to take somebody, you can just not go off and freelance. jared does not come from a world where he thanks that these kind of things are important. >> you can watch this and any of our programs in their entirety booktv.. >> every year booktv covers book fairs and festivals around the country, nearly 400 today. here is a look at some of the events coming up. >> next week in the world play book festival takes place in minneapolis, then we will be life from the get this part was festival in maryland. later in the month look for us a book expo in new york city, the largest publishing treatment in the united states will be live in chicago for the printer's row festival on june 8. and later in june, tuning for our coverage of the american library association conference

held this year in washington, d.c. for more information about book fairs and festivals and to watch our previous festival coverage, click the book fairs tab on our website. booktv.org. >> thank you all for coming out, we are very excited and thrilled to have you here, and her beautiful room here in tulsa, oklahoma, were excited to have our friends from cspan booktv as well to cover this really fascinating story that we will dive into an event. i want to show you a couple things coming up, we have our literary test coming up, all kinds of stuff coming up for the spring and the summer you can see that on magic city book.com. we will not go through the whole whitney of events but as you know, some of you frequently at our events, we do a lot of the stuff you have a big fun roster coming up. so stay tuned on that. how many of you are familiar with the odyssey abode dirt doll

and some of this through the news over the years. something over the last decade or nearly decades since story first began, it is been a little bit everywhere. i kind of heard the second season of the popular regular program which is dealing with this, and seen news clips, but i never got the full picture, that is one thing that is so fascinating about getting a chance to read "american cipher". we had the opportunity to bring matt orwell to tulsa to talk about the book, and the stranger than fiction story we jumped at it. and if you do not know matt's work, he's a freelance journalist and he is listen to publications, and one of the things that makes him a person under perfect person to write the story, he served in the army in afghanistan. so he comes out it from a very personal point of view and brings the tools needed to tell

the story. we are very excited to have him with us, a big welcome to matt farwell. [applause] >> vicki for being here. and thanks for having me. >> let's dive in, there is a lot to talk about here, and we only have five hours,. [laughter] >> let's make it last. >> will make it worth it. as i mentioned, a lot has been written about in the stories have been told, there is no lack of exaggeration for the story, but this brings everything together, what made you want to tackle this project specifically,. >> when i started on the story there was no immediate segregation, there have been suppressed by the pentagon and the white house, intelligence committee and ultimately by a couple suppressed itself. and so i worked with a guy named michael hasting who wrote

"rolling stone", and he wrote an article that got a guy fire. and when we worked our butts off on the story, and it was while but was still in captivity as well. and then the dam broke after that, and so at the time i started writing about bo, there's little author. i had served in the exact same area of afghanistan as bo i knew that that is not a place that you walk off. if you are in your right mind. i wonder what was going on. i cannot get the answers. so i got out of the army and i started digging for instance. >> one of the reasons i think that we have journalist and writers like yourself is not just illuminate the world for us, but a lot of the best work comes from us people are turned into questions for themselves and they have friends benefit

that is illumination for the general public. let's back up, for those who don't know the story, can i give is the 101 and what happened to bowe bergdahl and where the story began june 30, 2009 ? >> cracked, on june 30, 2009 for scotsman named bowe bergdahl he was out of alaska walked off his face. in a part of afghanistan where you don't really walk off your base, near the border with pakistan, along the popular smugglers root in very short order he was kidnapped, sold and chained in the economy network which is a mafia terrorist, outside contractor for intelligence agencies particular with the pakistani and agency. and began about four and a half five years of captivity were a

bargaining chip upon meanwhile his parents were back in the states in idaho not getting any answers and been trying to get more answers and just waiting for the sun to get home. and i heard about the story when it first came out and i just buried one of my best friends down in alabama. after he overdosed on pills, one of my best friends from the army from when i was in afghanistan. so i get really emotionally attached. but was from idaho which is where my parents, there in the audience, think you guys for coming, where they are from. there were a lot of emotional ties to the story they kept going with it. >> so, what were the initial assumptions about bowe bergdahl, was it just a wall, i just want to get out of this, he just bailed, what were the first reports on what the story was,

