we have been exhibition, mapping america's road from revolution to independence. it's open on view until 8:15 tonight. and russell's books are signed in the museum store. please go there as well, pick up the new book, and thank you again and thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible discussion] [inaudible discussion]

[inaudible conversations] >> okay. all right. hello. are we on? hi, guys. welcome to sunday morning at the texas book festival. does anybody know what time it is? and how awesome was that extra hour we all got this morning. let's applaud the extra hours. i'm going to officially welcome you to the 22nd annual book festival. thank you for coming out to support the authors, the still and great literature. first off, please silence your cell phones. i'll silence my phone while you silence yours. we'll have a book sinning after the session 0, so arm that both

of the authors are going to go back to the book-signing tent and sign books, hopefully you'll pick some up as the book people tent before that. when you buy book at the stifle, -- the festival, you're supporting the author, the festival, and the local independent book store. the mission is to support libraries in texas. and the reading rock stars program and to fund grants for libraries in texas. your book purchase makes a difference and for the harvey book drive, the texas book festival is running a special drive to raise money to help rebuild texas libraries affected by turk harvey. donate $15 for the reading rock star students and the talker foundation and the festival will match your donation, each of them, with a book to rebuild a library. so that's three books for the one you purchase. by being here today and buying books you're funding many

important initiatives and i remind you that the best way to support the writers who are here this weekend is to buy books. hope you will do that. so, thank you so much for being here. i want to say just really quickly, i'm becca oliver, the executive director of the writers league of texas, and i feel like i won the moderator lottery with this panel. i'm so excited to have this conversation. i cannot tell you enough time that i think all of you would benefit from buying these books. they're really terrific, and i think that's kind of conversation is exactly what we come to these book festivals for, for panel like this. so much to talk about. i'm going to dig in. we're here to talk about two specific books. so, i'm going to first read the bios for our two manyists. alex season dry ya marzanos less lesnevich. the author or the facts of the body.

she she won an award for her work, received a jaffe award, her essays appear in "new york times," oxford american and. she lives in boston where she teaches and in a graduate public policy program at harvard's kennedy school of government. please become alexandria marzano-lesnevich. [applause] >> ben blum was born and raised in denver, colorado. he holds a ph.d in computer science from the university of california berkeley, where he was a national science foundation grad what research fellow, and an msa in fiction from new york university. he was award the "new york times" fellowship. he lives in brooklyn with his wife and stepdaughter, welcome ben blum. [applause] >> so i'm going to give you the

very quick, brief synopsis. "ranger games" is a story of an all-american kid who after 9/11 wanted to do something important with his life. he entered the army, he went through the ranger indoctrination program. makes it through, which is such a feat in itself. he is about to go home for a short break to see his high school girlfriend, who he is very much in love with then he is going to deploy overseas and the night before he leaves he is the getaway driver in a bank robbery. the fact of a body is about so many things, but it's primarily one of the biggest pieces is it's about a man named ricky langley, who in 1992 in louisiana, he is a pedophile, with a history, and he invites a young boy into this house, and murders him. and then a law in concern first year law stunt goes down to

louisiana in gee starts to -- in 2003 and investigates the case as part of her internship, and the discovers in the midst of that, she uncovers a lot about her own personal history and her family. and so, these two books are very different but they have so many wonderful ways they connect: i want to ask each author -- one of the biggest things they connect on is the fact they're beautifully written. so i want to ask each author read a short excerpt for you today and then get into the conversation. so, alex san dria, start with you. >> thank you, beck campt thank you to all of you for coming today. because of the nature of the material i work with and everything we're going to say in the discussions following i need to begin by reading you this brief notice. this work is not authorized or approved by the louisiana capital assistance center or clients and the views expressed by me do not reflect the vows or possessions of anyone other than me.

