he is his own national security advisor. sue my people congress have given their powers and authority to the other end of pennsylvania avenue fairly steadily over the past few decades. when we cannot complain anonymously as you said, was to do something about it. it is to do something about a priest to watch what tv every weekend on c-span. >> welcome back to miami and our second day of live coverage of miami book fair. today's author programs include discussions on memoirs and the environment and the national security. plus you'll get the chance to talk to the authors from our set here on the campus of miami college. later today will be joined by david marinus, talking about his family's connection to the red scare of the 1950s. and elinor randolph, discussing the life and career of former new york city mayor and potential presidential candidate michael bloomberg. those are just a couple of the

programs you'll see today. you can check your program guide or visit our website booktv.org who a full schedule. >> and joining harris is the author of this book information wars. we lost the global battle against this information and what we can do about it. . . . information about the u.s. to the world track is yes. in olden days during the cold war we used to say telling america's story to the world. and how did you do your job,

it's funny, took me a while to figure out the parameters of the job what are the things i came to the conclusion was the way we tell our story is will be to our store to ourselves with american media, newspapers, magazines, tv. rather than produce content ourselves i used to do during the cold war i thought let's show people how they cover ourselves. that was one part of it. the other part was the more strictly public affairs things where people are standing in front and you have to have the government line. its safe use of your stance on issues, here's our policy, make other what you want. >> host: when you go to your subtitle, the word disinformation is included. the u.s. have a disinformation campaign? >> guest: we did not have a disinformation campaign. i do some people accuse us of having disinformation campaigns, people accuse me of being a propagandist and all that but we

didn't do the disinformation the russians do, which is deliberately false information trying to deceive people. that is that what we do. >> host: how did we combat how other people are doing? >> guest: incumbent one of the things i found, i came in from the private sector, i been an editor for seven years, in government people put the word counter in front of something they think they're doing something about it. counterterrorism, i had a group of debris that it counter isis messaging. what i realized was countering other people's content was often counterproductive because we were the enemy to the people whether he countering isis or people the russians are talking to. i tweet from under secretary of state of public diplomacy will look at that as that something from the enemy and we must be winning because that guy is engaged. i do drew back over from tryino counter things directly. >> host: one of the things you talk about is the fact isis was very good at waging social

media. >> guest: yes. when isis came on the scene, when i came the state department in february 2014, two things happen in quick succession. the invasion of crimea and annexation of crimea, which is the part of ukraine and the first isis beheading of american journalist. we saw this tsunami of isis messaging. it was powerful. they were good on social media. they get hundreds of thousands, millions of tweets. we needed to reckon with it. that was their form of terrorism, the sense of trying to scare us with the stuff they're doing on social media and they succeeded at that. >> host: how did we combat that? >> guest: it was a group underneath they called the center for strategic counterterrorism communications that was started by secretary hillary clinton against al-qaeda. we started to engage with them and to back and forth with them. i think that turned out to be

the wrong strategy. it's like whatever mark twain said, you don't want to get in an argument with a pig because you'll get dirty and he likes it. that is how it felt engaging with isis. what we pivoted to more of, helping the people whose voices were credible over able to counter isis message, moderate muslim groups. remember it wasn't isis versus the u.s. as so many people thought. it was isis versus the muslim world. 80% of messaging they did was in arabic. only 7% was in english. a did more in french and russian than in english. we were not the people they were really after. americans are narcissistic about everybody wants us to be at us. that really was a vehicle. >> host: they were targeting their own audience. how did we reach that audience? >> guest: we reached that audience by helping support mainstream messaging groups, islamic groups in the middle east.

many of whom didn't like as very much, saw america as an imperial power but they hated isis and they thought isis was besmirching islam. it was the wrong image for islam. so we helped some of those people are used to routinely criticized as at the same time because to me and in terms of american policy, isis was a much more important problem then relations between us and the sunni nations turn we are talking about "information wars." we will put the phone numbers up on the line. if you like to participate in our conversation, 202-748-8200 eastern/central. 202-748-2001 mountain/pacific. if you'd like to send a text you can send one death (202)748-8203. we'll also scroll through our social media sites -- sent a

text. russia was early the social media, what you call this information is at a quick statement? >> guest: yes. russia has been doing what they call active measures all drink the cold war which was this information. but without social media they had to bribe reporters, insert false stories into newspapers. social media gave them a platform. one of the things i write about is after putin's annexation of crimea we saw this tsunami of disinformation and that was coming from the internet research agency which was new to us. the internet research agency was a troll form in st. petersburg. it's all written about in mueller's report. they supported putin's narrative, putin's lies about russia invading ukraine and then the transfer that operation two yes election space in 2016. >> host: was this a prelude to what happened in 2016?

>> guest: enough so that he was. i don't intended it. the russians are opportunistic, not for strategic so they're in that research agency supported putin's narrative that the russians had not invaded crimea, the protesters in the madonna in ukraine were not supported by the cia. that's the disinformation we saw around that and then as the 2016 election started heating up somebody had the bright idea of maybe we can influence these guys in america. remember what they're doing in the russian periphery was in ukrainian and russian and other languages. then they start doing it in english and it wasn't very good. it was a very sophisticated. but the problem is american audiences are not that sophisticated and people will believe what they want to believe. part of the recent and was successful is that disinformation isn't just a supply problem. it's a demand problem. people like it. >> host: why do you think that

is some essential when not the sophisticated when it comes to news? >> guest: because of all of these cognitive biases we have come confirmation bias where we seek out information we agree with where we reject information we don't agree with. during the campaign that was the conspiracy theory about hillary clinton running on child sex trafficking ring out of op-eds a pizza parlor in washington. 30% of republican voters believed that. it's just wildly insane, that people believe it because they want to believe it. they didn't test it. they didn't test the assumptions of it. people will believe that, they will not care about how unsophisticated the tweets are for the social messaging is. >> host: were you there during the beginning of the election of 2016 at the state department seeing what was happening? >> guest: yes, i stayed until the end of president obama's term. we started seeing some of this in early 2016.

also monitored at a talk but in the book conventional russian media like russia today and all of those places, and one of the things that robert mueller didn't get in his report is out integrated the internet research agency was with mainstream russian media all the way to the russian foreign ministry where they would tweet out something, some canard, some falsehood and it would be echoed by the russian foreign ministry within half an hour. there was also something new to us. >> host: back to russia today. it's now rt. what's its purpose? >> guest: so it's purpose, actually it started this idea of russian public diplomacy. when it was started vladimir putin said and this is a quote where he said we need to do something about the anglo-saxon hegemony and international media. i mean, he said that at the launch. they felt from the russians always to persecute, always feel

the world is against them, that they were not getting the message out, not getting their nerd about. so russia today, then rt became this engine. and again a are not trying to make money. it's not a profitable enterprise like cnn or whatever. it's an engine of russian narrative, russian disinformation, russian information. part of the reason it has been relatively successful is it's a mixture of truth and falsehood, regular stories and these crazy conspiracy theories. >> host: richard stengel,, under book tour you've addressed the issue of the first amendment of free speech. what are you advocating? what are you distressed about? >> guest: i talk in the book about how when i travel around the world in the middle east and africa, even in europe consort in the baltics in these places, people don't understand the american first amendment. they understand this idea that as justice holmes said can we

protect notches the fact that we love but the fact that we hate. why do you protect top that you hate? why do you protect hate speech? it started me thinking about the first amendment as an outlier. i was on the ramparts and defend the first amendment my whole time as a journalist, but i more and more came to see that on how it affected perception of years abroad but affected america here, that what is the purpose of hate speech? why are we protecting speech that affects people on the basis of religion or color, ethnicity or sexual orientation? what possible benefit to the republic does that do? i started seeing the basis of the first amendment, the marketplace of ideas, this 18th century concept of the enlightenment where people felt as jefferson said that truth would drive out up falsehood it was free to combat it. boy, that doesn't seem right our situation now. and i think we need to rethink some of these things and not we

think the first amendment which is basically only 13 words, but we think this idea of hate speech. why shouldn't states or localities experiment with hate speech laws might penalize them? i'm not talking about throwing anybody in jail but talking a a how do we really are a consistent of this poison which is poisoned our democracy? >> host: we are in a roiling period when it comes to social media, politics and potentially disinformation and hate speech. >> guest: yes. one of the things i talk about, facebook does indeed have unity standards, terms of service that ban hate speech, that you're not allowed to attack people on the basis of religion or gender or anything like that. but the problem is they have no liability for the content. under the key vacations and decency act section 230 it basically says all of these companies are immune from any liability for this kind of content and even content that

they ban. part of what i recommend is that they have more liability for it, not the kind of like billy died as a "time" magazine but have some consequences for not taking speech which the event. that's all i'm talking about. >> host: some as a section 230 allows the the internet to floors. >> guest: it did. but again you pass laws to incentivize things at once you've incentivize them you change the law. that's what's happened now. they don't need any more incentive to grow than that you already. >> host: was a difficult to convince or to begin to get the u.s. government on board with a, hey, we need to counter these false attacks? >> guest: yes. because people in government, and you know the overwhelming number who were there for the right reasons and patriotic and serving their country, they don't necessarily see it as

their role to stick their head up and say let me get out there and fight this narrative war. people in government are conservative, in the sense of let's say what our point of view are what our policy is and then let everybody else discuss it. there's a lot of validity to that. i found this county efforts that we did were not always successful, in part because we were about the worst messenger for the message returned to get out there. i started to scale back with that and i think one of the things the u.s. can do is help people who support our point of view, who support free speech, who support the battle of ideas that are out there. that's a good rule of government to play. >> host: let's hear from our viewers and begin with ron in nevada. >> caller: good morning. thank you for letting to get in on this. i printed a lot of other

programs to tune in here and i'm enjoying mr. stengel. i have a question for you. i want to say first, this isn't a gotcha question but used the term that i'm asking about some going to hit you with this question and i'm interested in your answer. do you think it is disinformation to call the united states of america a democracy when fact it is a constitutional republic? and thank you for writing this book. >> guest: thank you. i don't think it's disinformation. one of the things i talk about in the book is the difference between disinformation and misinformation. disinformation is deliberately false content trying to deceive you. misinformation is more or less a mistake. it's not necessarily intended to be wrong. i think your question is hinting at one maybe it's disinformation to confuse the two. but have to say i don't come it doesn't bother me in the sense,

i mean, we are not a pure democracy. the framers didn't see us as a pure democracy. the constitution didn't have one person, one vote. obviously the expansion of voting rights has happened over 200 years where we are a representative democracy. but i don't find those terms consuming -- confusing and andi want people to talk narcissist feeling like we have agency over how we govern ourselves. that ultimately is what our republic is about. >> host: just what he was saying, prior to the show we were talking about notre dame professor new book, we talked to him yesterday while liberalism failed, and we would talk about the fact that is a liberal democracy our birthright. >> guest: yes. one of the things that i find alarming although i'm not an alarmist, about our current situation is it is undermining many of the tenets of liberal

democracy. one of the things i saw in the state department is the diminishment of liberal democracies around the world. freedom house does a survey every year about the as democracies dancing a receding? it's been receding for ten years or so. part of that is this rise of authoritarians, derisive flood and borders. it may be thank and i agree with the notre dame professor, is that liberal democracies nothing we felt was a birthright. it's something that was continued, the great martin luther king line, you know, the moral, , arc of the more you universe is long but tends towards justice. maybe it doesn't tend towards justice. we have to keep that are in line. one of the things the u.s. has i think that it is being a beacon of liberal democracy around the world. >> host: . we are not at the moment with the current administration, and so that is not advancing democracy. it's undermining democracy

around the world. >> host: jack is in new york city. good morning, jack. >> caller: hello? >> host: jack, we are listening. >> caller: okay, hello. it's a pleasure to be talking with you this morning. i am really appreciated all the things he said especially the distinction between misinformation and disinformation. my question is taking a look at his pieces, has been any data analytics on the advent of how this disinformation is affecting what i term as despaired communities around the united states? and if there is data analytics on that, can he suggest somewhere and in looking for to read his book, can he suggest some way that there can be some sort of real analysis around where those communities have been mostly disaffected in a prescriptive sort of way so that

we can do -- get back together and weave them back into the national fabric so with less disinformation and we deal with that in a way that is more, you know, i to say -- i'm running out of words but i'm thinking, , jack. the affect of disinformation and misinformation on society. >> guest: yes. and jack asked about data analytics. i'm a a big believer in the importance of data analytics in looking at this. part of the problem is that we don't have an airtight definition of the difference between disinformation and misinformation. those are my definitions are certainly the social be the companies immense amount of data analytics. and again if you look at the two reports from the senate intelligence committee on russian interference in the election. there's lot of data about how

much was done. i think there were more than 10 million tweets done by the internet research agency, almost half of which come from bots. that's another part of data analytics that we need to know, people need to know the difference between if they're getting something from a a humn being or from a machine. the other statistic that blew my mind the other day which was facebook's announcement that they taken down 5.4 billion false handles on facebook, so far this year. that's more than 5 billion. think about the immense amount of disinformation that is great by false persona that are on facebook. that after all was with the internet research agency did. they created false personas on facebook pricking the americans when fact ever russian trolls in st. petersburg. the more data analytics we have, the better we will be about figuring out to solve this problem. >> host: are you on social media? >> guest: i am indeed.

i'm going to be tweeting about this. i meant to do before i went on. >> host: my point is, how much of it do you trust? >> guest: well, i am a kind of media exception list. i think the benefits of the internet are 1000 fold compared to the drawbacks of it. i actually love social media even though a lot of pollution on social media. one of the things of talk but in the book is we don't have fake news problem. we have media news literacy project i've been trying to forget me give my whole life. i don't have to be taught how to concern -- discern fact from fictional but i do think people need to understand it better and we need to be teaching media literacy and digital literacy in the schools from the very earliest age. the platform company should pay for that. >> host: neil is in seattle. you are on booktv with richard stengel. >> caller: i'm not as if the

skin as you are. i have two questions, sort of divergent regarding disinformation and misinformation. how do you feel about the first question is, what do you feel about the disinformation and misinformation going on in the united states in the news media? we conclude msnbc, cnn, and, of course, fox, and how all these get use you could just tell -- the fact i don't even watch the news to any degree. >> host: could you go to your second point? were having a little trouble hearing you. >> caller: did you hear the first point? drama we did. please go on. >> caller: the second point is regarding the freedom of speech. anybody in the country believes in freedom of speech. how do you feel about what's going on in terms of what the northwest i live where any

conservative thought process especially close to the university of washington or anywhere are pretty much silence if you try to speak here your conservative point of view, you. we will get an answer on those to my point. number one he addressed the cable news that we have at the u.s. and the disinformation, misinformation potentially that we get from those. and secondly as a conservative in the northwest, he feels shut down at this point. >> guest: two good questions. the first question is really about something or talk in the book and writing about lately is the rise of domestic disinformation. this is not just the russians use of cutouts of americans that are echoing what rush is doing in the research agency but these are extremist groups, white supremacist groups that it didn't out there obnoxious message which is disinformation. the steel of domestic

disinformation is actually much larger than that disinformation that were getting from russian and other places. our market is vastly greater than what even a couple of thousand russian trolls can do. to me the more alarming thing going into 2020 and afterwards is them out and falling of domestic disinformation that is created here. the second question i agree, we would talk about marketplace of ideas before. i don't like anybody who is within the normative window of ideas to be excluded from the marketplace of ideas. conservative thought, we'll talk about conservative thought going back to john stuart mill and early. yes, that should be in a public dialogue. we should be talked about that. i like the idea of conservatives being excluded from this debate. what was healthy about our debate for a long time was the fact there were two legitimate

powerful points of view, conservative thought and liberalism and the tank. that's what the framers print though first amendment four. i want all points of view to be in the dialogue. what i don't want in the dialogue is actually hate speech, delivery time to wound people and disinformation which is false content trying to deceive people. i go see why that should be protected. >> host: then we have to put on your time editor hat and say who gets to be the gatekeeper? >> guest: everybody, i may come at the end of the day every citizen people need to feel combating disinformation is a public responsibility. i think someday people will but we need to talk about that. i do think the tech companies, the platform companies have a role and i think the government has a in regulating those platforms. it's not just one answer but it is a multiple group of answers. >> host: jim is in cooperstown, new york. these go ahead with your

question, yes, richard, i've a lot of respect for you and i enjoyed your "time" magazine tremendously during those years. i'm fearful that the best intentions can lead to serious implications, take his place of what we don't want to go. for instance, last month the new york state human rights commission decided to impose a $250,000 fine to people who use of the term illegal alien in certain contexts. so you can see where this thing is going, whereas we can discuss this now and agree or disagree. but five years down the road, ten years down the road are going to have some sort of appointed government commission or commissions that are deciding what's proper and what's not, what we can and can't say and finding us if we go off the

reservation? >> guest: yes, a very good question. i'm concerned about that, too. when i was editor of time and thank you for praising time in those years i was close to a first amendment absolutist. i wanted the most extreme points of view to be out there and i was a believer that the response to speech that you don't like is just more speech. so i do worry about people going too far in the opposite direction. but throughout our history the sense of the first amendment has swung back and forth between periods of expansion and contraction. it's basically expanded for the last 100 years. so yes, good intentions. i don't want to have people come in with draconian anti-hate speech laws where they are throwing people into prison or finding them hundreds of thousands. i don't want that owl. i would much rather have community standards with this kind of speech is frowned upon,

penalize, taken off his platforms. i completely agree with you, there's a danger if he could swing too far in the opposite direction that we're not in danger of that yet. >> host: your book is in the sense of prequel to the conversation were having with our viewers today. >> guest: peter, i had not thought about it that way but i think that's right and i do think in a way it is sort of stage one of encountering disinformation and how that is polluting hour system but also altering the marketplace of ideas. the question is what we do about that? and again in in a democracy, ad our democracy we have always wrestled with these ideas and we have come up with answers sometimes that right, sometimes that are wrong. that is the way our system works best. i would love some of the things i'm proposing to be tried and if they don't work then we restent than just like we talked about section 230. good work for a long time and it's not working out. >> host: thomas in a comatose florida. please go ahead.