didn't seem unique at the very beginning question. >> it seemed really weird. there were early television reports that were lagging behind on a patrol, there were reports that he had been pulled off of the entry without wiping his butt. there were reports that he had been in town looking for hash. there were reports that he just walked off. in all of these filtered through the army information system and ultimately the news. most of the news at the time was just whatever the army would leak you for most of the correspondence in afghanistan and washington and sort of thi thing. >> i want to talk about you personally and talk about your time in afghanistan. because one of the threads of the book is a quote on quote war on terror that we have been in for for nearly 20 years.

talk about your time in the service, you cannot separate the two in my mind for when i'm reading this book, so talk about your entry point into this wor world. >> i am from a military family, lived overseas, in turkey during the first gulf war, in germany, virginia, i came from that sort of environment. i hated college a lot and just stopped going 30. so i dropped out, and i needed something to do and working at lowe's wasn't much fun. so i figure the infantry would work out and make me a better person or something. >> what year was this customer. >> i dropped out of college in

2004. >> there was no doubt that type that there was a lot of stuff happening in the world. >> there is a very dangerous time. did you have any sense of where he would end up going? did you want to be in the middle of all of the good action, were you hoping to get a certain placement there? >> yeah, i joined the infantry so you don't do that if you're not a little bit nuts and want to go shoot at things and get shot for whatever reason. i didn't really want to go to iraq because i didn't think that was a smart work, i thought afghanistan be more sense. i was young and i hav naïve the. i was in an arrayed unit in fort drum new york. from there, we deployed almost immediately. i had very little time, then we wound up doing a 16 month

deployment and tacky to profits. kind of an interesting time in the war, the taliban had fled in 2001 and 2002, we were starting to come back into town. >> had you been interested in writing that you were the age ? or when did that start? did you keep any kind of journal or record in your time in the service or were you documenting that? >> i had a little notebook, i was always a reader, we moved around a lot and i like books and we were traveling a lot. so i went up going into rating, taking notes for whatever reason, taking a journal, then while i was in afghanistan i had written a nasty gram my university and published it in the alternative newspaper and somebody wrote me, e-mail me in between two week missions and i

come back, and we went off publisher essay, can you fix it up. and that was my first publication credit. and then i got the bug, then i went totally bananas, crazy, ptsd stuff, alcohol related stuff after the war. wound up bouncing between mental hospitals and jails, so i am kind of unemployable other than doing stuff like this. >> that's a really fascinating thing. we have been a generation of writers that have come out of this war, several people -- we have done events with elliott and phil, all the people who have served, and some of them are writing fiction, and some are doing more nonfiction and journalism reporting. but have you found, obviously this is not your personal story, but dealing with some of those issues, it's going to start a

process having a project where you can filter some of those things onto the page. >> i wish i could say that, but no. no. it's the opposite. [laughter] >> because you have to relive it questioning. >> yes because you're sitting around and thinking about, and you're right about bowe bergdahl getting tortured. and then remind you about we laughter flashlight and yak the american contractor if anybody found it and you found the guy and you tortured the guy for fun. that was your fault. then you go back to write about bowe bergdahl getting porter. so no, it was, my parents, my fiancé cannot tell you that. >> that's another point where i think we should eliminate some things which is, when we think about pow, you might think about john mccain or someone in vietnam, and then you also your terms of the geneva convention, do people actually know what

that is. >> do we know what that is is americans? >> but in terms, when you're finding out more about bowe, and to finish the story, he reemerges years later, what do we know, as soon as he came back, how quickly can we start getting a forward picture of what happened to him during that captive. customer. >> it depends on how we define we, if you mean we the public, it took quite a while. there was a lot of bs thrown out, a lot of misinformation, political point, a whole playbook in place to make bowe bergdahl into obama's willie horton oma moment. and the guy that did it is now the ambassador to germany. that's awesome. >> he invented a couple times of the covering up, not having access to the pentagon and all

