openness that women could get through what had been the biggest barrier. as a war correspondent you were not allowed on the field. >> journalist elizabeth becker sunday night on c-span's q and a, you can listen as a podcast where you catch your podcasts. .. discusses issues of race and identity as an asian american and america. in our weekly author interview program "after words" the washington post job work reports on america's effort to destroy chemical weapons in syria during its civil war. you can find full schedule information online about tv .org, or consult your program

guide. i would kick up the weekend with a look at the consequences of the abandonment of farm town in the united states. with journalist grace olson. >> we are very, very happy to welcome grace olmsted talk about her new book here called uprooted. it is coming out in a couple of weeks, you can preorder from amazon. so if you like what you hear you should run right out and do it is really an amazing book. grace is written for a number of publications including the book bend a few years ago, and has focused a lot on the themes reflected in this book. and has also a remarkable and wonderful newsletter too old to know exactly culturally wonderful content that she has been circulating around.

today were going to speak a lot about this book as well as other related questions, which i think comes up with the core issue of sort of the american character combined with human natural nature which is laid down roots, to know what tradition is to be attached to your place. in a country that sometimes does not care about that so much. and so how those two things interact. into how she comes where she is. we are going to let grace tell us a little bit about this book. if you have any comments or questions, you can put in the chat box i will read out once the initial presentation in a couple of other might have to get us started. we'll go through anybody's

questions they put in the chat pad at the very, very end i'll end a few minutes early to tell us a little something about the russell kirk center. so grace if i could lead it off with you, tell us where is bus book come from what kept you going as you read it, what themes or topics should we be looking at and looking for as we read through it? >> thank you so much. it is an honor to get to be with you all, to talk to you about this book. i hope that if you read it you will enjoy in callaway with some of the themes and ideas that mattered so much as i was putting it together. "uprooted" is really a book about and inspired by gratitude. it is a book written for my forebears, and particular for like my great-grandfather we

finally called grandpa dad. he was in his 90s when i was a child. some of my fondest childhood memories are the times i spent with him to his story, but shaw according to irs form helping play his favorite old gospel hymns on the piano or violin at family gatherings produce in his 90s but his mind is incredibly sharp. he loved to tell us stories about his life, his memories of forming projectors the silent movies he watch as a boy as the old theater. grandpa dad lived and died in the same community he was born. he spent all 90 plus years of his life caring for the same acreage on the outside of town going to the same church. although i in most of the people in my times can't wait

to get out a small world towns, i find it remarkable grandpa dad stayed and blessed his people and his book frequenting local businesses, teaching sunday school, grandpa dad also thought to bless his community with the cropsey group. i've often called down crop in accordance with proverbs three which commands the reader to honor the lord with a substance in the first of all vain increase. grandpa-dad grew sweet corn just to give it away. he planted it specifically to bless his neighbors, family members, and members of the local church. after he had harvested it, he would bring it to my grandparents house and he would shock, cook, freeze the corn altogether. it was a crappy group to nourish and bless us. that's when i was in college.

found it away to get away from my desk and refresh my mind. one october day in the fall of my junior year i think, i was jogging along the path and i remember suddenly catching the smell of wood smoke on the air. i remember freezing in my track because all the sudden i remembered grandpa-dad but in some ways feels more perfect as i felt grandpa-dad. in that moment i could feel his presence as if you were standing next to me. i remember his old shirt, his laughter, his country voice, his callous warmed hands in his stooped back. and i could hear him sing my name the way he used to do. it's hard but which explain even now. in the moment it almost felt as if i had been visited by a ghost a present never seen but intensely felt. i've often wondered whether russell kirk the master of this stories might have convinced me i did indeed feel

