she said i misjudged you you are the only one who came through i will never forget it. >> doctor safer's book is entitled "i love you, but i hate your politics", to watch the rest of the program visit our website freelibrary.org and type in the name of the book title or author using the search box at the top of the page. >> hello everyone. can everyone hear me? sounds good? awesome. thank you all for coming out tonight and supporting your local independent an employee owned bookstore. [applause] before we begin tonight's event with holly jackson for "american radicals" i want to mention other great programming

we have coming up. later this week we have romance writer duo christina lauren here with boston globe on thursday. next week on tuesday we are hosting former poet lawyer robert pinsky along with a few contributors for the new anthology the mind has cliff to fall, next wednesday we are hosting ncc usual the alice of boston history. he got many more events coming up and you can find more information on our website and in the brochures by the registers when you pick up your copy of the book tonight. tonight we are so glad to be hosting holly jackson for her new book "american radicals", how a 19th-century protest shape the nation. but page magazine calls it magnificent calling ãbwho protested wrongs in their society deserve wide readership. many find academic studies have cover the subjects here but this account written for a general audience is authoritative and fast-paced and visibly portrays a crucial

period. in publisher weekly star review wrote "electric, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how the u.s. became what it is today". holly jackson is an associate professor of english at the university of massachusetts boston. her writing has appeared in the new york times, washington post, and boston globe, as well as a number of other scholarly venues. she is the author of one previous book a scholarly study of family values politics and 19th century american literature and culture published by oxford university press. she lives in cambridge massachusetts and we are so glad to have her here tonight. [applause] thank you for joining us. [applause] >> hi, thank you so much for coming out tonight. it's kind of a blustery wet night it's so good to see you all. it's an absolute thrill to be here at porter square books which is my neighborhood bookstore and for those of us who live here it is such an

important institution in our community so i really want to encourage you to make some purchases tonight i definitely think you should start by buying out their stock of american radicals but after that you should buy a cookbook and a book of poems and some children's books and just support them, the holidays are around the corner. this book, my book, is a history of social justice activism in the united states from around 1817 to 1877 and if you are not regularly immersed in 19 century history, that can sound really remote. if you think of it as the civil war era or appeared a westward expansion or industrialization but the social issues that mattered at that time echo so clearly still in our own moment that i think they will likely sound very familiar to you. the people who drive this story were americans who were outraged by family separation by the idea of federal agents

who were hunting refugees by sexual assaults on women by the d value realization of black lives, by and economic one percent that outside control of government. they were in a moment a very real political crisis. they were deeply concerned that the country is on the wrong track. they felt called to do something about it. they set out to accomplish specific legal reforms the legal reforms are kind of the 19th century activism were most familiar with but more portly i wanted to write about people who wanted a deeper cultural transformation. they wanted to reeducate the conscience of the american public so it would see inequality as a moral failure and a national disgrace. they pursued this with a range of tactics protests look like a lot of things in this book it is individual lifestyle choices and consumer choices they figured out ways of exerting pressure on the economy and on public opinion and elected

officials and the tactics went all the way up to attempted armed coups against the government. there's kind of a paradoxical relationship with the nation is at the heart of this in the idea that they wanted to overthrow society and many of them were interested in actually overthrowing the government but they did this in the name of american political values. they saw themselves as the true heirs of the founders and that's a tension i tried to capture in the title and also that really informs the whole book. they saw themselves as engaged in a second american revolution one of them called it a second and more glorious revolution. they thought of the first american revolution that had been fought by their fathers and grandfathers. the book starts in the moment the founding generation was dying. kind of a question about what the meaning and the direction of the nation would be going forward. they saw that first american

revolution as merely political, like important but political. the goal of it was to break away from england, to establish a new political system. but the people in my book thought that a social revolution was absolutely necessary as a follow-up in order to make good on the ideas that the admonition revolution had articulated but had never made real american life. i think they succeeded is the argument i make to a surprising degree although incomplete certainly imperfect. i tried to show they were just responding to the relief singularly turbulent conditions of the period but the protest movements actually shape this period in a really sensual way. the first half the book the big story of the first of the book is that the rise of radical anti-slavery movement which was really the first political project brought together americans across lines of race

