biographies but also the book 1776 that i read a while back that, it's about that pivotal year and the founding of america but it's really about george washington who is my favorite president. another book, i come up from a think tank back on, that's what it for 25 it before i ran for congress. i'm kind of a nerd i guess, and i've been in meetings with scott with what his ideas of what we need to do to have a quality healthcare system, and to think i would add an affordable healthcare system. a couple of the books that i've read this summer, one back in the spring come was the little things by andy andrews. it's a really good little book. i've read i think practically everything and andy has written turkeys an excellent author. my wife is reading one of his books right now, the travelers

gift. and then also just finished a book called the power of a humble life, and really convicting a guy named richard simmons is actually a resident in birmingham, an outstanding book, and then on my list for the rest of the summer is a book by eric metaxas called if you can keep it, and then one that by gordon would, friends divided. i'm looking for to reason that because it's about thomas jefferson and john adams, and i think most people understand the importance of those two adjustment to the founding of the republic. obviously adams was her second president i do not sure they know the back story and that's i

think this book is about. adams and jefferson were great friends. adams had a tremendous opinion of jefferson intellect and his writing ability and it was adams insisted that jefferson as part of the committee, jefferson be the one who actually wrote the draft of the declaration, and later in life they became estranged. jefferson ran for presidency, and beat adams. adams was not able to serve the second term, and that caused a few between the two. over the years after jefferson left office, their friends begin to encourage him to reconcile and they begin by writing letters to fascinating and insightful letters and they were reconciled. i like to take people on private tours of the capitol at night and it will take them to the rotunda and the show them the

painting of the signing of a declaration, trumbull was a contemporary of adams and jefferson any new the dynamics of the relationship and on how many people have noticed this, but in the painting he painted jefferson standing on adams left foot which i think was his way of capturing that division that existed for a while. but the good news is they were reconciled, and adams died on july 4, 1826, 50 years to the day, and it's reported his last words, if not his last words come close to his last words were thank god jefferson lived. jefferson died four hours looted. i think it's really interesting the path that these two gentlemen took and how they came back together towards the end of their lives and the died on the same day i look forward to

reading that, getting a little more of the baxter. >> booktv wants to know what you'reib reading. send us your summer reading list @booktv on twitter, instagram, or on facebook. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. .. as you go from place to place and sometimes the journey is just what happens in the day. just what happens today, i drove from durango to hear and nothing happened,really . it was just 550 and the landscape opening up.

but also stopping for a moment at fresno, butte and just standing out there in the desert and lookingaround and seeing the landscape . seeing the rise of the san juan in the distance. seeing how this place looks like chess pieces set out on a board and you can map your life in so many ways before you based on the shape of the landscape and that's what i love about living and being in the southwest everything is exposed, where you can see from point to point and your journeys are marked on the shape of the horizon . it feels like a place meant for migration, meant for movement, where you can tell where you come from and where you are going and i know this

extends to the rest of the continent. it's just that here, it makes so much sense. here, it feels like you are in a place where you can map your self based on the compass marks of what stands above the skyline. but it does extend to everywhere out here. this continent is a place of migrants. everyone came from somewhere. my children are a quarter corian, a quarter welsh, a quarter german and a quarter what ever else made it this far and think aboutyour own bloodline. think about how many histories are here and go back to the oldest stories . i was talking with a woman in southeast alaska who was a

scholar in her tribe and we were talkingabout ice age stories and original legends , emergent stories. the oldest stories there are and we were talking about first about how raven the trickster god used to be white and then through a story, through a series of mishaps he was burned and became black and he said this is a story about the ice age. that the animals were white and the glaciers moved back in the darker animals moved back and the dark raven moved in. these old stories tell memories of ice ages, just departing and the glaciers retreating back into the mountains and raven going from white to black. trickster god raven, she said was walking along the beach

and he came upon a clamshell that had washed in and he leaned down and listened to the clamshell and he could hear inside the building of people and he was curious so he drove his beef into the seamen opened up the clamshell and out came the first people. the oldest stories are about arrivals or about emergence. about coming from the ground, coming from a watery underworld. coming in a clamshell on the cross the pacific and landing on the coast in northern british columbia.the stories are about getting here from someplace else, about the journey and that's one of the reasons i this book was to look at the journeys to this continent and what was going on here when first people arrive. what was their world before this world because we're talking about

archaeologically, probably between 27,000 and 15,000 years ago. this was a whole different kind of world. landscape is not really that much different and the ice age is not that long ago, even though it's the previous geologic arrow four hours, the mountains are on the same places. the rivers are on the same places . what really looks different are the coastlines because when ice was on land, all that water was taken out of the ccclevels were 400 feet down so the coast were rewritten . i wrote this book to look at that land, to see what it was like 20,000 years ago. what people would have encountered. came from which direction, who stopped and who didn't. who disappeared and who is still here .