the presence of a ghost. but regardless i didn't feel up my grandpa was a joy and love in that moment. as i thought about him that day i realized everything i am and have achieved is because of his labor and rootedness. his determination paid future generations of his family sick at the foot of that small farm community. he began to ask myself that day i might know something to the pass place because of grandpa-dad's life and. to "uprooted" came to be it is the result of the years of study and interviews and reading that followed that job, the book has some personal notes i considered the real nostalgia and connecting us to the past. i ask whether our world might be haunted by what wendell berry identifies as the absence of presidencies in the

presence of absences, the book begins and ends in the town graveyard with the question of what we owe to the past and where we will be very. but the because these concepts of indebtedness and rootedness in the soil of my great-grandfather's farm town, tries to trace some of the legacies of both blessing and brokenness and the path. the larger culture political pressures stick in place our society has its long history of cultivating home improvement. once called the united states to populations has populated

torn apart and rebuilt repeatedly by these two groups in various sizes. even while this is played and absolutely vital part of our history, it often feels as if they've always held her cultural megaphones, stickers are those who settle down and invest, when comes to expect extract value and then to leave it behind. another way to understand the conflict perhaps is to populations as consumers and stewards aren't larger culture as pope francis has put it for those who seek to be routed to cultivate fullness in place for present and future generations. wallace believed that in the west the lens that both he and i grew up in and places are exceptions rather than the rule. the one thing he explained all

western places are new for another establish them him to pillage our work for pilcher's rather than to settle for money. this becomes obvious when you come at the boom and bust cycles in places like idaho were many aspects of the natural landscape gemstone timber soil water silver and gold just to name a few has been severely decimated by the cycle throughout the decade and century. or as long as i don't has been settled it seems people have just come and gone and things have gotten hard in the community demand more love than we are able to give. it seems at this point the cycles of conquest and depletion have gone on for so long that they often seem normal and just accepted at this point. patrick argues in his book why liberalism fails that liberalism itself is largely

responsible for this sort of consumptive destruction. as well as for the individualism and routes which incentivize their spread. he writes in his book, gratitude to the past and obligation to the future i replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification. culture rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past become synonymous with crudeness and distraction, all oriented towards promoting consumption, appetite and attachment. in our culture it seems like successes track to leave a place behind the american dream is in essence about economic and class transient the ability to move from poverty to wealth even teachers often log mobility and progression instead in any mentality.

separation and departure are inherent to triumph. usually the most transient boomers of us all. while the silica built their allegiance to a community or town but rather achieved in isolation by individuals. we grow wealth most often through ruthlessness through them through loyalty and prosperity pendency place we abandon it if we are able too. while the corporate successors of her own world i think are generally jetting from coast-to-coast or country to country, christopher lasch wrote it is important for us to understand that modern man is fully unconscious we find it difficult to find a community that reaches into both the past and the future and is constituted by an awareness of intergenerational obligation. but if there is not a better definition of what it means to be a conservative, i think

that might be what it is. sadly he wrote that most ambitious people understand that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead. rootedness and its resulting farms such as the health soils plants and animals are often undergirded but rooted mutually giving community by people and associations who care about permanence, about was called the democracy of the dead and unborn that make up our past, present, and future and a place. in the middle ages next to his book quest for community comic town is more than a simple place of residence and occupation. it was itself a close association. and its members were bound to live up to its articles and customs.

it's kept live sacred obligations of mutual aid, religious faith, and political responsibility. argues in her own society and time capitalism has substituted quantity for quality, profits for function, bigness for smallness and transformed intense communities of purpose into the sprawling relationship of the marketplace. i think america's farmhands by nature of their enforced rootedness, held onto the virtues of medieval village longer than most. but they dwindled us that disappeared in more recent decades. especially probably since the 19 '80s farm crisis. in the urging of farmers to get big or get out. even during world war ii and after farmers have been told that international trade should take precedent over the cultivation of local markets. farming was the log to be understood as a primarily regional enterprise meant to