class and gender on a national scale the rise of that movement inspired a much broader and textured critique in america. once the institution of slavery, which was a centuries-old institution in the united states, it was completely the bases of the economy was supported at every level once that was called into question basically nothing was off the table for interrogation. we moved from the beginning of antislavery into a broader interrogation of religious observances, sex and marriage and family, private property and capitalism. the first part of the book i establish the network of activists that i will follow through the remainder of the century so the network includes leaders of free black communities in philadelphia and boston it includes the scottish air st. francis right to exists incredibly charismatic character but ends up being really a cautionary tale it

includes local hero william garretson who is conventionally known as the leader of the antislavery movement headquartered here in boston. he did a much better job than francis right at the kind of intersectional and coalitional work i'm interested in in this book. also in this part of the book you will find socialists on utopian communes, polyamorous begins another thing i really want to emphasize is this growing culture of dissent would met in this moment by a really reactionary mainstream opposition. that as people started to articulate a real resistance to the way things were, we see a huge backlash and it's really in that conflict that i see them as drivers of history rather than just as responders. the second half of the book is all about the civil war and reconstruction which was

obviously a real watershed moment in national history but i also talk about how it transformed these activists that i'm writing about as well. people who had been really visible pacifists for example, came to condone violence or even participate in violence there was a major riot of 50,000 people here in boston where a deputy federal agent was killed and the community here in boston had previously before that moment had been kind of defined by either working through political channels or working to these kind of moral suasion channels that were devoutly pass assist and that was a real changing of the guard moment that kicked off a very violent decade leading up to the civil war. another example of a figure of the book transformed in this period black nationalist martin delaney who had been ready to abandon the united states and

create a project to take african americans to make a new nation in west africa can make given the time he was among those who started to rally around ãhe served and reconstruction government, he backed john brown's raid before that so he had been willing to back an armed coup. this period in the spirit of reconstruction it was really an unprecedented opportunity for social reengineering it ended really tragically and violently especially for african americans in the south and for workers. the figures i follow had accomplished so much that really seemed impossible. most people in america thought it was impossible and crazy by the end of the period we do see a breakdown of their values or rethinking of some of their fundamental strategies and

also, sadly, the splintering a lot of the coalitional relationships the coalitions between movements that had really defined their work. i end with a conclusion to the book that evaluates what they see us he succeeded with and also and just reviewed some of their ambitious goals that remain ours to pursue. i'm going to read a short passage, i can read more after we talk if that's what you want to do. but this particular passage takes place in the late 1850s. essentially right on the brink of the civil war ended set a big meeting of reformers in vermont. there are a lot of interesting settings in this book like freelove dance parties and communism and various things and a lot of that conventions where people would come out and just try to hammer out strategy and argue and i think this

scene is fun because it captures the kind of wacky multi-issue counterculture that i was really wanted to emphasize in this book about how we see ideas and personnel overlapping in movements that generally we study in isolation or think of as separate. i also like this moment because it shines a light as i try to do also on how those overlap in collaboration sometimes just could not work in practice because their interpersonal dramas and that's fine but on the other hand they were real and necessary in very significant disagreements about strategy and about priorities. there's a lot in 19th century activist cultures that have been forgotten. i wanted to find those for you so you know what i'm saying when i get there.