i'm interested in this for a lot of different reasons. it's hard to tell where a book begins because it begins with many different stories. it begins with time in my early 20s when i was on the yukon river and a friend of mine got hold of the canoe and we went out for 50 days on thousand miles down the yukon from whitehorse into alaska and where the river spreads wide. i remember a stretch on the map, a river miles wide and it's degrading in between these islands of black goop and the sun is going around and around your head and i've never been that far out in the woods before and i felt like we were moving across the curve of the planet. you were out in the big open and i insisted on being on the bow of the canoe as i

wanted to be in the front. i wanted there to be as little as possible between me and the world splitting around me and i swear it felt like i was first. like nobody had been here before and granted in my early 20s, nobody had been there before. that's how i imagined the world coming to me. i decided the horizon was giving birth to itself over and over again. but then there were much older stories. but for that moment, you feel as if there is no one else on the planet. it is just the two of you and you are in the bow, it's just one of you and we were in commute for 50 days so you're stern, you're looking at the back of somebody's head the wholetime . and at one point out there in the flats import yukon, with that beard, it's the first

time we had beard for a while and i knew my partner well enough that three beersand he falls asleep . so he was drinking beer and i was pretending like i was drinking beers and stashing them until he passed out . i remember him just asleep in his car arm hanging over the gun whale with his fingers and the arctic terms were attacking him because you know the arctic terms are coming all the way from south america to the arctic to their breeding ground so they are highly defensive so if you pass anywhere near their breeding grounds they attack you so their swooping down at him for some reason so i crawled to the canoe and sat there with my paddle open air. that's the deal with arctic terms. i would sit around and they would attack the journal instead ofmy head. so i took a paddle and i held it up . and that kept the turns off

of him and that's how we drifted off into the yukon flats. my friend passed out, me crouched with this paddle but it's the first time in weeks i was alone and he was unconscious . and it felt like we were drifting over the edge of the planet . we landed in a village and it wasn't named on the map, it was just a little circle and up there it's hard to keep track of time if you don't have to watch as the sun is going around and around and it could be at two in the afternoon, it could be for in the morning, it's hard to tell and if you get into a village everybody saw all the time. all of alaska, everybody's up all the time all summer you still don't know what time it is and he landed in the village and i said what's the name of this village?

somebody said this is in a village. and i went oh, it's a village. i'm from arizona originally and they're going awesome, but and i said today, that means the people.there are people who live 2000 miles south of here who are alternate, they call themselves gin a's in other words started coming up and i guess before that i didn't think about how people move, i just thought people moved like my mom and i would move. he would say we live in phoenix and we're going to denver. but i didn't think about how languages move and how our landscape is interwoven with this history. i just thought people are everywhere and that's the way it is but hearing these words , seeing jen a there started connecting lines. connected routes for me where i went oh, there are connections between the arctic and the desert, that

languages span and they remember the movement of people and i was just in this village going crazy. i was like you guys, this is amazing. there are people in this desert and these big law towers in juniper trees that are all twisted and people are listening tome going yeah . could be. but for me, it was just having a glimpse. it was as if the door was opening for the first time and i could see the movement of people and thinking about my own history. why am i out on the edge of the world? out here on this trip we kept running into people from japan, solotravelers from japan . and just way out there. i remember we hadn't seen anybody for days and we saw somebody waving from shore far, far away.

the current will take you into these clues that might take you for days off into a side channel. he was from tokyo and on his journey from the bering sea. we had our act together. he had nothing. he was bare-bones and he was lost for two weeks. he'd gone out onto the sloughs and had alogjam . he didn't know where he was. and we open maps for him and got food out and he said he had seen some 50 wheels, and he had been stealing fish and i was going on no. you don't want to steal fish fromwheels.