feed one's neighbors but rather as a global and heavily political enterprise. we have created political and economic system that judges most rural communities not by how well they serve their own inhabitants or by the culture and the people they keep in place but by their profit and utility. when i was working on my journalism fellowship back in the day, which was about the struggles of family farming and farm town i remembered i had to sell a lot of people in d.c. on the idea explaining why farms mattered for national security or global traders alike. it was weird to find people who believed in the world of rural america or its farmers for their own thing, that is often how it felt. co-author of the book hollowing out the middle about rural american brain drain purge she also tell me she ran into this problem will she was working on her book. she remembers her publisher asking her so what if rural

america died? places like new york city i think in a lot of major cities may be so iconic and important they are viewed as intrinsically valuable. many rural towns are considered interchangeable and expendable. valuable to offer their own sakes but for resources it can be exported to other places by corporation. but many rural or small towns or lack thereof is contingent on what other spaces think of them come and take from or offer them. this is something wendell berry and economist have both referred to as the economic colonization of rural america. rural people and cultures are exploited not to benefit rural people, but to increase the wealth of corporate investors according. he sees industrial agriculture is the primary means of rural america's colonization because it is extracted and multiplies

the profit over long-term health. as he built it fear, larger, more specialized farms and had decreased both local markets and locally purchased input you can see that many rural communities seem to have lost their purpose. small farm towns are increasingly seen as middle of nowhere so to speak. practically nonexistent in the eyes of the larger world. but i hope that my book will help shine a light on the degree to which we have undervalued the small connected farm villages. the cultivate in their lifetime were nourishing and the virtues they fostered matter deeply for communal health. small farmers built a culture in a shared set of beliefs, values or practices that emphasize stewardship, volunteerism and responsibility. the community worked hard to build job opportunities for the kids who grew up there and did their best to help with

the soil. when a community is working think it will be neighborly and multigenerational. it will be made up of farmers who are training the next generation, whether sons and daughters are completely unrelated who just want to get a start on the land. a farming community is a membership, a village that pervert unchecked preserves culture. it remembers the path forward for membership which conservation can be linked to innovation in which we preserve and protect even as we continue to create. robert harris was returned century botanists studied sustainable agriculture in india. he suggested soil regenerates through this lifecycle of death, decay, and regrowth. to cultivate healthy suggested we must be investing as much or more in the earth as we take from it. as we move to deplete resources of future generations pay the price. my own ancestors were not rich

with a first arrived in idaho, along with some other relatives from kansas who had what was called the idaho fever. my great, great great grandfather walter traveled to idaho around the turn-of-the-century. he began developing a 40-acre farm outside new climates which is just a few miles west of emmett. the hardships of hauling feed, travel, clearing the land and building or out a lot of members of the family and they became discouraged. everyone moved back to the heart lead except for walter and liana might great, great great grandparents who decided to stay. sing a place was not easy, but they are proud of what they had built. when the great depression rolls around they opened up their home and born to families who needed shelter and offered hospitality to them for they did not have a lot but they had enough to share come to serve others in their community when they are called upon to do so. i think that mike grandpa dead

saw the importance of rootedness in community, service from his grandparents just as i learned it from him. there is a chain of membership of belonging that they handed down along with the virtues that kept that strong. not everything of course planted in the soil during my great grandpa rhodes time was good, farmers can and do abuse the land inhabitants sorting natural resources and those around impaired many forms of industrial agriculture in our dad think has consumed, annals soil and water to desire for larger profit. in the soil of emmett there often still trayce of arsenic and other chemicals that were once sprayed in old orchards in the soil. chemicals from past generations that continue to poison present ground. but there are farmers living in emmett currently her working in their lifetime to restore that depleted and broken soil into so health and wholeness in life there

instead. in my book i asked the reader and myself, whether we also had to think of our lives as nourishing or deplete or own home soil paired with our rootedness can re- center for future generations or whether our consumerism and transients might spoil a gem poison groundwater after we are gone. those who grip in the form soil that would have resulted unhealthy nourishment for the next generation. in this matters because the price of mobility on the part of america upper classes and educate classes is generally paid by those who do not either have the money, the opportunity, or the desire to believe. people left behind an agent rural town often see few opportunities for their future they lacked both social and economic security. those in place may fight the