my description of legal proceed, including the positions of the parties and the circumstances and events the crimes charged are drawn solely from the court record, other publicly available information hi and own research. as we said this is nonfiction. louisiana, 1992. the boy wears sweat pants the color of a louisiana headache. later, the police report will note them as blue. though in every description his mother gives thereafter she will always insist on calling them aqua or teal. on his feet are the mighty hiking boots every boy wears in this part of the state, perfect for playing in the woods. in one small fist, he grips a b.b. gun, half as tall as he is. the b.b. gun is the daisy brand, with a long background plastic barrel, the boy keeps as shiny as it were real metal. the on child of a single mother, jeremy gillry is used to moving

often. sleeping in bedrooms that aren't his. his mother's friends all ran houses on the same dead, end street the landlord calls watson road whenever he wants to charge higher rent. it doesn't have name and even the town police department needs directions to find it. settlers from iowa named the town after their home state but pronounce the name ioway. the town has always been a place people come for fresh starts. always been a place they can't quite leave the past behind. there, the boy and his mother stay with whoever can keep the electricity bill one month, whoever can keep the gas on the next. wherever the boy landses, he takes his b.b. gun with him. it is his most prized possession. now it's the first week in february. the leaves are green and lush on the trees but the temperature dips at night. laura, his mother, isn't working. she rentedded a home for the two of them, their first, but the

electricity has been turned off. so now laurel use and jeremy are staying with laura's boyfriend and the baby, the babyes two years old and wants to play with the boy and screamedded when he doesn't get his way. today the babyes wailing. jeremy, six years old, just off the school bus home, eats his afterschool snack in a herry, dream offering getting away from the noise, of the fun to be had out in the woods. at the end of the road there is a weathered white house. and behind it, a thatch of woods. the woods are the dense deciduous swampy kind, the kind in which rotting leaves mingle with the earth and ground gives away softly. the is only a sing recall vaccine, a single place to play war or dream of hiding forever. these woods of jeremy's favorite place to play. he asks his mother for the b.b.

gun. she takes its down from the shelf that keeps it safe from the baby and hand it to him. jeremy runs out the door two accomplish near his age, a buy named joey and a girl named june live in the white house by thes woulds and although jeremy likes exploring on his own it's more fun when joey joins him. he goes to the door and knocks. a man answers, he wears thick glasses, small head and large ears. at 26 and only 140 pounds, ricky joseph langley is slight for a grown man. but till much bigger than the boy. he rents a room from joany and june's parents whom he met when he start we working with her mother. supposed to pay pearl $50 a week but never been able to afford it. so he makes up the now baby-sitting. just a few days ago he looked of joey and jeremy, brought them

soap while they were in the bath. is joey here, jeremy asks? no. ricky says. they went fishing. it's true. joey's father and the boy packed up poles just 20 minutes ago and drove out to the lakes and gone all afternoon. they'll be back soon. ricky says. you can come in and wait if you like. jeremy plays at this house every week. he knows ricky. yet he pauses. why don't you come in, ricky says again. he opens the door wider and turns away. jeremy walks over the thresholds, carefully props his b.b. gun against the wall, and climbs the stairs to joey's bedroom. thank you. >> ben? >> i know. we want to applaud but it's so harrowing, and terrifying that opening, and we're going to dig a little bit more into that.

ben. >> thank you for having me. it's a really scary place to leave off. it's a completely different story. >> it's called true crime. you knew what you were getting into when you stepped into the tent. >> thank you for being here, i out lovely to be in austin for this great festival. this is nonfiction. from the time we were kids, alex always had a simple dream. to defend his country from the forces of evil and oppression. none of us took it seriously but him. after school in the suburbs of denver, he'd run off in his camouflage t letter and cargo panses to play vietnam commando on the canal through the neighborhood, laying booby traps and hiding behind stands of cat tails to watch joggers jump and yip as the ground exploded at their feet. he played every video game.

