mister farrell, who has a book about president nixon, live coverage of tv. >> welcome to the panel where

the panel is writing great lives and as you'll hear, we've got great lives and great writers to share the stories with. i have a couple announcements they always ask me to make . one is be sure your cell phone is turned off. we don't want any calls coming in in the middle of our discussion. and also, there are no personal recordings of these sessions so please honor that. this is part of the agreement we have by getting to do this so please do both for me if you would. the argument important to know is that after the events , we will be going going over designing area one and i encourage you to come over and do that. we will be signing books and if you have more conversations you'd like to have with any of these authors, you are welcome to walk over with us, follow us or meet us over there at signing area one and we will be there as long as you want us to be there and we'll see you at the end of this event

. in general, i want to say that we are going to try to keep this as informal as we can . i would encourage all the panelists to interact with each other. i'm going to ask them to agree briefly introducing their books so you get a sense of it and i'll ask them a couple questions and hopefully they will just take over for me. my name, if you need to do know that is diane smith and i have a book here that they had in the book thing which i thought was quite thrilling to see. i'll be over here too, if you're interested in yellowstone in particular i want to give you one very quick overview of all these books and i have been to show you. this is an amazing biography of richard nixon. i call it a thriller. you know the ending and yet you have no idea what a page turner this is so i highly recommend this book.

we have a biography of muhammed ali by jonathan eig. again, an amazing, very disturbing book because again, we know what happens to him and you see it literally happening, almost feeling like seeing it happen in real life so jonathan eig will be talking about this one. visionary women with andrea barnet here. this is about four meeting women you've never seen written about together before, i think. this is an interesting way of looking at for women who were revolutionary for their time and if you are in need of inspiration these days which i know i am, this may just be your book. and finally, we have adam federman who's going to tell us about somebody who may be we don't necessarily think of as being a great life . the author and sort of

cookbook, new foods expert patients grade, amazing book and i look forward to having a discussion about the difference to writing about somebody we think we know all about, somebody like a richard nixon and somebody like a patient's gray who runs off and lives on an island and lives off the land so we have a unique combination here. i'd like to start with john farrell who wrote the richard nixon book and asked him how he came to the subject, something we think we all know everything about and it turns out we know only part of the story. >> thank you. there are some certain rules for biographers and one of them is if your publisher asks you to write a biography of an american president, you say yes. i was asked by doubleday to see if there was a story to tell about nixon and i

decided that i would actually make the argument, having done this initial research, that we live in a world richard nixon left us, both in the polarization that we have at home, north versus south, black versus white, the people on the coast versus the good folks in the heartland and in the international order, he was the person who brought china back into the world order and gave us the structure we live in and have lived in if you define peace the way he did which is without a world war for 30 years. he's a caricature for most of us, the only president to resign. we know him for watergate and for vietnam and as sort of a semi-famous story of bob dole showing up at the white house

during the reagan years to join the delegation for the noir sought funeral and he walked in there was gerald ford and former president jimmy carter and richard nixon and bob dole with that savage wit of his said , see no evil, hear no evil, no evil. but having said that, the original title for the book was richard nixon : an american tragedy. because i think it is, a tragic story. he came up in almost dickensian straits in the outback of southern california and his parents were demonstrated one way or another, one through coldness, the other through passion that they didn't think much of them but to the two favored brothers of the families died and richard had to step in but he came away with the experience believing that as he told david frost that i am on the unlovable person. can you imagine going on television? i'm such an unworthy individual that nobody could ever possibly love me and that's the way he believed.

he had this thought in the back of his head that he was this loathsome creature. he was throughout his presidency, he was the iago to his own or fellow, whispering you can't succeed, you have to play the game harder, play the game dirtier . and in the final region , due to the mysteries of the national archive, all of a sudden in this century there was a tide, a flood of new material by next in. all white house tapes were released, the histories of his childhood were released, testimony was released so i almost feel like i don't deserve any accolades because i had this really rich stuff to work with and all i sort of had to do is get out of the way. >> jonathan, you have a similar kind of challengewith your books , since we assume, we know quite what a bit about muhammed ali yet as

