tokens. the conversation is never going to happen when you have a negative view of somebody that looks like you just because they don't share your politics. >> rob smith thank you for having a conversation with our viewers, we do appreciate that. >> absolutely. >> for our viewers who want to learn more about rob smith, the book always a soldier, service, sacrifice and coming out black american gay republican. you can follow him on twitter if you go to at rob smith online. >> book tv, television for serious readers. >> good evening virtual audience and welcome, thank you so much for joining us tonight. my name is hillary carr. i'm pleased to introduce this

event with nicholson baker, joining the conversation by christopher. thank you for joining us tonight. harvard bookstore continues to bring authors to our community and new digital community. as always, our events scheduled also appears on our website at harvard.com/events where you can sign up for e-mail news letter. this evening's discussion will conclude with questions and if you have any questions, click on q&a bottom. in the chat i will be posting a link to purchase and donate and support series in the store. your purchases an contributions make tonight possible. thank you so much for showing up and tuning in support of authors

at harvard bookstore. we appreciate your support now and always. as you may have experienced in virtual gatherings the last few weeks, months, technical issues may arise. [laughter] >> if they do, we will do our best to resolve them quickly and we thank you for your patience and understanding. and now i'm so pleased to introduce tonight's speakers, nicholson baker, author of ten novels, human smoke, substitute, going to school with a thousand kids and best-selling author, cath rib porter award from the american academy of arts and letters, tonight he will be joined by journalist and host of wbr christopher lydon and they will be discussing nicholson's

book. convincing case for opening government archives to public scrutiny and seattle times called a genre transforming blend of history and memoir offering behind the scenes glimpses of efforts and home life and worst fears about his own country. that makes baseless trying to grapple. we are so happy to have them both here tonight so without further due, the digital podium is yours, christopher and nicholsson. >> hilary, thank you. thank you for inviting me. nicholson baker is a friend and we've had this conversation quite a number of times before and always an education to me. let me just say i don't really need to introduce nick bake the other this audience but i think of him -- he writes 3 kinds of

books, one sort of photo realist pros, minute things about shoe laces, opening book, but also his -- his childlike should i say but grown up in -- but then there's a special category and this book baseless, nonfiction but history never -- i wouldn't say never, antiimperial, and not the grand scope how the english-speaking nations took over universe and all of that,

literature and intimate and self-conscious, consciousness, modern consciousness in a nightmarish world and this genre in nicholson world, incredibly moving book in substance and in the way he went about it, but having said all that, as you have with me, nick, detective story. it's a story of a -- reporter story but also at the highest level of writer's dairy, and all the great writers, most intimate writers. >> yes, first of all, i want to

say hello to everybody. it's amazing to me that these things can happen and a bunch of people, 60 people are here. i can't see you, but i'm so happy that you are here. yes, the harvard bookstore is one of those places in my memory that's -- i can remember individual books that i've bought there and i remember buying edmund gross -- goss father down in the base rent and -- basement and i love the bookstore and i'm happy to be a part of it even though i'm not in the bookstore. i was trying to write about something that happened a long time ago in this book and, but it just occurred to me that since i didn't know everything

about what happened along time ago because the documents were being withheld that i would write about what was happening while i was trying to write about what happened a long time ago, so i -- i ended up instead of having one timeline which is the timeline of the early cold war, harry truman, korea, china, a gathering sense of us possession and paranoia, i also was -- i wanted to write about my own life as i was trying to make sense of that early period, so just so happened, amazingly and wonderfully that my wife and i got to rescue the day before i started this -- i sort of -- it was like a clapper, start to seam and i started the book but it had happened that we had gotten two very difficult but very lovable dogs the day

before, so they kind of accompanied me through it and ended up being important story. so it's a book about trying to write -- trying to write a book about what happened a long time ago. >> a lot of stuff. i didn't know or i had forgotten that george kennon was deep into the story. alan douglas, one of the main players, frank, senior, into the job, new weapons, harriet truman was more involved. who are the main players? there's a lot of players. i think that bob bush, scientist and huge figure. president of mit.