there weren't men women back then, just grim-lipped men in high-tech gear, dropping down ropes from helicopters to the sound of the jingle, be all you can be in the army. back then, alex and i barely spoke. our dream worlds did not overloop. by age seven, i had become known in the family as the math prodigy. in the field where alex saw dory guerrillas i saw branching ferns, pinecones, manifold of swallows. i'd tell supermarket cashiers how lasers worked. give lifeguards introduction to the stokes equation, i was completely insufferable. human relations were not my specialty. to preliminary indicate. by 13 i was taking calculus and physics at the university of colorado. the only real common ground i had with alex lay between the

street hockey nets in this driveway where on summer afternoons we would scurry around my knees and destroy me. smiling in triumph. he was five years younger but already a budding star. our fathers had both made their efforts at manly education. alex's father, norm, was the assistant coach of alexy hockey team and played adult league in 1992. al, my own father, was the quarterback coach of george washington high school's football team downtown. both racinged bicycles competitively in range of the rockie mountains, played pick up street hockey in a rink, skied, golfed, climbed, and pumped iron. summers they took us camp, hiking, fishing in the ranch

lands in texas. they stuck here plugs in our eares, jammed shot guns begins our shoulder,s pointed it toward the discarded appliances and needle us us until we squeezed the trigger. it took better with alex then me. hen when he was in school reports of his shining all-americanings in filtering in shoveling know, coaching little kid, defending classmates against bullies. though he was flying to tournaments all over the country if his hockey team he became mo more and more serious about the army thing. seemed as he bought himself ready made off a toy store, a g.i. joe,. his would be a life of heroic accomplishment, an american life, a blum life, triumph.

alex signed his 11x airborne ranger contract in the final semester of hi senior year, reserving the chance to try out for the ranger regularment. many infantry recruits signed contracts just like this one, lured by the chance to become elite commando but only a small fraction made it through the trials on the path to special operations. the rest were consigned to the regular infantry. alex knew all this. he didn't care. he shipped off to basic before dawn on the 5th of july, five months later he graduate from basic and became an infab triman. three weeks after that he earned his airborne wings. one final stage remained. what today is calls the ranger assessment and selection program. it was a little commit 2006 than today. it was shorter, the concentrated four weeks instead of eight. it was still called the ranger indoctrination program.

r.i.p. alex blum was about to become a very strong argument for changing the name. [applause] >> so i think from those excerpts we can see how different these stories are, but there is so much that i think connects them again, and i will say to you guys, these are -- these books are thrilling, they're both full of twists and turns. there are surprises, and i think one thing i found so admirable about both of you as writers is that as you're telling these stories, you are in the middle of it and sort of learning things and uncovering things as the reader is, and so its felt very much like we were on this journey with you and where you began isn't necessarily where you expected to end, i believe. so, ben, we'll start with you. a feeling of urgency and high personal stakes? what you are expecting to find

out, and if you could talk a little bit about that personal side of it and how you came to write this story and why -- what it meant thank to you. >> sure. it's a big question. i'll try to cover it. >> you have two minutes -- no just kidding. >> so the arrest of my cousin, alex, was an enormous family catastrophe, we're a dwight knit family, and i -- we all drew together in this deeply tribal way, looking back, circling the wagons around alex and trying to figure out how this happened and how we could help them. the story that filtered out pretty quickly was that the robbery had been organized by his superior in the rangers, who had often taken alex and other young privates out to facilities around tacoma, the city the which the base i located to kind of war-game. heed ask them, how would you hit this dairy queen or this casino or this theater?

alex -- apparently fairly common practice among rangers actually but this particular superior took it to the next level. so according to alex he thought this bank robbery plan was just one more kind of training exercise, one more chance to practice his tactical skills before deployment, and i got involved in his legal case in an effort more or less to clear his name, a famous psychologist, createes an experiment in 1971, became involved in his level defense. i was working at the scientist and thought i could draw on my scientific expertise to write a book about the social psychology of influence and indoctrination, in order to clear my cousin's reputation, so i worked in vary close alliance with him over the years, and then gradually i started to discover evidence that maybe what he was telling