usual wedon't know half of what was involved . >> nixon and ali could have been opposite because ali certainly thought highlyof himself. he was the prettiest comedy was the slickest, the greatest fighter of all time and probably the most famous man of his time . he recognized before the days of the internet, even before the days of cable tv, recognized around the growth used a black, i drop out of an airplane, parachute any around the planet and walk up to any hot, a house in any village in the world and are going to love seeing me, that's how good it felt to be muhammed ali yet my story is a tragedy to in many ways because the thing that made him great was the thing that ultimately destroyed him. i was 10 years old when ali the george foreman in the rumble of the jungle when the heavyweight title back after the government had taken it away and i had this feeling

in my room and it never occurred to me as a kid that he was something more than a boxer. i says he was a spectacular personality, that he was just so incredibly attractive and hard to take your eyes off of and so entertaining but it wasn't obviously until later that i realized how interesting his life was and how relevant it is today. it's very much a story about race and religion and politics. standing up for what you believe in. when ali in 1964 announced he was abandoning christianity and joining thenation of islam and said i don't have to be what you want me to be , he became the most unpopular man in america. certainly the most unpopular man in white america. you think colin kaepernick is getting a hard time, try to imagine what ali went through in the 1960s when he was stripped of his heavyweight crown, denied the right to box in this country and sentenced to five years in prison. he really thought his boxing career was over so i began this project taking what else is there to say about the

most famous man in the world? we don't know everything about him and it turned out we didn't know much about him at all and i was able to interview everybody close to ali. i lost count after a while, more than 600 interviews for this book and was able to get sei documents that were recently released, not just from ali but members of the nation of islam. i was able to interview almost everybody close to him and really began to develop a different picture than the one that i have in my head as a kid and most of us have ali when we saw this glowing personality and his great telegenic personality. >> and when i came away with was the story that surprised me over and over that ali was so much more complicated than we thought and his life was just one of the great dramas and it's a great tragedy so,

i felt like an enormous responsibility in telling the sky story, telling the story of somebody so well-known and so famous i felt like given what's going on, it was incredibly relevant and i think that ali's story is one that we will be telling for generations to come. i'msure this will be the last biography but i think it will be the greatest . >> so andrew, you had another challenge with women, we assume we know well. rachel carson, jane jacobs, jane goodall and alice waters . and you were taking a different approach and i thought maybe you could tell us how you came to do that. >> the book grew out of the conversation i was having with a friend and i realized that there were four women, each of whom intriguingly similar and adjacent ways had changed the way we thought about the world. carson, the environment. jacob levy, goodall, animals and alice waters, food and eating and what really

interested me was that all of them, there were so many parallels in their stories, even though they didn't know each other, they were working in different fields, even in different generations so for instance, all were credentialedoutsiders. they were people who went into the field and literally got their hands literally and figuratively dirty and against all odds prevail . all were green before green had entered our vocabulary. three out of four wrote iconic books that the united social movements. and maybe most interesting, all came to power at a time when women had no voice and against all odds prevail . and all and had their breakthrough moments in the early 60s, which really interested me.i thought what was it about the cultural soil of the 60s that allow these voices to be heard and why did they speak so sincerely to the times. so of course i thought my

character was in the 1960s and but i started reading their work and i started reading books about the four women's work but also books about them, i realized my fifth character was the 1950s . because each of these women had been pushing against the values and priorities of the 1950s. the cultures increasing disconnection from nature, its love affair with science -based technology. his willingness to plunder the common with no sense of the future. it's deference to big business and all of these women very boldly had spoken up and said i don't think this is the way forward. it's easy to forget how much we absorbed their ideas and how much part of the bloodstream of the culture. in 1961, the idea was pesticides had been invented during the war , ddt particularly because it

killed insects that carry diseases. it was really good for soldiers in the trenches. it killed life at the end of the war, chemical companies had a product and they thought were going to turn it to domestic use, we will turn them and decide the idea was buns would be eliminated from riyadh we would beat up farming by using synthetic fertilizers. we would, cities it was believed were in crisis and the way to solve that was to knock down the old city. build, sort of top-down huge development projects. put up high-rise housing towers, surrounded by grass and m.d., maybe empty closets but basically to remove the old urban bread. adult animals would be fattened withpharmaceuticals, animals would be reengineered so that they were , they could fatten faster.