i can see him in the cover of magazine. we have not -- postwar but entering formally consciously along cold war with russia. set us back there. >> well, bush was one of the most famous and fascinating characters at the time. life or time said that he had shock of hair, very intense guy. he liked to carve pipes and give them to -- he gave a carve pipe to alan dolis, to the people he admired he would give a pipe. he was a tremendously powerful figure at mit and he was in charge of the adam bomb project in world war ii but also in charge to have biological warfare project and that's where it all began, in world war ii. so it just so happen that after the war was over, he stayed on in the government and he started

to, because he was deeply suspicious and unhappy about the russians, he decided that what was important to do is to ramp up the germ warfare program in the united states in order to triumph over the numerical superiority of the russian army with germs. and that was his -- his solution to the cold war, was to make russian plants sick and russian people sick. that was a bad idea. >> we can't beat them on the ground in human force, we have to have something else? >> that was a refrain that was repeated over and over by the secretaries of defense, by all the people in the pentagon. they were aware every minute of every day that if we try to fight the chinese armies and the russian armies and the east

german armies that we were going to lose and therefore we had to come up with a smarter solution, a new kind of weapon, because by 1949 the russians had developed the atopic bomb so there was parity there. what were we going to do? how would we win this war that seemed to be in the offing. it became worrisome when the korean war started. it was a war that was not called a war by harry truman but because there had been artificial line drawn across the country by korea by two functionaries meeting in the pentagon. the north became communist and the south became an ally of the

united states and therefore there was sort of polarization and it became -- and became involved in civil war in area. as soon as that happened as if it was an electric shock that went through washington and everything that had been plans, schemes, suddenly became specific and especially when the united states started losing, there was a feeling that, well, the russian tanks were better than the american tanks, for instance, and things like very concrete things started -- questions started to be asked and the main question was, what do we have -- what do we have in our arsenal that will win this apocalyptic war that's just around the corner. >> nick, there are two very specific questions that you ask in this search and one is, did

they actually put all these bugs and -- and chemical agents together? we knew they actually -- did they actually have serum or whatever it was going to be and the final smoking-gun question, did they ever use it? they have never -- they never quite deny that they wanted to find something and they were working on it, they were commissioning scientists to build it but they've always denied that they never used it, the chief of the government in north korea and also china eventually accused the united states of planting smallpox during the war. get to that fundamental question. did we or didn't we, did we have it and did we use it? >> well, unfortunately i think the answer -- the short answer is, yes. [laughter]

>> the chinese and the north koreans were very furious when they brought these charges. they sent a cable to the united nations. it wasn't something they just did casually one day and thought that was a nice thing to say. it was a very serious set of charges and what they said initially that in november of 1950 when the americans fled to the south of korea after a massive defeat, after the chinese counterattacked, that the americans had left behind diseases and then the americans said that's ridiculous and silly and, of course, we didn't do that. and then several months later a mysterious new disease appeared in north korea called korean hemorragic fever and exited in series of dots along the belt of korea, along the 38th parallel

which mystified the american epidemiologists so that i think actually happened. then there was a second massive propaganda battle between the communists and the anticommunists, the americans and the british and the french, and that battle hinged on whether the americans had flown over individual airplanes and dropped mysterious insect bombs, if you can believe it, on -- in the snow of the -- the very rural areas of china near the korean border. and that, i think, is -- has a slightly different answer and it hinges on the book's title, the book's title is baseless, the reason it's called baseless is because operation baseless was the name of top secret air force

program that aimed to perfect biological and chemical weapons at the earliest possible date and it was a project that sprang into motion on an emergency basis as the korean war got bigger and became more -- well, just everything got worse in korea. so project baseless was -- what was interesting about the word is that it has denial built into it because the state department was saying that this is a baseless accusation, these are baseless charges and the expectation was that these particular weapons, if they were used, one of their advantages -- and this was written about, one to have advantages of biological weapons is that it's very hard to determine whether these

things happened spontaneously because there are diseases or pandemic to a country or whether they happened because some other foreign airplane has dropped feathers doped with various diseases. >> let me just say -- >> they decided to -- yeah. >> i want to quote your man tom kennedy because didn't manage to put in podcast but we did on this book. >> right. >> the united states government, of course, denied they had planted this hemrragic fever no less than new york times wrote story, there's no evidence for this charge at all, but you spoke to an ex-marine tom kennedy who had been there, you talked to him in manhattan and he said that he had been told on, you know, must have been in