me didn't completely add up. so it became very complicated. very intense. our relationship is at the heart of the book, and it evolves in dramatic ways through thank you twists and turns of where the evidence takes me. >> thank you. alex, how about you? alexandria. >> much like with ben, this book took me somewhere i never would have anticipated. i am the daughter of two lawyers. i grew up literally talking about the constitution over the dinner table. i remember when, at age eight, the moment that i learned about the death penalty. it took me years to realize that was not a formative memory for most children. but i remember when i learned about it and i remember my visceral response of being deeply opposed to it and, i went to law al harvard to fight the death spent. so my first chance to do this was with an internship i took with a firm in louisiana, and i -- picture me there, i'm 25

years old, wearing my first ever real suit, discovering how poorly matched my suit is to the new orleans heat and kind of sitting there in the law library, sweating bullets. thirst first thing hat happened is i'm shown a confession videotape by ricky joe jeff langley in which he describes killing jeremy gillery and describes the pleasure he nook molesting children. and i'm 25, i'm watching him, but all of a sudden i wasn't 25 anymore. all of a sudden i was a kid again and what i could feel with my grandfather's hands on me because i grew up being molest. in that moment, despite what wanted to work for, i wanted him dead. i wanted him to die for what he had done. but the very next thing that happened was that i learned that jeremy gillery's mother, laurel

lye, when the took the stand at the trial, she testified for ricky langley. she fought to keep him alive. so, as you can imagine, this causes all sorts of questions in me. how had she been able to do that while i couldn't, and also, it's who we are determined by what we believe and what we want to fight for or is who we are determined by the past. so, when i set out embarking on this i thought -- i had no intention of writing about this. i wrote this book off of 30,000 ages of court roadside tracked down over rural louisiana. when i got the first set of court record is just wanted to put it down and stop thinking about this. was haunted by it. and i thought that what i would discover was whatever simple thing -- i thought there was an answer -- lawyer gillery able to may the plea when i couldn't and i would stop seeing it through

the lens of my own past. then i discovered a whole bunch of other things inside. it and led me to a place never expected and i don't thick would have gone on my own. and that place i went to profoundly changed my life and changed my understanding of everything any life, my family, my past, any understanding who i am and how we understand the past. but i never would have gone there directly. i think. >> i think that's something interesting that you do as well, you create almost these larger than life bad guys in -- well, not create, obviously they existed, but you unveil them to the reader, whether it's ricky or it's elliott sommer, deman mat alex looks to that takes alex into the bank robbery, and you, through them and through talking about them, you're both able to sort of reveal your own -- the real sort of demons

in the story if that makes sense. one that that you do, alex san dria, that is so compel -- i'm i'm not trying to g.i. april spoil erred but your decision at the end of the book to not share with the readerses your conversation with ricky because you met him after all of this. can you talk about that dismission found it to feel like the exact right decision, is a was reading it but just curious to hear where that came from for you. >> the next to last word in the book is "hello." which sound like a strange place to end a book. but what i realized was that anything you heard ricky and i talk about, after i had taken you through his life and through mine, as the reader, they would want to find an answer, and all the-and-had i'd already given the reader. the answers dish don't want to give it away. i'm not going to say i didn't

arrive at an answer because i did, profound answer that changed my life. but the answer wasn't in that conversation. the answer wasn't in two things that two people can say to each other in a prison visiting room. that wasn't going to be the answer. and when i realized was that the answer was in some ways in coming face-to-face with a person who had haunted my nightmare for so long with the american who haunted my subconscious ex-then who had forced know look at things in any past i never wanted to look out but deeply needed to to and there was something about coming face-to-face with the reality of this person that was the only place the book could end. hello. >> ben, i want to talk about elliott and the role he plays in this story as well because there is a period in the middle of the book where we go away from alex and focus on elliott, and your kind of allegiances waiver a

little bit but ultimately it doesn't feel like it's really about el yet. it's about alex's own decision, thank you talk about the elliott character? i know he's a human being, but how he played into the story for you. >> yeah. so, elliott sommer is an immensely intelligent, charismatic, persuasive combat veteran, whom numerous people have described to me as a like lie sociopath. i first started talking to him in the challenging months when my sense of alex's story mutated and i began to have doubted about the narrative me and my family clung to so tightly. so, looking back i realized now i was vulnerable in a way i didn't understand to sommer. i approached him with what thought was skepticism but i