>> caller: thank you all -- boca raton, florida. >> caller: my concern, question, the notion of regulating hate speech as some of the previous callers said the devil is in the details and i believe that people with agendas often time can get into that decision-making process decide what i say mesozoic might be hate speech, because they just disagree. very concerned about that. , i apologize. we running out of time. we will leave it there. again, he's a little concerned about the regulation of speech. >> guest: i am concerned, too. i've always been concerned about that. i do think that's a plethora of hate speech that's on this platforms that doesn't anybody good that it's not civilized discourse is a danger to our democracy. i don't see the harm in taking

that poison off of those platforms. but again we don't want it to go to for any opposite direction. right now we're not really in danger of the. >> host: here's the book, "how we lost the global battle against disinformation and what we can do about it." richard stengel is the author. we appreciate your time being on booktv here in miami. our miami coverage live all day long continues now. we're going to go and hear from authors talking about race in america and the personal experiences. emily bernard, carolyn forche eight and dani shapiro lifer miami. this is booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good morning. it is still morning. good morning. thank you so much, and my name

is patrick. i'm with the college, students were learning and on the moderator for today. how many of you been to a miami fair section so far? you know what i'm about to say, which is welcome to the book fair. it is our 36 miami book fair international. yes, this is great. i will applaud. [applause] and i want to thank some people, this capital runs books and books, it was great 36 use go, and i would like to mention their names. for this wonderful event. we have a few things to say. one is that this is a volunteer run event. so when you see people with a volunteer tag, please be kind to them. they are giving the time to help make it a great event. with the other people are making this happen our sponsors and they include the knight

foundation, will craving, meredith foundation, and the degroot foundation and many others. the college is a major sponsor, too. you are in wilson campus of miami-dade college today, and pretty much all all of the stae doting the time to make this work. here we go to fashion when we see, what have i got? at the end of the session we are going to have a question and answer. you use the the middle and lighter. some of you been to other sessions. you know how this works. we will have questions and answers, , and the office will e autographing section here on this floor passed the elevators, the green autographing section afterwards. the books are for sale outside the door and they will be here. if you don't get a chance ask a question here you may go ask your question there. with that i'm going to introduce the rabbi rabbi who will be our introducer today for this

session. thank you very much. [applause] >> hello. i'm from the city for advancement of jewish education at the director of adult lifelong learning and growth. it's a privilege to be here on stage. we're thrilled to be one of the sponsors of this series. we host adult learning throughout miami-dade county in north date, south dade and miami beach and the love for all of you who are interested to join us on an incredible journey of learning, of exploration and dynamic engagement. today i have the privilege of introducing three extraordinary authors, emily bernard, carolyn forche a, and dani shapiro. emily bernard received her phd in american studies on yale university. her essays have been published in the american scholar, best american essays, and best

african american essays. she is the green and gold professor of english at the university of vermont. her latest book "black is the body" is an extraordinary exquisitely written memoir that looks at race and a fearless penetrating on true way. in 12 telltale connected deeply personal essays that explore up close the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing reality of growing up black in the south with the family name inherited from a white man of getting a phd from yale of adopting to make babies from ethiopia, a teaching at a white college and living in america's new england today, henry louis gates calls it a major contribution and the "washington post" says it's magnificent.

carolyn forche is an american poet, editor, translator and activist. her books of poetry are blue hour from the angel of history, the country between us and gathering the tribes. in 2013 she received the academy of american poets fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. in 2017 she became one of the first to make poets to receive the wind and campbell prize. she a professor at georgetown university and margaret atwood calls her new book "what you have heard is true", a memoir of witness and resistance astonishing, powerful, so important at this time. it is a devastating lyrical and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage in order to help others. and dani shapiro is a best-selling author of the memoirs hourglass, still

writing, devotion and slow-motion, and five novels. in "inheritance" she confronts a staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test. her father was not her biological father. she woke up one morning and her entire history, the life she had lived crumbled beneath her. united states as a book about the extraordinaire time in which we live, time in which science and technology has outpaced that only medical ethics also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. ruth franklin in the new york times book review found "inheritance" profound, the true drama of inheritance is not the discovery of her fathers identity but the meaning she makes of it. her account is beautifully written and deeply moving. brought me to tears or than

once, she said. so please join the in welcoming emily bernard, carolyn forche and dani shapiro. [applause] [inaudible] >> hi, everybody. i'm going to read a bit from a few of the essays in my book, the first one is a title essay "black is the body." black history. my brown daughters became black when they were six years old. there were watching television when the in february, black history month. a commercial came on to it was

more like a 30-second history lesson, a commemoration of a pilot pilot, a poet or a politician, a first black as a writer i know calls them. then being the racial pioneers, the inaugural negroes, the four most african-americans to break through racial barriers in their chosen fields. by breakthrough i mean of course secure the regard of white people. we are black, julia said to isabella. no, we are brown, isabella responded. yet, but they call it black. despite my efforts to shield them, my daughters had some luck unwise to the absurd and illogical nature of american racial identity. blackness, julia had figured out, , had nothing to do with actual skin color. blackness should come to understand was an external identity, extra to her anyway.

race was something of the people identified come something they said but not necessarily saw. blackness she had into it it was a social category, not a color but a condition. and like it or not it was time she was informing her sister to get with the proverbial program and in spite of me but also because me my brown daughters were becoming black. my heart sank. it was not blackness per se because my heart to sink. i enjoy being black. but it took me a long time to get here to this place of racial pleasure. my earliest expenses of blackness were defined by an unpleasant and uncomfortable hypervigilance. being black meant you had to be constantly aware of that you could never really be at ease on i got wise to the fact that being black in a white place meant that the world was not a

safe place, not for you. in my family race was not a construction or three or an outdated consequence of history, the active living foundation of our reality. race determined the contours of every choice we made, every monday public act we performed with a project with a name. when we moved into our house it was called integration. when my older brother and i entered the public school system it was called desegregation. the split between black and white was not metaphorical. railroad tracks to find a black and white nashville. on the white side of town south national, we played a role in the grand project of enormous proportions. we lived in south nashville, but in north nashville we could be black in a way that was not possible in any other part of the city. in north nashville no one white was watching it we could relax.

we were free. north nashville was where my father practiced medicine and where he attended events at the university. my parents alma mater and one of the countries oldest hbcus. north nashville was where we attended church at a a small chapel that was established with the faculty and students of the medical college from which both of my parents received the graduate degrees. among the parishioners in the chapel where men and women i called aunt and uncle in with him we had no biological relationship. we shared something bigger and more profound than blood. history. inside the church we celebrated i believe in god and a common pride in how it all made it over and broke through. we were a community, and black community built in spite of because of racism. because if it had not been white

supremacy, schools like fisc and harry might never have existed. but my daughters were not born under the shadow of this history. they are black by ideology and infinity but not my blood. when they were 12 months old they assume dual citizenship in america, and africa america. once when we were out of town visiting john's extent, i told them the black history month store that i could see the story unsettled them. i tried to explain my reasons for having wanted to protect my daughters from the language of race that my explanation seemed only to make the more impatient. don't you want them to know their history, john's cousin asked? i knew what she meant she met american slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement, frederick douglass, rosa parks, martin, malcolm and of the first blacks. february stories which as american stories belong to her,

this white american woman more than they do to my daughters. i am an african who lives in america, isabella expect one figure she's recounting a conversation she had with a third grade classmate. the african children's choir had come to burlington and the class had taken a a field trip to see them perform. later that day isabell his classmates in an attempt identify the difference she perceived between isabella and the children on stage had referred to isabella as an african-american. isabella corrected her. while the law may say i am an american, i am african. when i came to this country, she continued, astonishment made it difficult for me to continue paying attention, that my daughter had such a fine sense of her place in the world i had not known. her implicit assessment of my role as essentially a porter in the stage of her life journey felt wholly appropriate.

my daughters and i flipped through a picture of 12th century underground churches carved out of rock. i showed them websites that feature both centuries old drawings and modern photographs of ethiopian kings and queens. yours is the only african country to fight off the colonizer i remind them often. every mother thinks her daughters look like angels, , bt my daughters do resemble the don't i'd brown cherubs that dominate ethiopian orthodox christians iconography. why did white people make black people slates, isabella asked? there's been slavery all over the world i told her. even in ethiopia. i am proud my daughters were born in a world where not only slaves but angels and aristocrats just like them. so my husband and i adopted our children and want to read a

little piece from the essay i wrote about the experience of going to ethiopia called motherland. so this is in the middle of the journey to pick them up and i think it will be clear. we drive slowly as the road fans and then disappears as if it had surrendered to the commanding natural landscape around us. helen had told us the road would end and we would have to walk for an hour to meet the girls and their family. our american agent marjorie dismissed this information as another one of helen's fantastic stories. the car was pulled to a gentle stop among bunches of beaver tail cactus with stems as wide as paddles and decorated with bristles like stubble on a man's face. there are only three yards between us but the means of voices sound far away. underneath my seat the earth is

a slight impact as brown sugar. within arms reach of the small island of green bordered by layer of rocks, in its center stands the tree with a thin trunk and a flowery afro desha excuse me, a flowering crown like a tall skinny kid with an afro. in the distance more trees some dense and willowy stand in a line of cracked earth. the sky is thick with all the blue left in the world. i nearly tripped on titanic pieces of shale in my boots catch in the valley of crevices between them. i discover the beneath my hat. i feel appears the impact in my joints and lungs. if we'd been in the states, if we were anywhere else i would have been preoccupied with us soon i could seek out a piece of

sheet in which to hide. here even as i stoop, stumble and go forward i began to understand beneath this piercing set and breathtaking sky is exactly where i belong. everything allies in front of me, nothing is behind. there is no shelter, nowhere to hide here the sun may be relentless but it is glorious, to come evaporating any doubt about the road ahead. i stand up straight. the heat is not something to shun i decide that something only to carry. as we approach a group of thatched huts topped with cylinders of long grass, my heart beats so rapidly that i reflexively cover it with my hand. i smoothed by shirt and adjust my hat. i hope i look like with the family wants for the twins. as we are greeted by the people to whom the girls belong, i imagine a woman being presented

to a groom at the inauguration of an arranged marriage. be prepared to be treated like royalty, helen had written in an unusually helpful email. e-mail. indeed, the girls family had slotted a sheet and our honor. a large platter of the roasted sheep meat sits on a clay table, and both the red repot his place on the side. everyone gathers to eat, but after a few token bites, i sit back from the table and the walls of the white circular room. i try to arrange features into an expression i communicates my appreciation for the food, my desire to enjoy it, and my inability to do so. i am not successful. it is clear from the quality of the murmurs. emily doesn't like it and smiles empathetically. i can tell he is trying to translate the disappointment i have caused.

it is terrible to know that i failing to demonstrate the boundless depth of gratitude i feel for everyone in this room. my palms sweat. i am rigid with anticipation, eager for the wonderful, terrible moment in which the girls would be placed in our arms. beside me, john eat heartily and drinks sheets note from a ten count. i cannot say no when it is offered to me. i can multiple pairs of interested eyes as a bring the cup to my mouth. the twins grandmother brings up the baby we will know as isabella to choose rep in the same light blue quilted outfit she wears in the picture at helen sent months ago. her grandmother, a slight one with a slightly wrinkled face stand the space the separates the family home. the sky shines a movie star light down on them. isabella regards me --

disregards me as she takes in the entire scene. julie emerges midway atoll pic she is afraid just ever seen white skin, and gently touches john's arm. julia continues to cry as a stand outside the compound and are presented with carrots so bright and large they could service props in the bugs bunny cartoon. john gathers as together for a photograph before we begin the trackback to the land rover. the return hide feels more arduous, the son hotter, the air dryer. i'm trying not to show my exhaustion. the grandmother has two swaddle isabella strapped her back. her steps are light and efficient on rocks that protrude from the earth. i walked next to one of the babies cousins, the girl of 11 or 12. her eyes are large in kind, the braids in her hair shine. she wears julia who seems to be

dozing on her back under the a cloth secured to her dress. we take turns looking at each other and to looking away before the other one catches us. they're so much a want to ask and tell her that the membrane of language fine and opaque it once it travels with us like a mobile glass partition. even though it feels it is silly, the next time i see her looking i meet her gaze up at the second time today put my hand over my heart. i pressed down hard. when she looks away she is still smiling. you are a part of our family now, an older male cousin tells us, but that's it for goodbyes. john and i hustled into the car was rumbling engine inspires more caterwauling from julia. the babies are shuffled around. i hold julia who screens and stares at me with tears cascading from her eyes. isabella rests quietly in john's

lap, snug in the nest of his arms and chest. suddenly she sits up and opens her mouth slightly. sheets milk spills out of her tiny body. julia follows suit. before second-round i take my hat and turn upside down under her chin. three hours later we have become almost used to the smell and feeling of our daughters vomit caked on her clothing cookware sticky with heat and sweat and bodily fluids by the time would arrive at the airport. john lisa goes with me while he rushes to the bathroom to clean out my hat. with the baby tucked into the crook of each arm i sink into a plastic chair. my dizziness and blurry vision must be a result of the heat i think. an older woman wearing -- sits down next to me. she holds her arms open. i hand her julia and she pulls a small blanket from her belongings and hands it to me.

she and shut each day when my arms when it's time to board. i still feel rickety as walk towards the point whatever firm grip on isabella who emerges from the cloth on the shoulder is sold as a plant sprout up from the earth and the time lapsed video. she stretches her neck i could periscope and pivots her head slowly, , a stern look on her face, like a general assessing a battlefield or magellan survey the atlantic i think in which she smiles at least we're sharing our first private joke. julie has decided that it is my particular job to tempt you are so john and i trade babies once we are seated. she and i follow sleep quickly after takeoff. a few minutes later a wave of pain propels me out of my seat and towards the bathroom. along the way i shove unmissable and indignant julia into the arms of a pretty flight attendant. i'm on my hands and knees in the

throes of abdominal pain when the attendant knocks on the door. as soon as it under the latch she snatches the door open. i look up. she is still new. i'm particular, madam, your baby, she presents me with julie looks to have me with what appears to be alarm under 12 month old face. the thing about unpasteurized milk is it does not agree with you and i spent the next few days at various heights angled on and run the floor of our hotel bathroom, my stomach in a losing war against bacteria. gradually unable to climb onto the bed at night where i lie on my back breathing deeply, mouth open. late at night john takes the girls to the lobby when they became restless. julia doses while john collins isabella by pushing her two inches back and forth into the short motion gets her to sleep. thank you.

[applause] >> it's a pleasure to read with you. i'm going to read from whichever is true. most of it takes place in el salvador before the war, in the two years leading up to the war and i and i was, my guide there was a man who was quite mysterious. he was the cousin of the poet whom i translated the previous summer. i'm going to just read some scenes from the book. it is near the end now. we are walking in the rippling heat of a sorghum field, cicadas

were ring to an empty sky. a man uncorks a waterboard pick another man leans against a a state. there is a woman here wearing an apron and skirt over her trousers. hard like and the drive route of sorghum seed heads. i'm holding a spray of seeds. one of the men takes him aside and tells them something, a secret, like everything else. we get into the jeep and without explanation drive to another place not far from this field. the compass he knows, , rural peasants would have walked measuring distance not in kilometers but in hours or days. what i would looking for? i asked. and as always he doesn't answer, swearing under his breath through the haze of smoke that hangs in the airware the corn had been growing.

we stopped near a cluster of shacks made of mud. one of them has collapsed and smoke rises from it. wait here, he tells me, but i don't wait. i i had stopped waiting for him months before this but he can't seem to break this habit of telling me to wait. smoke is rolling like a short cloud along the field just above the black and stubble. we walk and when he stops i stop. and when he continues, i continue. he palms the error to say slow down, or be quiet. i slow down and am quiet. when we reached the heights, no, it isn't the. no one is home. a large plastic bowl used for making the slurry that becomes tortillas is overturned on the ground. there is a child's t-shirt in

the tortilla slurry. behind one of the hats it appears several chickens have been held by their feet and whacked against a stone. they are lying on the ground. one of them still opening and closing its beak. 100 or so meters more and we hear the wind of flies, the hissing and belching of turkey vultures, a flapping of wings like applause in the maize stocks as the fat and birds try to lift themselves. a flatbed truck follows at a distance behind this with three stan in the back. they are calling out to us, or to the driver of the truck, but i do understand what they say. i don't know what i had expected to see, but not the swollen torso of a man with one arm

attached to him. a black pool of tar over his crotch i didn't expect that his head would be by itself some distance away without eyes or lips. the stench in the air is familiar, a riding, suite, sickening smell. .. >> the three men take off their straw hats and stand in a

circle around the man they have reassembled. they stand and one crosses himself lightly. the parts are not quite touching. there is soil between them. especially the head and the rest. birds nearby, hoping he will go away and leave them to this meal. the air harms. we walk. why doesn't anyone do something? i think i asked. on this day, i will learn that the human head weighs about 2.5 kilos. i went into a prison in - - extensively to visit someone i had pretended to know in the past. but the purpose was to look around in the prison and be shown something that i was then

to talk about on the outside. and so, i will just begin in the middle of this walk inside the prison. we turned a corner where a group of prison guards had gathered in a circle, playing a game with dice. thoroughly occupied with the game, tossing dice and laughing or groaning. no one looked at us. we had made almost a full circle of this courtyard on all four wings. mcgill looked around cautiously. - - he whispered, are you ready? he locked eyes with me and then asked if i saw the dark doorway nearby.i did. it was not quite 10 feet away. a room with an entrance like the barracks. but it was on the other side of the courtyard. the far side. no one is paying attention to you now. just walk into that room and try to see what you can.