hospital that he had a new did called hemorragic fever carried by tick and there was no history of hemorragic fever in korea. this is in 2015, only 5 years ago. i, he said, one of those american service members exposed to the secret crime against humanity. that's pretty close to the horse's mouth. how do we weigh that? >> well, he's the guy who woke up with a fever one day in korea and he was medevec out and he said there's 3 hut, hut 1, hut 2 and hut 3. if you go to hut 3, you are

going to die, hut 2 you have a chance and he went to hut 3 and he survived and then discharged with a completely false diagnosis. hemorragic fever was something that spontaneously happened. he's trying his best to explain to himself something immense that happened to him as a young man in korea and it happened to a number of men and there were people who -- americans who died. the thing is that hemorragic fever is still a problem in korea and it was a problem that was studied by japanese germ experts during the second world war and purified and intensified by them and then the americans hired the same germ ware --

warfare experts and the fever appeared. there's a very strong case to be made that a small very evil program happened in -- somewhere around november of 1950 in which the americans decided to use japanese know how to infect people in north korea. i do think that's true and i think that one of the victims was tom kennedy. >> can i add a little bit of the japanese background which i happened to know because a wonderfully, marvelous writer, dear friend of open source and of all -- all good people, gene sullivan wrote a book about the tokyo war crimes, tokyo trials of war crimes that never really took place. we all know about the nuremberg trials of germans, matching

trials in tokyo which were -- we will block out in some face because we would have been called about the nuclear weapon we dropped on nagasaki and hiroshima. there's no question that the japanese had dropped all kinds of evil bugs on china before world war but the japanese, they were the world leaders in this technology and part of this story you're revealing or confirming is that the united states caught onto this and were using the japanese in some fashion in this whole project. have i got it right? this is a global monstrous story. >> and gene did a good job in telling the story, absolutely indispensable book and i'm sorry that she's gone and -- >> she would be incredible

witness in this covid moment. >> she's -- she was the wife of matthew who is also a major figure in this book. i quote both of them in the book because they are both so important, but what she -- what she chronicled was the fact -- was something that other people have talked about too but she did the best job of it that there was a desperate attempt to get as many of the japanese germ warfares and get them away from russians and into american whoever orbits and hide them from view and they decided that the war crime trials should take place and they had a huge germ japanese experts and they held their own trials and there's a

full transcript of the trials and it's really an appalling book because there's no question that everything that people are saying in that book is -- is absolutely, it's an absolute transcript of what people actually said and the japanese scientists said, i am so -- i so regret what i did and it's just an amazing book, actually, it's an amazing book, but what the result of it was that the russians were upset, worried, frightened of the united states' plans. the united states meanwhile had teams of experts interviewing all of the japanese savants of biological weaponry and figuring out how best to take what they had learned, they had done experiments on humans so there was it was actually priceless into their way of thinking and pulled those things back to

camp, germ warfare in the united states and see if the diseases could be further perfected and intensified so that we could then apply them in a hostile to the russians. that was the flow. >> quick emphasis and i want to go some place else. here we are, trump calling coronavirus the china, the china virus. china every once in a while humbles under it's breathe, well, maybe it's an american bioweapon, maybe it's all politics. we hear incredible depth in the history. what is possible in the manipulation of the coronavirus even now since you finished your book? >> well, i think -- the history of germ warfare in the united states is history of american scientists getting sick from their own weapons.

