viewpoint

took it was really something i didn't even really learn until after the movie was produced and had all these questions about how this particular part of this script to come together, but they made this very just in decision to really make a movie about math as opposed to about engineering, which the book is a lot more about engineering than the minutia of the map itself. >> and about their lives. >> and about their lives. >> you detail their lives a lot more. i went to ask you quickly to talk about the human computer project that you are working on. this is something you have continued past the life of the book. can you talk a bit about what you are doing their and how it has succeeded since the book of movie have come out? >> the human computer project, essentially what i was so

surprised to discover during the research for "hidden figures" is how many women were involved in computing as i talked about before, not just at nasa, but all these other organizations, so this is really a way to try and catalog all the women who are involved in doing this work in the early days of computing and really understand what kind of work they were doing and also to get a snapshot of women in these fields and see if there is something we might learn from those early pioneers that we can apply to women working in these fields today see next up, if people want to participate they can find it online? >> human computer project.com. or reset-- reach out to me. >> thank you. we really appreciate your attention and great questions. we ran out of time. [applause]. clec i have to wrap it up. i do want to thank our guests,

margot lee shetterly author of "hidden figures". please enjoy the rest of the festival. thank you so much. [applause]. .. [inaudible conversations]

>> there i was on the laplatneyform. you know, feeling like an out of body experience. pl platfort. and this speech which was a cry from the white nationalist gut. what an opportunity to say okay, i am proud of my supporters but i am the president of all americans. that is not what we heard at all. >> hillary clinton's newest book "what happened" will be released tuesday by simon and shuster and on monday evening, september 18th, booktv will cover a discussion between hillary clinton and politics and pros co-owner. they will discuss secretary clinton's presidential