these territories have been around for a really long time and he gave us, and pulled out his bucket of salmon eggs, had a five gallon bucket of salmon eggs you been eating and they were getting pretty sticky and crusty but that's what he had to give us and we had whatever food, who knows what we had in our supplies but we were bringing it out giving it to them and we were out in the middle of the landscape known as easter or india. for india is the subcontinent that stretches between northern yukon and into central siberia and this eastside is alaska and it's the east side of the bering land bridge and it is in theory there are people who cross the land bridge stopped for 8 to 15,000 years and became genetically and linguistically isolated from eurasian roots. and as we were, when i look

back back at this meeting between us and this japanese guy who was on this crazy adventure us off on this crazy adventure i think who are we? why are we looking for the edge of the world? why are we drifting as far out as we can and was it like this 27,000 years ago. out in for ngo where you would see somebody in the distance and humans were probably so few and far between you wouldn't have known if this was an enemy, a friend and maybe it wouldn't have mattered. it was human and this was a back door of the world. this was the arctic during the human diaspora which is a slow diaspora, especially when you're getting out to the very edges, getting up into siberia toward the bering land bridge. this is the back door of the

human world to to see somebody else, it must have been the same experience of two entirely different languages meeting 27,000 years ago in boring gr, exchanging food and gestures and showing maps and saying this is where we're coming from, where are you coming from? you are lost, eating salmon eggs and stealing from fish wheels. this is how it would have happened. exchanging stories. this is your map. somebody tells you what was farther out there and you say what you saw and you learn a couple words from each other and then you part. i remember paddling away and leaving him behind which was a curious experience because we been way out for a long time and hadn't really seen other people. when we paddled away, menudo

stayed at his camp and kept waving. after half a mile i could barely make him out. his island disappeared and the isolation hit me like nothing i've felt before . in our short time together we become a small clan. this wasn't loneliness i felt to myself for menudo or time but for the three of us together. we found ourselves and again had set ourselves adrift. a clan of people who falloff the edge of the world . this started in a lot of places. it started there in alaska, hearing about the village and is starting to imagine the connections between people across time and distances. it also began before people were on this continent. it began 300,000 years ago in a cave in colorado where i was on a pleistocene

excavation. why don't i just read? this is a reading, right? nothing stirred in the bowels of the earth . bones lay on bones in silence. cave shot, it's infants collapsed. the last geological before our own. anything stuck inside never got out. the first inkling of new life was the white light of the headlamp and the rash of small metal tools. i lay on my side with my heart all, working on the camel that had died back here . awkward place for anything to die, i thought. it was a crack in the backside of a small chamber which is why they gave the site to me. i was in my early 30s, base camp for a museum crew working on one of the most prolific bone producing sites in the american west. porcupine keys in the mountains of central colorado. turns out bones for the most

part with the occasional of discovering a little fetuses, but to loans of horses, cores of bison horns. elsewhere doesn't excavators in the cave and screeners were pulling up a treasure trove of pleistocene porcupines and squirrels. filling and labeling bags while i was alone in a whole catalog sterno. i imagined the camera crawling into the its hindquarters/like sabertooth or hamstrung by firewalls trying to save itself and dying here. when the silver miners blasted in the mountainside in 1860s, they accidentally clipped one of the cave's chambers . so they popped open the panel with wooden posts and beams, then dropped into it there when found pathways, crystals and don't the rooms, or is buried in dust, bones sealed

in 300,000 years ago. now a ladder, cross paleontologist down through the hole that miners had open. they moved through the molasses smell of urine into the dark, crawling through those spots, pushing beer, headlamps shining on each other's souls. they went to their own trenches with screams and vacuums setting up grids, fingers picking through countless rodent bones. i went to the camel. i remember two seasons of working on this camel. weeks of taking little tools and scraping up its eyesockets, getting all the dirt out and accidentally peeling off a tiny little sliver of bone and going sorry. and i can't and of course said nothing. >> but this camel as i was working with i kept thinking this is from before people. this is from a time when the earth had two sides.

this side of the planet had no people. the other side had hominids and early humans and homo sapiens. the presence of creatures with hands going back one, 2 million years depending where you are. whereas this planet was off-limits. hard to get to. the journey to get here required great effort. the only way to get here by land would have been across the land bridge, connecting asia to north america when sea levels were down and it wasn't a bridge, it wasn't a narrow causeway, it was a subcontinent. if you were in the middle of elaborate you would have been 500 miles from the nearest shorelinewhere now of the land bridge , st. lawrence island, this being shaped island between alaska and siberia. that was the way to get across my foot except on the other side that we think you walked across the land bridge