and that was sort of accepted that this sort of technological or technocratic mindset was what was really driving the 50s. and all these women said i don't think this is the way forward. there's another way forward, it's a more holistic way forward. we need to understand the systems that support all of these things. it's also easy to forget, one of the things i foundraising was to remember and i hadn't really known this during the 50s , in 1961, a woman in many states, a woman couldbe on jury duty because she would be neglecting her duties . if she, if she had property and she married as soon as shemarried, it was her husband's property . if they wanted to rent it, the rent was her husband. if you wanted a credit card she had to have a male cosigner. she wanted to be a scientist,

she could maybe teach, but she never was sent out to the field. she could be, if she can be a stewardess but if she had children or got married, she had to quit her job. she could be secretary, both jane goodall and jane jacobs went tosecretarial school because that's how they thought they would support themselves . maybe the most unbelievable law, well, in many states if women wore men's clothing she could be arrested. there was a story i read where a woman walked into the courtyard into the courthouse to pay her husband's parking ticket and was ordered out of the courthouse because she was wearing pants. so it's just, i thought how is it that these four untrained outsiders were able to really make inroads and really change the way we think about the whole fieldat time when no one was

listening to women . and so that became kind of the connective tissue that i was searching for as i was researching, because all along, there being sort of repetitive patterns and for instance, i was reading about , i read maybe like a lot of people, i wasn't sure if i'd read silent spring so when i read it, i said this is extremely difficult stuff but she's made it so lyrical and so literal and so eloquent. this very bad news is being delivered in a way that is just, you're able to get through it. and when i got to, then when i started reading jane jacobs, i realized he was speaking about the ecologies of cities using the same language that rachel parson was using to describethe ecosystem . jane jacobs said a city wasn't just what the

buildings lookedlike but there was a human ecology and then if you knock down the whole squad of the city , you destroy the streetlights and if the streetlights was the connective tissue, that knits together the urban bread and that's kind of one neighborhood to flow into another and citieswere fragile ecosystems and that you couldn't , you couldn't intervene from on high without really destroying their life which was the same thing that carson was saying about you can't imagine that you can put pesticides in one place and it will flow into other places. a really good example i used is if a drop of water with paramecium which is a single cell organism, it upon water dries up, where's the paramecium? it's a few specks of dust, it doesn't exist. paramecium doesn't exist except in the context of its environment so all these women were looking at basically the systems that supported theliving world .

whether it was in cities or the national environment and it was seeing the same patterns in jacobs. i was following these through lines and i really feel the biography in a way is a paradigm change. a real shift in emphasis from theory and ideology to hands-on you know, going into the field and observing very closely and see what's there.'s thank you. i want to get adam in here. one of the things that i sort of, when i took my notes about these four books, i was talking about richard nixon being a thriller. as i said, which you don't expect. mohammed ali as jonathan said, really being a tragedy and you see that tragedy unfolding in the classical sense of that word.

inspiration would be visionary women. i would consider this about a revolutionary and this woman you probably have not heard of, i certainly hadn't until i read the book so the question is how do you come to a topic about someone that you don't know that much about in your readers are not going to know that much about, how do you approach that maybe as different as you start to write about it? >> the other colorful figures we're talking about, it's safe to say relatively unknown to most people. and that presented some challenges and opportunities. perhaps the greatest challenge was convincing a publisher to do something about a person most people have never heard of. and in fact, i had never heard of patients gray until after she died in 2005. i came across her work in her life really by happenstance,

reading and obituary in the food magazine called the art of eating. the editor of the magazine had been a great champion of patients his work, and reviewed her best work coming from a weed published in 19 he six and in that obituary he describes coming from a weed as one of the greatest cookbooks that will ever be written which sounded over-the-top to me and implausible, really. but highly intriguing. and around the same time i found a copy of that book on my parents bookshelf which had been there for most of my childhood and i had never seen it and they had hardly used it there was one recipe in the margins . so i opened the book and i was completely taken away by the pros, the life that she lived. her depth of knowledge about the natural environment, wild plants, fungi. she had become over the course of her life a kind of

amateur no botanist, photographer, but she was able to put it together in a sort of masterly way is a travel writer, really. i just could not resist the impulse to know more about her. in december she had written several other books including the best-selling cookbook in the 1950s which has andrea was saying was a remarkable. and in particular for food writing , mft fisher and patience was part of that revolution. >> and really, this project was about understanding who she was and how she came to write this monumental book that had a real impact and influence on food writers in the united states and the uk. when it was published, patients was seen as a kind of guru and a number of these two writers including alice