don't stay long and control your face when you come out. i'll be right here if anyone sees you and asks what you're doing, just make an absent-minded north american lady face. and he imitated such a face by looking at me blankly of his mouth slightly open. i had never seen anyone do that before and didn't realize that this is what we look like to others. just say you got lost. for a moment, i froze and he smiled and nodded yes. tossing his head in the direction of the doorway. go now, quickly. i was inside the room. it was darker than any other room and it stank more. i tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness. try to see, leonel has said.

it's what he always asked me to do to try to see you. look at the world hearsay and not at the mirror. what i saw were wooden boxes. about the size of washing machines. maybe a little smaller. i counted the boxes, there were sticks. they had small openings cut into the front with chicken wire mesh. they were padlocked. as i stood there, some of the boxes started to wobble a little. and i realized they were men inside them. fingers came through one of the mesh openings. blood rushed to my ears and i stood trying to orient myself so i could know not only where the room was for which all the boxes were against and i walked slowly toward the light of the open doorway and into the hall where mcgill was standing against his crotch. as i came toward him, he

whispered, tie your sweater sleeves around your neck, you have hives. i get hives. not as often as i once did but inchildhood frequently. whenever i was afraid of resource, they bloomed on my face and neck . so i did as he asked and tied the sweater sleeves. the darkness, solitary. sometimes men are held in there for a year and can't move when they come out because of the atrophy of their muscles. some of them never recover their minds. tell them on the outside, tell them. and then raising his voice he said, katerina, it has been nice to see you again. give my love to anna and carlos. he was walking. whispering again. it's time now for you to go. go he said. motioning with his head toward the gate. but will you be all right?

go. at the entrance, leonel was waiting as promised but beyond him, soldiers had surrounded his - - and were looking through the windows. he rested his hands on my shoulder and we began walking side-by-side. why are they - - i don't know. i guess we will find out. i had a friend named margarita and she worked at the jesuit catholic university in san salvador. it was the place for the jesuit priests were later assassinated in 1989. we were there for a day and this is what happens when we left.

that evening, we planned to me with some of margarita's friends and a few european journalists who arrived several weeks earlier. we would listen to reports of what they had seen and he would tell them what we knew. they would be coca-cola and potato chips. we were still in the clothes we had chosen that morning so we did look bourgeois. but i would never have been able to run in those shoes. i could barely walk in them. margarita pulled out of the parking lot onto what i would call a slip road. narrow and unlit.a road that wound around. she was laughing and teasing me when suddenly she said my name. and the car was flooded with light. she pressed the excelerator to the floor. the vehicle behind us was following so closely that a person could have leapt phone one room to the other. margarita sped into a tunnel of darkness and the vehicle behind us spread too.

it is the death squad. they're going to capture us. i turned around to watch the other car but couldn't see it. margarita, iv mother calling out. can you go faster? no, i cannot. this is as fast as i can go and i think i'm lost. there's the city ahead of us. drive toward the lights. we sped. the other cars sped too. this was going to beat it i thought. now when it wasn't expected. after they are talking about philosophy and god and the practice of liberation, i wanted to be brave. i did not feel brave. i had no weapon.it would not have helped. there was no last chance to do anything over again. are you afraid margarita? >> yes.

behind us when we got to the roundabout, that is where the honking began. other cars whose drivers saw what was happening, other cars pulling into the roundabout. slowing down. blocking the way of those who followed us and all the while, horns honking and even some cars stopping in people getting out of the cars. then there was an opening and we took it. all the way to the house of the friends of margarita. we didn't breathe and then the doors were opening and we ran through it from the front of the house to the garden in the back where the journalists were standing around in the dark. there are some passages from notebooks kept at the time. they're in a different language. partly because they were written 40 years ago and partly because i wrote them when i was under an intense pressure.

i wanted to get everything down on paper. written in pencil. this is the village abandoned. a road stretches between - - and in the mud there's a dance picture decorated with stars. there's no smoke rising the people returned here briefly. as they gathered the dead listing their names. possible sex and approximate age. they poured lime until the bodies is covered with - -. she had so rubbed her eyes from grief that all can be seen in

them. [indiscernible] death still patrols. in a poem, the blood of dead peasants has not dried. yes, leonel said, but pablo also wrote, the poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts. shaken by the fire and darkness of his time. over the years, i have been asked why as a 27-year-old american poet who spoke spanish broken the and knew nothing about the isthmus of the americas. i would accept the invitation of a man i barely knew.

why would this stranger, said to be a long wolf. a cia operative. a world-class marksman and smalltime coffee farmer take any interest in a nacve north american poet. as one man put it, what does poetry have to do with anything? we reached the chosen place and before digging my hands into his remains, i asked him quietly if i might tell the story now. everything or almost everything. of course he bellows. and to not waste time. why don't you think i brought you to san salvador in the first place. so you can eat papayas? you're a god dam poet. you must write. people asked me what it was like to work with him before

the war. some still want to know who he really was of course. but that is becoming apparent to friends and also enemies. as he knew it might one day. this is what i tell people now. it was as if he had stood me squarely before the world. removed the blindfold and ordered me to open my eyes. [applause] >> just mesmerized. a privilege and honor to be reading with both carolyn and emily. i'm going to read a bit from the opening and then skip and read a passage i don't read very often.

when i was a girl, i would sneak down the hall late at night once my parents were asleep. i would lock myself in the bathroom. climb onto the counter and get as close as possible to the mirror until i was nose to nose with my own reflection. this wasn't an exercise in the self absorption of childhood. the stakes felt high. who knows how long i kneeled there, staring into my own eyes. i was looking for something i couldn't possibly have articulated. but i always knew it when i saw it. if i waited long enough, my face would begin to morph. i was eight, 10, 13. cheeks, eyes, chin and forehead. features softened and shape shifted. until finally, i was able to see another phase.

a different pace. what seemed to me, a truer face. just beneath my own. now it is early morning and i'm in a small hotel bathroom, 3000 miles from home. i'm 54 years old and it's a long time since i was that girl. here i am again staring at my reflection. a stranger stares back at me. the coordinates. i'm in san francisco, just off a long flight. i'm a woman, a wife, mother, a writer, a teacher. of a daughter.i blink. the stranger in the mirror blanks too. a daughter. over the course of a single day and night, the familiar has vanished. familiar, belonging to a family. on the other side of the thin wall, i hear my husband crack open a newspaper.

perhaps it's my body trembling. i don't know what a nervous breakdown would feel like but i'm wondering if i'm having one. i trace my fingers across my cheekbones, down my neck and across my clavicle. as if to be certain i still exists. i'm hit by a wave of dizziness and gripped the bathroom counter. in the weeks and months to come, i will become well acquainted with this sensation. it will come over me on street corners and curbs and airports, train stations. i will take it as a sign to slow down. take a breath. feel my own body. you are still you, i tell myself. again and again and again. 24 hours earlier, i was in my home office trying to get organized for trip to the west coast when i heard michael's feet pounding up the stairs. it was 1030 in the evening and

we had to leave before dawn to get to the hartford airport for an early flight. i made a packing list. i'm a list maker and there were 1 million things to do. bras, panties, gene skirts, sweater/jacket. check whether in sf. i was good at reading the sound of my husband's footsteps. these sounded urgent. though i couldn't tell whether they were good urgent or bad. whatever it was, we didn't have time for it. skin stuff. brush/cold. headphones.he burst through my office door, open laptop in hand. susie sent her results, he said. susie was my much older half-sister. my father's daughter from an early marriage. we weren't close and hadn't spoken in a couple years but i had recently asked if she had ever done genetic testing. a new exciting psychoanalyst, she had been on the cutting edge of all things medical

point my email reached her at the teleconference. she had written back right away she had indeed done genetic testing and would look to see if she had her results on her computer. our father had died in a car accident, many years earlier when i was 23 and susie 38. through him, we are part of a large orthodox jewish clan. it was a family history i was proud of and i loved. our grandfather had been a founder of lincoln square synagogue, one of the most respected orthodox institutions. our uncle had been president of the orthodox union. our grandparents, pillars of the jewish community both in america and israel. as a grown woman, i was not remotely religious. i had a powerful, nearly romantic sense of my family and its past. the previous winter, michael had become curious about his own origins. he knew far less about the

generations preceding him and i did about mine. his mother had alzheimer's and had recently fallen and broken her hip. accommodation of her injury and memory loss have precipitated a steep and rapid decline. his father was frail but mentally sharp. michael's sudden interest in genealogy was surprising to me. but i understood it. is open to learn more about his roots while his dad was still around. do you want to do it? he might have asked. i'm sending away for a kit. it's only like 100 bucks. though i no longer remember the exact moment, it is in fact the small, undramatic, the yeah sure. that could just have easily been a shrug and a no thanks. the kids arrived and sat on our kitchen counter for days. perhaps weeks, unopened.

they became part of the scenery like the books and magazines that pile up until the card to them to our local library. we made coffee, poor jews, scrambled eggs. with a dinner at the kitchen table. we fed the dog. sorted mail. took out recycling. all the while, the kids remained sealed in their boxes decorated with the three leaf clover. ancestry. the dna test that tells a more complete story of you. one evening, michael opened the packages and handed me a small plastic vial. spit he said. i felt vaguely ridiculous and undignified as i bent over the pile. why was i even doing this? i wondered if my results would be affected by the lamb chops i had just eaten or the glass of wine or residue from my lipstick. two months passed and i gave

little thought to my dna test. i was deep into revisions of my new book. i had all but forgotten about it until one day an email containing my results appeared. we were puzzled by some of the findings. i say puzzled, a gentle word because this is how it felt to me. according to ancestry, my dna was 52 percent eastern european ashkenazi. the rest was a smattering of french, english, irish and german. odd. and i had nothing to compare it with. i wasn't disturbed. i wasn't confused. even though that seemed very low considered all my ancestors were jewish from eastern europe. i figured there must be a reasonable explanation tied up in migrations and conflict been many generations before me. such was my certainty that i know exactly where i came from.

so that 52 percent breakdown was kind of weird, that's all. a bland and innocuous as those green and white boxes have been. i thought i'd clear it up by comparing mine with susie's. now on the eve of our trip to the west coast, michael was sitting next to me. i felt his leg pressed against mine as side-by-side we looked down as his laptop screen. later, he told me he already knew what i couldn't allow myself to even begin to consider. on the wall directly behind us, i'm a black-and-white portrait of my grandmother. her hair parted in the center. comparing kit - - largest segment equals 14.9 sent to

morgan's. estimated number of generations equals 4.5. comparison took 0.0.538 seconds. what does it mean? my voice sounded strange to my own heirs. you are not sisters. not half-sisters? no kind of sisters point how do you know? michael traced the line estimating the number of generations to our most recent common ancestor. here. the numbers, symbols, unfamiliar terms on the screen were a language i didn't understand. it had taken a fraction of a second to upend my life. they would now forever be a before. the innocence of a packing list. preparation for a simple trip. the portrait of my grandmother

in a frame. my mind began to spin with calculations. if susie was not my half-sister, no kind of sister, it could mean only one of two things. either my father was not her father or my father was not my father. i'm going to skip way ahead. i want to read a brief scene for later in the book. i find out in the interim, i do a deep dive into the twin mysteries that propelled this book and my life, ever since that moment. one was, if my beloved father wasn't my father who was and the other was what did my parents know? i solved the question of who my biological father was within 36 hours. making this discovery. my parents, i am able to discover because miraculously, i have a couple clues as it had

been laid out in plain sight that i had never seen. i came to understand my parents had a great deal of trouble conceiving me and they had gone to an institute in philadelphia where they had used a donor. and that my biological father was a sperm donor. i was able to find him in 36 hours. i did say the book ends up being this deep dive into the history of reproductive medicine in this country and the nature of secrecy and what makes a family of family and a father a father. these are the big universal questions. or as my friend said to me yesterday, she was like, that dj up there really had something in store for you. this is a scene where i'm about to meet my biological father for the first time. the streets of teaneck, new

jersey were nearly distorted on yom kippur. michael and i parked outside an italian restaurant i had chosen. i didn't know the area at all and relied on the recommendations of local friends with one had even scouted a couple places and send me photographs. much of my anxiety had been poured into making a restaurant choice. it needed to be quiet but not too quiet. not anti-at lunch hour or two busy. i didn't want us to feel rushed and not too expensive. nice enough to be relaxing. i then called and asked for a corner table my friend specified which one and explained it would be a special occasion. not a birthday or anniversary, just important. i was in a state of high alert. even if all the careful planning seems crazy and

impossible. i was playing a character rather than living my life. and then they were practical concerns. were we going to keep it at polite chitchat. how much would we share with each other and what about his wife? i wondered what it could be like, married for 50 years, retired with three grown children to discover your husband had another child. we should go win, michael said. we still have half an hour. maybe they arrived early as well. what if they were already inside. i wanted to stay suspended in this moment. how could i possibly be emotionally or psychologically equipped to meet the biological father i hadn't even known had existed. it was as if i strapped on my ice skates and was expected to perform a triple axle. i'm not ready.

we stood in the car. the restaurants canopy hung over a patio with tables. it was still quite warm, unseasonably so. father, michael had said that morning. we have been married for 20 years and i'm about to meet your father. i considered wearing something of my dance to keep him close to me but i didn't want him at the table with ben. i didn't want him hovering. stricken, sorrowful. if that like a betrayal of one father that i was meeting my other father. if my dad had known, this too would make this day fraught behind measure. if you chosen to keep such a massive secret. when it was too late to discuss it or make amends. [indiscernible] in that case, the entire restaurant would be filled with my long lost relatives.

i watched the sidewalk in front. let's go and michael said. i can't. i felt pinned to the spot.how do i greet him? who should pick up the check? >> we will pick up the check. >> you don't think that will insult him? honey, you'll have to let this play out. just as i was registering what i was in, caught a glimpse of a couple walking in the near distance. the man was tall, white haired and wearing a blue button-down shirt and white khakis. it was then, get out of the car michael said. i can't. let's wait. get out of the car, now. he said it lovingly but firmly. not taking no for an answer as

if teaching a child to swim or ride a bike. this was my moment to flail or fall. i opened the car door. i saw them seeing me. there was no going back. it was probably no more than a half a dozen steps. what now, this seemed nothing to do but acknowledge the strangeness. and live inside of it. i said hello. it was people doing to look at him and see my features reflected back at me. and those staring contests i held with myself as a child were about this. i now understood. i've been searching for the truth in the mirror. trying to make sure of my own phase. here it was, finally, irrefutably in the form of the old man standing before me. i stuck out my own hand bid i'm danny and his eyes cackled as he smiled. both of us were flushed, bright

pink. a passerby might take us for a family. ben took an awkward half step toward me. his voice was like a fragment from a remembered dream did his first words, would it feel right to give you a hug? [applause] >> now we will open it up to questions. >> my question is for madame shapiro. your book mentioned your

inheritance or the jewish inheritance? >> not entirely sure i understand the question.>> the book is titled inheritance. it operates on a number of different levels. it operates on the level of inherited identity. one of the things i came to understand is that our identities are formed by the stores we are told from the time where small. in the stores i was told about myself or simply factually, genetically not true. so that is a level of inheritance. discovering technically i'm half jewish as opposed to full jewish. it doesn't matter to me as i had questions on my life. i'm sorry? >> may i say something?

from my past studies, jewish people are from egypt and are more egyptian or using a hybrid language today and hybrid people. it's not a full identity as to what they were initially when it crossed the red sea. >> the only thing i would say about it is these dna tests are creating all sorts of upended narratives in terms of what they understand about themselves and their identity. >> quick question to the lady who mentioned on blackness, please. let me clarify that. >> there's a whole line of people behind you and we will run out of time. >> just give me half a second only. i just want to let you know. racism and slavery came from

the torah and joshua was told to enslave the canaanites and take their land. >> i enjoyed the presentations from all three of you. would you please recite the poem on what your title is based? >> that would take too much time i think but thank you for asking for that. >> it's really powerful. it's easily available online too. sorry. i don't want to take so much time. but thank you for asking for it.