spiritualism spiritualism was not a radical political movement they were kind of like fellow travelers. outside of the passage is the only place we see them. you might've heard in the 19th century that people were communicating with the dead, they were spirits coming around rapping on tables. ouija boards, spirit medium, those are the spirituals. free love, free love is a big subject in the book because all the way from the 1820s through the 1870s and it looked like a lot of different things there were a lot of varieties of it but basically it was a movement to reform or abolish the institution of marriage and it really overlapped with surprising degree with other movements like socialism and anti-slavery that i try to highlight. nonresistance very important controversial strain of antislavery movement, they were radical pacifists but more than that they completely rejected the american government they didn't want anything to do with the legal system they wouldn't

vote, they wouldn't serve in the military they wouldn't deal with the court of law, they didn't recognize the american government at all and it was really controversial within antislavery.and finally become outers. come outers were also abolitionist. their critique was religion and specifically the northern churches like they found it outrageous and appalling that northern churches were not at the absolute vanguard of evolution. they withdrew from their own churches but that really wasn't even enough. this one guy you will meet, stephen foster, was particularly famous for his direct action protests he would do on sunday mornings in which he would go into a church and sit with the congregation quietly to the beginning and then when the minister got up to start talking he would rise in the audience and just deliver a barn burning speech until people in the congregation grabbed him he was very tall and lanky he would

just go limp they would have to carry him out, he was beat up, he was beat up every time.he was kicked, he was thrown out of a window. he went to jail. they made it a crime to interrupt his church service. in prior hampshire where he ordinarily was doing this but he did it anyway. he's actually one of my very favorite figures in the book. in the last week of june 1858 they stepped off the trains into dazzling sunshine in the small but bustling town of rutland vermont, shorthaired women along here men sporting bloomers and bio encounters six is a smirking new york times reporter with right there were medalist people of all sorts of shapes white, black, partially black, badly sunburned and convened to discuss

abolitionism, free love, free trade and all other queer things. finding the vacant lot on the east side of grove street about root beer and gingerbread from the locals who would set up booths around the perimeter and gathered under tents from 100 feet across decorated with buntings that say heavily in the airless heat. they talked all day and late into the evening ãbcolorful countercultural pipe skipping out of the woodwork times reporter claims to have walked into one gathering in hotel parlor just as a woman freestyle in poetry and accompanying herself on an antique accordion was interrupted by an adolescent in a trance and began flailing around the room. the conventions resolution affirmed their belief in spirit communications are rejected wore the death penalty and sabbath observances. they stated that the american union was a crime in its formation and proved occurs ever since. the influence of the radical abolitionist was evident in the declarations and indeed among

the first to speak was received write a founding nonresistance. as most impassioned remarks at a rutland convention pertain to sham marriages, abortions and gender politics of consensual consent.it turns out right chose to be ãbbecause he could not stand to be at home with his wife. no marriage love is between us. many years since we slept in the same bed. staying in other people's homes as he traveled he was tortured by the sight of happy couples embracing newborns nursing and other blissful domestic scenes he was denied. he felt he was trapped in his marriage as in a living death. but travels presented other opportunities as well. passionate affairs at least one and likely multiple women in europe led to question the traditional standards that deemed sexless marriage the only legitimate form of intimacy. by the time of the rutland convention and while still

actively at work for the antislavery movement he published a book called marriage and parentage called for sex to be taken up as an object for full reform in movements like abolition and temperance. extending his no government principles to private life right declares that no human law or license or authority or social custom can make a true marriage. his call at rutland for the immediate abolition of all external authority was a wide net cast to encompass not only the slave power but the government and the churches but the institution of marriage as well. all participants had their own causes to add to the list of external authorities to be abolished and they were practically climbing over one another for the floor. spiritualists butting in after ãbimpassioned advocate for native americans tried valiantly to call attention to a recent massacre but could gain no traction with the crowd as it jumped from one topic to the next. julia branch a vivacious resident of the manhattan commune was a star of the convention. for the new york times reporter

it produced an odd sensation to see a good-looking woman rise and about herself free lever. she said women have bought and paid for as the negro ãthe feminist talk of marriage slavery was matched by others it's a crying mental slavery spiritual slavery manned enslavement by religious conventions they seem to compete over which of these could be proved worse than the slavery of the body practice in the south stephen s foster the cantankerous, order was there as well listening intently to two days of such speeches. he had engaged in free love discussions with an open mind insisting that the real problem was gender inequality but granting is truly egalitarian marriage did not work for others the way it worked for him then he would support them in trying to experiment a different kind. by saturday afternoon foster was tired of listening to all this talk not just tired, furious. he rose and addressed the convention in the same come outers spirit with which he arraigned inspecting church