waters made the long journey to the very tip of the sondheim peninsula to visit her. they sought her out, but by the time she died in 2005, the bbc described her as an almost forgotten culinary star my hope in this book was to reintroduce her to a contemporary audience. >> so john, we often read these biographies of people to sort of learn lessons and i'm wondering, what are the lessons welearn from richard nixon's life ? >>. >> the lesson he learned and most of what i'm going to talk about you can see on youtube. but those of you who are old enough who will remember him going into the east room of the white house on the day he resigned and standing there, respire, the only time he

wore glasses during his presidency is because he wanted to read a quote from teddy roosevelt and it was the only time in his life that he actually reflected on the tragedy and what the lesson was in the lesson was and i think it is really applicable today as we look at our country for the part. was that you never hate your enemy because it's only when you hate them that they win because you destroy yourself. and that was the lesson that i think i can't think of too many moments like it in american history. words of wisdom in that final house, really hard one through a lot of suffering. >> and the other thing jonathan, i was saying to that your book is a very poetical about ali. i'm old enough to remember the antiwar protests and what

not that he got involved with and really the religious side of his existence. i'm wondering how you managed to balance all that. to make him come alive as a totally dimensional person. >> one of the great things about ali is he's not reflective at all. he's flying by the seat of his hands, making it up as he goes along and yet he becomes this bellwether, this icon for the civil rights movement and when he dies, a year and a half ago , all these people regard to his role in the civil rights movement and he was opposed to integration. >> he said integration was a waste of time, that white people would never have any power and the only way forward was for black people to do it on their own, for their own organizations, eventually stick away from the united states, his father was a guardian and found in mohammed a new version of barbie in that it suggested that you really have to be independent but ali was all

over the place. he never really had a strong center when it came to ideals. he was of course perhaps most famous for saying that he wouldn't fight in vietnam and said i got no quarrel with viacom . he never called me the n-word and yet years later, he was asked by an interviewer if he had any regrets in life and he said yes, i regret that stuff i said about vietnam and the vietcong. for a minute i had to, i couldn't believe it. the thing that he will be remembered for most is the thing that elevated him from being an accolade and an important political figure. and why would he say that he regretted it? and to understand that is really key to understanding ali because he always wanted to rebel and he always wanted to be loved and his impulses were at war within him and

you see it from an early age, there's this myth that he used the race the bus to school in his training to become a boxer. what kind of bus was it? a city bus. doesn't the city bus stop all the time? he was doing it for attention, he'd stop every time the bus stopped. and he'd wait with it until it transferred. ali was saying that he regretted those remarks he made about vietnam, he didn't regress the stand he took. he said he would die before he would go against his religious principles. he was offered a compromise about his exhibitions and avoid prison, he wouldn't do it but what he meant was he was upset that it offended so many people. he stuck to his principles but felt bad that he had upset so many people so in the end, ali had this great desire to be loved and that trumped his desire to be respected. that's really key to understanding him, i think. >> you did that throughout

the book reading about him. there's a lot more to him it helps explain why he was married four times and a few extracurriculars. >> and also why he fought so well, because he needed the money. >> he couldn't give up boxing because he needed the money but also, what else are you going to do that going to put you in that spotlight where you have people watching you live on tv. it was what offered tv deals and movie deals he was sitting in a trailer for months and make a movie and then you're not there when people are watching you on the screen. you get to see their reaction, he had no interest whatsoever. he needed that immediate gratification. >> i wanted to raise with john again, the one thing that struck me about him that you are able to accomplish and it goes along well with this story is that you may not like him anymore then you have this image of him or respecting anymore, but i do feel like i understood him more and how he got to where

he was and i'm just wondering briefly if you can , what that challenge was because what people do care about the people you're writing about and you don't want them necessarily to recruit. >> i think that probably there are some that are beyond the pale but even explaining someone like hitler was important, to try to, where the biology comes from but basically i think the rule of a biologist, allied biographer is to approach a subject fairly, and with not sympathy like you're in the tank for them but before them as a human being.nixon had, i was immediately struck by when i started interviewing the friends and family members who were still alive about how enamored they were of this awkward man and it immediately like a light bulb went off that there's something more here. again, talking about all those documents that were released to his love letters