these things, how do you start doing that, are you using freedom of information act? how are you getting the material to write this book if you don't have true axis to the documents and materials that you need. >> i am a big believer on knocking on doors, i knocked on so many doors for this book. i show up, and don't go until they talk to you or they refuse to talk to. but beyond that, court documents are always a wonderful thing, this was built a lot from the court documents, and then, the army are subject to foia, and the fbi is subject to foia, you can pick up some good things by that, but be there, meeting the

people, doing it multiple times, talking to the same person over and over and over again, and then you start to assemble something close to the picture and then you get a little bit bananas for a while and trying to figure out what exactly it is and then you come back and ride it out. >> is bowe bergdahl, what does he represent now in our culture, in 2019, ten years later, is he a figure of mystery still, and some ways yet, is he an inspirational figure, a cautionary tale, what is he? and to the broader, looking at the war on terror, he's a chapter in the story, what is that chapter? >> the book is an attempt to use wear-and-tear through the lens of this one young man's story.

>> you could call him a lens to be the story. but he is a representative guy and he could've been any of us. >> he is sort of the everyman and also sort of the weirdo, the outcast, the person that does not belong anywhere. and maybe never will. >> we have this cast of characters over the last 20 years. the sit in different roles, remember john walker link, and then you have chelsea manning, bowe bergdahl, these are all characters in this larger drama in his part is very specific, but told people who don't know, who was bowe bergdahl personally and how did he get into the service, where did he come from? >> he was a young man from sun valley idaho which i didn't even know the place, to studying contrast.

he had grown up in a pretty conservative, strict regimented christian household. sorta rebelled against as a teenager, went into town, into sun valley which is a playground for billionaires. people fly in their, go around and drink a lot, do drugs, whatever. and then leave. and so bowe went into town. and he was kind of a weirdo, if you saw him walking around town who's a sympathetic weirdo but he was a dude that was obsessed with weapons, a little bit off, very nice, very hard worker, but people cannot figure him out. and he was really into guns, so he went off and trained at a place in mississippi to help work at a gun range to do training at a place in mississippi for navy seals and those kind guys.

got really into it and decided he was going to fall under join the legion pretty godly to. and then got to the legion recruiting station and he came back and they decided he was going to join the coast guard, he did that and he served for 27 days and he had a blood enter but he knows in a panic attack and they found him collapsed in the back room under bathroom and he got a psychiatric discharge. a couple years later, he army is harder for people because the work is not going well and by this time, i was back from afghanistan working in command that oversaw the recruiting command and it was not going well. people were really grasping to get new people. so bowe got rated to the infantry which is the best thing to do to give this guy a gun and sent him overseas. but that's what they did, and honestly by that point he seemed better. he was a good soldier the platoon liked him, you don't

care if summary is a weirdo, and a unit like that as long as they are hauling their own stuff, not causing any trouble in pulling their weight and beyond. you don't care, and both were good soldiers up until the point that he walked off and was in. >> how is common is it for soldiers to walk off or to disappear or go awol or whatever the term is. as i have been frequently. >> no it's super rare. backhoe, all the time. we had two or three dudes go awol the first week and we got back. overseas, it is different because if you go, where are you going to go, you're an american presumably, i spoke a little bit, our interpreter spoke a lot

it would also spoke a lot. it's not world war ii you cannot going to paris and escape in the café or something. >> where does -- let me back up, talk about when he came home. what was the initial response, he was not welcome home, there were some different reactions. >> the initial response was an attempt to welcome home. the president brought bob and janet bergdahl out to the rose garden and bob had a huge berg under bearbeard.it was a smart , he got her with i think. but it made him look like a

weirdo to people that watched it and did not have any content for it. so the white house should've known better, they all know that was bad optic, i don't know why he did that. but he did. and then the worm turns, i was up in new york during during tv when he came back and michael hastings had worked on the rolling stones story with, the guy in l.a., and so i up there and i watched the worm turn as they plucked a couple of guys from bergdahl's unit brought into new york, coached a few on what to say. >> these are guys that are justifiably really upset with virgil, he walked off, he left us, they have gotten only abandonment stuff but then they have got, we had to look for you for so long. so they are mad at the sky, giving him a little bit of coaching, homemaking kelly. it was just sort of a public