and boom, you are in north america but no, there's an ice sitting on half of north america and the shortest way across is 1800 miles of just straight ice. before you would ramp down into the dakotas or the eastern oregon. and washington. so it's not an easy place to get to. because just the land bridge is way out in the middle of nowhere and i'm thinking this is i'm working on this camel going you don't know us yet. you've never encountered our kind. this is a moments before it happens. lunch everyone else left the cave and step down generator up top so they could eat in peace. i stayed below because my days be quick. i had to leave the cave early, run two miles back to camp and get a campfire going. the generator off, all were campers fell into darkness as i kept working, the only light in the pit of the earth . i heard the pump of a man

striking rock on the surface of the where it swept through snow with its cost looking for winter browse. a colombian manner, the longest of its kind in the world with 13 feet tall at the shoulder.i kept digging and scratching as i felt the boom of its steps as it moved its tonnage forward. it would have been planner and i strained to listen for them padding across the ground about me. i did not imagine the sound of people. no cracking stone on stone were switched from wooden rhyme making fire. instead i imagine the country empty lot of us long before human eyes. in my imagination i rose up through the entrance of porcupines the , shielding my eyes and sunlight across brace glaciers. beaches of costs and goes grazing in the ballet below. would have been in the same position. thousands of planes, mostly unmoved, wheelers in much the

same places that they were now. more ice existed and we have to day in the form of glaciers and ice caps, causing sea levels to drain by a few hundred feet, rewriting the coastline. 10 years ago it's not hard to imagine 100 is well within grass. you probably know people who live that long. 10,000 years is 100 lifetimes. it was around 250 lifetimes ago that people began to arrive in north america into the ice age megaphone. i listened through the case for the moment before the arrival. time without timearea . >> i was with a singer in his home on the north side of non-whole mountain talking about this question, about where people came from and his grandson has grown adult grandson was translating from

dna into english and i was asking these questions about my migration and the singer said that there was no migration, we came from the ground. and i feel stupid about this whole encounter so i write about things that i do stupidly in books. i wrote about this moment where i was going no, i didn't explain myself right. i'm not talking about stories of emergence, i'm talking about archaeological data and linguistics and so let me try to explain. then he listens and he says yes, we came up from the ground. this linguistic stuff, that's something else and i went oh, it's getting lost in translation. how do i saythis ? i ran into this people in a village in the arctic and i went through the whole story. and he's just listening to me

and just going okay. how do i explain this? he pointed to the ground and he said we came from the ground and i looked down at the red hardtack and i went oh, the ground. that place, you came out of the ground and i feel like in this book this is, i'm holding these different stories in my hands going okay, i was told this story about emergence and i spent time with archaeologists who told me this story and how do these stories move together. and i'm not you're trying to figure out how i got here. i'm walking around the continent going okay. i showed up, how do i fit into this story? i feel sometimes i washed up on the beach and i'm standing up going new land, what do i do now?

cause i'm here. and this book is my own journey of trying to find my place andgoing how long does it take ?how many tens of thousands of years for you've emerged from the ground? how many stories have come to this place? i went to an excavation in texas. it's called the eagle site on buttermilk creek and its the dates of human occupationare going back 15,500 years . that's the lowest level. let me read from goal. the uppermost excavated horizon was the size of the living room. down through tears , passing into older dates, arrowheads and small points going into

post colombian indians, below them more mound builders, woodland hunter gatherers from 1000 years ago, people who wouldnot have known of europe . another step i was at eye level with big-game hunters from the holocene 6000 years ago. down the wooden stairs, bits of charcoal start out walls, the leavings of people returning over and over for the goodness of the spring that flows here. below them were kaleo archaic hunter gatherers who knew of this church, learning of it from those before them. the pleistocene people, the mammoth eaters. the stairs continued past nails with strength , damp dirt walls becoming soaked. the water table came up around me. bones of pleistocene roses and the mammoths found in layers, parks oil and water. 13,000 years ago i was in the closest age, the rise of the mammoth hunters, long thought to be the first people in north america. their unique stone tool

technology swept the continent like wildfire. i decided to human occupation , 15,000 years old. the pre-columbian layers of buttermilk beach or buttermilk creek which have produced 15,528 artifacts in the form of broken pieces of tools, projectiles and work stone.proof that clovis was not first. at the bottom of the pit, a wood plank on blocks amid standing water. the plant bowed under my weight, touching the oldest money human horizons. last of the work stone, stair soil below. the goal has reached 15,500 years old, a solid timeframe for human arrival in this part of texas. here, plastic bags were in a bucket, each holding a rock that had been found in its deepest horizon area i found through the bottommost artifact. found the whole corridor