to his wife and he was a nobody, just a starving lawyer in california, and on an entirely different side. it really was tragic that these boring insecure person had the ability to move so far beyond limitation. and still brought down in the end. henry kissinger said that nixon was, that the classic definition of greek tragedy because not only did nixon have this tragic flaw but he saw it in himself and it inevitably brought down the punishment. >> he couldn't stop it. >> so andrea, i'm interested based on what you said earlier about what was in the , in the water, what was the water they were drinking. that suddenly made these for women acceptable in the culture that they were

actually being listened to when they were making a difference because it's an unusual time for women to be rising to the forefront intellectual thought. >> because they were outsiders, the culture at that moment gave priority to theory and expertise. none of them had been trained in their field. they were, they were not part of the status quo but i was struck by the fact that none of the women that i write about were interested in power and in fact they were very, mitch mccarthy was reticent and shy and was quite mortified every time she was asked to speak and her agent was always saying you have to go to more book events. she was so passionate about what she was doing she wanted to get the word out he was dying of cancer and she's riding in the spring. she didn't want anyone to know because she thought the chemical companies would use it against her.

because they were outsiders, because they were untrained in the know any better, they went into the field and they were cute observers and jane jacobson walked through every neighborhood of new york city and started visiting cities all over the country, trying to figure out what makes the sidewalk work?why do they feel menacing? why do some feel and you while others are abandoned? and jane goodall when she arrived in bombay, she hadn't been trained in primatology. she had been a secretary, a skirt chaser and i think he wanted to have her around so he sent her to study chimpanzees in the wild. she had no methodology though she started following them and watching and she would sit for hours and watch them and she started to see the theory at that time was animals were sort of like clocks.

that they were biological monoliths and they operated by fixed rules and they didn't have emotions or sentence or intent and as she watched and again, for weeks and weeks in this incredibly arduous conditions, she started realizing there were friendships. she noticed there were two chimps she finally identified and had given names which is a cardinal sin, that they rushed up and hugged each other and she realized this is more than clockwork. there seems to be a whole constellation ofemotions she saw revenge, anger, she saw tenderness, she saw some chimpanzees were better mothers . and the same with rachel carson. she the time that she was working, biology was about hounding and categorizing things. and in the way that zoology, they killed wild animals and then measured their bones and count their teeth and that was the way it proceeded.

and carson was really in the natural world day after day watching and seeing the world as a whole web. i think the fact they didn't know better and they were grounded in the physical and in their sense, they were afraid of being intuitive, they weren't afraid of looking hard and the subjective wasn't considered very professional, they were part of their field in many ways and they were also not afraid to use personal attitudes in the writings. they're all incredibly beautiful writers they would weave in stories of things they seen and doneas part of their arguments . so they really were able to put a human face on a very big questions about where the country was going and that was perhaps because they were women but perhaps because they just had a different orientation. >> many people saw that and

received the message maybe differently perhaps, i don't know. so adam, again, what we're dealing with somebody like patience gray who runsoff and does her own thing and that time , how do you approach those kinds of questions from a biographers perspective? >> i think being an outsider defined new patients was. she unlike ali and nixon, she shunned, not only did she shun the limelight, to the extent that she sort of advertised her own career as a journalist and writer in the 1950s. he was appointed the first editor of the woman's page at the observer which was one of the leading postwar papers in london and it also just published a best-selling cookbook in 1957 and in 1962, gave all of that up and rejected the trappings of consumer society and basically embark on this 40 year odyssey throughout the mediterraneanand in the end , settled a place that was so

remote and live without electricity, running water or a telephone so in a sense, in a very elusive figure and patience also had very, she looked at the genre of videography and autobiography very skeptically. she did write a memoir and had a section on childhood but it begins on page 300 and has a quote missing it that says all autobiography is suppression and lives. so i shudder to think, to imagine what she would think of my book. but the same time, all of these figures are full of contradictions and patience left behind a remarkable treasure trove of letters. she course on a daily basis by writing letters and in part by necessity, they had no other way to communicate and she saved all those letters. she saw thoseletters from her friends , really in an

attempt to preserve them. so without those letters i think the project would have been doomed. but it made her an inherently fascinating person and i think teasing that was really sort of one of the threads that run throughout the book. >> and bring to life for the readers is important. so you started a thread that i'm very interested in pursuing all of you here. this title of this is writing great lives. and as a writer myself i'm interested in the process. what's involved and i know as writers you often get the question you write with a computer or by hand, that sort of thing that there is a real art, i think the writing biography and a lot of work . so i'm interested if you