meeting of somebody who had just been beaten a lot. like literally, at that point, he is more of the symbol, not even a person at that point. >> he is a character in everything that went wrong. meanwhile they had culpability in real guilt and they go through their scandals and there's no problem, the running big corporations. he was a scapegoat, and he is a low ranking dude that ultimately doesn't matter but we project a lot of anger on that guy,. >> you mentioned the there is an attempt to do a rose garden heroes welcome which is out of the playbook of what you see in world war ii, and it makes me think, you still think we are functioning off of 20th

century norms in the 21st century world like one of the reasons we have had such trouble dealing with the at-home realities of some of the war on terror issues because how we view things through world war ii, korean war and vietnam in a way of thinking about heroes and more in the general. >> we view the war through highly propaganda lens. that is their every angle, the pentagon, the report is to write about it, embedding reporters with troops who is the most brilliant thing pentagon has 30 done, all the sudden they can only write goo news stories. and the fact and get like to present off applebee's, who cares. i can get on a plane early, but

why? i went overseas, we all went overseas, we didn't make things better in afghanistan, is not a thriving country now. and there has been a disconnect between what the military actually is and what the military is actually doing and how to proceed. and that's not accidental and post- vietnam they will never let this happen again. >> you think part of that is because whether vietnam is where the line is drawn and said ten is been a completely volunteer base,. >> is easy to create a separate segment of society, labeled them all heroes, platform a baseball game totally forget about anything that they do. >> i can't remember the number, but i read the percentage of people in america who know someone personally who is in the military is an all time low. >> it's very small. and veterans in the military

population, we have our responsibility for that too. we don't particularly like civilians in uniform. there is still -- i still have a problem with people my age particularly men my age who haven't put on a uniform or does something like that. it irks me and i don't know why it irks me, i suffer, everyone else should suffer. i have no idea what that is but we isolate in different locations and don't mix with the general population and we expect general population to reflect us. >> when do we get our first chance to hear from bowe bergdahl post returning in his own words. >> he got the chance to self incriminate on the cereal podcast, the friday before the

general was set to make his decision on whether or not to go easy or through the book at her. so if you guys don't know it is a podcast that was started in the first season was straightforward murder mystery high school murder mystery with a huge huge success, and then they take the 180 into a second season and the whole season is focused on the story of bowe bergdahl, it's fascinating and i've heard about in the accused. that was someways the largest exposure this whole story his head. how is it exploited in your eyes customer. >> it started with a dude named mark, he wrote the hurt locker and zero dark thirty, and who he

made all his money on a cia contract. and so mark boll got a lot of access to make zero dark thirty, he is basically an instrument of the state. and he is a propagandist in the dirt bag. and so he calls up bowe bergdahl and gets to him through a series of intermediaries and records over 20 hours of tape with him. >> this is like how long after customer. >> very soon, like a month. the lawyer circumspect whether they should okay it, this is a dude who walked off his base in afghanistan, you will not stop them from doing what he wants to do. so he never came clean on where they were without. so bowe was going to make a movie about this.

and had some troubles making movies, and serial podcast needed a new hook, and he said i have all this raw audiotape. and he said i want to be jason board and be on the secret agent and walk up my base. i totally did it. he had just been quiet, the whole thing might've been different. but he wasn't, because he is unguarded and mentally ill portrait victim who had come back from huger deal and was getting disappointed. >> talk about how that one moment that was snowballed, a few days before the general did that, talk about how that created another situation. >> the decision was going to be made by generals, who his dad was a four-star general.