around its edges to get down to a workable piece. open the bag and split the stone into my hand.it was a discard, something the toolmaker had thrown aside maybe a particular rock would have liked, it had so much packing on one side and was so thick in the middle it could have been pickup and work again but it was forgotten. all is big as my paul, it was heavy and sharp enough to cut flesh. i hand wrapped around the school service, and gritty. it felt amniotic, still wet from birth . holding that stone in my hand, going down to the bottom ofthis fit , i bought back to the singer telling me we came from the ground and i thought of course. this makes sense in an archaeological context also. here are these trenches going down deeper and deeper until you are in the water, until

generators are pumping water through tubes and filling up like a swimming pool and here, they are opening up his face inthe underworld is full of people , full of remnants sticking out of the soil. these stories are in the ground all around us . but then this is a human story which is only half of this book. the other half is this story. because i'm really curious about what kind of world people lived in during the ice age and so while i was writing this book and this was a long book, five years of research on this which for me, i generally write a book in a year or two so this just consumed me and the whole time i was sitting on my desk staring at me. and i'm imagining what it's like cause if you get a chance, come up and touch these teeth and you will feel these are sharp on both

sides. this is meant for getting on back of the mammoth and a giant bison and just tearing and cutting through arteries and veins so that the animal will bleed out and i'm thinking, how would this work on me? or with this thing just walk around me and go no, too small. but this was, there were many big cats living in north america at the time. there was a 500 pound are called the american lion and it was more lionlike. there was also one that had canines about this long so maybe half the length and instead of these blades it had sought teeth on the inside of and rather than being an artery slasher, the cat, it's teeth are designed

to get in and get under a piece of flesh and peel it back and take big stakes on an animal. i spent a lot of time thinking which one i would rather die by . i think the scimitar cat would be a lot of kicking and screaming where this would just cut you wide open and it would be over so i'm going for this guy. when i go to school, the kids are always asking which one would win if you got a sabertooth cat and a scimitar cat, who's going to win? i don't know. you figure it out. it would have been a rough and tumble world to walk into because think about europe at the time. think about the painted caves of the iberian peninsula and something i often wondered is why are there similar painted caves in north america and then i realized they were hanging out around these caves 70,000 years before

anybody started painting and maybe it takes that long to feel comfortable with a place and do a little something on the wall . this was a whole different story. the americas are unlike the other side of the planet because here, people showed up in a landscape where humans were not known. it was an animal landscape entirely so humans would have been few and far between. and here in a world of giant animals, of ground that are standing one story tall, the beavers, the giant beavers of the ice age, it was the americas standing on their hind legs were six feet tall. so everything is big. humans are few. humans are coming with dogs and it's looking like one of the oldest gate of the domestic dog is out of florida out of a sinkhole where it looks like they're going back 15,000 years and that these dogs have siberian lineage so these are wolf dogs came over from siberia.

so you're walking into this landscape of giant animals and no room for humans, really. you've got to findyour niche in this place . so it's just a whole different world. i think realistic people were badasses. i think paleolithic people in the americas, all i got. they had to figure something out in order to survive here. and the people who went north, the people who went into siberia, they were also different from people who stayed in the south. they have skins in order to survive but youdidn't need . you didn't need skins in borneo. where people were living with much simpler tools because you didn't, you were having to fend off mammoths and sabertooth cats that parse out what in the north, people are having to wear clothes and i had sewing needles made

of metal ivory have been found in alaska and in. so people are doing tailored fitting clothing. probably the first residential structures made by humans were done in the north. they start to appear 25, 27,000 years ago in iberia and it's the only way to survive in the foreign. you need shelter so there are all kinds of adaptations.i look at people coming and going up into the north and having to change their technology, and adapt to a new environment and spending a 15,000 years incubating, separating on the rest of the world. this is a whole different human story from the other side of the planet . and the ice, when i went out on an ice sheet as part of this book, one of my objects

was to gather the data and go on to the ground and followed follow their route, on to the landscapes they crossed through. face similar conditions as i could find. i joined a group of people crossing the harding ice fields in south-central alaska which is 700 square miles of ice. and just seeing how group dynamics work. how we face professes. how do you deal with this ice landscape and in the end i got went away going back. but that's not a way to get children into north america because the migration is not a bunch of yahoos going where going to cross a nice feeling. that's just a lark. but if you want to get into a company, you have to have grandfathers, grandmothers written. you have to have a group. you have to have a survival population and the ice sheet is not the way to do it.