>> i'm going to be a facilitator for your book. i loved it. it brought me to eat years. my question is, since time has passed since you finished the book, do you feel any differently about the whole situation? do you feel anything different about your birth father what he has decided to do with the other people around? >> first of all, even my biological father? there haven't been any more people. i'm unusual it often when people are making these discoveries, there also discovering they have 47 other half siblings it's a typical story these days but it's not my story. i'm kind of unusual in that way. the other thing i would say is that traveling for inheritance, traveling around the country. it has been such a remarkable privilege to be able to do. to connect with so many people who are experiencing this very

modern phenomenon that's one of the social and bioethical issues of our time and connecting in that way. it's been a powerfully liberating and healing experience for me. because i've gone to make meeting out of what life handed to me which is what i think we all want to do as poets and novelists. we want to make meaning. >> do you have another book in the works now? >> i can't imagine what i will write next. >> okay, thank you. >> hello. i am so delighted to be here. my question is for danny. i have read all of your book. i'm a huge fan of your work. i'm an aspiring writer. as well. during the time i was reading your book, i got a call from my brother in new jersey. basically, he told me i was the first person was learning about

those. his wife had just received a text from a woman who was her half-sister. so the story has played out, the dynamics are similar to your story. so i was asked by my brother to be his sounding board and not say anything. which was ridiculously hard for me. but i managed to do it. i'm curious as to how many people have reached out to you. who have similar stories. i think you are the impetus for it all. it's all changing because of you. >> when i first discovered this, i wanted to return the story to the story store. the answer to that question is very simple. last year, 12 million people

bought dna tests. that number is expected to exceed 100 million in a year from now. about 200 people are making discoveries like has happened in your story. i'm hearing these stories constantly every day, everywhere. it is not an exaggeration to say it's epidemic. thank you. >> to prepare for a preview, i read through all your memoirs also. somehow, inheritance didn't come as a shock to me. it all made sense after reading all of the memoirs. i'd like to ask each of you. is writing about your life, examining your life the way you do, does it help you make sense

of it? because dan is like makes more sense to me than my life at this point. i'm curious how it is for each of your. [laughter] >> that's a great question. i think it's part of the process. i know that i write, just as danny said, to try to make meaning out of the stories we've been handed. it is part of the process i think. the danger is when it becomes a story and then there's the life you're living which is complex and difficult in many ways. they work together. in the end, the story is its own thing. >> this is my first pro book. events happen mostly 40 years ago. for me, in order to write this particular book, i wanted to write it so the reader would never know more than i do at the time. because i wanted to replicate a journey. so i actually had to relive it

in order to rewrite it. and then reliving it, i got to be puzzled at my younger self and angry at my younger self. many emotions. i think in that way, it did help me to come to terms with what had happened. it was a little like putting a giant jigsaw puzzle together. upside down. so you don't get to see the picture while you're working on it. in the end, you have a picture. >> it's so interesting to hear you say that because i thought for a long time. the relationship between the self and the story is the story. if you had tried to write this book 40 years ago, it would be a completely different book not mediated by everything those 40 years has sort of, offered you all i will say is when i go back and reviewed yes, it does make sense of everything. when i go back and read my

early work which this forced me to do. it was like, it is all there. it was in my first novel. in unpublished stories i was writing in graduate school. is a term i write about an inheritance which is the unthought known. i think i was driven i the unthought known. what we absolutely no but is too dangerous to allow ourselves to think. which is a lot of what i think makes writers, writers. we follow the line of words to use any dillards phrase. at least for me, that's how i discovered what i know but i have no idea what i think or understand or i fear until i'm following the line of words and it takes me to that place of understanding. >> question for mla. i swear, i must be your biggest fan. your essays in the book, every single one was powerful.

but the one in the hospital. that has stayed with me for a while. could you talk a little about it? >> yes, thank you. my cousin everybody. [laughter] the experience happened august 7, 1994 and it would have been a very different essay if i had written it all those years ago. took me a long time to figure out how to write that story. i needed the distance from it emotionally and psychologically to see it as a story and all the applications of the story. i opened the book with that because toni morrison talked about - - and not wanting to talk about the thing that happens first. so the reader wouldn't be looking for the climax of the

tragedy that happens in the book. i thought about that a lot as i was composing this book and putting the essays together. he had shaped so much of my adult life. - - and then in the end, this was a man who was afraid and mentally ill.there were seven of us.no one died. and i'm fortunate to have had the chance to reflect on the experience. to think about how it shaped my life. and had to keep going back to the hospital because i developed - - in my bowel. took seven years, which made biblical sense. then we passed eight years and my husband and i were high-fiving saying, we really killed this. then i was sick in the

hospital. the lesson is that we have no control over these things. and i have no control ultimately and how the stabbing impacts me. i was back in the hospital after i turned my books in and realized, i had believed i had written this out for my life that i really believe that and i learned an important lesson. the story keeps unfolding. but i also learned i had to live with my scars, really. it's how i've made sense of that experience. i have to make peace with the situation that keeps emerging in my life. and do the work i need to do. so it's been an organizing event in my life. and i'm still understanding it. and it's had more impact than i prefer. but i've had to make peace with that and i do that through the work. >> thank you. love you.

>> let's give them all a round of applause. [applause] you can continue the conversation at the autograph station on this floor past the elevator. walk across. it's the green signing station and you may find the books right outside here. thank you so much. >> good afternoon everyone. if you're here for the 12:30 p.m. - - [audio lost] >> once again, make sure you have your tickets available for the 12:30 p.m. [inaudible

conversations] >> this is booktv's live coverage of the miami book fair continues in about 15 minutes. you will hear from the author, novelist, jonathan safran. his new book is we are the weather. saving the planet begins at breakfast. in the meantime, we are joined on the set in miami byformer professional quarterback , syracuse quarterback, on mcpherson. was also the author of this book. you throw like a girl. the blind spot of masculinity. don mcpherson, who is sidney crawford? >> sidney crawford, she is one of the most well-known models.

>> no, your friend. sidney crawford. >> she was the first fight i ever had in grade school. i was 10 years old and we started throwing rocks at each other. and i called him a sissy and that's when the fight turned on. >> why? >> we learned at an early age that the worst thing you can be called as a boy, is a girl. i just came from catholic school and here we were, fighting for dominance on the playground. as soon as i evoked gender in the conversation, that from the fight happened. >> why did that incident that was you so much that you left it in your book? >> because it was, going back to fundamentally how boys learn what it means to be a man and how we learn to juxtapose girls are in our lives. it was that moment. that thing that happened at a

very early age. my will is i don't like fighting number one. and number two, what me to 10-year-old boys start rolling in the gravel, fighting because one of them questions the others masculinity. >> in your book, you write, we do not raise boys to be men. we raised them not to be women or gay men. >> that came from asking man, what does it mean to be a man? and i heard don't be a sissy. don't be a fag. >> is that part of locker room culture and building a bond? >> i would say that part of patriarchal culture. understanding who men are. masculinity is this thing of share our feelings, don't discuss our feelings.

what i refer to as the blind thought of masculinity. we don't talk about these things so we don't get better at these things. >> did you feel that way while you were in sports? >> there's no question. not just to not talk about emotions but anything more broad of who i was as a person. i listen to six songs before every football game. people think they were headbanging songs. two of the six songs were from the film, - - those of things i thought about a lot as a young boy. as i progressed as an athlete, those things i realized i wasn't practicing. >> did you feel uncomfortable being around other guys in the locker room? >> i didn't feel comfortable because the performance of masculinity is something we learn at a young age. i knew how to function. i didn't feel comfortable like i wasn't being true to myself but there were so many things i

was not bringing to the environment. that made me feel uncomfortable with who i was presenting. >> has the world changed? >> i think it's changed dramatically. the very fact we are having this conversation. i wrote this book in 2001. i went on oprah and was given the name of the publisher. and i was told the people need this book, men, don't buy books. that was 2001. i think we've changed a lot since then. >> you write that essentially, removing the dogma of heterosexuality exclusive claim of marriage takes power and control away from men. you move into social issues in this book. >> i do. i think one of the things we often do is we hide from important conversations and we will blame religion or family or culture and it keeps us from a more progressive and enlightened conversation. >> have we had a reaction from your former syracuse teammates

or nfl teammates? >> the reaction has always been positive. men will say you were ahead of your time. or they will wonder how i got involved in the conversation. but for the most part, by and large. this is why i reject what was told to me in 2001, that men don't care. i believe that men do care. that's what the conversation is about. >> does your attitude threaten football in a sense? >> no, i'm critical of football but i'm critical of a lot of things. i'm critical of things i care about. in order for us to progress, this goes back to the blind spot. i'm very critical of men but i love who men are. i love my father and themen in my life. in order for us to be better , we have to be critical of ourselves. >> a portion of your book deals with ray rice. what happened? >> maybe not so much the

incident or reaction. but one key point that happened in the aftermath of ray rice was why i stayed. - - married him in the aftermath of all that. people want to know why did she stay. the question we have to ask is why did he stay? what is it about men that staying in an abusive relationship, and unhealthy relationship is not something we as men question. why we stay in a place that's not so fulfilling in our own cells. >> you go on to say that the semantics of sexism perpetuate myths. >> it's the way we's that cite statistics. we don't talk about how many men are involved in that conversation. the way we frame the problem by calling it women's issues. allows men to do nothing, quite frankly. if we call it women's issues, it's not for us to deal with or

to truly understand. >> were you raised to be a man? were you raised with some of these values? >> i was raised talking specifically about my father. by a gentle, stoic man. but he did not intentionally talk about masculinity. so his silence made the prevailing culture, that i was around, especially the sports culture to demonstrate what it meant to be a man. that's only half the story we are being told.i do say i was raised by a gentle, loving, caring man and parents. but their silence made the cultural narrative morepowerful in my life. >> you go on to talk about mandate , performance, promise and lie. >> the mandate of masculinity is what were told to be. be a man. suck it up. performances all the things we do to do those things that masked our true identity. that we are loving and caring and sensitive.

little boys were loving and sweet have to perform this thing of masculinity where they have to not like and do the things there may do. take on this performance of masculinity. the promises as long as we do that, where in the club. that's part of the promise of masculinity. as long as we are silent and buy into this narrow definition of masculinity, then we are okay. don't be a sissy and those other things. we don't raise meant to be men, we raise them not to be women. and the light is, that's a lie. men are loving, caring, sensitive, vulnerable. that's not my feminine side but that's the reality of my wholeness as a person. if you have those qualities front and center, we are not teaching boys to behold men. >> at one point were you recognized to have some quarterback talent? >> i was probably 11-12 years

old. all of a sudden i was a commodity in the sports world. i transferred high schools to go to a school that had a better football program. it was part of my talent that led me to a high school and a scholarship at the recuse. it happened at the very early age. >> what was that like? >> i think you learn the performance of masculinity in a much more acute way. you learn that not only do you have to be this man's man but now you have this other player as a football player. there's a certain way you have to adhere to the team and the culture around you that you no longer just revisit yourself if you represent the school, the town and the city in many cases. >> did you feel like a phony at that time? >> not a phony. because what i did was when i was faced with adversity, i would draw. i wasn't perpetrating myself to

be a man's man that i really withdrew. in high school, i started wearing a shirt and tie to class. and i did all through college but i wanted to project a broader understanding or a broader perspective and persona than what people expected of me. back then, i really thought it was about my race. i didn't want to be the black kids from the neighborhood just using football to get out of a bad situation. i came from a middle-class, wonderful family. my mother was a school nurse and my father was a police officer. i wanted to project something broader than what the world was seeing. >> what kind of pressures is an all american quarterback at syracuse university face? as basically a kid. >> yeah, exactly. the biggest pressure is that you are living, what's really ironic about sports. it's an extraordinarily vulnerable endeavor.

you really go out and play in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. now with media, millions of people. i've always said what's ironic about talking with you is the ã it's only to reality tv. it's c-span and sports. we will find out, the game starts at 9:00 and we will find out by midnight who wins and it will be the human experience. that's the biggest thing that athletes face. >> did you ever think about dropping out because of the pressure? >> no. i always felt like there was something bigger. i think this book and the reason i wrote this book is part of that. i think there was a bigger narrative to be told. if i was going through the experience, i knew there were life lessons.

that i needed to share. so i was documenting that. the first book i wrote that i never published was titled, i thought it mattered. there were all these things about sports that we think matters. there's no i in team. all that bs. all the altruism we assume was all bs. all part of the performance of masculinity. i always felt like there was something i had to tell in this process i was going through. >> so you're masculinity was commodified in the sense. >> absolutely. i write about a game that was the absolute worst performance i've ever had in any sporting event from the time i was 10 years old and it was the last game i played in syracuse university. all people remember was the last 90 seconds. when west virginia scores. we drive the length of the field and when by appointed everyone remembers that last 90 seconds. it's an the chapter about

hyperbole and myths. the reality of that game, that was the worst football game, the worst performance. i threw four interceptions. i gave the bull to virginia five times. - - the ball. >> that 90 seconds made you the hero. >> that's why my masculinity was commodified. five or ability, my lack of preparation, characterize the first 58 minutes. >> do you have sons and let them play football? >> i don't have sons but i would certainly let them play football. >> there's talk now about paying college athletes and it's started in california. what your overall thought about that? >> i think athletes get paid with education. if you're saying athletes should get money and we don't fulfill the first promise of a

meaningful education, then you're saying they're not worth the time of higher education. the purpose of higher education is to get an education that takes you beyond your life. it's to have a job. we should be educating them about the multibillion-dollar industry that surrounds them. >> don mcpherson, do you think there are more men in the locker room and young guys in the locker room who feel the way you do? but feel trapped. ... men see the need for accommodation. i believe i would be doing this if it wasn't there.

>> down is the author. he has served on the board of news ncaa sexual assault task force and the board of governors commission to combat campus sexual violence. thanks for your time. book tvs live coverage of the miami book fair continues now. next is about climate change. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. if i could get your attention, good afternoon. welcome to the 36th edition of

the miami book fair. the confines of this campus, i want to say welcome and please do something to your phones so they don't make noise. if you don't know how to handle that, to the person next year. don't be shy. ask for help. [laughter] my name is patrick, i work here at the college and i am a volunteer. be kind to your volunteers. we are really crowded so thank you for coming. [applause] do we have any friends of the book fair here? let's give them a round of applause. our biggest supporters and you can talk to them about what a great thing it is to be and off

the benefits associated. this book fair doesn't happen without our sponsors and i need to acknowledge our sponsors. north america, the foundation, found a spinning and many other sponsors. at the end of this session, the author will have the autographing decision on this floor in the green station, books are for sarah outside. we will have time for q&a but if you don't ask questions, you can line up with the autographing station. with that, i will introduce our introducer who is carolyn she will explain her institute to you any moment. [applause] >> hello, it's a pleasure to be

here. i'm the founder and senior advisor at the institute right now. [applause] we've been talking about it nonstop for ten years. it's a pleasure to meet you all. you can hear a bit about this message of mobilizing us, inspiring us and keeping us optimistic. that's a hell of a job. jonathan is the author of the nonfiction book, eating animals and the novels, everything eliminated, incredibly close and here i am. in this book, we are the weather, climate change the central global dilemma of all time and surprising new ways. some people reject the fact that

our planet is warming because of human activity. are those of us who believe in the science who need to change our lives in response, it's a great reckoning with ourselves. with our comfort for the sake of the future, we have turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products. the consequences are catastrophic. all of it starts with what we eat and what we don't eat for breakfast. in her review, they noted the message is for depressing and optimistic informs readers to rethink their commitment to combating the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced. please help me welcome jonathan.

[applause] >> thank you. nice to be here. i knew within a second or two we were going to get along. we have a lot to talk about. i said it probably be better if you and i had a public conversation rather than my just getting up and reading or delivering some kind of lecture because i have believed the problem of climate change is largely a problem of conversation and how conversations are ahead. this is the last event i think i'm doing for a book tour for this book. the first event i did wasn't an event, it was an interview with someone name ben shapiro, a far

right winged, he's quite conservative, public intellectual radio host. before i went out there, my friends said why would you do that? why would you talk to this person? why would you even share a table with him? second, why would you think there's anything productive to be had in the conversation? i felt that even if a lot of his opinions and values are quite different on my own, he's driven by his own values. i don't think of him as somebody as i might some other public figures, purely in it for money or fame.

he's clearly a smart person. however, i strongly disagree with him. he has an audience in the millions. this is a problem we will either solve or suffer together. there has to be some white of having productive conversations. when we sat down, we made some nice conversation between us and then he began to dig in and said climate change, what is it you want to talk about? what are your feelings about climate change? i said what do you think climate change is? and i will tell you my feelings. he said well, the fact -- not the idea, notion or argument, the fact that the planet is going to warm in the next century by between two and 6 degrees because of human activity. i thought, that's a pretty

robust description of climate change. it was not at all what i expected him to say. the goalposts of climate has been moving over the last month and year. it used to be that a fairly large number of people didn't accept the basic science of human activity, the new form of denial was the earth is warming, we don't really know if it's human activity or not or if it's regular climate cycles. now the most form of climate denial is the earth is warming because of human activities, we don't know exactly how bad it will be. it would be premature or even reckless to overreact, let's wait ten or 20 years. technologies will develop which will get us out of the problem. so i spent a lot of time thinking about different kinds of climate denial because i have

grown to think of myself as a kind of denier. a different kind, but kind that knows everything that's necessary to know and cares about necessary amounts, but doesn't do very much. it has a larger carbon footprint meet average science denier. 91% now citizens except the basic science of climate change. many americans believe in the existence of bigfoot but deny the existence of climate change. 70% say they wished the u.s. state in crime accord. the challenge is how to have a conversation in a way that reveals this broad agreement rather than focuses on the areas

of disagreement. i thought before we get into our conversation, i would read a short passage that gets this notion of there being different kinds of denial and the most insidious kinds, probably everybody in this room practices. including myself. 1942, a 28-year-old catholic embarked on a mission to travel to poland 200 and ultimately america to inform world leaders of what the germans were perpetrating. in anticipation of his journey, he met with resistance groups accumulating information testimonies to bring to the west. after surviving the journey, he arrived in d.c. in june 1943. he met with supreme court justice, felix, one of the great legal minds in american history

and himself a jew. after hearing the account of the clearing, exterminations and concentration camps, after asking him a series of increasingly specific questions like what the height of the wall that separates the ghetto from the rest of the city parks he paced the room and silence and took his seat and said mr. gorski, a man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank, i must say i'm unable to believe what you told me. when he pleaded with him to accept his account, frankfurter responded i didn't say this young man is lying, i said i am unable to believe him. my mind, my heart is in such a way i cannot accept it. frankfurter didn't question the truthfulness of his story. he didn't dispute the germans

were systematically murdering the jews of europe. he didn't respond while he was persuaded and horrified, there's nothing he can do. rather he admitted not only is an ability to believe the truth but his awareness of the inability. our minds and hearts are well-built to perform different tax for others. we are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way. to need evidence of this, look around miami and people building houses 3 feet higher and if that were a solution. we evolved over hundreds of millions of years and the resemblance of the modern world, we are left with desires, fears and differences neither

correspond nor respond to modern realities. we are disproportionately drawn to immediate and local needs, we create sugars which are bad for people, we watch our children despite the many greater risks to their health we ignore. while remaining indifferent to what is lethal but feels over there. many climate change is accompanying calamities, extreme water weather events, wildfires, displacement of scarcity, vivid, personal and suggestion of the worsening situation, it doesn't feel that way. distance and isolated rather than the strengthening narrative. as the journalist put, evil psychologist gathered enough secret undersea base, would be hopelessly deliberate to address and contact on better in climate change. so-called climate change deniers reject the conclusion that 97%

of climate scientists have reached. the planet is warming from human activity. what about those of us who say we accept the reality of human caused climate change? we may not think the scientists are lying but are we able to believe what they tell us? such a belief would surely awaken us to the imperative attached to it, shake our conscience and willing to make small sacrifices in the presence to avoid cataclysmic ones in the future. intellectually accepting the truth isn't virtuous in and of itself and it will save us. as a child, i was often told you know better, i did something i shouldn't have done knowing the difference between mistake and an offense. if we accept the factual reality that we are destroying the planet, unable to believe it,

then we are no better than those who deny the existence of human caused climate change. just as frankfurter was no better than those who denied the holocaust. when the future distinguishes between these two aisles of denial, it will appear to be in error and an unforgivable crime. with that, i can begin our conversation. [applause] >> way to dump a heavy question here in miami. what side will you be on? >> i have to say thank you, totally unprepared for this, it's only your generation that has us here. what side of history? i don't know. i don't know how much change i

am capable of. in a way, that was the point of the book. i wasn't sharing some sort of moment of enlightenment and i wasn't sharing any kind of accomplishment, i was trying to share my own struggles and i find my response, my experience of climate change is a struggle. i don't feel like -- there are things i know because i spent a fair amount of time becoming familiar with the science but you know, i flew hear from new york yesterday. i'm flying back today. i did an awful lot of flying when i was getting readings from this book. i live in a house that i know is not the right kind of house to live in. i make decisions every day,

often times i try to pretend i'm not making them by ignoring them but the truth is, i make decisions every day that i know that i'm keeping with my failures because it's very complicated to have competing values. especially when some of them are immediate and primitive like winter break is coming up, what should i do with my kids? it would be great to fly somewhere warm. or, i am hungry and my hotel has not a single vegetarian option. what will i do? those are sort of primitive and immediate values that are sometimes at odds with other things that i know but are a little bit vague or feel distant so i am not figuring out what is that i'm capable of.