want to pick up a little bit on what started that process because you started the question and then i like to move down and talk about a little bit x i'll be completely upfront to say that i never imagined i would write a biography and i had no idea that i would this book or how i would write this book when i did the research. which i think in a way was sort of a blessing because i didn't come at it with some sort of preconceived idea of how i had to put this thing together and over the course of about 10 years, collecting material and reading through her letters and visiting archives, the process to use the word that doesn't perhaps illuminate much, it was very organic . and this was my first book and writing it came so much more easily than i thought it would. but i think when you're dealing with a lot of materials, you have to be

selective. you can't just dump everything into the book and think that people are going to appreciate that because they won't. so that's a real art and you have to be your own editor and the way in terms of getting a sense of what matters about this place because we know that every life and take multitudes and if we tried to capture all that, it would be pretty dreary stuff. so i think that was one of the great challenges and you know, i'm sure if i have the opportunity to write another book it will be that. >> so john, you have a presidential library to work with but i sense there was a lot more involved and in being outside the nixon library and i'm wondering what that process was and i'm alsointerested in the dining because these are not books that you turn around in a year . >> first of all, i'm in great

all of writing about a white man writing about a black person and you writing about a woman. >> because i despair sometimes when you think about what you had to defeat to write a life. in some ways it's easier than a novelist because you have every plot written for you. but there's also a way that you can approach that. you can write it short, you can write it long. >> you can put a couple in there, you can write one person so there is within that stricken structure, there is freedom of style. that you have to deal with but basically, it is writing. when nixon was in law school at duke, they call him gus which stood for a gloomy gus.

which is just his personality but they also call him iron but. because he did not have a fast file, quick intellect. what he was was a great writer and he was 02 law library and sit there and he would study and he would study and then he go to his part-time job and go back to his little rented room in the woods where there was no heat . i mean, it was this onerous part of richard nixon's early life that but you can't put a dickensian spin on it but there's a lot of iron but in the biographers wrath. >> and timewise, again. just to give people a sense of the time commitment that goes into these books. >> my first three books had been six years from the time that i say it goes off and somebody said from the time until it hits the stores. >> to give you a sense of what balk here, it's quite extensive. let me before i ask jonathan

to start, i'm going to alert you that in a few minutes, i'm going to ask some questions from the audience, if you have questions. i'll always like to point out that if you have comments or you want to talk about a book, we have plenty of time to do that afterwards if you have a specific question for the panelists, we have some, i think we have microphones somewhere which this gentleman in the back will help us with so think about if there's something you would like to ask any of these people while we are here and then again, if you have more of a comment or whatever, we can bring those up when we go over to the signing area so i want to give you a heads up on that. >> i typically spend at least a year without even thinking about writing, just doing the initial research and trying to become something of an expert on the subject of reading and figuring out where the archival material is and in the case of ali, the first time i was writing about someone who was still alive and his colleagues were still alive so the priority

was doing interviews. especially, i hate to be crude about it but doing the older people as quickly as possible and especially when you are dealing with famous people who been around someone very famous, it's difficult. you can just call them up and say can i come over and spend a week interviewing you. it took me two years, three years just to win them over. ali's brother who is still alive, the first time i told him i said i'd like to come down. so i started calling him just trying again, i said i just have one question, what was the name of your dog? he said $1000. i said that's a terrible name for a dog and he said that's not funny and it's ill thousand dollars. so it took a long time before rocco and i became friends and before i was able to interview him at length and that was the case over and over again and often you're doing these interviews for

you are prepared because if they say yes, you can come do the interview, you go and a year or two later you realize you asked all the wrong questions and then you hope you can get back in the door. and going through the process again, ken burns is working on an ali documentary so going back to these people, you burn too many bridges over somebody who's contemporary like ali, a lot of it is interviewing which i love and which i didn't get to do so much from my other books and when you begin to feel like you have some capacity on the subject, then it's okay but the stuff i found if you start writing, i don't know about the others but when you start writing too soon, you're wasting time because a year later you realize you are an amateur, you don't really have command of your material, you didn't understand the importance of your subject and gregory said to me, he was one of the first people i interviewed . >> he said especially for you as a white guy.