the likely way that people came into the americas was michael . my thin boats coming down the west coast and the book travel is well known on the asian side to the paleolithic . there were nights off the coast of japan where people had to reach my boat. the artifacts that they'renot just clinging to a long and drifting over there. they're coming in numbers . and these sites are dating back to 30,000, 35,000 years ago so there's both travel on way back in the humanrecord . so you look at the american side and the ice started retreating about 17,000 years ago and that's where the coastline started revealing itself, going from alaska to washington state . this was, by 17,000 years ago you had a contiguous coastline that you could have followed theoretically from

thomas to all the way up across the bering land bridge coast down the americas to southern chile. this was one long coastline and evidence of human travel is becoming more and more clear as researchers are looking into underwater archaeology. one of the most crucial sites in american ice age human occupation happens to be in southern chile which is as far from the land bridge as you can get. the monthly bird a site and this goes back solidly to 14,500 years ago. i excavated their findings, 17,000-year-old find in the head excavator there, he thinks he's found human signs 30,000 years. so you've got these old days

at the far end of south america which denis says this story of arrival in north america is much more complex than a bunch of mammoth hunters coming across the land bridge. there were multiple ways of getting here, probably multiple groups. some survived, some didn't. one of the groups that i believe did not survive is on the east coast. there is evidence of an early european arrival around maryland, virginia, chesapeake bay because the tools found that there are holes identical to what is being found in northern spain and southern france. archaeologists, a number of them came up as i was writing the book and said don't write about that part and as soon as an archaeologist says don't write about that part i go all right, there's something there. i went to the smithsonian and

talk to people were working on this and these artifacts look like they are made from local rock but they are made in a european style. but this is a european parents. this is a europe which at that time, people were more homogeneous than we are now. we're not talking about europeans. we're talking about a different group of people and there are probably ice hunters working these ice flows that are floating around in the north atlantic and maybe they were lost and they landed on the east coast . some archaeologists and maybe they landed but there were already here waving at them as they showed up. but the thing is there's no genetic record of their presence. to me, that means they landed but they didn't survive. there were enough of them to leave tools but either they were too isolated or they

were eating or who knows what happened but that was one failed landing and i think there were many. i think there would have been many groups. when i look at the coastal arrival, i went back to the story of ravens and the clamshell and the clamshell is said to have landed on the shores of these islands in northern dc.that's where raven found the first people. i look at the story and i thought how would you get here? if you set off from somewhere where would you have come from? i looked at the fukushima earthquake and the tsunami and all of the debris washed back into the pacific but then carried around the north america and i found the first the first artifacts to land on the shores of north

america was took a month to get across those pacific under the power of parents. so i'm imagining people in a boat fishing and hunting off the coast of japan, getting lost for blown up and drifting for a month and then starting to see bird, starting to see ways and seals and seeing a landmass in the distance with a giant ice cap over it.and approaching it and landing on the coast of hay deguy and wondering where they are in the world. the first object to land in north america from shiva landed on the coast of hay deguy where the clamshell landed and it happened to the harley-davidson motorcycle. >> it was in a container that rolled up onto the shore, spilled off the motorcycle and rolled back into the sea. and so in this book i'm

looking at these layers, i'm saying okay, clamshell, raven, both travel, harley-davidson. hay deguy, it's all coming together and i go from landscape to landscape putting these layers together because i think we look into the path and we go that's the path. it's so long ago we can't even imagine it anymore but i don't thinkit's that long ago. i think we are in the continual . i was down in white sands for one of the chapters in this book and mammoth tracks have been appearing for quite some time out on the missile range because it was a dry lake bed . the mammoths walking across the lake bed left whole track ways for you can see them walking. and these are fossil tracks. they're not rocks. they're just impressions in the mind that were then buried and now the wind is scraping off the surface and

revealing these mushroom shapes sticking up and they don't last that long. they might only last year's four they are swept off because they are just. and i was traveling down there with some friends and then we were, i was writing about clovis and fulcrum technology and i was down there with a friend of mine was a bomb the user in iraq. he's talking about weapons and we're walking on the edge of the bombing range and finding shrapnel and everything else and he's looking at the ground going this is what humans do. they killed. they make big weapons and i'm looking at these going and clovis points were found here too. oh there's a bombing range. there are clovis weapons, mammoth tracks out there. you're walking in these dust storms blowing off the playa and itfeels like time is getting compressed so that everything is happening at once . that you see on the track way