assumption they weren't enough or are not enough to be something more with their lives. but i believe the farm community can and should nurture goodness in the life of its inhabitants. i think emmett specifically is a testament of many past and present community members. kenny and i replaces survived hardship has beautiful but margin troubled in various places. i need to be loved for its own sake. our communities seem to be loved not for anything they might do for stretches of the rubber for what they can do for their own community members. i believe this is the only way we can be and to fight up the exploitation and the abuse that often characterize our rural homeland. and it is the only way we can begin to build places or drug newcomers and the children of the land in place by valuing places in local locations, disarming evil forebears did. but keeping that local vocation paramount people will

stay and try to heal broken ground will try to restore future generations. twenty think is perhaps less acknowledged is a fact that we need to stick for own sake as well that's good for us to be rooted in healthy soil we crave this deep embeddedness and a place in a community. the least recognized need of the human soul. by virtue of his real active and natural participation in certain particular pope francis and his speech he gave and to thousand 18 noted that there is no worst form of

alienation than to fill up rooted belonging to no one. linda be fruitful in its people bear fruit and give birth to the future, only to the extent that it can foster a sense of belonging among its members, create bonds of integration between generations and different communities, and avoid and lead to on the berries long argued as embodied humans we cannot view ourselves apart from placer community but even while obvious a distinction can be made between our body and other bodies in our body in the world, it's also true these thing that in his words appear to be disappearing are nevertheless caught in a network of mutual dependence it influence it is the substantiation of their unity. it is such a beautiful thought. body, soul, community and world are all susceptible to each other's and can conductors of each other.

our health is inseparable from the health of our places. but the word of being held back to these communities will be, as wendell berry said his will require several generations. we need to reestablish complex local cultures, re- strengthen our sense of communal memories and reanimate traditions of care. could also require some soul-searching on the part of both conservatives and progressives over the social, political, economic atmosphere we have created in our country. how does often make it difficult to live a rooted life. for instance in conservator should grapple with the argument that capitalism is especially prone to fostering the vision of the thomas individual. he wrote that capitalism's great impersonal systems sees humans as individual units of energy and production rather than as members of a society.

all it does means he built a lot of wealth of the course of our history, it also means they ignore deeper spiritual and communal needs and broken down the social pathway that so often supports communal health. and progressives for their part must reckon with the fact that individualism and self actualization are not enough to foster happiness in the world on their own. the federal government is not enough on its own to the citizens, humans create membership within the locality's and associations. rather than building a cultural political environment that would foster the sense of belonging liberalism has historically done the opposite. i think we could do a lot in rural america by not just investing in individuals, by for instance giving subsidies to individual farmers and clear farming families, but also by looking to nourish groups and networks that support them. that could evolve preserving

and protecting farmland via agricultural easements, providing lands that helped pass land down from one generation to the next pretty vitalizing struggling downtowns, and countless other measures that are also connecting members of the local community and enabling them to help and support each other. i think it could also happen by investing our capitol and stewardship and long-term care. rather than in temporary profits. for instance an effort on the usda are private actors to invest the majority of its funds in regenerative programs rather than cash crop subsidies. efforts like this would make a massive statement about her priorities as a country, whether we want short-term profit or long-term fidelity. it would also require people to stay in place and cultivate something for the long haul. we also have a simple yet incredibly difficult work ahead of us. we need to reanimate people's love of place and of sticking we need to make rootedness