found him to immediately compelling and relatable in the least expected way, he was fascinated with math mat ticks, which is what i spend -- mathematics, which i want i spent my entire childhood thinking me. got in contact with a professor at san francisco state university, who maybe he was going to fin nagle a ph.d out of. thinking of proof of the number theory conjectures and wanted input on his reasoning, and he looked up to my mathematical authority at a time when i left behind the mathematical career for writing and didn't know what i was doing and felt insecure about it. i got much closer to him than i should have, and. the a few years into it, kind of waking up in this weird way and realizing, wait, how is it possible the guy that, the ranger commander who was so relatable to my cousin, he got him to rob a bank, i equally relatable to me?

this is not the same person. these are two artfully constricted facades that drew both of us. in at the same time i was not willing to give into that easy out of the psychopath label which just makes a monster of someone. i knew there was a heart to elliott, and for me the way that heart came to life was through his mother, through his family. i developed a pretty deep relationship with them. his mother is actually a very impressive woman in her way, and through the way she saw him, through the way that she kept the hope alive that redemption was possible for elliott, i also began to see that possibility, too. but it was very hard to break out of the spell of sommer. he was telling me things that my cousin wasn't. he had this kind of power over me that he seemed to have to be

offering a truth i want able to get at through alex. >> let's talk about what your experiences were writing about your family and the way that you both are writing about your family. alex san dria, there was a lot of silence and secrets and denial but you're always talking about a very personal story that it impacts your siblings. thank you speak to pulling back the curtains on some really hard truths that you did in this book. >> absolutely. i think that any story of growing up in a family is also a story of that family, and i have lot of siblings, and one thing that kept coming to mind as i was writing this and learning to try to see my parents from a perspective i hadn't seen them

as a child. you sort of live your life at eye level and interact with people in this way. when you're writing about them as characters and have to ask yourselves, why did they make the decisions they did? no matter how the decisions affected me oh, do capture the way they were thinking about it and you have to scurry up above them and try to look down the different mechanisms of the family and start to realize something i think is true for all of us, that siblings grow up in different families. they all live totally different experiences in childhood, it and was important to me to give the reader sort of a deep intimate connection to what my experience growing up had been but to also highlight how these different events and the secrecy around the events really helped construction very different childhood for each of us that we experienced differently. that's something i think was mirrored inic langley's family. and that's kind of how i thought about it. i want ode to give the reader

something that felt intimate and also take it as something that felt vivid. my memories are very vivid. the smell of the grandson in the summer n -- the grass on the summer lawn, the dad's music to try bring all of us into that and capture that kaleidoscope world. >> you did an amazing job and just even as you take us through and we're not quite sure in the early parts of the book what is your secret, there's still this just feeling of tension and sort of there's a menace lingering somewhere but we're not quite sure what it is. something you did so wonderfully in this book. ben, i wanted to talk about family stories, the stories we grow up with, and then the stories that we later maybe learn the truth about, and i think one thing is you're sort of chasing your grandpa's world war ii memoirs throughout the

book as well. as yao became a writer, is was important to find their discovered your grandma and you do get it and it kind of throws back also a curtain on secrets you were not aware0. can you talk about that. >> yeah, coming from a scientific background, the biggest takeaway for me from the process of grappling with alex's story is the power of stories and mythology to shape our identities, shame the way we retreat each other, and the enormous toxicity that can be folded into family myths. we all have dish mean, there's a place of course for celebrating those that we descend from and their best and truest and moe most virtuous selfs and have

lovable stories about the foibles and grand exploits of our forebearers, but in alex and my case work, we grew up we tales of grab, maverick soldier who went his own way, we learned that at one point he'd actually punned a superior because he wasn't so great at following rules and regulations but got the job done. and alex grew up, i think, envisioning himself as a military man in the mold of our grandfather, mold we learned of as a heroic one. and after years of tracking down this memoir i finally got my hand on it and was frankly appalled. i go into some of it there in the book, but my grandfather was not a war hero. i'll put it that way. he was a weak and insecure