will either all be on the right side or all on the wrong side. we will all figure this out together. it's not that half of us can figure it out on behalf of the other. 90% which is an idea that i think was something we've grown accustomed to. my hope is that i will participate in something and i cultural wave, which sometimes it feels like we are on the verge of and sometimes it feels like a fantasy. >> thank you for being honest, i do think it concert of the summative, to know one thing and to do another. if we all get what we could, and an individual but the big thing, the political and economic world to turn the shift on fossil fuel. his constant and individual

everything you do affects the weather from what you have for breakfast, what you drive, what you order your hotel room but are you voting? how you spend your monday, what is the momentum? is that what we are looking for? a combination? >> and awareness to begin with. as we make choices in our life, we are not only having the real world, we are changing our culture with influences our system. an example of this the rise of veggie burgers which might sound silly but six months ago, if i were traveling from new york to d.c., as i often do, i stopped

at a restaurant, there was virtually nothing to eat as a vegetarian, within the last three months, pretty much every fast food chain in the country now sells a beyond burger or impossible burger and mcdonald's is now in the process of making that transition. it's not because the government regulated them to do that and to stop because the ceo of these corporations woke up one morning and said wouldn't it be great to participate in the solution rather than the problem, it's because there were market forces because people are making changes in their lives. we live in an age of historically unprecedented tracking of our choices. amazon is aware of our choices. google is aware. netflix is aware. in this sense, it's a good thing because our choices can take on a greater importance.

one of the interesting things about the rise of beyond burgers is that 90% of them are sold to meat eaters, not vegetarians. i think we are now moving away from the binary of this being a question of personal identity. you can either do all or none. anybody who's in between is a version of a hypocrite. instead, we are moving toward the idea that we know we will do our best to do it. even if that best is not complete. the reality is, nobody's best is complete. i've never met or heard of anybody in any ethical route who's complete. i think we allow the fear of hypocrisy is so great that it prevents us from even trying. >> really, i really appreciate that answer because there's some

insight, this group is probably on believing this but there's insight on this now of people thinking we are wasting our time, changing lightbulbs and doing those things and we should focus on elections and economy and so on. but i agree, i think it will take all of us, everything to start that wave. >> democrats are only talking about climate change because of young people. voters have made it clear it's important to them. i have no faith whatsoever in the current administration. virtually no faith in whatever the replacement administration will be. i don't necessarily believe than talking, i like her, i would be happy if she became president,

we are just talking now. she said these corporations are happy when you talk about your lightbulbs. happy because it distracts from their responsibility. i'm going to tell you nobody will take away your hamburger. i thought is this heston talking about guns right now? this does not sound like a message i believe and it doesn't sound like a message she believes in either. the reality is, we cannot wait for our leaders to lead us. we have to participate in this virtuous cycle where our individual choices nudge the marketplace and leaders to make it easier for us to make good choices, harder to make bad choices which will create a system easier for them to make it easier for us as it happens with veggie burgers. it something driven by an individual desire of individuals to drive a different kind of

automobile. so what scientists tell us, therefore what matters, more than all others. in terms of an individual's participation in stopping global warming which are lifeless, car free, have fewer children and eat a plant -based diet. 85% of americans drive to work, the majority of flights we take are either for work or non- leisure personal purposes like visiting a sick relative. most people are not right now in the process of deciding whether or not to have a kid. those three things, but we have to do, i don't know if that's a nervous laughter or -- those three things we have to do less of. there's a fifth thing, which is

to vote. while it's true that there's nothing more important than systemic change, it's probably the aspect of the battle against climate change that i have the least amount of faith and. >> what about evil? this information campaign is well-funded. i asked backstage, how do you deal with climate denial? he goes, i don't get them that often. i have this kind of mouth that gets them. they attract me on social media all the time and they want to prove this and that, i give them a website. stop being lazy. but these are very bright peop people, these are doctors and lawyers and healthcare professionals and teachers who have drunk the kool-aid that the

others so beautifully given them they call themselves skeptics, i laughed. skeptics work truth. that's the difference. so how do we confront billions of dollars, the coke brothers and not that we find out so many more that hid the signs from us in the interest of province, knowing, i'm taking names and i will publish them because their children and grand children need to know, my daughters no, they will say he died trying. that's what it's going to take. [applause] so how do we, with limited fun

funds, how do we deal with that? how do we deal with the amount of money and cleverness and successful ways that that information campaign is still taking root? the scientists pronounced a window of opportunity for us to change this is shrinking. we are not saying the world will disappear. our ability to provide this uncontrolled warming and it will be compromised. what do you see? >> it's fairly easy to wake up somebody who's asleep, just nudge the shoulder or make a loud noise or pinched their nostrils closed, whatever. but it's impossible to wake up somebody who's pretending to be

asleep. people who deny science of climate change right now are pretending to deny the science of climate change. it's not intellectually honest and there are so few of them, it's a great shame our present happens to be one but there are so few of them that i think it's a waste of energy to involve oneself any more than is proportionate to how the bigger piece of the problem they are. the problem is people like us, we are the low hanging fruit. all the people who are aware of what's happening and care about what's happening in our either not making changes in their lives are not insisting from the elected officials that brought systemic changes in place. i think there's a way in which battling against signs deniers can be self-indulgent. it can be soothing because when we externalize the responsibility, it feels good to

not be one of the ignorant people. even though each of us has a hard time believing what we know and acting on the things we know. so i would let them go. ...

>> i'm confused because of the denials of money and power that are spending so much money on on informing. it's like the cigarette - - you don't want to tell them it's not happening but create enough doubt that they're not worried and they don't see urgency. that's what kisses me off. >> i worried about getting pissed off. >> health me there. >> my worry is that it feels good to be pissed off. i gave a reading about a month ago and there's assigning

afterwords. the couple opened the book to what would normally be an empty page and it was filled with their handwriting. i asked him, what is this? they said were getting married in a month and we decided that we needed to have a plan for how we will live our life together. their plan was, have no more than two children. each vegetarian unless you are serve to meet at a friends house and there's no other option.eat vegan two days a week. only car sharing and no more than 1000 miles in the year. instead of having that a headline that said, witness. and then just a ton of bricks. i said i don't have a plan for myself. i wrote this book. i was on the stage.

i expect my government to have a plan. i expect the school that my kid goes to to have a plan for it and my plan is to say things like i'm going to fly left which is no plan at all. i went home back to my hotel that night i wrote out a plan. that is to eat no animal products for breakfast or lunch. eat is vegetarian for dinner. a maximum of three cab rides a week. no flying for vacation in 2020. volunteer one full day of week and in the new york city school system, to raise awareness. so i wrote the plan and i knew it wasn't really enough that i knew i would be for cyclic consistent about it. but it changed me very genetically. to force these feelings like

hope or hopelessness. feelings of being pissed off into numbers and sentences that i could not only witness myself. you have to confront that on an viciousness of your own limitations. you risk having witnesses and being held accountable. i don't even have to ask, i assume everyone accepts the science of climate change. i don't even have to ask. does anybody in this room, how many people in this room have a plan? by that, i don't mean i-4 a tesla. where you break down the various aspects of your life that you know are significant. and have concrete ties to your values. numbers are days the week or

numbers. does anybody here have such a thing? one person. so i think that's a great use of energy. >> i agree. i think you should be vp if elizabeth warren wins and make a plan. challenge everybody to make a plan. >> i don't think i'm the best choice. >> hour that we push jonathan and his next book to be, make a plan.>> that was this book. it's such a simple notion, isn't it? before this couple mentioned it to me, - - i spent two years researching, doing interviews. it's just a great human

exercise. if you do it with a partner or your kids. it brings you closer. >> the kids would love it. kids need hope. they desperately need a plan. >> there's a poll the "washington post" conducted that found the majority of teenagers are feeling scared and angry about climate change. which is understandable. the thought of those emotions aren't being turned into anything. >> i work with a group. we have this mobilization called generation of climate leaders. they are part of extinction rebellion.sunrise. all sorts of things. and we are there hope. you take your anxiety and depression on the science and you mobilize your plan. so these kids have been with

the city of miami, city of miami beach. getting them to make a plan. b claire - - [indiscernible]. he was going, no, i will act like it's an emergency but i will declare an emergency. the kids were getting desponding and i was dusting them off saying, he's listening. no one's challenged him like this before. and then last week, he did it. and of the city of miami beach did it first. now are going to the county. so we are trying to mobilize people but you have to let that anxiety and depression sink and a little bit because it is the reality, isn't it? use the word x essential

threats. you have kids?>> yeah i do. 13-year-old and 10-year-old boys. >> if you have to do it again, would you have kids? >> if i do it again? >>. [laughter] very cute, jonathan. i know my kids so i would do it again. they're just so adorable. >> mine are very adorable. the reason i brought up that issue of how to move emotions into actions as it's not a problem unique to kids. we live in a culture where we are at extreme risk of mistaking (for action. watching rachel maddow for doing your political duty that night. mistaking saying someone having to do something. marches are wonderful and a necessary part.

of this broader action. but they are not sufficient. i would much rather see students of america boycott beef than school. 91 percent of amazonian deforestation is for livestock. a clear area for those animals to graze. i believe any number of marches will sway tron. it may sway the democrats to have agendas more in line with our values. but in the meantime, when this enormous power in our wallets. to withhold money from the bad actors and to give money to the good actors. there's literally no better place than the beef industry. >> and it's so catchy, boycott

beef. >> it would make a good tote. >> at this point, we will open it up to questions. you know the drill but i will repeat, please have a question. and one per customer. so if people want to ask, they have a chance as well. the author will be at the signing station after this session. i do - - of this will sound like bragging. but i will do it anyway. 13 years ago, this college made one of its learning outcomes for every student that students will be able to describe how natural systems function in the impact on humans. so the college you are at has been real proactive in terms of education. you can google our earth ethics institute to see what students are doing on this question. and that is like 15 years old.

the other is where opening a training center for tesla on our campus. we partnered with them. but enough about us. right? >> thank you very much for your optimistic view in getting us to mobilize amongst ourselves. i'm just curious as to how you - - this is a non-chaotic way to overcome the climate crisis. so how are we going to go from individual plans to convincing our congressmen to formulate their plans. and ultimately to change the ultimate goal, being to decrease fossil fuel use almost to zero. how are we going to do that.

in an orderly fashion. because, if we can't, then the earth will sort of, nature will take its course. and that will be chaotic. if things get very bad, i mean, you could see a lot of people just demonstrating and closing down every single drilling operation. and that will reduce carbon 20. so how can we do it in an orderly process and convince everyone to? >> i wish i knew. i don't really know. when i was telling you i wrote that plan of mine. i didn't want it all to just be individual choices. i wanted to participate in the systemic change that is

necessary. all of the things we can do as individuals are not enough. we also need systemic change. are we going to write letters to our congressmen? i don't leave that will ever bring everything. - - i think there's not going to be a silver bullet solution just as not a silver bullet version of the story that moves people to care. and it's relation of conversations and actions. i don't know the song, at the harvard yale football game. couple hundred people took the field urging universities to divest from fossil fuels. in my hotel this morning, i heard that as i glided past fox news but they said this is a perfect example of america's

elite interrupting football games. forgetting who was playing in that football game. right? [laughter] >> one of the things i keep coming back to is, i have to know the ultimate answers to begin. sometimes when we feel vulnerable, race to the end of the story. well i'm not going to become a vegan so i will take food off. i can't stop - - we measure our distance from perfection rather than measuring our distance from doing nothing at all. someone said the other day, i read your book and i decided i will become a vegan.

is there any chance you're setting yourself up for failure or success, he said i've been a vegan for eight days. he said i will slip because everybody does. as opposed to i'm doing my best to eat as little of these products as possible. >> is all or nothing. >> right. if he goes for a month and messes up one meal, that's a failure. instead he looks at it starting from the beginning. rather to the end. he will get 90 out of 91 meals. i know that we need to have a leader that will push us in ways that will make us uncomfortable. my lack of that knowledge doesn't stop me from doing what

i can do as modest as it might be. i don't even know what the ultimate effectiveness is. >> maybe you can run from office - - for office. >> i smoked too much pot probably. that qualifies now. if you want to be president, you have to smoke pot. >> you run the cleo institute doing amazing work in miami. can you talk about the cleo institute and how we can become involved? >> get online. www.cleoinstitute.org and register your name. best thing you can do is sign up to become a cleo climate

speaker. where we train your on the basic science. give you slides. a coach. time to practice. now we bring you back into present and recertify you if you pass. that really allows you to be an informed advocate as you influence your circles. we all have circles of influence. another way to do is to follow cleo. the mayor's roundtables. we had 104 donors help us reach 23,000. we've trained more than 20,000 people. i can't celebrate 100 donors when i've trained hundreds of thousands. get out there and do the good work and thank you for asking that.

[applause] >> we have time for one more question and then the author will be at the autographing table. sorry about that time. we have another show coming up. >> it's really great that you municipalities are starting that trend.but how are we going to stop all of those monstrous buildings on the bay and ocean from being built? >> that's not my pay grade. >> it's likely mother nature will take care of that. >> i do think they're getting closer to discussing policy and zoning restrictions. we couldn't talk about retreat five days ago - - years ago. slow but steady. although we don't have the time, so it's a little frustrating.

>> i was really moved by what you said to the last verse. the idea of training people to talk rather than asking them to give. i was reading, the last question in a session like this was maybe a seven-year-old young woman. and she said very boldly, do you think we will do what we need to do to save the planet? i said, i really don't know. she said, i don't know either. i asked her, what do you think it would take to do what we need to do? in time. she thought about it and she said, i think we would need to talk about it all the time. and i'm sometimes asked questions as if, how to convince a representative. i really don't know. the more we talk about it, the more progress we will make.

to talk about zoning. talk about elections. how to reform the animal agriculture industry. the fossil fuel industry. this is a case where we have to be vigilant about making a subject around our dinner tables. >> thanksgiving is giving us a nice challenge. >> that's another story. i will leave you with this one thanksgiving thought. >> every single turkey sold in every single supermarket in the united states was incapable of sexual reproduction. it was artificially inseminated because they've been bread to grow so quickly that their genitals literally can't meet

anymore. it's something to contemplate - - thanksgiving is the perfect occasion when gathering to think about themes of harvest and gratitude to talk about why it is we sometimes choose to go against the flow of the river. and make the foods on our plate that are reflections of our values. rather than antithetical to our values. [applause] >> if we can head this way and the autographing is on this floor. past the elevator that way. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> welcome to miami where the rain has started. the first time in several years of coverage in miami that we've had to indoor a little bit of a rainstorm. still clouds out there but they're all taking cover underneath tents. our live coverage will continue. we are joined by author al ramiro. he has self published a book called revolution. how the castro's lies, cheated

and murdered their way into power. before we get into this book, what do you do for a living? are you an author? >> actually it's my first book. i'm an actor and standup comedian. that's what i've been doing for many years. this story is a passion of mine. it's inspired by my family. members of my family. i wrote it as a screenplay at first. they budgeted it at $15 million which is a lot of money for an independent film. they couldn't come up with the money. so the rights to the story reverted back to me. i threw it in a drawer for 2-3 years and then i dusted it off and wrote it as a book. >> is it historical fiction? >> yes it is.

everything in that book, actually happened. what i did was, you know how the godfathers a different mafia stories, put together into one family to tell the story of the godfather. i used basically the same format. the cuban revolution told through a family. it is a novel. it's a fiction book. i wrote it as a novel because i wanted to make it more interesting and didn't want to make it just about my family. also, when you write it as a novel, it's more interesting. and you get more people to be interested in the story. because everyone has a family rather than a textbook. >> tell us about the much ado family.

>> it's a typical middle-class family in cuba. who in the 50s ãeverybody in the beginning was pro-castro. cubans were tired of having this banana republic mentality. and image. we wanted to get - - a lot of people were with fidel castro in the beginning. some people in the family were with castro in the mountains. some of them were fighting in the underground city. and that's how i started the story.the story starts at the beginning when he lands in the oriente province in 1956. and right before the bay of pigs. the reason why i did that was

because after the bay of pigs, he was in complete and total control and that's when he told the whole world, i have always been a marxist, leninist, communist. which was news to others. especially people in my family that talked with him. he never told that to anybody. >> was bautista a crook? >> yes he was. he was the classic 1950 latin america dictator. classic. robbing from the country. robbing from the people. even though it was a horrible dictator and even though he was robbing from the country, the standard of living was still pretty high. if you look at 1958 statistics of the united nations, cuba was number one, two and three in all categories of all of latin america. in the caribbean. he was a horrible thing.

but sometimes you wish for things and turn out to be worse. one the new york times interviewed him, he said on camera, that he was a communist. that he was for democracy. for instituting the constitution of 1940 and open elections. so everything he told people was a lie. and part one of my book tells you how he got into power and part two tells you how he started - - behind the scenes to turn cuba into a communist country. >> one of the things that comes into play in revolution is the cuban constitution.