great again into this more young people that it is in fact the good things to live in a quiet provincial place until levitt well. this is in many ways the work wendell berry has done his entire life during his essays, novels, and poems. his example suggests to me that it is perhaps first and foremost a work of poetry and art. drawing the souls of men and women toward homecoming by animating their imagination and their love. but i think the examples can also play big part in this as grandpa-dad story made clear. if not for his example of devotion to place, i would not have written this book. and so i think each of us if we can choose to serve as an inspiration to love place well into live. in my mind returning comber speaking of the importance of rootedness should not be about nostalgia. there is a place for nostalgia, and it can be a good instinct. i think in some ways it can

also form as a distraction for the actual real we should be -- loving a place well means loving it for what it is with all that's broken it and advices and seeking to address those things rather to ignore them. anything less is idolization, not love. and i feel that we just create a blindness among home comers that would prevent them from truly serving or loving their landscape well. as for me and my own life, i do not know yet winter weather i will return to idaho. i hope to someday, if job and life circumstances allow. i'm also committed to living like make great granddad is a transplant and display the same stewardship in love in virginia for as long as i am here. and help that is a helpful message to all this people who perhaps could not return home or don't have a home to return to. not all of us are called for homecomings, by think all of

us can try to live a more rooted life. >> host: thank you, thank you that was wonderful. i do it to catch up on a couple of things you had said, which as an example going back home. at what point in time people like the writer, kevin williamson wrote a relatively famous article that basically assumed, and you tell me if you agree, the free market model. that is what happens. if it's in your town you should just get up and leave it. not that the market is a human design system for certain purposes, certain common good depending upon what ideal you would too have it just happens it destroys your town and then some like bill coffman, is one of my favorites. he spent a large part of his life out of his hometown that he grew up in an upstate new

york. he decided no, i'm going back. because what was in that town is just as rich and has just as many moving and important stories that maybe i could write about or i could explain to my children for another generation. i don't care what the free market model is suppose a child going back. until we have one on each side of that story. your question about what with the governmental institutions teach reminded me of an island that i go to sometimes in the summer off the coast of maine. and at one point they had a high school principal command, that basically said you all need to leave the silence, high school graduates. you should go find another job somewhere. and their families were like, we are lobster people we should not be paying you to teach them to leave us. if people ask you as you said the friend might explain to me

once, sometimes called a vocation. if you feel like you need to be a medical doctor of a certain kind that can only be done in certain cities, through sears skills your divine gift has been given you have to go. that is one thing. but just to give them a lesson that you don't belong here because look at this place, it's too small or whatever, that is nods. that is a lesson that someone can change and say no. we are going to teach you how to survive and maintain this community. and i didn't read in your book, there is a governmental driver in addition to the corporate market. i think they worked together in this way, to say that we want you away from your community. and part of the reason is we can then have more control of you. we can turn you into a consumer to the point you were

making before, sure you can join some sort of community in her big town, that may be political and only has to agree with you at everything. you cannot go to a place it's less virtuous than you think it is or has to be love that's good and bad see stay with us for we all agree on the same thing. do you think those obstacles you say it might take some time to do this or something are those the kind of messages that conservatives or progressives who are in our way about small communities and they should be, but those are things that still have to be surmounted? >> absolutely. it is interesting as an rural writer from kansas is written a memoir about heart labs in her own experience as someone who grew up on a farm in kansas and has stayed in

kansas as a native of that place. but one thing she argues is that we also often find value the value of living in a place only by economic profit. and so of course by that measure it is vastly the small town behind if you are not going to be able to proceed up the ladder to greater economic success. or perhaps even within whatever realm of your profession your end if you're not able to gather greater prestige as you work on your writing career, that could also be an argument. but she said what are we measuring wealth and value by? are we able to included the ability to look up at the knights guy and see the stars the ability to live in cloaks proximity to one's family the ability to live in the land and to love it well. solace of the forms of either that just are not getting taken into account. and perhaps they are not taken into account because you cannot not measure them very