services the crash. he would not allow self-styled reformers to feel comfortable while in the south/continue to fall. frankly disgusted by so much talk foster demanded action. my heart has been tamed and sunk within me as i listen to the discussion which the discussions which have been going on before this audience. i call upon you in the name of 4 million slaves to go to work he charged that when his listeners sit and chat about communications from beyond the grave they fall back to the cries of millions of living people bound in chains. how can they speak abstractly of women's rights, he wonders? in the very moments that enslaved women were being raped and newborn babies were torn from mother's sold at auction with cattle and swine. the free convention threatened and fosters view to splinter

activist energy into offshoots that seemed distressingly apolitical. doing nothing to save lives and unjust suffering. in response he made his commitment clear, let me say here and now that i never intend to lay aside the question of slavery come what may i never intend to turn my eyes until the last shackles fall. ending with a secretary note becoming inescapable in the late 1850s even in the rhetoric of devoted nonresistance he warned, i leave the responsibility with you but god is my witness if you go down to the grave with this crime upon your soul, my soul is clean of your blood. fosters for voting remarks logged into what had been a boisterous reformer shindig suggest something of the precipice on which they in the entire country teetered. in a few short years all americans would be living in the shadow of mass debt in the long crime of slavery would meet at its end and apocalyptic bloodshed. there would soon be little time to debate who should be emancipated next to the national crisis the abolitionists had long desired finally arrived.

[applause] okay. let me hear from you. what interests you in this period what questions do you have? what residence are you hearing with their own moment? >>. >> i was wondering is there anything you learn from the coalition building at that time that could apply to coalition building efforts now? >> yes, there are examples that are incredibly inspiring the people working together across movements and across difference and then there are also a lot of just cringe worthy moments of failure better cautionary tales of the book. the first example in the first part of the book basically you

have these free black communities in the north who had been for years doing this work of civil rights and of anti-slavery in their communities and then when white activists come on the scene the first example i have is francis right and she had every opportunity. she knew people in common and she was aware of the work in philadelphia was doing and she had every opportunity to collaborate with them and understand with the top the resolutions were but she walked through on grand adventure instead and had her own ideas about how things should be. she ended up, it ended really badly. she founded the socialist commune she ended up purchasing slaves herself enslaving them on commune. shipping them off to haiti even though by the time the african american community had largely abandoned the haitian immigration movement they previously back.

it's a combination of being willing to follow the leadership of the people who have skin in the game as it were and probably the best-known moment of a coalition that fell apart really graphically was when these movements that had been the women's movement and the antislavery movement turned into a land grab in post-civil war moment who was going to get the right to vote first. white women had a bad moment there, a faction of white women like elizabeth ãand susan b anthony. that's probably the best known example. >> i read this book i love this book i had a great time reading this book. >> one of the things i learned is there was little moment when reparations happened people got 40 acres and a mule but then we sucked it up and i wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that happened.

>> sorry c-span. you are absolutely right. [ [laughter] you're absolutely right that in the wake of the civil war and even while the civil war was still going on, there were programs in the south for land redistribution and this was understood, many african american leaders put this out there as the number one priority that what they could do for generational lasting economic sustainability was to have some land to farm and to pass down. it would also create a voting block etc. once there was

suffrage. but actually suffrage became an easier concession because, i think, it was so easy to take away and practice. tragically easy to tickle and practice. the idea was, we give these communities, they should really look after themselves with the vote and protect themselves are in themselves the vote but of course that simply was not possible in the context it followed. >>