out there and you're seeing the man. you're standing in a place where a mammoth occupied space in the air and you're hearing the explosions of missile tests going on downrange from you and at the same time looking at the horizon where the trinity site in 1945 , the first atomic weapon in human history was detonated. and then about eight miles from is a cycle mockingbird which is one of the largest clovis in the west. so you got this big clovis with a nuclear bomb and you've got mammoth tracks and it's all compressed right there and you're thinking about weaponry, you're thinking about clovis who were making weapons that were way too big. i picked up some of these clovis points from a museum

collection and they are that long. i'm talking to archaeologists going what's up with this and they're going i don't know, you can't really use that. i'm looking at nuclear weapons going same thing. it's just too big and this , being out there on the land inking if you showed up 10,000 years from now, if you were an archaeologist, you would see the trinity site. you see clovis weapons and continue on. you would think people lived here from 13,000 years ago. until this ball was set off and this is where it came with weapon. it comes down to details where the parts for the bomb set off the trinity site where were assembled or parts were assembled in los alamos and brought down and built into the bomb and detonated out there. the stones that were showed up at the mockingbird gap site, the exotic stones were up from around los alamos.

and brought down here. and no, it doesn't mean anything. >> it's just happenstance but i see those things and i are we just doing the same thing over and over again? do we come to the land and do what it tells us to do? and what do we do now? that's the question in this book is here we are at the point that people were at 13,000 years ago with massive climate changes, sealevel rise and some archaeologists are looking at that period of time and saying that when they started hunting mammoths, that's when they started killing off mega fauna on a scale that can be seen before. one archaeologist i talked to, bruce bradley was a lithic specialist said he believes that the reaction to

the environment falling apart was people saying we are giants. we are big. we killed the biggest animal. we will ritualized the killing of the biggest animal. i look at that now and say are we doing the samething? are we trying to make ourselves big where do we do what clovis did is adapt ? these giant weapons smaller until full some points were that big. so i'm looking at these layers of time throughout this book and piecing this all back together as well as i can and i think i figured out how it happened. i figured out the migration process and what people encounter and i traveled to florida to the back rivers of new jersey, oregon. i sawpart of this continent that i've never imagined . to piece this story back together. to go back into the ground and say here are the oldest stories. and they will keep getting older. i think the more we look into the ground, the more we will find these dates keep going back into time and i don't

know how old we will finally go. there was a site that came out recently in san diego where mammoth bones were found and they look shattered open with rock with very precise blows and the rocks are still there andyou can see the break mark on the rock . i talked to the archaeologist who found this and he's convinced this is real. that is one site only but they are mastodon bones and their dating to 130,000 years ago which throws things off so far you don't even want to talk about it because science is a very slowly moving discipline and this is way too fast. but it makes sense. this was probably a comedy, maybe not even a homo sapiens. it was somebody who came across an earlier iteration

of the land bridge. how long has this been going on, how many ways are there to get to this place and what do you do whenyou get here. what stories do you leave ? there's a panel in northern nevada. that it's unusual to be able to date a panel but this one is on a lake edge where the lake level has risen and fallen multiple times so it leaves a calcium carbonate level that can be dated and the oldest date inside this rockhard is 14,800 years old. so i stood out there and just imagined this was the beginning. and it probably wasn't even the beginning. you can't find the beginning. who wasfirst. it's a ridiculous question . it keeps going back farther and farther to the ground until people came out of the ground. until the clamshell landed on the side of the world. everybody has stories.

everybody has memories. lineage that we bring in this room. >> became here at different times. with different ways. different places. and the stories go deeper and deeper and deeper to where the water is gathering and there's stones like human hands. deep inside the earth. thank you. thank you for listening to me. >> thank you. [applause] >> book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. to us, twitter.com tv or post a comment on her facebook page. facebook.com/book tv. >>. >> you're watching tv on c-span two. one of the things we like to do when we come to the publishers convention in new york is bringing some of the books coming out in the fall. and joining us now is a long time publishing news reporter

and editor. sarah weinman is now a first-time author. sarahweinman , the book is called real lolita. before we get into that, who was vladimir knockoff? >> he was a russian born eventual american in a great author. the author of many novels of whom a wonderful autobiography but most of america would know him for his iconic and still very much controversial novel lolita which came in for publication in 1958. it has never been out of print since and has never stop being talked about. >> came out in 1958, pretty racy, pretty controversial. >> about aman named humbert , 37 years old. it's told from his vantage point and he's very accurately but stylistically describes his affinity and proclivities for prepubescent