well generally. quantitative rather than qualitative measures. i think in terms of the way that our government often times just impacted these communities, one thing i talk about a lot of my book is the way that the farm bill in the u.s. department of agriculture really tries to get more people off of the land in the early 20th century up until the 1970s and 80s and beyond. there is a message there too many people farming. they wanted to consolidate land at the hand of fewer people. which in many instances' farm villages and farm community. made it so that instead of relying on each other for support farmers increasingly had to look to the federal government to give than the emergency help they need. whether it's through crop insurance, subsidies, they're

getting the crops to market because they were no longer being grown for local industry would sell them to local tumors that left out the village. i went straight from individual farmers to the states may think it's interesting how they foresaw a lot of this and wrote about in his book quest for community. how that breaks down in the intermediary institutions and association. results in a situation where individuals are completely reliant upon the state for all of the goods that they need to have a pollution life. it is a broken form of flourishing.

separation out from all of your connections that are not the government. maybe the time is well-intentioned or whatever. at the end of the day it resulted in a lot of people having little to rely on should not pick up your policy at least take that into account to do that we have to get rid of our citizens from where they want to be. i grew up in brooklyn, although no one believes this but in the 1970s and 80s

was a lot of very tiny communities who stuck together forever. and there was something in that 70s -- 80s, 90s the movement of making things more expensive. next city was doing various things to become an even bigger attraction to finance capitol. and people started to leave because they cannot afford to live there anymore. breaking up those communities that have been there for a long time. and one reason why, he set a little bit of this in the book, people sometimes choose careers or jobs even if it is a place that's not so attractive to them. it so they can stay near their families. when i was 26 i wanted to be a professor of classics. that was not going to keep me in new york, which is where i wanted to be.

i had to try and do something else. new york city happens to be for better or worse the city that absorbs a lot of opportunities. mostly for the worse, my families had been here turned out to be okay, at least for me. and so the other question that i was thinking of asking, you had mentioned this in your talk is that, do you think that wanting to maintain those community habits, no matter where you might be, is that specifically a result of your experience, or is that something you think if use grape each person a little but they talked at that's basically it most people want customer even if they know they can't go back home, most of them don't really want to come to a big city and move around forever.

but they're being told that's what they should do. that's quantitative measures that count. so do you think it really depends on where they've grown up or does it matter that's just so people care about? and that's of the need to be encouraged to do? spit back at such an interesting question. i think the family you come from the place you live in could probably make that intervoice stronger or weaker. i do think that it is probably an inner longing to be rooted. if you have perhaps lived in a situation where you have been constantly moving about, i'm curious whether that would make it much difficult to listen to or to hear that longing and to express it because what matt even drop on to make it real. you don't have that in your lived experience. i think that for a lot of

people, if they have lived in a case where they have examples to draw on, relatives in which they sought rootedness happen and saw that it was actually an enjoyable life for them, then it makes it feel more possible. i think the average american summer in the realm of 11 -- 20 times in their lifetime. so we have just had a tendency as a culture to just move about quite a bit. whereas a lot of our counterparts historically did not have the same inclinations. whether because they owned lands and it was kept in place for longer as part of their inheritance, i think it's tocqueville who said same aristocratic nature as our european forebears, we are just much more used to moving about and seeking greater wealth. we are very discontent with

our fortune. and that is not always been a bad thing. but i think when you look at the actual health of our towns and also our ecology, our landscape you can see the toll that has taken. ischemic i think all of that is true. i would put the general, not always disposition of americans to come move around and look for more money to be different than some of what you describe in this book. this is the government agency telling you have to do this. this is why the corporate organizations are telling you consumers should be and why you should live around there or stay at home. one is building on the desire, but tends to have more of a detrimental effect because they are together. i think that's exactly right. i have a question is command, how do you think or hope, or

expect, that people who live in emmett will respond to this book if they know it's coming? have they seen it? have you talked to them about it? was it a challenge at all writing about maybe not your great-grandfather or grandfather, but other people in town. i hope that it will be positive. we tried to do every person you wrote about talking to people multiple times. having a long view of their life and what they're going through.