sergeant who was trying to kind of live up -- he was jewish but wasn't admitting that to anyone in the army, at time where anti-semitism was rampant. trying to live up to the tough image of his underlings of soldiers and in the process enabling worse and worse war crimes, really. i was of course jobbed and horrified by that. and the most difficult pushback from the family to the book has been having this treasured image of our war hero grandfather in some way called into question or revoked. these stories are just how we build our sense of who we and are it's very, very challenging to people to have this stories unmined. but at the same time i think if you can grapple with them honestly and sincerely and recover the good parent at the heart of the misbehavior that's

been covered up for so long, the opportunity for healing and for reaching a deeper and truer sense of who you are and what you all jointly struggle with as a family can we really transformative next book ended um serving that role in some way for us. >> so i want to talk about both of you, actually, studied and went very far in certain disciplines and then later, after that, focused on writing and made writing your life. your day job. so, to talk -- start with you, alex san dria, with the law -- alexandria, start with the law and that's compelling about the search and the conversations around the trial and gilt innocence and all of these things you bring into it. talk the about the lawyer side of you and how that informed this narrative. >> well, it informed my life deeply, as anyone who has been in an argument with me can tell.

you still argue like a lawyer. but i was always dish think like many people before i went to law school and before the current cultural moment, i really thought of the -- a trial as a truth-finding mechanism. deeply engrained belief of the adversaryial system, and each side fighting hard and the minute you start looking closely at the kind overwork was doing with dealt penalty cases, you realize that less than a truth-finding mechanism, it's a story making mechanism and produced a story of the past and we call that story truth because we need to call it something but it make this story, and because of the way rules of evidence work, because of the way that the different steps in the process work, the fact it's authored, the fact that it involves difference subjectivities is written over, and erased, i would say.

and so a lot of what i found myself doing before this book even, when i was in law school and doing the kind of research i was doing, was starting to become about, what happens when you pull back the overhang and say, okay, yes, this serves a function but let's talk about everything that went into making it. the way i got back into writing -- i always -- as a kid, my high school yearbook is full of people saying, i can't wait to read your first book, which i hope they all have now. they said they would the way i got back into writing was actually during law school, i was encountering cases and i was realizing that my interest lied in the stories that weren't really admitted into the courtroom but were fundamental to how we actually understand each other, how we actually judge, and that became what drove me back. i started writing a lot to try

to understand what was happening. i think they've informed each other pretty closely because law is such story-making enterprise. >> ben, the math genius who was insufferable as a child. i'm sure you weren't real. >> math really comes into it and there's a moment toward this end of the book where you really -- you turn on that brain of yours and come up with something you call the matrix of lies, right? talk about how the math and that side of you, that analytical brain of yours, is so much a part of the way the story unfolds. >> well, i found that answer from alexandria fascinating, and i see a lot in common with science, actually. i think science maybe even more than law, we see as a realm that is succeeded in excising

subjectivity in excising narrative, and creating a path to truth that doesn't depend on individual perspective. some ways that's the whole point of science. and yet it's not true. yet, scientist are people. and yet scientific theories offer ways -- lenses of looking at the world that shatter when a century later it turns out that, oops, relativity. so, i think for me, the step away from science was sort of personally shattering. i -- when i started to encount their way that subjective was showing up in alex's story and competing perspectives issue felt completely at sea and really at a loss for how to handle. i i was expecting science to provide the answer as it always had for me in the past. but then overtime i came to understand narrative and story-telling as in fact its own way toward a truth.