the lab accidents are just a constant. in this book there's national institute of health, there's a man who decided he will study cue fever and study it because it's dangerous disease and he will weponized and takes it and people die. this is a refrain in history of american laboratory science that diseases get out of laboratories. the first thing, if there's a murder in a couple, you want to ask did the husband do it and the first thing you always explain if there's exotic disease that breaks out in a certain place and you always want to look to see if there's a laboratory in the area. so i think -- i do not think that the chinese are involved in

some sort of evil plan to cook up a germ weapon, they are like the americans very concerned about getting a lucrative vaccine for various viruses and they -- and all of the american laboratories were doing the same kind of work, national institute of health was paying to do this kind of work, the fact is that it may be something that happened in a laboratory but the first thing you want to do is ask the people who are in charge of the laboratory to open their freezers and their notebooks and explain what happened. and that hasn't happened, so -- >> i want to digress because assaying in the outset, this is a historical inquiry but it's also as we -- there's a lot of

nick baker. would you read a paragraph and i bet you will find it. i think it's page 225, but you're talking about your method , your house, your dogs, your wife, your weather. there you are. why do you write these books? >> well, this is -- the book is so -- this chapter, the title to have chapter is april 15th, 2019 monday, each chapter is titled by the day of the week and i just had gotten wound up and i sort of half revealed my theory about what happened with this mysterious 700-volts that dropped from the sky and i ran up steam. every day i tried to write something and i would get exhausted and be done, so the

next day starts, the edges of old secrets are blurred and the middle is spongy and there are bits of recorded troops spread around in the secrets like pieces of ceramic. i've been thinking about japan's rice crop and then i go upstairs, come back downstairs and then i make a note. >> you do some of your best work on the staircase, nick. [laughter] >> that's so nice of you, chris. upstairs, i thought, what do i really want from a book. i want truth in every paragraph, i want surprises, i want a sense that everything is not hopeless, that we can do better. i want a sense that life is a complicated mixture of emotions and inconsistencies, life is a sandwich. i want to include or simulate

the pleasure of eating a sandwich. [laughter] >> and then i finally say and i have to get to this and the dogs are so important to me, when i woke up, whenever it was, hours ago now i guess, i reached out with my hand and found out that cedric had screwed it up that he was elongated sleep between emma and me. i held his paw for a while and felt the braille of joy of his paw pads. [laughter] >> nick, this is so wonderful. i have to acknowledge that the nasty critics out there that you write that sort of stuff in the book. to me it's where you grab all of us at 4:00 o'clock in the morning, puzzled, just off beat, off message, really concerned.

there's so much that we know and much more that we haven't the foggiest way to get around or heads around, mysteries, political mysteries. is trump going to rebound in november? i love it. .. the more the better. i credible science of mass killing and destruction. at the same time like a lot of us you're kind of madly in love with this country. an amazingly fun, interesting, lively, changeable, interesting, delightful, fun. i mean, read one of those passages where you talk about

the context of all this craziness. >> well, i thank you for asking me to do that and i would have to find one. i just -- >> i could give suggest -- >> while you find a page number i just want to say issue guess the thing that excited me, the idea that some people, there is the bad review out there and it's very painful. i'm sorry it's there but it is there. it's that i'm trying to do something a little bit new here for gosh sakes, trying to say there are plenty of novels that look at the past and then have the person who is researching the past eating a peanut butter sandwich and i've done that and like doing that, but this is trying to chronicle an actual life with all of it minor trivial ups and downs, as it is mapping itself on to the quest

to find out momentous world historical events from from 70 s ago, and the two timelines kind of blur and merge, and separate and come back into focus again, and that was, i thought, the contribution that the book was making, was to add a little bit of genuine truth, real, real felt reality and moods to the historical quest. historians are not robots. i'm not a professional historian but i have written a couple of books of history and i happen to know there are times when you feel you're on top of it you feel you're the world residents expert on some tiny things and sometimes you feel completely out of your depth and also when there's so many facts swarming in your mind you cannot possibly

find your way through them, and those moods, all those moodded of confusion and grief and of frustration when secret are withheld are all part of the process. i think we have to have that kind of sound track of the actual historians' voice as well as the larger band of the account of what happened. >> well, let -- job page number. >> well said. 331 and 332, you go from the sort of nightmare to the dreamscape. starting with jfk and then comes kennedy. we're in vietnam. he's like carry on to page 332. >> okay. well, right if was talking because kennedy and henry kissinger and things we know about a little bit. sometimes -- i work myself up