>> the court-martial is a trial, a military trail, you can get tried by a jury which isn't necessarily of your peers, officers and enlisted, or you can do straight up trial by a judge, but otherwise it's pretty indistinguishable by your regular court session. he basically had the option of going to traffic court or report. any goes to report. this happened, trump had been on the campaign trail railing on bergdahl, saying he should've been shot, jumping out of a helicopter, isis territory and also to stuff. mccain, was unhappy with bergdahl, there was a lot of political pressure. so of course he's going to go full court-martial. which is weird because it had actually had a full general court-martial who is founded.

so there were a lot of unusual circumstances to put on a contempt of trial. >> when you take out a subject like this is focused around one person. talk about early attempts or the attempt to get him involved in the project. >> early attempts are tough because he was an iconic, we can't get a message across. some of the people from his unit, and then he gets back i in the get involved, he was in the courtroom every day and there's a lot of stuff we said about them, i went bowling with him, he pulled under bold pretty well, 118, the military

appropriates all sorts of american indian names for their weapons in their unit. >> talk about the way that you craft a story, this book is not just a collection of documents, there is a narrative flow and you have this trove, i don't know how many documents, but a lot, thousands and thousands of pages,. >> and hours and hours in. >> and not to mention all the material, how do you wiggle that down into something that is adjustable, you don't have to know the story at all, if you start walking down the street pick the story up, there is enough to give you. >> you i should buy it. i think it would be easy to get

overwhelmed,. >> useyou start with character n place, if you have an interesting character you're not an interesting place and you don't have anything. so in a story like this you have so many interesting characters and i wrote quite a bit about all sorts of people and that print out, and got burned out, but i went with the characters in the places that could kind of tell the names right of the story which is why we are on time shifts. you go all the way back from bowe coming back and being interviewed by the general all the way back to 1979 which seems like a huge leap but when you're viewing this as a multigenerational story it is sort of room one back that you have to go to.

>> i have to imagine is about a hundred title ideas for this book,. >> know that's only the proposal and then i believe there was one. were about 300 e-mails went back-and-forth about a different title. and then it came back to "american cipher". >> what does that mean too? "american cipher", talk about, and dumbing things down, but i want to make sure -- "american cipher", bowe bergdahl, what does that mean to you, why does it represent him in the full story. >> cipher is a code. it is a mystery. so this is not just "american cipher" bowe bergdahl, it's a market cipher bowe bergdahl in thafghanistan. >> you call the tragedy, and there are plenty of people who is the other was, but a lot of times are on the portable side of the stage at inspector.

>> was there a moment where it could not of been a tragedy, the fate sealed from day one. >> was there moment when it took a turn. >> with u.s. involvement? or in general? >> from the 50s in the 60s to the 70s up until the soviet invasion, afghanistan was all right, it was not bad. by the time we got involved, we were coming in on a sinking ship there,. >> the cake was baked already. >> the best thing we could have done was going top of the taliban and operated a hundred and killer teams of the agency to go shoot up bin laden's when they popped up again. but then we sent armies over there and kept doing it. police when you hear the argument comes back it seems like every few months whether to pull all the troops out or keep

the place stable, there's always the back-and-forth between the two arguments, for you come out on that, does it turn to full chaos, do we owe it to the space you have security presence there? , was iraq in afghanistan full chaos before got the customer are we contained with chaos or are we causing the chaos? this is kind of a debate that we don't have as americans. >> the argument could be that we went in and destabilized but now that is honest. in the top level government officials, and now there's a huge opioid academic in the u.s. there is no shortage of trouble in afghanistan. just bailout, justly, the pakistanis can take care of it, and the indians can take care of it. the afghans himself, they are

pretty well capable of taking care of themselves, they haven't been successfully invaded by a foreign power ever. they have driven everyone off. so i think they can do okay if we leave. >> do you think americans think we are in a worry now? >> or do you consider us being in the work right now, you consider the wear-and-tear which has no end or beginning, you feel like, are we a country at war currently? >> i think regular civilians in afghanistan, iraq, syria, yemen, sudan, ethiopia, and tanzania, rwanda, they all sure feel like were at work. in the philippines, yes. they should feel like were at work. i think we do and they get warm and fuzzy the national guard in the beginning of a movie or with

a $3.5 million contract or whatever the dollar figures. i just threw that off at the top of my head to do nfl promotions. we generally shy away from what were means going into work and being very mean to people after the point of killing them. >> we were talking earlier about when you enlisted in the service in the infantry and it was in the middle of a very serious dangerous drug. did none of that stuff that you're talking about now occur to you at the time? >> i think it probably had an impact. yet it altered, i thought yeah, i'll go do all this. and maybe i'll die in the process, that would be cool. but that didn't happen. >> not even in terms of that personal point of view, but didn't feel like that?