i'm not dish don't think it's all just different stories and anyone is as good as any other. i think no story is finally and absolutely true but they approach truth. the get us closer to it. and the book became this long process of working closer and closer to truth, through setting this stories against each other as a trial does. then in the end, as you say, i bizarrely, the final process was taking my mathematical mind some shopping up stories into a giant mate direction, story froms that apply to different moments and slipping around and slicing and dicing and the new pattern popped out i never expected. this coherent alternative narrative that end up solving the mystery i'd been going for all along. >> so i have about a million more questions for these guys but i want to open it up in case anybody here has some questions

for them. so, if you have a question and you want to couple the mic up here, you're welcome to. it's your chance to be on booktv. no one wants to give that up. you have a question, sir? >> sure. i have a question for mr. blum. i think part of the your book's appeal or shock value was the fact that these were all-american boys in the u.s. military doing armed bank republicry but that didn't come as any surprise to mitchell uncle's unit in korea -- before he went to korea, 111th 111th airborne had all the private ubels taken from from enlisted troopers and only commissioned officers can keep them because they'd been going on a bank-robbing spree, knowing they were going korea next. >> what's your question for mr. blum? >> so, the question i have about the book, after reading it, i is about you and your family and

why nobody in your family ever, from what i read in the book, ever said anything to discourage alex from going the military during a time of unprovoked wars of aggression -- >> okay. >> that are the results of which his being part of are not going to be good for him by any means whatsoever, much less any people abroad who he kills. >> we got it. >> so -- there's something --time i. >> i'm going cut you off, sir. >> you're moral come bus -- >> whoa, okay. well,. >> that's okay. i i appreciate the question. first of all, thank you for relate that anecdote about korean war soldiers. i have to look that up. that's hard to find stories at the intersections of soldier and bank robbery. thought it was new territory. i appreciate the political feelings. i certainly share some of them. the family does as well, but

the -- there's a broad political spectrum within the family. these kinds of political conversations are hard for families to have. some of us supported alex in his decision and some didn't. you're certainly entitled to your feelings as well but maltly he -- ultimately die think that everyone has the right to make their own choices and that was the position we came to with alex. >> yes. >> this is for alexandria. i am curious in your revealing in your book the experience you had with your grandfather and i'm wondering now, in this time of, like, the me-too movement, where women are coming out online and let agos know, many others know, they may have been sexually harassed or assaulted

in the work place do you feel like the same level -- do you feel like our society has reached a comfort level -- similar comfort level when it comes to matter of childhood sexual assault, particularly when it involving families? >> that's an a fantastic question. thank you. i would say -- so, i knew, of course, this was a widespread problem. i knew that from the statistics we have, but i wasn't prepared for the outpouring i would hear. for the first four months this book was out, i got between one and three e-mails every single day. from people talking about what happened in their family. now it's about four a week. that is a magnitude. just people who are choosing to wright to me. a magnitude that says, my family -- because people were uncomfortable talking about this, i it was covered up and i felt alone if think we're

starting to recognize just how not alone people who have had these experiences are. i dearly hope that some of the stigma against talking but it will amile you'reate -- ameliorate. silence perpetuates the problem and many families have the experiencey silent meant we didn't know what was happening. are people ready? i don't know. it was shocking to me. i'm trained as a lawyer. i was really far into writing this book, writing the third part of the book, with realized what my grandfather had done was crime. i was thinking of what langley had done as a crime. didn't occur know think in legal terms with respect to my orb life. we have defensor around who we can recognize as criminals, really. and my grandfather was many thing. also a really loving grandfather who taught me to draw and first artist i ever knew and deeply

influenced my life in that way, but also committing a crime. so, there's no short answer to you question except that, god, i hope we're ready. it's time be readity. dearly hope this book can contribute to having that conversation. [applause] >> so we are out of time but i want to say two things. we have barely scratched the surface. the two books are so interesting and compelling and i hope that you will take some time to now follow us to the signing tent because both alexandria and ben are going to sign copies. you can pick up copy advertise book people tent before hand. can we please give a big round of applause to alexandria and ben. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

we're please teed be joined by author and journalist, jefferson morley. his most recent book the called "the ghost: the secret life of cia spymaster james acknowledge ton." who was mr. angle ton, mr. morley? >> guest: born in 1917, 100 years old this year. a yale educated spy, and one of re t