into these -- >> i love the paragraph before that and then comes kennedy. >> and then comes kennedy approves defoilation and food deniable operation month guisse, appointing henry cabot throng be ambassador to vietnam. ambassador lodge is fill with a murderous pet runs in saigon and writes to dean rusk and robert mcnamara. it would help there if were some screens -- extremes forgot north vietnam they were hit. must be different ways to make some screen. the mentioned rockets deployed on the pretext they were returning fire. one method is redacted. lodge uses the word "scream" four times in one telegram. then the gulf of tonkin incident the rolling thunderment the war is in a new phase thanks to the

president's great decisions lodge wrote to clark clifford, delighted by the bombing. more thunder, endless thunder, anything that flies on anything that moves says kissinger relaying nixon's orders. then comes aspace space break. sometime its don't believe in the history of the united states. when i say that i'm not saying as a general rule every day of my life, every hour of every day, but i don't believe that this place deserves to have any sort of moral standing in the world as a country. it has been the source of incalculable disruption. understand that americans individually have done good things, paintings, sitcoms, songs, cars, toasters, locomotives, buildings, bridgesle billboards, sunglasses, toneairey, corn maizes, no-hitter, speeches, ad

campaigns. you tube videos. the new yorker of the cath written white and ep white era is a great american achievement no question. i always go back to the mid-century new yorker and there's john singer sargent. operation sphynx, this home-grown american plan to kill 5 million human beings in the space of weeks, almost all of them. civilians in too awful to think about. you have to read the book to see what operation sphinx was. >> thank you. thank you for no-hitters on the list. what could be more beautiful. >> i don't even fully understand baseball but when you get into that zone and you're far interest a game and the sounds of the baseball hitting the mitt is just so -- there's so much conviction there, so american. >> so, how do we reconcile these

things in really, we don't. we have had so many good conversations over the years and a lot of them had this -- it's not simple mined but very appreciative, very grateful. was listening to one in which you talk but the character paul charter, who has a lot of things in common with you but you talked about bursts and what the hell is wrong with kipling's burst and you lead to point, is there anything more glory you even in poetry, than the american songs of the mid-century, and was there ever in our real lifetimes a more moving poet than lawrence hart. larry hart as you know him. wrote songs with richard rodgers, and also hoagy car michael who was speaking of his

song which you wrote the music to sky lark. perfect poem. or george gershwin. ira gershwin, george's lyricist, but some day he'll come along, the man i love. unbelievably lovely poetry. the boy makes baker in all of white house not the least simple minded but conflicted shall we say. i want to hear more about you. let's get more about nick baker. >> well, i think the reason that sometimes i want to write a book -- first of all, yes, to all that you're saying about song lyrics and poetry and the american inventiveness and the the comedic playfulness in

writing, hip-hop, a sleight of mouth that is happening, that's very characteristic of this real american originality, inventiveness, of rhyme and metrical sophistication and all. it continues. so it's not as if we are locking back -- >> right, right, good point. >> it's all happening. we're in the middle of it. >> rap, there's no end to the -- there's a dance of words in good rap. >> but as far as what i like to do, i of course want to write about happy people and i want to write books that are evidence for why places is worth living and good, but there are these kind of chasms that open up in history and they're unpleasant

and unfortunate and not just unfortunate, they're terrifying, and one of them is world war ii, and then the cold war that immediately followed it, and i just sometimes think that i -- it's my job to write but those things and try to figure out a way to heal over them or to make them -- by understanding them, make them less distracting so i can get back to writing about why straws float or whatever little tiny things that are actually part of the delicate texture of ongoing existence, which is what i really have always been drawn to and what i -- this gossamer fabric of lived life. that's what is really important. but sometimes there's a crack,

fissure that opens in frond of you and it's like a dash movie. what is it -- it's like a disaster movie. a piece of history that is so awful you cannot ignore it. so i sometimes write a book about that in order to get past that thing make a bridge beyond it. and i -- >> i remind people listening and watching that you're invited to submit your own questions questd for nick baker to answer. one. >> submit the answer, took that would be very helpful. >> you get royalties for that, too. dane has a question. two questions. what part of you, nick baker you think allows you to write books that slow down time and action, so extremely as in the mezzanine or a back of matches and now the serious question, your