>> what was in its was one of the most progressive constitutions around. it actually was based on the american constitution. free speech. freedom for all. free market. you know, all of the things that we today enjoy in the united states. were the things in the 1940 constitution. that's what we were hoping when we were fighting against bautista that fidel castro would turn cuba into. >> did the cuban revolution split families? >> terribly, yes. >> tell us about your own. >> my family, it didn't happen in my family. what i did was, a very good friend of my father's, son. turned his parents into the state because as

counterrevolutionaries. i took that idea and put it into the family because i wanted to bring the conflict right into family. you have protagonist and antagonist. it was better to have the antagonist in the family then to have it outside the family. because that created more interest and made it more interesting. >> when did you come to the states? >> i came in 1961 on the peter pan flights. that's one fidel castro, there was a rumor that the age of 10, all children were going to be taken from their parents in government run schools bid and basically indoctrinated. they would be taken from their parents. if you lived in this province, you go to school in this province. so they were trying to basically take the kids away from parents to brainwash them. cuban parents went nuts.

i remember my parents talking about barricading themselves and fighting and all that. the catholic church came up with this idea of bringing kids by themselves on the peter pan flights without their parents until their parents could come to the united states when i came on one of those flights. i was very fortunate that my aunt by fluke came three weeks before me and i went to live with her. otherwise i would've went to those orphanage run - - catholic orphanages. that's where a lot of the kids were sent to point i got very fortunate. >> so they were still transportation between the u.s. and cuba at that time. >> yes there was. >> what kind of work did your parents do? >> my father had his own business. he was import export broker. and he also taught import export law at the university.

>> what do you remember about political discussions at home? >> a lot. my family was involved against bautista and then against fidel. i heard a lot of this talk going on. we had guns hidden in my house for a short period of time. i live right next door to the secretary of labor undersecretary bautista. i even put it in the book. i used to play with his son. they use to guard. lease to hide behind the guards and play cowboys and indians and stuff like that. so it was very much in my life. >> you have family members stating their positions. >> right, exactly. a lot of that was going on at the time. being that as a kid, i was not

participating in all of them. there were people that didn't want to get involved in any way shape or form. i didn't have - - members in my family though. >> when did your parents or did they ever leave cuba? >> yes they did. they came six months later. my college roommate who was also a peter pan flights kid, his parents didn't, until three years after.he lived in an orphanage and then he was sent to virginia. >> at what point were your parents disillusioned by fidel castro. >> my father was messed up pretty quickly because one of the things that castro did was to control the import and export things. my father was a custom broker. so my father lost his business like the next day practically.

later on, he was still teaching import export law. since we started - - stopped being a free market society. he lost his job at the university also. >> one of his job - - your jobs was as a standup comedian on cruise ships have you been back? >> no i have not entitled the company, don't send me there. in cuba, they know everything. they know who my uncle is my uncle was killed in a firing squad. i had another uncle sentence to 30 years of hard labor. i don't think i'm welcome in cuba. but they don't go there anymore by the way. >> already. >> they stop there. the president stopped it when they found out the government

was supporting - - and keeping him in power. as punishment for doing that, they took some of the benefits of people going to cuba. >> as this nearly 60 years of sanctions worked in your view? >> no. >> should be allowed free trade with cuba? >> it's kind of dating me by saying this statement. you know, the definition of insanity, is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result minnesota embargo has no worse. but the fear of people against castro is that any type of financial benefit to that government goes to the government and not to the people. any industry in cuba that makes money, including tourism is one by the military. all those hotels - - those hotels are run by the military.

any profit that the cuban government takes, goes to the government and not to the people. so, it's one of those questions. so what do you do? do you open to give more money to the government to continue to subjugate their people? do you continue the embargo that doesn't work? there's no real clear answer for it. >> here's the cover of the book. however castro's murdered, lied and cheated their way into power. al ramiro. thank you for your time. >> thank you for having me. we've got a couple collins coming up plus, we want to hear from you. what you are reading. if you like to send a text, you can do so two 202-748-8003. you can leave a comment on

social media@ booktv. we will read those comments later today. now here's another author discussion on climate change. live from miami. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon.

good afternoon everybody. how is anybody doing this afternoon? awesome. my name is tony cruz and i am the president of the hialeah campus of miami college and it's my pleasure to be with you today. at our 36th annual miami book fair. we know that today's the last day but we know the book fair continues to happen throughout the year. different activities and events. make sure to take advantage of those. we are grateful to the college. and the hundreds of volunteers that have taken their time through this week to make this event possible. we also want to acknowledge our sponsors. the knight foundation. rural caribbean. o hl north america.

the crew to foundation and the meredith and stanford foundation. thanks to those sponsors for making this possible throughout the week. [applause] also a big thank you to our members and friends of the fair. how many are here? great. thank you all of you for what you do. to make this possible as well. as friends, you receive multiple benefits your round while helping us fulfill self art as vibrant community of readers and writers. thank you for that. please consider joining the friends and following us on social media and sign up for our newsletter. we will soon build on our past successes by establishing four new programs for youth and emerging writers. in a month to come, you will hear about these initiatives

and how you can take part in them. thank you all and welcome to this session.at this point, it's my pleasure to introduce you to michael grunwald and he will be introducing our authors. thank you. [applause] >> hey, how are you doing? i am mike one wall. a writer with political magazine. i live in miami. [applause] we know something about climate change down here. i'm working on a book about it myself. i really want to thank all of you for coming. it's such an important topic. this is the only planet with pizza. we need to try to save it. and this is a tough topic that not everyone wants to hear about. i've never interviewing al gore and he said when he does talks, is to think about three budgets. a time budget. people can only listen for so

long. a complexity budget. because people have so much tolerance. in the hope of budget. there's almost a much climate people can take, the doom and gloom before they start to nod off. we have an incredible panel here of guys will have a tough time with the hope budget. david has written an incredible book about how we are all screwed. and nathaniel has written the ã i read the magazine piece which is amazing and it tells you we wouldn't have been greeted if we would have done something 30 years ago. but now we are as crude. gil is how we are particularly screwed in miami. and michael will talk about how our military is dealing with our screwed-ness. really great that you came those into something that's not only peppy - - always peppy and

cheery.i will introduce nathaniel who has brought roman, his research assistant. [applause] >> nathaniel is the author of three novels. he writes for new york times magazine. i'm sure you've all read his incredible the rest the magazine had never done that when they devoted an entire magazine the one brilliant piece of journalism. i will let daniel tell you about it. without further - - further a do. >>. [applause] >> thank you. we had a sudden change of itinerary. my wife came down with the flu and we made a calculation. so roman is with me today. i started working on the original magazine piece that

became the book right after roman was born actually. one of the - - i will use this as a segue. might as well. it's a historical narrative set between 1979-1989. i felt that there are excellent reporters and journalists from the best on the stage right now who are doing the work of finding out where the problems are. where the problems will be. certainly how things will get worse and some of the solutions available to us. were mitigations i should say. what i wanted to write about was something different. it was about the way this knowledge of what's coming for us. and what we've entered.

this new world we have entered. touches our own lives. our personal lives. the ways we think about not only our own lives, our futures, our children's future. but also just our democracies. our civilization. the way we've organized ourselves. economics and so forth. wanted to write about the first people who not only were taking on this issue in terms of public policy and the politics, but also in terms of their personal lives. so i will read short sections to introduce you to the main two figures i think are most responsible during this period. for bringing about her coming close to bringing about what was seen at the time as a solution. binding global treaty to reduce carbon emissions. i begin in 1979 because that's the moment of scientific

consensus. i will read a short section that introduces you to the first of these two figures. this is from the spring of 1979. the first suggestion that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on page 66 of the government publication ãno go. it was a technical report. many such reports that leah and uneven piles around his windowless office. on the first floor of capitol hill townhouse. in the final paragraph of the chapter on environmental regulation, the authors noted

the continued use of fossil fuel my within 2-3 decades, bring about quote, significant and damaging changes to the global atmosphere. it seems to have come out of nowhere. he reread it. it made no sense. 11 years earlier, [indiscernible]. his defining characteristic was his gratuitous height. six feet four inches which seem to embarrass him. his to dover to accommodate. his active face was prone to breaking out in maniacal grins but his composure was when he read the report the projected concern. he proceeded as a historian would. cautiously. scrutinizing the material.

scientists were not used to. [indiscernible]. yet one big question about the cold report if the burning of coal oil could invite global catastrophe, why had nobody told him about it? i will stop there. he was an air quality specialist and he went home that night and had a frank conversation with his wife who was seven months pregnant with their first child about whether they were doing the ethical thing. i will read another from james hansen, a scientist that became the face of climate science in 1988 when he testified before congress and said it's time to stop waffling. climate change is here now. but of course he had been

testifying every year just about in congress. this is just the beginning of that section. in the living room of - - under a bright window onto morningside park, there was a well velvet glove see that nobody ever sat in. eric, their two-year-old son was for bidding to go near it. the ceiling above the couch sat ominously as if pregnant with some alien life form and the bolts were with each passing week. - - promised he would fix it. it had been on his insistence that they gave up the prospect of another apartment overlooking the hudson river and moved to this walker with crumbling walls with police siren lullabies. - - [indiscernible].

despite living within a few blocks of his office, jim couldn't find time for the ceiling. after four months, it finally burst, releasing a confetti of brown pipes and splintered wood. that was april. jim repeated his vow to fix the ceiling each time he had a spare moment. there would come on thanks giving day. the mention she had to live with a hole in her searing for seven months. plaster and dust powdering the loveseat. another promise jim made, he would be home for dinner every night by 7:00. by 8:30:00, he was back to his mathematical preoccupations. the ãdid not begrudge his deep commitment to his research. it was one of the things that she loved about him. subject of his obsession should be the atmosphere conditions of a planet more than 24 million miles away.

it baffled jim too when he came to think about it and how he had traveled to venus from iowa where he had beenthe youngest child of a diner waitress and a farmer turned bartender , was a mystery. the outcome of a series of bizarre twists of fate for which he claims no agency. it was just something that happened to him. hansen figured he was the only scientist who as a child, did not dream about before he dreamed only of baseball. on clear nights, his transistor radio picked up the broadcast of the kansas city blues. - - in a childhood of deprivation and meekness, during his earliest years, he shared two rooms. with six siblings in homes that lacked running water and a refrigerator . anson found comfort in numbers. he majored in math and physics at the university of iowa. but he never would have taken an interest in celestial matters would not have been two events during his graduation year. the eruption of a volcano in bali and the total eclipse of the moon.

in 1963, whipping winds, 12 low, and said accompanied his professor to a cornfield outside of town. they set a telescope that hansen surely discovered was being used to shelter by every beetle, fly and wasp from the surrounding 40 acres. anson made continuous photoelectric recordings of the eclipse. pausing only when the extension cord froze and when he had to race to the car to avoid frostbite. during an eclipse, the moon resembles a tangerine. or if it's total, a drop of blood. but this night, to the consternation of hansen's professor, the moon vanished altogether. hansen made the mystery the subject of his masters thesis. concluding the moon had been ups cured by the dust erupted into the atmosphere by - - on theother side of the planet , six monthsthe discovery stirred

fascination with influence of invisible particles on the visible world. he could not make sense of the visible world, he realized, until you understood the invisible one. as the story follows through the decade, you have this kind of invisible world of politics. of policy and ingrained obstruction to any kind of terrifying news that - - and jim are able to first give senior politicians within the carter administration and his agencies. then the american public and finally the un and the bush white house ultimately. so the story is about why even before the incredible this information propaganda campaign began in earnest in the late 80s when they started doing millions and millions of

dollars to thwart any climate policy. why did we fail even before that. when everybody agreed on the basic facts and politicians made major pledges to do something. and what was it that stopped all of that. and i will stop speaking now but that is the story. the results of our inaction, i think our next speakers will tell you all about. and you. [applause]. >> so now i want to introduce david wallace wells was a deputy editor at new york magazine. he also wrote a brilliant magazine piece i'm sureyou all read , titled the on inhabitable earth. now he's written an equally spectacular book that's not

necessarily we want to hear but really something we got to hear. david, take it away. [applause] >> thanks mike and all you guys for coming. it's great to be here. great to be on stage with all of you. whenever i'm in a situation like this, i like to start by saying how uncomfortable it makes me to be in front of any audience talking about climate change. i don't think of myself as an ivy environmentalist or as a nature person. i've never owned a pet, never gone on a hike. i literally lived my entire life in new york city. i always thought that while i would like to go on a trip to visit nature, that all of modern life was a fortress that protected me against its forces. matt and i used to work together. he at the time was starting to write about climate. and i thought, this is interesting but why is he so worried? [laughter]

i think i spent most of my life really complacent and really deluded about the threat from climate change. as i started researching the subject in earnest if you years ago, i came to think that there was sort of three big delusions i had in which i took to be actually representative for at least the members of my generation and i think the public as a whole. i think it's illuminated to talk about each of them in return. they explained a bit about why, not why the people who knew have done so little to change the course of our carbon emissions. but why as a public, we've been so slow to really wake up to this challenge for the first allusion is about the speed of change. when i was growing up, i heard a lot about the industrial revolution. as the cause of climate change.

was taught to basically, by newspapers and television and documentary movies that this was the legacy of our ancestors. and it was something we had to deal with so our grandchildren wouldn't be dealing with the impacts. james hansen, who mentioned in his talk, it was called storms of my grandchildren. that was the time scale that you alarmed scientists were talking about. when they were talking about the possible impacts of climate change. it was a story of centuries. in fact, half of the emissions ever produced in the entire history of humanity, from the burning of fossil fuels have come in the last 30 years. that's since al gore publishes book on warming. i read in the book, since the premiere of seinfeld. i'm 37 years old which means my life contains this entire story. when i was born, the planet's

climate seemed stable. scientists worried about the medium and long term but for the time being, things seems okay. now we are poised on the brink of catastrophe because of what has happened over the course of those three decades. climate change is at the legacy of our ancestors beautifully is the work of a single generation. which is to say, hours. that's the speed of change. the scope of change is the second thing i was deluded about. i heard a lot about arctic melt and sea level rise and that made me think if i lived anywhere but the coast, i was basically safe. the more i realized, the more i learned about the other aspects of climate science which suggest dramatic impact on economic productivity. which could fall as much as 30 percent over the course of a century if we don't change course. two impacts on war which could double or more if you don't change course to impact on

agricultural yields which could be cut in half. to cognition and public health where mosquitoes that used to fly only in the tropics, could be carrying malaria as far north as the arctic circle in a few decades. i started to see this not as a story that could be cut - - compartmentalized. parts of the planet will be hit harder than others and unfortunately, it's the global south that will be hit hardest. no matter where you are. that's how all-encompassing and universal the story really is. that's to say it won't impact through extreme weather. it will really shake up our place in nature and our place in history and our sense of capitalism and technology in every other aspect of modern life.

that's the second illusion. the third was about the severity of change. this has changed over the last year or two. since i started working on this book. up until then, you really didn't hear about science projecting scenarios north of two degrees celsius. scientists called let level catastrophic in other areas of the world called it genocide. most would say we would have to do everything we can do to avoid two degrees. and that meant people like me, i thought that meant it was about a worst-case scenario. but actually given where we are now, i think practically speaking it's about a best case scenario. today, the plan is 1.1 degrees warmer than it was before the industrial revolution. that doesn't sound like very much but it means we are already entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose all of human history. everythingwe've ever known as a species , the development of agriculture, the rise of civilization, modern civilization.

everything we know about ourselves as biological and political creatures but all that is the result of climate conditions we have entirely left behind. we are now in a position where we have to figure out what of the civilization we brought with us can survive these new conditions. what must be renovated and what must be discarded. and that's just at 1.1 degrees. ...

draw 100 fold. some of the biggest cities in south asia and the middle east would become so hot in summer that during heat waves it would be unsafe to walk around outside without risking heatstroke or death. that's why the un thinks just two degrees which are likely to see 2040 ã2050 if we don't change course we can have 200 million climate refugees. they estimate the number could be as high as 1 billion which is as many people has led to gay in north and south america combined. i think those numbers are a little bit high but if you take the lower number 200 million divided by half it still 100 times as many people as left syria and went to europe after the civil war and so scrambled that continent politics were still dealing with the ramifications today almost a decade later. just two degrees would probably be about to lock in the permanent and irreversible loss

of all the planets ice sheets that should happen about 2.1 degrees scientists believe which would take centuries it takes a long time for ice to melt. but what eventually rise sea level 250 feet. enough to drown at least two thirds: two thirds of the world's major cities if we didn't lose them, which we probably will. most horrifying detail for me, just two degrees to the impact of air pollution along with estimated 150 million additional people would die. that's dying at the scale of 25 ãand i think practically speaking it's inevitable. that probably sounds like bad news [laughter] obviously it's really terrible news but i think there's a little bit of a silver lining in it and it might sound pollyanna or nacve of me to say

but all those scenarios, as terrifying as they can become as paralyzing the largest vacancy they are ultimately a reflection of the power we have over the climate. the main driver of climate change is human carbon admissions. which means our hands are on those levers. we can write the story of the planets feature ourselves through what we choose to do. and not just write it but live it and not just as observers but as protagonists. trying to say we have about 30 years left to take and action to meaningfully avert worst-case scenarios for company means almost everyone in this room will be around for a part of that next act too. at the last 30 years with the story of bringing the planet from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe the next 30 will be how we manage that

crisis. this isn't just any story it makes me uncomfortable to say but is the kind of story we used to only recognize in mythology and theology. all of us collectively holding the fate of the world and the future of the species in our hands. i think almost certainly we won't be able to do enough to avoid some truly harrowing outcomes and bring about some truly unprecedented human suffering but how much is actually up to us? i think that's not gonna be easy, the politics, the culture, all the human obstacles we have are enormous. but they are human obstacles. science isn't stopping us from taking action and neither is technology.