i have sure though growth man two things that are inevitable. anytime i am critical they will perhaps be some defensiveness. that's also understandable. but to the utmost of my ability, tried to write a picture that was loving, compassionate, and that took into account the experiences of people as a whole rather than just getting a snapshot of a moment in time that sought to fit whatever my point was going to be. and so really do hope that shines through. i've also failed to share the entirety of the book with several of my family members that have been really blessed to get their feedback. in so that has been wonderful as well. my grandpa wally is responsible for a lot of the historical family anecdotes. that's great, that's great.

someone else has written they are watching or living in vermont, which has gone through some consolidation of school districts. the population is getting small there's a lot of concern how to move to a larger scale organization he tells whether emmett or the statewide organization looks like? are things consolidating into bigger places? kids have to travel further whatever the example might be. do those communities still have their own specific community schools or things just getting bigger to accommodate fewer kids to get them all in one spot? >> this a couple of high schools, middle school, one

interesting thing happening later on in the book is this area is actually suburban icing. what we see is incredibly popular to move to right now. there's kind of a mixed blessing there gained some people but farmland itself is being farmed over at astronomical rates. think the statistics say somewhere upwards of 60% of its harmless farmland could be gone the next several decades. and said that is a problem need to grapple with in terms of thinking about the land that we have been giving to stuart and how to steward and build well. even as a welcome new people were not losing the land that we have been given. but in terms of the school districts, i know they struggle to get bonds passed to make improvements on the local school. one of my favorite experiences which did not actually make it into the book local farmer on

the bench tell me why the schoolhouses. back in the day he remembers how they would walk to school, it was much more a village atmosphere it knocks the town itself but breaking it down into these very minute regions they were on the bench that makes it outside of town or the town of coral for these various places how they each have their own character because of that small very dense school system. i know some of that has been lost for sure. back your passage about the paving over so couple of another question. if you can provide any more

detail about the tension between a desire for localism and maybe some level of capitalism or liberal capitalism are not, how they always opposed? or is the question is can we maintain the good of what capitalism can do they're more able to live. while doing that at the same time while fostering a love for place of community, do they have to do one or the other. >> it's a dairy deck but difficult question. i have to be honest and say don't feel entirely qualified to answer. when it would be like to look at our situation in terms of the monopolies that a been

built around agriculture, many of which are fed by capitalism and enables the growth of these. if we could be fighting but if that were to happen might have a newer open and more free market in which smaller players in local industry clusters to be allowed to hopefully rise back up to the service. surface. i think that will be very interesting to explore in greater depth. the grip and pennsylvania on a farm saturn the next book i should write should be about how actually capitalism and the help of small family farms are incompatible. that was her opinion. i'll have to do a lot more research reform able to come to any final decision on that.

>> just think about in light of this question there incompatible if people want live liberal capitalist life come move to new york december move to chicago but don't impose it on everybody else let those communities live out the way they want. it is a big country. what i drew from your book was that a lot of these shouldn't say a lot but a certain number of driving factors are basically policies and perspectives that these people once it imposed over the whole country. in your comments about people should leave the farm, who cares about the farm or whatever they don't they should leave. they should say we shall have fewer farm owners that's our

policy. i think there may be some ability to accommodate, but unclear. some going to ask you a question before we leave since we are the russell kirk center you do have a comments and interviews given i think to the gospel coalition you had nice things about it, so as we and i like to hear how you found him, what you thought about his writing or whatever else you can remember. >> i first read russell kirk's work in college. i just immediately resonated with me on a got level. as i think often times searching can when you meet a kindred spirit to the printed word. one of my favorite quotes from russell he said he found himself a conservative, once i began to reflect on such concerns. and i can relate to that very deeply i think because of my upbringing many of these

things were departed to me by awesome moses these cultural traditions we take in, often times in his spiritual subconscious level before they even become fully clear in our heads. but then as i began to read russell kirk he began to express those thoughts verbally or on the page i began to see how much my character and my view of the world. the virtues of modesty and prudence and the importance of particularity and distribute is in, there's so many has written in his various written works that have continued to formally think about the world. and i think just continues to be vitally important to restoring and reforming conservatism today.