protagonist in the anthologist, paul charter, sometimes podcaster, too, he likes to sing a song, anytime the barn, i'm in the barn, i'm in the barn, in the afternoon. i've been -- it's been bothering me for years. what is the tune? how does the song go? thank you. >> that is a friendly question. i'm in the barn, i'm in the barn, i'm in the barn in the afternoon. that's the way it was, in the barn. that's the answer to the second question. the first question, why -- how do you write book that slow down time. i think that everybody who is writing a become is trying to slow down time. anytime you take something and lift it up into the foyers 0 your own attention and think about it and turn it around, it's a momentary parenthesis

that's been built around that object or that social moment, whatever it is, that transaction. and that is -- so it is a slowing down of time, sentence has these wonderful little breath marks, semi colons, come mas, dashes in them, and all of those kind of machinery of churching and huffing and puffing are all basically ways of taking your overly eager leaping mind and putting it on a track and saying, just think your way along this with me now, slowly. and it's almost inevitable, if you write a sequence of words that other people have to follow, they are slowed down because we actually are very good at parallel processing and doing -- so i think i'm just

doing what everybody wants to do, but i -- it feels so good that i maybe do it a little explore i also dispense with the other stuff somewhat. i sometimes get rid of the larger spine of a plot and just leave the slowed down worm trails of the thoughts i've had. >> yeah. you're teaching us something here, nick. who taught you? you credited -- but who does that -- it's not slowing down. it's thinking actually how we think and how distractable and how multilevel our part really is. >> i think it was -- well, the person who first did it for me was -- i took -- i auditedded a class in high school and one of the stories that was in the text book in the class was a nabokoh

story and it had -- heroics don't know -- practically every paragraph had this moment where the paragraph would -- you'd be going along at a normal rate of speed and then -- and it's just as if you're in this described world that is -- it's a surrealized normalcy is what it is, and it was very exciting, and i thought this is -- this guy is doing something that none of the science fiction writers, none of the suspense writers was able to do. so i -- so he took me off, and -- [loss of audio] -- >> he has faults. he was an arrogant person and didn't like does testify ski and stuff like that but he was just

his most vulnerable self is when he would just be writing about a rainstorm reaching a certain tree or he wrote -- well, there were people who followed from him. think updike learned from him. he learned a lot from prust. prust learned from george el mott. a long tradition but the 20th 20th century, one of the beautiful things about the 20th century it's the center of observation and improvization situation but two things -- it seems mysteriously to have happened most juicily in the united states. >> interesting. other questions. robert, i've read that the u.s. bombed virtually every city and town in knocker to the sense

there was nothing left to bomb. why bit a biological weapon. >> the becoming campaign, very good win. the bombing campaign was unsuccessful even though every single village and city was burn. not just bombed but burned. an attempt to burn an entire country. it did not succeed because the north koreans escaped by living in caves so they'd spent years in caves. and the idea was the checkpoints were assisting them and we didn't want that. the final effort was to frighten the chinese and make them good away by dropping these very traditional looking bombs that were actually leaflet bombs fill with insects and the chinese made very detailed accounts of

all these different insects. my suspension is that actually happened but that the chinese charged those insects were droned -- doped with diseases was falsified and it was what the americans called a deception operation, and it was baseless. a deniable effort. so they wanted to discourage, terrify, cause unhappiness in the area of china that was right on the border of korea. that's where these events supposedly happened, and that's i think what did happen. >> another question and a message from steve saluting your work, he wrote a remarkable book on fort deitrick. the general assumption is -- not making it up -- under douglas

macarthur's purview the japanese know-how in germ warfare was transferred to maryland where mk-ultra and other horrors developed and described in the book [inaudible] -- but and the name of steve's book is "fastening chief" or something. >> another level out history. >> i want to say something but steve kinzer. could i not possibly have written this book. this man is a great explainer, and it is impossible to describe how difficult it is to deal with something as complicated as the cold war and make it clear, and this is what steven kinzer has done in a whole bunch of books. >> amen. >> one after another.