because you know, you're going to have a real challenge. you need to make me understand what made this kid he could be special and that's true for anybody who's worthy of biography, what made them think he could do something special but it's true as dick gregory pointed out for a kid was the same age as an hill who saw what happened to phil and was raised in a society where he was told that he certainly was not the greatest, he was in fact inferior and not entitled to the same rights that white people were entitled to. what made this kid think he could challenge authority, call himself the greatest and stick to the man. that's a serious marching order when somebody puts it in yourface and says don't bother writing a book . >> i think that's probably something we all face. >> andrea, go ahead. >> i was, i remembered a comment virginia woolf made. she said writing biography is donkey work area. >> the cause there is a huge amount of slogging. just to get a lot of

materialism. and then you begin to see patterns and see what you got but but i have to say, i borrowed all three of these new but getting a full life and really trying to get every phase of their life and to give it a quick development is enormously ambitious and are an admirable. >> i was as i was doing a group biography, i was looking for moments that illuminated the work, their character, the genesis of their ideas and the kind of common ground that they shared, but i also, four different lives which i had to research and as jonathan said, you start to think okay, what do i need to tell my audience about? about these women that really makes us care. that makes it all makes sense. so i would, i would do a huge

amount of research and write a rough draft of the first of one woman and then i would move on to the second, and then i would do a huge amount of research and then i of course ended up doing a huge amount of rewriting because there were all kinds of things you have to know as a biographer so much more than you can include in their workplaces where i've gone off on jane goodall had a fascinating childhood and i spent a lot of time and i realized doesn't belong in this book. it's out of proportion so i have to cut out the easily 20 pages. which is i guess why it's so slow because you have to know so much more than you can include. and you don't really know, you want to keep the story going so that there's a kind of dramatic arc to it but i think that for me it was always looking for connective tissue and looking for moments that really illuminated each one.

>> one of the things you run into is that especially the older folks, they don't remember the actual event. there are the memory of it or they remember somebody else use them once and their reading back to you what was written about them so it has to be , you have to persevere and george schultz was secretary of state, and he was richard nixon's economic advisor and secretary of labor and when i interviewed him he was doing the same thing. he was giving me nixon was a nice guy, he let his cabinet officials use that on the weekends and you were going through all the stories and finally i said okay, but he tried to get you involved in watergate, going through the irs and blackmailing people and he finally got frustrated and he said richard nixon was

like that:.what problem? he said the one we learned in first grade. there was a little girl who had a little girl. and when she was good she was very very good. and when she was bad, she was pouring. >> those are the moments that your lips work. >>. >> that's actually, i want you to start thinking about your questions right now. i would like to ask others for a snippet of one of those kind of stories that you uncovered. jonathan ? >> there's so many and as you pointed out, we had to tell the stories over and over and embellish them to the point that they no longer resemble the original story. george foreman told me that he wasdrawn by his own manager before the fight in desire . and he was drawn by his own manager? and i know it. i found evidence that the manager was hired by ali's camp after the fight sogeorge also said to me , the other thing he said, he said i found out afterwards we gave the referee $10,000 cash

before that fight to make sure it was a fair fight. and i found out later that ali gave the rest 20,000. so i called ali's manager and i said is it true that george says he gave the rest 10,000 and you gave the rest 20,000? and the manager got really angry, he said that's ridiculous, we only gave him 5000. so like they teach you in journalism school, your mother says she loves you, check it out. >> adam, a little quick one he was very skilled at crafting a very sort of loose interpretation of her own life. she embellished, she romanticized in the autobiographical writing that she did and late in her life she drafted letters to a writer and a journalist who

was thinking of doing a biography and included a lot of personal details, including a reference to someone who had told her in the early days of the second world war that she had been the subject of interest to and i six, the british intelligence agency. and this seems like one of those things that couldn't possibly be true because why would the british secret service be interested in this woman? so that was something i thought was an interesting notion but probably had no basis in fact but as i started doing archival work and i requested information from the national archives in the uk it turned out the patient said bond to the london school of economics with a woman whose sister had actually been a soviet spy for the soviet union and this woman was being watched by