which means, what we need is a kind of political reorientation, one that makes how to manage and how to limit this burden the central priority of our time. when i wrote the book i sort of concluded on those two notes light, the scale of the impact is actually a sign of our power and politics is a path forward. i wrote them sort of half believing them. i knew they were true but i also look back at the last 30 years of climate activism and thought, not much had changed. emissions were still going up every year and all these incredibly courageous advocates have accomplished in the big picture very little. i turned my book in last september, i had never heard of greta thunberg, extinction

rebellion had not been formed in the uk, sunrise had not announced itself in the u.s. we had an elected aoc to congress we have were talking about a green new deal work dealing in the primary which all democratic candidates were competing with each other to be more ambitious on climate. the landscape has profoundly changed over the last year. [applause] and that's most exciting not just because of what it means and looks possible now but because what it means in the future. because what seemed totally impossible a year ago now seems possible. that means that what seems impossible today may seem possible a year from now and that pattern may continue throughout the end of the decade. hopefully it will continue forever. in fact, we need it to continue because as unprecedented as the movement, mobilization has been over the last year not just with activists but with public opinion moving in every poll you look at at least 10 points over the course of the last year we need much more movement

still. world war ii every minute of fighting age was drafted into the army. every woman of working age was drafted into the workforce. factories were claimed and repurposed whole industrial sectors were nationalized. that's the scale will change the un says is necessary to avoid catastrophic warming and needs to happen globally this year. that means as excited as we all are about greta and the climate strikes and zero hour, sunrise, extension rebellion, all the new pledges made of the last year from the uk and norway and filling finland and denmark, we need much more than that. that means ultimately it's responsibility for all of us, not just the political leadership but every voter and every personal life to take action so a generation from now we don't look back at these

years in the same way we look back at the years between 1979 in 1989 with regret for having failed to take action, the less chance we had to secure a world that people alive today would recognize a global and prosperous and just. that window is closing very soon which means it's unbelievably important we move quickly starting today. with that i will turn it over. [applause] >> a little personal thing, on generation, i first met david now a few years ago at the time he was a young journalist i hired him to do a little research work for a book. he was like my research assistant, he lasted two weeks he said i feel bad i got offered a job to run the paris

review. yeah that's a better job. [laughter] gil on the other hand when i was a young little nobody journalist at the washington post, gil was the legend who won two pulitzer prizes. an incredible investigative reporter is done amazing work. he's done three previous books this one is called "geography of risk: epic storms, rising seas, the cost of america's coasts" which obviously to those of us who lived on the coast this is right in our wheelhouse. [applause] >> thank you. michael mentioned earlier that i would be talking about miami and i'm going to disappoint you a little bit in that. i actually went out of my way not to write about miami in my book because i assume from

everything being written that most people already knew about miami so i ended up focusing, i do write a bike miami the book i read about, for example, 1926 the city was hammered by cat 3 hurricane and endured $100 million with of damage, which in 1926 was an awful lot of money. but if you fast-forward and look at today and if you had a cat 3 hurricane hit you guys now, god forbid cat 4 or cat 5, the researchers say you are staring at somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 billion-$250 billion in damage. i do write about that of a rate a little bit about the flooding which we all know about miami. i will come back and talk a little bit about what's coming down the pike and how i think it's going to impact miami. everybody has a role on this

panel, my role is probably to play the role of the economist and numbers guy because that's kind of the hip to the extent to have expertise at all that's my training and what i do. going to start by telling you a little bit about the origins of my book and i will tell you that i come from new jersey and i have lived on the coast for much of my life in new jersey. even though i don't vacation there anymore and have it for 35 years, go to the outer banks. i will tell you that i go around the country, i've been doing an awful lot of talking in the last two months since the book comes out and everybody of course this is along the coast everybody is worried, there's a great hunger for knowledge about what's coming down the pike. the first question i always get asked is, how long do we have? when i answer is that not that much and then i asked him how long should i hold onto my

property? i say you should sell. and they say will when should i sell and i tell them, you should have sold yesterday or last week or last year. again, being a little bit glib because then what i really try to tell people is if you are here for the right reasons come you lived here, you work here you spent your life here company you like going to the beach, you like the water, like i do. just enjoy it. you probably got maybe two or three decades before it's uninhabitable or adjusted to become extremely problematic because he'll get another foot or two of water on top of the barrier island.you have large chunks of that barrier island in which you will no longer be able to drive. it's good to be like charleston is today now with ordinary what we call nuisance flooding where they have to block off the streets and you can't drive down streets.

in 1962 i spent that summer on a place called long beach island. anybody know long beach island in new jersey? good. i was 11 years old., we didn't have much money going up but somehow my father knew someone who knew someone who knew someone and they needed somebody to watch their cabin for the summer and we ended up being though somebody's. my brother is two years older than i and we had great fun. it was 2.5 months after the great ash wednesday storm of march 1962. for those of you who don't know that storm, and history of the mid-atlantic coast there were two epic storms that serve as bookends one is the march 62 storm which cut long beach island in half in six different places along the ocean to run through to meet barnegat bay.

completely wrecked the island. the only reason the damage was that more was because in 1962 there really wasn't all that much development on the coast. florida is a little bit of an exception but along most of the atlantic and gulf coast there wasn't nearly as much as we see today. that's a key point i'm going to get to in a second. 50 years later not quite to the day but not quite to the month but almost we had hurricane sandy in 2000 2012. this is important because in 1962 the damage was so epic that kennedy flew over the coast with the governor richard j hughes, they looked at the damage and said we really can't go back and do what we been doing. he was, to his credit, this was really a tipping point for the

entire atlantic and gulf coasts. he was to his credit says let's hit the pause button for six months. let's not develop anything at the new jersey coast. let's think about this and think about what we want the coast to look like going forward and how we can build a little bit safer going forward. he then proposed to her wrecked or have a 100 foot buffer or barrier from the sand dunes, the primary sand dunes along the oceanfront new jersey that would encompass roughly if you are on the island today the first two or three blocks back from the sand dunes. a fair amount of what's filled with pricey property. if the house was damaged more than 50% you should not be able to build back there.

after a month or two that idea went away. he was beaten back by the developers and builders by the beach town mayors, principally, and what happened after the 62 storm in new jersey, this happens everywhere after a major hurricane. we build back and we built back in a hurry and we build back without thinking and we build back on barrier islands along the bays, sounds, estuaries and the coastal floodplains. which is arguably the last place on earth we ought to be directing pricey housing. then somehow we expected that to turn out well. of course it never turns out well. because you have mother nature. in 2012 hurricane sandy

lumbered up the coast it was a giant storm 1000 miles wide. it was a particularly powerful it didn't have a strong center and not strong winds but that didn't matter because it pumped water up the coast. that water gets to the inlets and fills up the back bay and then storm was blocked by a high-pressure system up in labrador or greenland and the storm took a hard left hand turn i always have to ask myself what's left to right. a left-hand turn into the coast and once it moves inland what happens? the wind switches. the wind switched and it blew up all that water that had been building and filling up the bay.today was already at record level prior to sandy arriving. then the wind goes south all that water comes roaring up the back base of new jersey and we see something we hadn't seen in

recorded history. we saw epic flooding along the back base. which we had filled since 1962. with 300,000 houses. along the base. then we were surprised that we saw $38 billion worth of damage. let me cut to the chase. this is really a story about land use. with all due respect to the wildfires in california to the occasional earthquake or tornadoes, is hurricane. and water piling up the coast. this is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. sandy did $38 billion since 2000 alone we have seen over $725 billion of damage along

the atlantic and gulf coast. it's probably closer to $850 billion today after the last couple years. we saw $300 billion with of damage in 2017 alone. which included harvey in houston which is a new kind of storm a hurricane that slows down as it hits the coast. it dumps 40 to 60 inches of rain on top of houston which is itself or was it self-directed on top of a coastal floodplains. wetlands what they call in texas coastal prairies. we have seen far more damage from hurricanes in the last two

decades than in all other natural disasters combined. it's not even remotely close. and that's just going to get worse. we know the oceans have heated up in the last two decades by several degrees. it doesn't take that much. carrie emmanuelle, who is one of the premier best known atmospheric scientists at mit has written a paper suggesting that hurricanes and the future might be 45 percent more powerful than they are today. about that, think about dorian, if dorian were 45 percent more powerful than it was a skeptic about if dorian had instead of obliterating the bahamas had like and you and 92 just roared

across the atlantic ocean into southeast florida and the amount of damage that would've cost. we have sea level rise, is based on modeling. the consensus for 2100 three feet, 3.5 feet, which alone will align the barrier islands with all the property. if it hits six feet but not impossible number. it looks like it might become more likely.it's estimated that a million homes in florida will be buried under water. i don't mean the mortgages i mean the homes. in my home state 200,000 property along our coast, which is a large chunk of those

properties. i come back with a fairly depressing finding in that i didn't get a sense from the people who have control over the coast, which is to say they make the decisions where we are going to build, how much we are going to build, land use, zoning, that sort of thing, they took this very seriously. many of them just didn't believe in climate change, many simply responding unsurprisingly to the economic incentives, which are always to build more, not to build less. nobody wants to get smaller in

america. in 1962 when i lived on long beach island it was worth $100 million had a couple thousand 600 square-foot bungalows and occasional hotel or two. today it is worth $15 billion as an assessed value if you do market value it's probably closer to $17 million. i'm sure it's the same story here in miami. there are 19,000 properties literally not even elbowroom between the houses. this average size of the houses has gone from 600 square feet in 262 2019 70 to 1500 square feet in 1985, 2000 square feet you got the picture. then lo and behold, after hurricane sandy, which obliterated our coast, it is

now the average size of house being built in new jersey on the coast is 3000 square feet. that's 500 square feet more than the average size of a house in the american suburbs. it gives you a sense of what's going on. despite all the risk, the money keeps flowing toward the coast. we can talk about in the question and answer period. my book is called geography risk and will explore the book is this division between how much is private risk, how much is public risk. the short answer is, the federal government is picking up most of the risk at the coast and that adds to the acceleration and development at the coast and this loop of even more damage and more risk. dq. [applause]

>> just a couple shutouts. i don't see if he's here but always have to think mitchell kaplan michael claire, the author of 15 books, this one is "all hell breaking loose: the

pentagon's take on climate change". everybody there has read the books by the other panelists as well. they know what's going on. michael. >>. [applause] hello everybody. i'm thrilled to be here with you today.

nathaniel spoke about when the issue first arose there was a lot of consciousness and it since has come to a halt. i feel that perhaps telling the story of what people in the military, the senior leadership in the military has to say about this might alter the conversation some because i think the u.s. military had something unique and important to say on this topic and it's important for all of us to hear. my book begins shortly after president trump takes office in 2017 one of the first things he does is rescind the executive order 13653 called preparing the united states for the impact of climate change.

this was an executive order issued by president obama in 2013 and went further than any other single lateral motion to prepare the country to take steps to the u.s. to adapt to climate change and take to reduce our contributions to global warming. one of the first things that trump did was to rescind this order. under the order every federal agency including the department of defense among others was required to take whatever to first survey what is exposure what is vulnerability to climate change was and then take whatever steps it could to correct its overcome its vulnerabilities and to do whatever contributions it would make to reduce its carbon

emissions as part of a national effort. all of this was to come to an end when trump rescinded this executive order. most federal agencies which is been able to control by replacing their leadership more or less marched in step with that. one federal agency the u.s. department of defense has largely gone on as before and continued to act under the obama measure. unofficial conversations but acting as if the original order was in effect and still necessary to proceed to address the risks risks of climate change. my book attempts to ask why is

this so?why has the department of defense continued to address climate change is a serious issue we have to face and what does that mean for the rest of us? despite the fact that their commander-in-chief says climate change is a known issue and we shouldn't be doing something about it. there is a degree of tension here to begin with that interested me. what is the u.s. military died climate change to be such a serious issue that it has to override the issues of the commander-in-chief in the ways that it's doing? that's because senior officers in the u.s. military, most of them have served overseas in one of what we call the forever wars in iraq and afghanistan.

many of american officers have seen this for themselves and they see how climate change is affecting the most vulnerable society in the world.

when government fails to address this ineffective and equitable fashion the result is often conflict and violence and terrorists come in and exploit these divisions for their own benefit create antigovernment anti-western hostility and war. this is what sucks in the american military into these wars that they would much prefer to be able to withdraw from north finish. they could see how climate change is a cause of conflict and disruption and chaos that is making their job much harder. they can see how this is just the beginning they can calculate how as temperatures rise, water comes more scarce, food becomes more scarce how

states we can expect states one after the other in the developing world and not just poor countries but richer countries to disintegrate a creating warlord states and mass migrations not just poor countries like afghanistan and nigeria and chad, places involved in but bigger and more powerful countries nigeria, india, pakistan, the philippines, countries with nuclear weapons. they can see that these effects will create mass disasters in such countries with military disintegrating some possessing nuclear weapons creating scenarios for which the military is unprepared and would wish would never happen.

so that's one part of the future that they see. secondly, they see, and we've now heard from my co-panelists about the threats of the united states itself. like all others they see rising seas and increasing numbers of wildfires in the west melting permafrost in alaska, more intense storms, more intense hurricanes as we just heard in this matters to the military because they know that in the final instance they are the ones who are going to be called in to deal with the aftermath of disaster because local authorities are not capable of dealing with disasters on the magnitude that we've heard about in the case of hurricane sandy local authorities collapsed and many of the communities that were affected

by this massive storm. they couldn't cope with the numbers of people in distress and president obama had to call up tens of thousands of active-duty troops to send into the area to perform emergency services. in the case of houston it was even more tens of thousands who were called up and for hurricane irma and hurricane maria the government called up the equivalent of a small army aircraft carriers hundreds of helicopters and planes, tens of thousands of troops in the military, understand that this is just the beginning as we purred the storms will become more intense they will also

occur ãbthis is a base that is as at close to sea level now. it's built like so many of these facilities on mudflaps so the base itself is subsiding into the sea while the end sea is rising faster there than anywhere else on the planet. this is a base that is not going to be available for use in all likelihood in the decades to come. the military has a mammoth problem that its ability to carry out the responsibilities given to it by higher leadership will not be able to perform its duties. the military foresees what i call and all hell breaking news scenario in the not too distant future when there will be massive chaos abroad and mass migrations were breaking out

the president saying we need you to go over to the philippines to pakistan to nigeria to deal with the crisis there at the same time as there are three or four hurricanes or other disasters in united states and their own bases are inaccessible to them. their ability to defend the nation as they believe is their primary function and duty they will not be able to do that. this is their nightmare. and for this reason the military believes that it has to address the issue of climate change it cannot avoid it. it has to do what it can to adapt to the future of climate change of rising seas. bolstering the defenses of its bases moving them further inland, relocating forces away from the coast, hardening its

buildings against hurricanes. it also taking steps to diminish its own contribution to climate change so as to reduce the risk that it will face in the future. the military is after all the biggest consumer of energy in the united states biggest single organizational consumer of energy and it's making a massive effort to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and convert to renewable energy. it's working with the countries

what matters to us is the message that this brings to the american public that climate change can no longer be treated in my mind as a partisan issue, if your democrat you have one issue on climate change, if you are republican, you have another issue on climate change. [applause] rank you. i think what the military is saying, we can't argue about this. there are some issues that we can't agree on, okay let's put them aside but we have to realize our country is at risk. like we have foreign enemies, consider this another enemy of threat like those and we have to unite to defend our country against these threats. we as the military can show us what kind of action can be taken to do that.

i hope by writing this book that i would share with you what i've learned about how the people in the military see the risk of climate change and by expressing this, how it might provide us with a new language a new narrative that can bring together people across the partisan divide to take practical steps to reduce the level of threat and maybe things won't get quite as bad as some of the very worst scenarios we've seen. and heard about. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] >> we have time for some questions. please come up to the microphone. please don't be d, i have three comments and a question guy.