>> all the -- >> the brothers -- so one book after another, he is a master quoter. that's another talent i think people don't understand how important it is. there's an infinitude of things you can quote, you can make 0-point but if you choose the right quote the paragraph sits, the mind is both moved along but comforted that some learning has happened, and he does that. >> dale evans, mass roy rogers maybe, why is henry kissinger still alive? maybe we can -- we don't need to answer that. ann asks, or says, i'm so glad you mentioned floating straws. plastic straws. i've been thinking about the paper straw and soda in a can,

and the pizza passage ins me anymore. how do you like the new breed of paper straws? >> oh, gosh. it's funny about trying to slow time down, which i tried to do in the mezzanine footnotes and a footnote about the floating straws. so some straws float, some straw does not float. has to do whether they're plastic or paper. i thought i really nailed this one. like the hot air blower in restrooms. really, that's it? there's nothing more to be said about this. them teen marches on, and -- time marches on and suddenly there's political element and what die think but the floating straws of today? or -- is basically very, very

little experience with them. >> don't know too much but them. >> i don't know very much about the current straws. i think i'm lost in '80s straw time. but i obviously get to do some serious research. it's hard to go to a restaurant and -- straws are completely unnecessary but they're joyful. they're a miracle. as kid i loved the idea you could simply levitate your liquid -- whatever liquid you were drinking right to your mouth as if it's an elevator. i loved that. >> i have a question and maybe you're answering it as we go when you look at this really fascinating range of books you have written, and some of them -- some are -- all of them are funny. reflexive. and hard to account for. what is the pattern you see in the range from your soft porn to

deep history and deeply thoughtful human history, to your, shall we say -- i don't want to say trivia but your microscopic examination of small things? who is this guy nicholson baker who would have been a bass afternoonist if hey had 1% more talent. >> a -- 40% more talent. >> there's i could say that one thing that i do think is important is to write every day, and if you write every day, every day is especially if you ask yourself what is the best moment of the day, new things are always arising but i guess the theme, if i was going to be grand, is rescue. i like to russian everyday life

from kind of neglect of its everydayness. i like to rescue the idea there's nothing more completely overtalked but than sex and say maybe there's nor be said about sex, or that this book is the rescue in this book is there were two very nice historians from toronto that wrote a book about this and the book was panned, and they so were such wounded men because of this process and i thought they had done a really -- written a really good and useful book. part of what motivated me to write this book was to rescue them. and one of them died before i finished the book, and while i was writing the book the other one died. but always i want to bring something out, bring some

aspect, some often -- just some wayside wild flower of noticed life, and i want to say, that's -- let's put a frame around that and talk about that for a moment, and -- >> all part of making a tasty sandwich. >> you know what i found with sandwiches and only discovered this in the last couple of years, anything, you can make a sandwich out of anything. i mean, because all you need is the crunch, the mixture of cold and warm, and just a few different kind of incompatable layers and you have the sandwich joy. you don't need meat; my sandwiches don't have meat anymore. >> sprouts. >> you need sprouts sprouts andd something grossy. i've made o'tate to sandwiches,

today i hat two -- ir'll just lay it out -- two spin nash sandwiches, made spin nash, put it in a bun, and take bite and it's a complete experience. >> deanna has a serious question and it's part of the book. can you please speak of how the freedom of information act played into your process using a process allegedly to temperatures temporaries -- transparency but heinous -- you say everything older than 70 years old should be released, unmarked, unquestioned, unasked, just put it out there? >> this word redaction just -- just say and i gibb to shiver. i can't stand it. it's a terrible thing. there should be -- i actually

more radical view which is all documents older than 50 years ought to be completely and totally declassified with no redactions because they have entered the world of history and they're no longer state secrets and they're historical bits of richness we can think about and learn -- if they're mistakes we can learn from those mistakes. >> why didn't the foia get its job done? >> it was a great law and is a good law. it's a very good law and took a long time to get it passed, ten years i think. lyndon johnson signed it into law, and at almost immediately it began to dislodge all kind secrets. secrets began exploding out of agencies like the air force and the central intelligence agency and it was all the way through the late 70s there was a tremendous outpouring of knowledge about what had happened in the cold war, and