this thing doesn't have any potential for success customer. >> it's not very romantic to fight anything. >> sure that's interesting. >> it doesn't persuade people. i'm trying to persuade people to join the military, i know the people that are just going to get persuaded, they're going to do it and they're going to learn the hard lessons just like bowe. bowe way more than me. >> i want to make sure we have some time for questions, anybody have a couple questions? you are here. >> when we talk about afghanistan and setting up a base, a place where students were looking for hospitals all the time, you would think you would have a secure base, how does he wander off the base question. >> i would think man, they should be secure, somebody no

[inaudible] >> the bc had was between a real base, forward operating base in vietnam. >> not even a wall compound, little barriers that they made a fortune off of. and maybe some concertina fire contracts providing security. so it is not an impenetrable by any means. and the irvine spots, it's a bad location, it's the bottom of the hill, and then up to the top of the hill, there are places that you can get out, and he knew that, both americans and afghans sleep in small cash on guard. [inaudible] >> he claims that he was going to try to make it to trying, and

tried to talk to the general. he was 90 miles away, he could do the same thing and i know, he could do it in afghanistan. that was proved very quick that he couldn't. >> you think the attempt that our government to cover up this is also along with how they handle 1979 afghanistan specifically with the trips that resolved in 1979 afghanistan? - you mean like the special forces and cia and operation cycle? >> in 1979 the soviets created afghanistan and then we initiated the counter invasion and used a lot of bad dudes.

anyways, use bad dudes, we also spent sent along a lot of weapoe built up a lot of the camps that would later betray trained to come after us now. as i will return for customer. [inaudible question] >> were say like 94 is time for. >> ninety-four, 95. >> in time we had done what we were there to do. and one thing about the u.s., we are not very good about taking about the consequences of what we do, really ever. specifically with armed conflict and foreign policy. and so, i think some people might it anticipated that, but also what you do, kill all the dudes that you trained to kill

the soviets? how are you going to knock over some government, 600 miles to the east that we customer. >> so i think it was an inevitable blowback. on the other hand, they like to tell a story. charlie wilson's war, a big movie, they really liked that story, they like to tell the story of rambo three, and freedom fighters taking out the soviets. so they don't like people connecting that story to the current story. so i think you're right maybe, using him is sort of look over here might've been part of the strategy. i don't have any way to back that up. but it seems logical to me. >> what is bowe birdsall doing today customer. >> i don't know. he is out of the army, he is not in jail, he pled guilty, got

time served, does not have va care which is i think it's an oversight on our government's part. they gave him a discharge to characterize such that a guy that was a pow for five years and ultimately gave us a lot of pretty good intelligence on the network that held him can't get healthcare now. i go into any va and get healthcare, i do it. i have a problem, i can go into the va. depends on whether or not wearing him and whether the figure out the problem is to fix it. but at least have the option. >> he does not have the option. and so the one option that i think i have to give him his option, i wrote a book about you, i invaded the worst part of your life, so are you in court every day, your job was clenching, your grimacing, raw

stuff exposed. particularly for very private person. other people don't like to do that. and so i think i owe him the option of not being my friend. not being my pal, i don't have to be up in the business now. i'm done with that, you pled guilty, he got out, i think you go your way, i'll go mine. i think he's doing well, i'm in contact with a couple of his lawyers and they would probably tell me if something was going on, but other than that, i value his privacy. believe it or not in a row whole book about him. [laughter] >> is there any restrictions, on him making money off of his personal story, is he able to write his own book, would he be able to do something. >> presumably,. >> because he was not paid for serial podcast. >> is forging a.