>> what you think you learned about leadership in writing this? >> wow. that's a really good question. i think for these movements that inspirational leadership was really important but these leaders were not commit there are a few of these cults mentioned in the novel that had like full on charismatic leaders the kind you would imagine multiple wives in the whole thing. in terms of these actual political movements many of the most inspirational leaders like william garrison for instance, succeeded where fanny wright failed in that he was able to position himself as a megaphone for the black community in boston. he picks up the work they were already doing and when he

started his newspaper the liberator which was the most groundbreaking radical newspaper of the century most of the early subscribers were african-american many of the contributors were african americans and he also will, he really brought people in step two champion women join the movement but not only that, in leadership positions and he was going to see had this kind of far-reaching insistence on human rights not just a single issue of slavery but human rights and he was willing to do things like sit in silence and protest of any antislavery convention that didn't allow women to be speak as delegates he was considered the most important abolitionist leader in the world but he would just sit there and not speak and people would try to applaud him into saying something that he would not he would sit and protest. he really was there for the people in the coalition that he cared about and to me he is one example of leadership that

stands out to me as having been really successful. in fact, abraham lincoln himself credited him with the ultimate with his decision to write the emancipation proclamation. >> you mentioned as one of the connections to current day people speaking out about sexual violence and i was wondering what context people were doing that, who was speaking out about it and how that went. what happened. >> thank you. that's a great question. i love to talk about this because also we are in a moment where we are celebrating the passage of the 19th amendment which is the women's suffrage amendment and it's such an important time to think about the role we have as women in the american electorate and we could seize that. in another way i think we take of the 19th century women's movement as a suffrage movement

from the jump and really that was a latebreaking, in my mind, this is really in the moment with the bookends for me in 1870 the women's movement was turning focus to constitutional reform in a single minded way just at that moment. the women's moment before that is like, as the entirety of it i cover in the book as sexual violence is very important to them. economic power, social power, all these things are very important to them. they were women's liberation movement. they wanted change. they were talking about sexual violence in marriage. this was something that people who were kind of the respectable wing of what became the women's rights movement and the free lovers had this in common is that they believe that women had to be empowered to have command of their own bodies in the institution of marriage and this was for the free lovers and interesting

back door into critiquing the whole institution calling for the abolition of the whole institution but marital rape is out live now but at the time this was a really controversial thing to talk about in public also these conversations about women's rights sexual rights and marriage also opened the door for this kind of slippery term voluntary motherhood. voluntary motherhood it meant a lot of things in meant that since women bore a very dangerous consequences at the time of giving birth they had the responsibility for caring for these children that they ought to be the ones to decide when conception can take place. like when they are having sex in marriages but voluntary motherhood also was a nice term that could be used by birth control advocates to talk about more active ways of planning for one's family.

so in both the women's movement and free love and overlap in thinking about reform in the private sphere which i think largely dropped out of the conversation we still think about this public political focus in terms of women's rights but maybe now in the "me too" moment we are thinking more about these kind of psychological and private dynamics that very much concerned women in the 1840s and for the rest of the century. [inaudible question] was there something new to you like we were like we all need to know this right now. >> i been studying this period for a long time i went to graduate school to study 19th century american culture and i've been a teacher at been a college professor working in this area since 2008 it's kind

of long time. i wrote another book about it and yet i actually felt like, i was all the way through this research i felt like i was learning about things that were not familiar to me and that i did not really know even as a supposedly expert on the subject so that's part of what, i really felt like these stories are so resonant right now that that's why i thought they should be blot to a broader readership as i could marshal. specific things. that were particularly some of you i think of already read the book. if there was anything in the book you found really surprising i knew about john braun. i think he's in there. i think a lot of the labor stuff i didn't know. one of the things the book ends with was 1877 was like this incredibly violent terrible

year in american life there was a workers strike started as a strike of railway workers in pennsylvania but flashed across the country and almost turned into a workers revolution and it was one of two instances in the book where the president of the united states deploy the military to put down civilian protests so the military came out and killed about 100 protesters and restored order it was the first time the government had then put to use to protect corporate interest. to protect the interest of the railroad corporations that elected the president who deployed them. that really set the tone for a relationship between corporate money in the government and people going forward that was really different than what you see in the previous century. i was less familiar with the labor movement so i learned a lot by leading that into the story that it was more familiar

with. >> a little related to that story where in terms of the squabbles that society has about what free speech means and covers now versus then, what remains consistent that you've seen and what's changed. >> like stability? >> yes. people thinking about zuckerberg's facebook speech recently. >> thank you for asking. it's incredibly relevant. she's asking about free speech and activist speech and about in public what could be said.