the panelists are right here and want to hear from you. >> am wondering whether any of the panelists is willing to comment on what apparently many scientists believed to be a reasonable, practical solution to the problem without having to count the human population on one hand. or avoid airplane travel on the other. the solution i'm referring to is molecular seating of the atmosphere. >> molecular seating of the atmosphere. >> i think we are going to be dealing with a lot of different coping mechanisms over the decades ahead as warming becomes more intense i think it's possible we will find ourselves walking down that path in the same way i think it's possible we walked on the path of solar geo-engineering. i think it's possible we deploy

large-scale carbon capture technology but i don't think we know at the moment just how safe or dangerous many of these approaches would be. we just know we are going to be needing a much more dramatic response than anything we managed thus far. >> my understanding is we only cost ã >> let the panelists talk. >> i would add briefly at this event for the watch of ãb wallace broker who has since passed, one of the earliest scientists to raise the alarm in the mid-1970s about this issue was very much a proponent of that kind of approach and he had done a lot of the math and his larger point was not necessarily that it was a silver bullet or even that it would work but that our government has new began to fund the kind of project and i think that's one of the most dangerous things about the

nihilism is it's infected our political process it's not just that it causes some people to doubt science it puts off a lot of really difficult ethical and technological debates that we are going to have to have that we have a need for god to have because one side is refusing to even engage. >> next panel. >> thank you gentlemen for your incredible enlightening, scary, dystopic future your painting for us. i'm in the business of selling hope even when there are days i don't want to get out of bed. what gives you hope right now in 2019 that we can turn the ship? [laughter] >> the most alarmist of all of us, i think hope is really a matter of perspective. i think if what you are hoping for is to secure the climate we have today, there's no hope for

that. when i can be able to do that. i think it's a much more reasonable side of expectation to think about the path we are on and where we are headed i talked about some of the terrifying scenarios that two degrees we follow the path we are heading now, we are likely to get north of three degrees may be north of four degrees this century i think we will do a lot to avoid those outcomes and that is progress. it is success. for every tiny tick upward of temperature we can avoid we are avoiding a huge amount of human suffering. i think it's really important to keep in mind this is not, in general, a binary system it's not a matter of whether we defeat climate or it defeats us. it's already here. but it is a spectrum and what will be determining is where i met spectrum of suffering we land. that's entirely up to us. everything is within our power

theoretically and if we fail to take action to avoid really dramatic warming it will be our response ability. i like to think of it more in terms of responsibility that hope but i think it's also important to say that very little of the future climates future is written in stone today it will be up to austin based on what we do from here on out. >> i might just mention one thing which is i believe this is going to be a political struggle and is and you don't and you just refer to that you can make progress if our national political leadership is divided and that stalemate which is where it is today. one thing that gives me hope is that there is a new caucus in the congress called the climate solutions caucus. which is divided evenly by design of republicans and democrats. the understanding is there are

things we will not argue. this is not a debating society but a solutions caucus to come up with practical solutions to climate change and this is a growing caucus. i think there is an understanding in congress and it's coming in particular from states with coastal areas where you have republicans who often are the representative of these areas but where the damage is becoming so severe that people realize that we have to start thinking about solutions now and put the arguments aside. >> the question then becomes for me what are those solutions at the coast? >> i don't see a lot of good solutions at the moment at the coast. we talk about using the corps of engineers to widen beaches in front of homes owned by millionaires and multimillion

dollar homes perched on top of ocean fronts. we talk about elevating property but i can tell you from experience that elevating property only gets you so far. it buys time, which is how i look at most solutions. i think for individual places like charleston, maybe you can save it, you may end up having to build a wall around it in which case it's no longer really going to be charleston, at least as we know it today. i'm not sure what you do with the place like miami or miami beach or florida year built on limestone. limestone is porous is like swiss cheese, the water comes at you every which way. we are not going to be able to afford to build a dutch style wall around a 1200 mile long peninsula. we are talking about building a surge gate in front of new york city lower manhattan, that could probably be done, it could probably work but just the cost of that the estimates

are anywhere from $40 billion upward. >> that's what it cost to build the subway station. >> we need to be honest about this, we need to talk about the extraordinary amount of money we might go with this problem and how far it might ultimately get us. >> i feel like i want to get to the questions but quickly i think, we live in new orleans and to build on what the other speakers were saying, despite the recent election there is no right or state statewide would we go they don't call it this, they don't speak in these terms but i think it's probably the biggest climate adaptation project in the world as far as i know which is rebuilding the coast. it's an effort not only of showing up what's there but

already sorted a cold eyed acknowledgment that what's there is not enough and then unless we take an active intervention in managing the coast and actually building new land using the mississippi river to do so, there is no shot. this is something that has unanimous support across state so i think it's instructive that as you go down we had this cancer in the national politics holder right with cut climate tribalism as you go down to local to get back to your question. it's a trickle-down thing and we know i know from my reporting this was a strategy that was designed by people at the highest levels of exxon and the american petroleum institute has become a right-wing policy that has trickled down but i don't think among the rank-and-file and among local politicians you have the same kind of dogma that's forcing them to heal.

if you want to look for hope in the political process, which is a dangerous game, i would start there. >> am afraid we have to shut it down. they can have the next one. but they will be signing books and you should ask him in person. [applause] [inaudible background conversations] the sun has come back out here in miami and the street fair is in full swing. here at miami-dade college the miami book fair continues. booktv will be live in another couple hours. coming up at 4:00 p.m., james ã

of the new york times and richard stengel, formerly of "time magazine" and the state department talking about information wars and misinformation.that's coming up at 4:00 p.m., in the meantime, we have two call income eleanor randolph for being here about 40 minutes to talk about her biography of michael bloomberg, the many lives of michael bloomberg. now we are joined by the author of this book a good american family, david marinus, mr. emeritus, who were elliott and mary? >> elliott and mary were my parents. elliott was a lifelong newspaperman. my mother was a book editor. they are the central figures in this book, which is about most difficult period of our families lives. >> why did he find out that your parents had been communists at one point? >> either i knew that as i was growing up, but was never

talked about, it was sort of the shadow of the family's lives by the time i knew my dad i was conscious of him he had moved on and survived very well and taught me all the lessons that i used in my own journalistic careers don't fall for any rigid ideology, search for the truth wherever it takes you. it was only a shadow in our families business after that. >> like you said, you did it talk about it with the family, was because they wanted to keep it tamped down? >> i don't think my father was embarrassed by his past but i think he didn't want to be defined by it. he learned some lessons from that period, he always made ã his idealism and optimism.

he wanted his family to florida. >> how did it affect your life growing up? >> it affected my life mostly from ages two to seven. i was two years old but my father was called before the house un-american activities ã ãi have no memory of that. after he was named he was fired from his job at the detroit times in our family bounced around for five years. until we ended up in medicine in 1957. those were years of trauma and moving for our family was the youngest of then three kids and i think it affected my older brother and sister more. they want to to go to three elementary schools in one semester i was younger than that. for me it was sort of a family sort of being vagabond but there is nothing ideological or political to my memories of

that. >> here at c-span and booktv we've known you professionally and personally for a long time. reading this book it seems that this is probably, i don't know if it's fair to say that toughest book you've ever written. >> will use the same methodology for this book that i do for all my books. get all of the archival documents you can, talk to everyone you can, go to the places the book, feel the geography of the book. try to pierce through the mid solid ology to find the real story but i've never written a book this personal and although it deals with history and many other figures in the book, parts of it a lot of it is in first person because i'm writing about my own family. it had a deeper psychological and emotional effect on me than any of my other books. >> did you ever have a chance to talk to parents about why they joined the communist party at a young age? >> i never did. i want to try to talk to my

father about a certain period of that when i thought it was gonna write a novel, which wasn't any good at. i'm a nonfiction writer and journalist and author but he didn't want to go there. it's the one interview i've done in my life where i backed away from it out of love for my father cited it push him as hard as i might have but it was only after he was gone that the idea for the book bubbled up. it's probably been inside me all along but when i write all these books about other people, they were all strangers to me at first and then by the end i knew more about their families than they did. here i had somebody who is very familiar to me, what would i think in the end? that was sort of the extension of me as i went into it. how long does the fbi tractor father specialist? >> they track my father for 12

years. 1946 to 1958 and in the course of my research i got the fbi files i filed freedom of information act for those. the first batch of about 100 pages came after a year and another batch came a year later. it's interesting, they are rather prosaic and yet yearly at the same time. he was followed by 37 different agents and/or informants during the course of the whole period. we the reports they would file were either boring or they would go into a building and this was his license point or they were meaningless in the sense that after a while they say we have no indications of involvement with the communist party but they kept following for years. >> david marinus as our guest will be talking about the 1950s

red scare america during that time, if you'd like to call in and participate, here's how you can do so. 202-748-8200, if you live in the east and central time zone. 202748 202748 8201 for mountain time zone. to text 202-748-8003. we will get to the calls and text in just a minute. mr. marinus, who were the michigan six? >> the michigan six were six members of the communist party in michigan who were tried and convicted a little bit after my father was called before the committee under the smith act.

the first trial was in new york city the holy scripture trial in 1949 or the top 11 members of the u.s. communist party were tried and convicted and then other trials around the country including michigan six. >> was it illegal to be a communist? >> at various points it was illegal to be a communist if you are registered as a communist. there were periods throughout the 40s into the 50s. >> part of your research for this book "a good american family" took you to spain. why?

>> because my mother's brother robert cummins, who like my mother and my father was a student at the university of michigan the day he graduated in 1957 he had two of his classmates went to new york city to k boat across the atlantic, a train across france to the famous border. climbed over the pyrenees and fought in the spanish civil war. for what was known as the abraham lincoln brigade, which is somewhat of a misnomer it was a battalion but they actually fought with the international brigade in that war against franco and mussolini and hitler. it was a precursor in many ways to world war ii. my uncle after that was also called before the committee the same week my father was in 1962 and suffered as well. >> arthur miller played a role in this. >> he was a student at michigan at a close friend of one of the

three students over to fight in the spanish civil war. before that ãbthe same school my dad attended my father followed miller to the university of michigan and not michigan miller befriended ralph ãone of the three young men who went to fight in the spanish civil war miller in his own memoir writes about driving ãfrom ann arbor to new york before we go fight. he writes that all the way on that trip he felt like he was looking at a dead man. he said " i wanted to fight about where i should've fought in that war but i knew if i did i would be killed and never be able to come famous for his playwright which is what he wanted to be. in 1952 at the same time my father was being called before the committee miller was writing the crucible which was sort of the central parable of that era of which is the

assailant. >> february i believe it was 1952 detroit michigan. >>. >> they would hold these ãb house un-american activities committee. the chairman and several committee came to their main intent was to move out the communists in the united auto workers union. my father and dozens of other people were collateral damage of that effort. my father was not a member of the uaw. but there was an informant who became known as the grandmothers spy. >> bernice baldwin. been recruited by the fbi in the early 1940s to join the michigan communist party she rose through the ranks for nine years became the secretary of the party came in from the

hearings and named hundreds of names of everybody from across during that whole period my father was one of those names as soon as he was named by her he was fired from his job. >> and subsequently fired from the cleveland plain dealer and other jobs. >> was five years of blacklisting we went from detroit to brooklyn lived in a small apartment three kids and my father's parents back to ann arbor to live with my mother's parents. then he got a job at the plain dealer through a friend who had worked with him in the michigan daily but the fbi came to the editor of the play dealer said he fired a communist or former communist. he was fired from that job and bounced around again for another few years. >> for some reason ended up in the quad cities area of iowa and illinois. what was it about quad cities? >> it was that there was a strict care by the international typographical

union against the newspapers there. the icu set up a paper called labors daily run by the printers and edited by people like my dad who'd been bounced around for various reasons so he was hired as the editor of the local edition of that paper and started the incubation of his return to newspapers. >> that was the quad city labor daily a ragtag collection of left my father was one of those. who was that hired him from madison as he ended up establishing himself. >> my dad had newspapers and he was really good at it. he loved every part of it, the layout, talking to the back shop, editing, writing, so put off this really nice looking

strike newspaper and one of the things they did every few weeks was run a column called hello wisconsin. by the founder and publisher of the madison capital times. close associate of the look ãb he at one time saw this little strike paper and basically said, who's putting this out it's better than our paper? it was right when labors daily was about to fold. he found out it was elliot marinus he invited him up to madison and hired him. in the summer of 1957 joseph mccarthy the symbol of that era had just died, i was eight years old. the milwaukee braves became my team and went on to win the world series that year. life became good. but madison really save their family. >> when you look back and when you write historical nonfiction

like this you try to put yourself in that era? >> very much so. was their legitimacy in your view now to the red scare? >> there were certainly legitimacy to the fear of communism at that point. the korean war was going on. the tension was there, the cold war, the middle of the cold war. there were indeed people recruited by the soviet union to spy in the united states. the reality of that was exaggerated many fold. fear was used as a weapon against a lot of people just living their lives.

202-748-8200 for those of you in the east noon central time zone, 202-748-8201 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones. we are talking about the mccarthy era. did your father ever come to contact with macarthur? >> no. mccarthy died before we got to his contact, and it should be understood that senator joseph mccarthy of wisconsin was a senator. he was the chairman of the subcommittee doing many of the same things as the house un-american activities committee. his focus is mostly on what he saw were communists in the federal government. he was the leading of the congressman on the committee who interviewed my father was elected to the senate right after that. join the committee with mccarthy and saul mccarthy's demagogue and really helped

president eisenhower and others undo mccarthy and a decade later would read a book called days of shame regretting everything he done during that era. >> what was your mother's call during all these moves and during the red scare. my mother was political too. she was as ideological or more so than my dad. she had been a member of the young communist. she was not followed by the fbi, there's no fbi report on her. in any case, the moment my father was called before the committee, my mother took it upon herself to keep the family ãbduring the four years of moving never was possible, whatever she would buy a house she went to work at hudson's department store in troy and

elsewhere to bring money for the family and really made the three kids, as much as possible, feel like we will be living a normal american life. which in essence we were even though everything was coming down around us. >> jim, jane, david, and wendy, where are they now? how many are living? >> jim is my oldest brother he was five and six when this was going on and probably affected the most by it. he became a professor of spanish literature at amherst university. amherst college, now retired. my sister jeannie was a year and and a half younger than jim and she became a russian scholar and then the chief researcher at carnegie mellon university in pittsburgh my little sister wendy who is the most talented of all of us was a classical pianist who died in

a car crash in 1997. >> on her way to ã⌟ >> on her way to helping a young student with piano.>> and you retired from the washington post? or still associated with the coast? >> i write books and i've edited some stories for the post. i come back next year and do some politics with paper but i sorta call myself a professor at nearest. i've been there 42 years and will be there until the end. >> did you interview jim and jean for this book or ever talk to wendy about your parents experience? >> never talk to wendy about it. she died long before i ever started to do this book. i did interview both my brother and my sister for the book and they were very valuable because their memories were much deeper about what our family was enduring during the five years

after the moment of trauma. >> had kept you long enough let's hear from our viewers, i apologize for keeping our viewers on hold. mike is in la crosse wisconsin. you are on with david marinus, a good american family and name of the book. >> i'm sorry to say that i am from wisconsin the biggest black market in our political history. >> mike in la crosse? >> i'm sorry to say am from wisconsin. >> what's the question on what? >> roy colen. >> interesting connection from then to now. president trumps one of his most famous utterances was where is my roy cohn. cohen was a mentor to donald

trump when he was in new york city. cohen and mccarthy are not essential to my book because it's not about the senate committee the congressional in the house american activities but i think that some of the politics that color foster are evident still today. >> michael, new rochelle new york. >> and just wanted to tell david i really appreciated his book. i came from a family with a similar background and though we struggled we ultimately we have a good outcome. our family ran a printshop in the west side of manhattan that was left-wing printshop and helped organize labor unions in the theatrical industry. had an uncle who is in the lincoln brigade the fbi used to come around trying to get them

fired but the family would fire him because a relative. he was hard for a while. his family suffered, his children suffered. ultimately we survived. it was quite a time. >> thank you michael. i want to say that of all the books i've written this book has gotten the most powerful personal response. i've gotten hundreds of letters from people like you who said their family endured something similar to this and bounced around and some of them survived and flourished i feel lucky that my family did. we were not destroyed by it. but there are accounts i got from people there's a lot of dysfunction because of what had happened during that period.

i just feel lucky, thank you for going. >> one of the interesting tidbits in a good american family is you interview the granddaughter bernice baldwin the mole. >> that was really fascinating because it took a long time to find her and some of the other grandchildren but time is passing and interesting way. as i talked to her she basically said she didn't know the story of her grandmother. she knew her grandmother very well but didn't find out about it and tell her mother died in in the closet of her mother she found all these articles about her grandmother. the grandmother spy. then she said, did your dad talk to you about it? i said not really. i sort of knew but it was never discussed. we bonded over this.

that history had this opposite effect on our families but similar effect as well. she ended it by saying, that was a weird time, wasn't it? >> walter reuther of the uaw has a big part in your book as well. how did he come about? >> it's interesting. walter rew is a major figure in my previous book which was about detroit in 1963 when he was really the uaw was the heart of the labor movement. this is 10 years earlier and reuther is trying to assert himself and survive in this very difficult red scare climate. one of his missions was to route the leftist and communist out of the united auto workers. he wasn't really cooperating with the house un-american activities committee but he was sort of caught in the middle because he too wanted the communists out for different

reasons that the labor movement then can be justified by its leftist. >> text for you from chris in newburgh maryland. do you think there is a risk of red scare something on a smaller scale scope happening today? >> i think it's different but there's some parallel. i would say the use of fear as a political weapon is being evidenced today. i would say that the definition of who is american and who is not are quite similar. although people who are turning against but in the era it was intellectuals and leftists and communists, today it's muslims and people from latin america trying to come into the united states with the same issue of what is it mean to be american is prevalent. and evident today as is a

larger question of what is the role of the sense and freedom of speech in american life and what is the patriot and who isn't? >> carol hallandale florida. >> i'm also from brooklyn and i have a lot in common with you. i been watching and listening to your story. we left brooklyn in 1946 to go to detroit. ãbmy father worked in the automotive industry and couldn't get work in brooklyn as i understood. i didn't understand a lot. i was probably anywhere from eight years old to tiei love my father and thought he was the kindest most caring person in the world. i would come home from school and watch the mccarthy hearings

and it was very scary and i remember hearing on television people talk about dirty economy, dirty red people edit know if they were gonna come and get my father my father was from hungary but lived in russia before coming to the united states and i'm not sure exactly where he got exposed to communism but i know that was something that was an important part of his life. my mother did not share that with him, they live very temporally. but it was a time that laid its mark and i always remember the concept of fearing the russians. in the text message you just received reminded me of how strange it could be that we can have something like that happening again with people

fearing people unlike themselves but yet trump and pollutants seem to do so connected i don't understand the idea that americans are going along with it and not wondering, the russians are coming the russians are coming. i used to hear that and fear that. so i really have nothing more to share. it's just it was interesting coming from brooklyn. >> carol, thank you for sharing your story with us.>> i have a couple thoughts about that. we all know you can never judge somebody in terms of their kindness, goodness, relationships with people by their ideology.

they can be people who are jerks of any analogy or wonderful people of any ideology. there's an assumption that a false assumption that people remember the communist party of that period didn't love america. your father i'm sure loved america as much as my father did my father fought in world war ii for four years and help train and lead a black unit that went to okinawa. today everything seems upside down. then the fbi was for my family's perspective the bad guys surrounding my father now the fbi trying to find the truth that it was russia considered evil by conservatives and now embracing russia through trump. everything is discombobulated today. >> to remember resentment or fear during this period in the