girls. so he arrives in town and he alights on a girl named dolores 12 years old and he names verbally and through various machinations she ends up in his clutches. they go on this road trip and because it's from his point of view you get the sense that there's a great romance happening but of course in reality it far more horrible and nightmarish, especially for the 12-year-old girl who has been robbed of her childhood . >> what was now a cause reputation as a writer? >> the time he was considered to be one of the greatest russian language writers and when he arrived he had just begun writing in english so he had already started publishing novels and other works but he was considered to be a great literary artist and writer area but when he was working on lolita, he would write letters to

friends and sort of confess how challenging the subject matter was but as i discovered in my book had been dealing in various literary forms with this particular compulsion dating back early in his career. there was a poem he wrote in the 20s that deals with the subject matter. there are paragraphs in other novels that it really didn't come to fruition until he wrote and published lolita. >> let's get to the story in the book. who is sally harper? >> sally porter was an 11-year-old girl born and raised in camden new jersey and sometime in the spring of 1948 she had been dared by a group of girls in her school. she wanted to join. it was sort of like a girls club or something along those lines and she wanted to be among the popular kids. she was a lonely girl. being raised by single mothers, her father had

killed herself when she was six years old. and but there it was. she had to steal on the book from a local woolworths. she had come out of prison for serving time for various crimes and he catches her out and then as he's doing so he says i'm an fbi agent and you're under arrest. he wasn't an fbi agent but sally didn't know better. so he let her go and for several months she thinks she's home free and in june 1948, he finds her again. and says you have to come with me or else you're going to go to the reform school though he essentially manipulates her into telling her mother they're going to go away to atlantic city for a week and she agrees because she's feeling guilty. she wants to get sally a vacation. allie goes away to atlantic city for a while she's writing her mother letters and then the letters top and

the phone calls and she gets one last letter, we're going to baltimore. this is late july 48 minus point mother realizes nothing terrible has happened. she really realizes nothing terrible has happened when the police are called and they tell her this guy frank lasalle, the reason he was in prison was for the statutory rape of five girls. that's the beginning. that leads to a 21 month cross-country nightmare for sally that takes her from atlantic city to baltimore to texas and eventually to san jose california where she is ultimately rescued. >> sarah weinman, was this story widely reported? >> when i first started looking into this a few years ago i had seen him wire reports in the associated press, from upi so it was widely reported but i didn't realize the extent of the until later on when i got hold of the camden papers and

newspapers in philadelphia, even new york was but because the new york times didn't report on it, somehow it didn't last to the same degree but yes, there was a lot of coverage and that interesting to my point too because if the media coverage of a girl who's cannot and recovered, it was alternately very thoughtful but also weirdly sexist. like there be descriptions of sally being chunky and this is irrelevant and yet this is how sex stories were done in 1950. so that was also sort of a fascinating byproduct and the thing writing this book was got me in a lot of different reporting tangents and research tangents because trying to juggle sally horner's story with now calls writing of the lolita and all these other cultural significant moments, it was a challenge but also rewarding

to stitch it all together into this mosaic that is lolita. >> why do you call sally horner the real lolita ? >> because nabokov references the text. humbert humbert returns to the town where he meets dolores hayes, where he had married her mother and that turned out to be a disaster because he wasn't interested in her so many years have passed. dolores is now elsewhere. he comes back. he's trying to figure out things and as he's wandering through the town, he thinks had i gone to dolly, what frank lasalle had done to sally porter. there it was like a neon sign in the text and yet i who had first read believe that at the age of 16 had never realized it was there and all

the while i was writing i would ask did you know that this article phrase was in lolita?i think one person, everyone said no. there are so many other things going on in the lolita from the language standpoint, a style standpoint and did such a brilliant novel that you get distracted by all the language so of course people would miss this but obviously nabokov had a reason for leaving this clue in so as i discovered in my research, he knew a lot more about the case that anybody had realized. >> what was it like being a first-time author when you been reporting for publishers marketplace? >> it's surreal but at the same time i feel like i've been working for this moment as an author my entire career, in addition to writing and recording and editing in publishers

marketplace i've edited anthologies so i'm not unfamiliar with the process and i feel like i learned a lot from editing anthologies. so all of my crime tips and all my reporting experience, everything has kind of coalesced and when i found this story 2 years ago when it was a magazine piece, i knew from the first that there was so much more to tell about sally and her cases relationship tololita . >> ..