as soon as the radical antislavery movement developed and started to make pamphlets in the liberator and other newspapers, the south outlawed the distribution of those and sort of clamped down on activist speech and it wasn't just the south, the federal government and congress passed gag rules on abolitionist speech which meant any proposal having to do with abolition could not be heard by the elected representative of the american people would be automatically tabled and not discussed. this incredibly important movement that was growing and had hundreds of thousands of people in it congress was just saying out right, we just simply will not consider it. there was criminalization of

the distribution of those materials and then later on you see this again around obscenity laws. it becomes a legal for the free lovers and women's rights magazines talking about the control or talking about sex at all a lot of them were locked up in jail one of my guys edward haywood was locked up several times. so that was one format talk about a lot of forms of opposition some of it was like a mob comes to your house and builds gallows in the yard or tars and feathers you are be to open a street or murders you or throws your printing press into a river. so what was the federal government passing gag rules or deploying military i think i mentioned the protest in boston that was the other occasion were the president sent military downtown boston was

under martial law for part of the summer of 1854. but that crack on speech was a really core way to silence them. thank you for asking. >> some people said we had to be righteously angry about things that are wrong and not settle for anything less than justice. but also let's know when to be calm and use strategy. in respect our fellow human beings just because they are human beings. was there any of that or was it just mostly rowdiness? >>. [laughter] >> in fact, kind of across the

board the reformers were just much less rowdy than the opposition. the opposition was really rowdy, but turning it out during brickbats, robbing people in the street. as i said, for half of the period the book covers, most of the people involved in this work were nonviolent. i will say that it also includes people in the slave system and slay people who were carrying violent uprising. they were masters of rhetoric. they really believed in written word and spoken word and i think this should be familiar to you now that people who want to make social change for movements like weather climate strike or whatever movement you want to think of, there are certain narratives that end up being effective and get in people's feelings and you remember them.

the abolitionists were masters of this. all of them really were adhered to find or construct and circulate and peddle these narratives as part of the project of reeducating the american conscious and making people think this thing that has been part of my life i think it supported by the bible, maybe something is in me is saying that's not right. i was just thinking about that the video that was really big a few years ago the terrible the whale in the baby whale the mother whale doing the protest

with the baby whale that wouldn't let go and that's the same narrative. that gained a certain tracy for the same reason. so yes there were many rhetorical and textbased textbased ways of going about this, also consumer boycotts were huge. people exerted pressure on the economy by walking off their jobs which i think is an pretty important way but there also just little micro decisions like i'm not going to let my kid have candy even though it's very hard because sugar comes from slave plantations. a lot of people were defiantly refusing to be a part of exploitation even if it was just personal and private. >> what narrative do you see could be written to propel people whatever the cause is. i would hire you.

>> as i said, i think a lot of the same strategies are still effective in a certain way. writing this book actually made me a little less cynical about protests and the effect it can have because before i wrote the book i was like, give me a break, it's a straw. or like, are we going to save the planet to the government and military that need to be addressed. can i just have a straw? but now i understand these individual choices and like a rigorous attempt to lead a life that you yourself don't find disgusting and hypocritical i think it's important. when i look at these movements one of the things it's really strikes me they were incredibly diffuse.it took people who said i'm gonna work through the political system and make a new political party and it also took people saying it took a

long time for americans to be ready to die in a war. it took a long time. this kind of diffuse pressure where you see it coming from all angles and i think you see that now with some of the movements in our own moment where you feel like, like you feel that people are putting enough pressure on corporations or there has to be summer software etc. some governments perhaps not ours but governments around the world. so yes. i think there are strategies that can be applied now. you want me to read one more thing you want to ask more questions? it been really interested in the question of failure. because i think they succeeded