>> in terms of making a living, the only currency he may have currently would be his perspective on what happened to him, it's very difficult to imagine what kind of job he would go get to make a living off of. >> one thing to say about him, he's a worker. >> he could do whatever he wants with his own personal story. >> i believe so. >> i hope he does. if he wants to tell it, if you want to tell his way, more power to him. i think the world should hear. >> will ultimately do hope people take away from this book other than just a story -- more than just what happened, but what you want them to take away from it? >> i hope it takes just a little bit the vaseline off the lens about military in our complex overseas and what actually happened to soldiers versus what we like to pretend happened to soldiers, who soldiers are

versus who we idealists the mats, and i hope that people learn a lesson from it, i doubt they will, will the still be a r in afghanistan, we are not leaving anytime soon, but i hope at least a few people get the idea that maybe there is a problem with the fact that this is our longest war, why are we still there, if the war in afghanistan could vote next year,. >> are there more things that you plan to write about? are you done writing this time. or do you anticipate writing more books about the military industrial complex or the war on terror or any of those things customer. >> people asked me what i write, and i think depressing as potus of soldiers and spies. and it is true, it's depressing. i tell my parents, my fiancée,

my mentors, i'm going to quit writing about that, i'm going to write about other stuff, but no, i'll probably write about this kind of stuff. [laughter] let's be honest. so yeah i'm casting for my neck story, hopefully it is not -- this is a really bummer story, and nobody really makes out super while in the story. and i hope to write something a little happier maybe. >> that's good. let's hear from matt are well everybody. [applause] i hope you guys will take the time to read the book and we just scratch the surface tonight and do so, we will be right outside signing copies and come say hi to matt and thank you all for coming. >> here is a look at our future programs this weekend booktv. today at 6:50 p.m. eastern, tyler callan with his latest book big business. most of the money spent is spent

as voters desire. president donald trump, what he is doing on trade, i disapprove, most american businesses disapprove what he is doing in terms of predictability, most businesses are against. >> and sunday noon eastern in depth is life with university of pennsylvania professor kathleen hall jamieson for an interactive discussion on her book packaging the presidency and cyber war. our russian hackers control help elect the president. with your phone calls, tweets and facebook questions. at nine eastern, on "after words", stanford university professor jennifer everhart offers her insight of reese's o. >> a lot of people talk about old-fashioned racism. but this implicit bias is something that you may not even

know that you have, something that you don't know how is affecting even, even if we know what the stereotypes are about social groups, we don't always know that the stereotypes are influencing what we're doing, how we are pretreated for evaluating someone, watch this weekend booktv on c-span2. >> every year book tv covers hundreds of author events around the country. recently in washington, d.c., candidate for governor of turner under georgia dcf reps reflected on how she wrote her recent book. read from the outside. i wanted to write a how-to guide, often people ask me how did i get to the minority leader, did i start this company, why am i able to do the same, and i would make up answers. enough to fill up the speech.

so i started reading what i was saying, that's quite clever. and so i wanted to write it down in part because i thought what i was able to accomplish, i certainly had not done all the things i wanted to do but i got close to doing a lot of what i wanted to see. and when i pitched the book the first time, the agent said, what is your story, and i said no, i am not interesting enough for mmr. i wasn't being self-deprecating, some are very good, but a lot of folks need to have a diary. [laughter] i did not want to be that person who should've just been journaling very intensively. [laughter] so what became from the outside was really my attempt to write my how-to guide but what impressed upon me i was not writing a memoir i was

explaining that i had authority to tell the story, i was explaining -- you can tell people to do something but they're not going to believe you if you can show them what you are talking about. so the structure of the book came about because then i tried to dissect what were the steps that led me to it where i am and what are the questions i have that no one ever answered for me. if i had me or someone like me who could've told me these things or people who did tell me but i should just been listening of what that would've been. . . .