then during the reagan ear -- era, it contracted and rules changed. think we're living in a time in which the -- several important switches in the bank of switches of the freedom of information act, circuit breakers have been shut off and we have to go back and actually enforce the law also it is on the book, flip all the circuit breakers on and let's learn what is there. why would i -- i guess the fundamental frustration of this book is that it's a 400 page book and all the way -- all the time i was writing it for eight, ten years, i was waiting for a set of documents to be released, and -- >> maybe it has to be done -- gary hart was on our program talking about he was -- he and walter mondale were the last two survivors of the church committee, but they unearthed a

lot of evil stuff, assassinations, and it's got to be put out. but at the very moment we're in, president trump likes to say, i have power that nobody knows about. you don't know about. i can do -- after declaring a national emergency and gary hart said we better find out and talk about it. what are those secret files -- secret powers? i want to credit your friend and mine, alexander who told me you want to sea a real writer go get mezzanine by a guy named nicholson baker and i did and he was entirely write. i rejoice and having read i think all of your books and getting to know you, ten more of these interviews and we'll get to know each other. >> well, i want to say i've learned a huge amount from you

and every time we talk i feel i'm getting closer to understanding myself and the out world. so thank you. i want to say one tiny victories, here is a redacted document that i debt with for ten years, right? it's a very important document from 1949 that is a plan of how to deceive somebody but all blacked out what is being deceived. here's the document that mysteriously appeared in the mail the very same document without a single redaction two weeks before the book went to press. the national archives somehow got the pentagon to reres this thing it and is the beginning of the biological weapons arms race between the americans and the soviet union because it says the americans are going to deceive the soviet union into thinking the americans have come watch super toxic germ weapon, and

once they do that then the russians will waste their efforts trying to built the same weapon. they did waste their efforts. in fact they did build the weapon and we had a huge mess of an arms race because of this plan from 1949. so, you write a whole book and there's all these frustrations and documents that aren't released and then mysteriously because the book exists, one crucial document gets pried out at the end. and it's all worth it. >> wow, that's news. that's important. >> i think is it important, i'm going post it on twitter it's important you have 0 post it on twitter. >> nick baker, thank you, i think we ought to say thank you to the harvard book store and welcome our hostess back to say good night. >> thank you so much, chris,

thank you. >> always a joy. >> thank you both so much. truly lovely. so thank you both. thanks all of you out for spending your evening with us. learn more but this important book and purchase -- at the link in our chat. or our harvard.com once this closes. and on behalf of harvard book store in cambridge, mass, thank you both and have a good night, keep reading and please, everybody, be well. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you so much, everybody, take care. >> grabee he was in the occupy wall street movement and author of the book "bullshit jobs." thomas rabb, chief executive or

the parent company of penguin random house expressed his interest in acquiring seem and schuster. it is the third largest publisher in the u.s., trailing only random house and harper collins, in another news, pan america, nonprofit literary organization that champions free expression of writerred around the world named aktar as its new president. the succeeds jennifer eagan who has led the organization for the past two years. also in the news, npd become scan report that print book sales were up just over 7% for the week ending august 29th. adult nonfiction sales continued gains up 4% leads by jon meacham busy book titled his truth is matching on "but a the late john lewis. the estate of tr eliot has

donated to keep the bronte. they lost 4,500,000 pounds due to the coronavirus pandemic. book tv will bring you news. you can watch archived programs at any time on booktv.org. >> booktv on c-span2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. coming up this weekend, tonight at 8:40 p.m. eastern, carter page, former policy adviser for president trump's 2016 presidential campaign, on his book "abuse and power. how an innocent american was framed in an attempted coup against the president. "then sunday, at 7:40 p.m. eastern, cnn worldwide chief media correspondent, bryan still at the with his book," hoax, donald trump, fox news and the dangerous distortion of truth

"and at 9:00 p.m. sarah huckabee sanders, on her book, i speaking for myself, faith, freedom, and the fight for our lives inside the trump white house interviewed by bloomberg news white house reporter jennifer jacobs. watch booktv on c-span2 this weekend. >> welcome to its distinguished forum dwight d. eisenhower, president of the united states of america. [applause] this happy occasion