so much they really shape the conditions in this period rather than just responding to them but they also failed in a lot of ways. none of the communes are existing today. john brown, he meant to in-state a new u.s. government but instead he was immediately captured and executed. i want to reevaluate the way in which they were successful and the ways they failed to stop the i ended up wanting to think a lot about how failure is building the social justice work and allison inevitable. it takes a certain kind of radical hope and antagonism to just keep trying things in the face of almost certain failure. i will just read the end of the

book. a handful of the many thousands engage in social protest in this period have been elevated to a pantheon of reformers in national memory the process requires a degree of subrogation in defining the weirder elements of the counterculture that edited them out. looking now at your portraits and waste colors preserved in brass frames and tool whether cases one easily forgets they were hated mocked and feared most of their countrymen and aggravated all balls looking to overthrow american life their willingness to hazard failure rather than accept the world as they found it. though the history of radicals thought it must be a history of a certain kind of failure we have so completely metabolized the wild ideas of 19th century america succeeded the telephone, regular bathing,

that their original implausibility is low, success carries with it a feeling of inevitability as though it represents the march of history a stray path miraculously just barely caught only the ideas that were dropped look impossible or silly to us now. the stories of these activists summoned a variety of potential americans that have not come to be, at least not fully at least not yet with what success can we credit the radicals of the glorious social revolution? not spotless personal virtue certainly. achievement of crucial goals to be sure but nowhere near the realization of their full ambitions. following their lead we might look not to the perpetuity of their outcomes but to the rightness of their principles. their success in prefiguring at least for a time a different and better world and most of all their motivation to act on those principles in the face of failure. to try something when it's easier and safer by far to do nothing. devoting their lives to a

struggle with no end they dare to begin. [applause] >> if you buy a book i will give you a little button and i will sign it. [laughter] >> thank you so much holly and thank you all for coming. we have copies of the book up at the register and we will do a little reshuffling of the furniture and have a signing line form along the aisle for holly. thank you all again. [applause] >> tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern on "after words" steven greenhouse talks about his book "beaten-down worked up". >> so many people had no idea what unions are what unions do and how unions help bring us the 40 hour work week and bring us pensions and the bumper sticker unions folks who brought us the weekend and

wanted to explain to people unions have achieved a whole lot in american history but now they are really in decline they really been taken on the chin and as a result, things are considerably worse for workers i believe that was the case 30 to 40 years ago.>> watch "after words" tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> here are some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the new york times. topping the list is "becoming" former first lady michelle obama memoir. minutes terra westover's account of growing up in the idaho mountains in her introduction to formal education is age 17 in her book "educated" it's been a bestseller list for over a year. elton john recalls his life and career in his memoir "me". following that is talking to

strangers, new yorker staff writer malcolm gladwell's examination on how we misread strangers words and actions. in wrapping up our look at some of the books on the new york times nonfiction bestseller list is sam houston and the alamo ventures. by fox news host brian kill mead the book provides a history of america's 19th-century war with mexico over texas. many of these authors have appeared on tv and you can watch them online on freelibrary.org ãbbooktv.org. >> i'm delighted to tell you about this book, it is written by a friend and constituent of mine who spent 544 days in iranian prison a story about that is a story about his amazing work as a journalist his relationship with his incredible journalist wife, his reentry into society after this terrible ordeal this is my

dogeared copy of prisoner and i hope everyone watching this will go out and buy prisoner available on amazon at a reputable bookstores around the country and great read. >> we want to hear what you are reading, send us your list on facebook, twitter or instagram at booktv ..... miami. joining us now the author of unfollow an mri leaving the westborough active - - baptist church burka where did you grow up and how quex. >> i grew up in kansas at the westborough baptist church started by my grandfather and almost my entire extended family at westborough we had a normal life in some ways. public school, video games, made cookies with my parents with all wonderful meri