intelligence agencies and it turned out that patient's name turned up in that file frequently and the details were at that time hilarious and just really surprising and i also learned that they probably had a separate file from the one i requested that they no longer have an biography, it's littered with those threads that you never quite get to the end of. that was certainly the case with this instance. >> andrea, one quick one and i'm going to ask for questions so go ahead. >> when alice waters, in the early days it wascompletely chaotic and there were a lot of drugs in the kitchen . kind of this private aside when i was there interviewing her, i realized that i

certainly mentioned those things but i heard more in depth, in the weeds stories about what was going on and there's a lot of sex and a lot of drugs but i think it is. there's always a lot of stories that can't make it in but they are great stories. >> i saw a couple hands over here. can i do the lady in the black to start with and please keep the questions short so we can get to as many people who would like to get questions and if we run out of time, we will meet you at the staging area. go ahead . >> i'm anita dobbs and i have spent many, many years teaching high school students english and literature and writing and they can't grasp what it means to really edit or what it means to revise.

they give a few comments here and there because they're so in love with what they've written. i know a few writers and i say to them all my gosh, one paragraph could gothrough 50 revisions so i'd love to hear from each of you. i know every writer isa difference, what you do to revise and edit . thank you . >> thank you for that question. anyone want to jump in? >> i am a big rewriter. i write by my ear and there's probably no paragraph i have worked over 10 times . i really like writing to read itself. i don't want anyone to have to work and i have a bad memory so the only way i remember things like telling stories so i really worked at the writing and in fact i remember the writer was interviewed and the interviewer said why did it

take 11 years for your first novel and your second novel and she said i seem to haveto write it in every possible variation . and i'm a little that way. >> my first book was 700 pages too long so it had to be cut by 700 pages. all of us have more left on the cutting room floor then goes out into the book. you can measure the quality of this product by how much is on the floor so editing is completely thorough . >> andsometimes students don't want to hear that. i have aquestion over here . >> you, my name is paul . i'm on my second book but i think it's more difficult than the first one, even the first one was a mass book. this one is about what my peers and myself lived through in world war ii about

the bombing of 37, i just turned 81. i've always wanted to write about what the war did to us, because there's a lot of heroes, a lot of new plans, i know what they are on the fringe of course but it seems like the kids have been left behind and i would like someone, i think it's adam said you have to write high without destroying anyone. this is what i would like to do with my book and i'm looking for help the cause i don't have a ghost writer. >> so the question to adam then is give us a little bit ofadvice, thank you very much .>> is challenging when you are close to the subject.

biographers have the luxury of distance . but you know, i think that great power also comes from that and trying to illuminate whatever that experience might have been to you and your peers. but i don't know, writing is so personal. i wish i could give some good advice. i mean, maybe the fellow panelists would have some wisdom on that. but i admire your pursuit. >> i wanted to see if i could do it and we will bringthe subject up again when we want to the signing area. >> . [inaudible]

>> in the end you're going to just be at the right here and sometimes, my first book is a very pointy book in the last book is a much better, easier to read book so part of it could be that i'm 20 years older and 20 years more experience and my year is 20 years better, but i start by picking up theboring parts . >> one of the advice i like is cut out the bits that people skip over. >> said kill your darlings. a lot of times i find things that are the most beautiful art always the most important . >> i think you're answering the question i was going to ask but i didn't hear the

question, would you repeat the initial question she had? >> we were talking about how you decide to any things down. >> i have time for one minute so you do you want to pursue this and will take another question when we leave here? i've got a minute left . >> was going to have to share your work, readers can determine what needs to go. writers and keep these things very close but it sounds like you're at a point where people read, get feedback and i think that can really inform the process. >> i give my manuscript to a guy named mark who had written the volume about nixon at the movies and i said mark, your group wasan is ruthless . >> is really helpful though. that's a hard thing, it's hard to have someone who will really well with you. >> we all need as writers, we need readers to help us see what's on the page.

it is very quick, i can take the question. >> .. >> now thinking only about his irish lass, the vagabond princess who -- [laughter] >> i'm not making this up. this is richard nixon. [laughter] and then she would write back, and she would say, dear dick, why don't you come over wednesday, and i'll burn a hamburger for you. [laughter] >> i'd like you to give these people a round of applause. [applause] thank you so much for being here. and as i said, you're welcome to join us over at the signing area one, and we'd love to see you there, and we can have more questions and more discussions. thanks again.

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