and i think it would be wonderful if i could just go ahead and spend another book talk about the work of russell kirk pretty wish i would've quoted him more and this one. very thankful for the work he's done in this as well, just making sure more people are reading him in understanding the importance of his philosophy. >> thank you. it's funny you should say that because although we come from different backgrounds as a city kid i read russell's work it hit me exactly as i what are to read. what he was saying was part of my experience were known as talking about in new york city. i first learned of him in college and it's the same thing right on the same point this makes sense to me. those i continue to read and not to hear him speak a couple of times which was really great. make sure we have enough time you want to say something towards the end?

>> yes. thanks for coming so many different topics on to get a chance to talk to yet. on say a couple things to those who are new to the center for the centers continue to work as gracie said russell kirk, author of the conservative mind agents ma other books. essentially to transmit a body of learning and spend in that way to aid in cultural renewal. jacinta let you know if you do not receive our newsletter we have a regular newsletter which is just twice year actually called permanent things. and just sign up for that either on the website or you can send me an e-mail at info@kirk center.org just with your mailing address and will get that out to you. i did went to pick up only thing gracie manchin about was the kirk center is based at

the home library in michigan which if any of you have been there, my dad some very much as a romantic ghost town. because there's a lot of empty stores and their family farms around that make it look somehow romantic in his eyes. i was his ancestral religion which is why he end up settling there full-time even though he traveled first speaking engagements and stuff like that. something else he said kind of struck me to it because my kids actually called the middle of nowhere. it's essentially in the center of michigan. so they affectionately called back. so i can understand a lot of the connections that people think of with the various places the rural area and a lot of the towns my dad

settled there a lot of people were lumber men and the boom and bust cycle. they came in as lumber men and then my dad said he was always atoning for the sins of his ancestors by planting tons and tons of trees in that area. his fortune that time he was young you take the train up through there. enforce there's a longer passage in vail that is the factor there's not really a lot of what choice say, there's not a lot of traffic through there in a good way. but you need some traffic through there. there is a lovely bookstore there is a used bookstore if you been and are these books i'm happy to say my brother-in-law and my sister felicia have just bought the old, what used to be called the snow queen and our town. this spring it will reopen coffee and cream.

mostly ice cream, small coffee shop and things like that. through acosta again. they face at the actual home and library of my parents, my mother is of course still there. there was part for my dad obviously was a very important part to him. but both in terms of the intellectual history cultural inheritance that way as well as the actual, the physicality and locality of it in that. so it went little longer than i expected, but there's so many different things and i wanted to pull up as well, thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you again very much thanks for coming here and talking to us a put up again, let's run out and get the book which is out in a couple of

weeks. thank you again for spending time with us talk about this book and the important themes you put in here. >> thank you so much all of you for coming and listening, thank you so much gerald ince affiliate for the work you do and for including me tonight. >> great thank you. >> aright, by, by ♪ ♪ book tv on cspan2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for book tv comes from these television companies who support cspan2 as a public service ♪ ♪ >> here is a look at some publishing industry news, asian-american and pacific islander author and other members of the book industry have lots of social media initiative to bring attention to violence perpetrated against members of their community. the effort # stand up for api, asked reporters to post books

by asian-american and authors admit an impact on them to contact their local libraries and book publishers to inquire about making more titles by api authors available. a children's book about the life of dr. anthony fauci will be released this summer by simon & schuster. the biography written by kate messner and illustrated by alexander by, follows anthony from his brooklyn beginnings through medical school. : :

which is housed in the basement of frequent books which i'm associated with in brooklyn, new york. they are