nikki giovanni and charles schultz. who is often referred to as the new yorker for kids. let a book bar by the queens public library in new york had been returned 63 years after its due date. the book, a collection of stories about paul bunyan was checked out by betty diamond in 1957 and recently returned along with a 500-dollar donation to the library. now 74 and a literature professor in wisconsin said that the book traveled with her throughout her life in academic career and that it was time to make amends. book tv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. you can also watch all of our past anytime booktv.org. >> it is my pleasure to welcome carl zimmer the weekly column is for near times and author of life's edge the search for what it means to be live. carl is a deeply respected science journalist on us when numerous rewards including the american association for the

advancement of science and science journalism award that's a mouthful, three times but he also teaches el where he's a professor adjunct at biophysics and biochemistry saqqara welcome. >> thanks for having me. >> let me start off by asking you, you have written more than a dozen other books about viruses, parasites, neuroscience, genetics, evolution, what made you ask the central question of your new book, what is life? >> i guess in a way it is sort of working there in the background the whole time that i've been writing other books about life. i'm writing for the "new york times", i'm writing about these things that are live like trees and jellyfish and all sorts of other cool things. the question keeps coming up what unites them. what is it that they all are? what is it mean to be live the subtitle of the book.

it is a kind of question i would delve into from time to time writing articles over the years but just thought you know, maybe this is something i should go deep into with an entire book. until that that was sort of the genesis of life's edge. maybe i should think about this not necessarily as the writing but going on a trip with the readers through life starting kind of at the core of life and then going into that weird fuzzy borderlands work life in nonlife meat and trying to figure out where do we go with that line between the living and the nonliving? >> as we sort of take that trip to this book over and over we see scientists try and spoiler alert ultimately failed to come up with big sweeping theories of life or

discover its essence. we took the stories you came across that stuck with you. there are many, that is the amazing thing. there are so many stories over the course of the past essay 300 years where you have scientists who one way or another are confronting are sometimes going off some pretty wild directions and chasing mirages. the best sense of the word if not reckoned with what life is yet and it will take a while. you have for example in the 1800s mid- 1800s a lot of really prominent naturalist, some the world's best

naturalist was covered with one living thing there called a living paste per thought it was the most fundamental feature of life on earth. we even gave it a latin name it was in textbooks. everybody thought it was the real thing maybe it's the source of all life as we know it it did not exist. as a result of a freak of bad chemistry some preserving some news on the seafloor. the question of what it takes to be live is so tricky that even the greatest minds can get fooled and see mirages were nonexistent. so, those are the kind of stories that really fascinated me. scientists today should take some comfort from them that

really great minds could get fooled. >> something i wondered when i was reading about how it was just an accident of chemistry. that tells us about the search of what it means to be live. does it mean it's fruitless? >> no not at all. it means it's kind of a bumpy road. one reason that this idea was so embraced, and was reported on and newspapers. everyone thought this was real. the reason for it in part was at the time scientists are finally able to see inside of cells. they finally realized there was the strange gooey substance in their that they called photo plasm. it started to become clear that whatever it is that makes life special, the answer is going to be found in that

protoplasm. and so when scientists would look to their microscopes and think they solve the very primitive cell -like thing, they might say will this is it. germans in the early 1800s almost predicted this. they said that the first former life what they called the ursuline or the proto- slime. some people thought here is we found it. it all kind of fit together until some good chemists said wait a minute. we were looking for and we were not finding it. i think somebody made a big mistake. to the credit of the scientists like huxley for example, perhaps the greatest biologist of his time, he got a letter from a scientific

voyage where the scientists are saying we don't think this is real. and he immediately published the rhetoric in nature and said if there's a mistake, it's my fault. so he owned it. doesn't exist but that there is something like photo plasm ourselves are full of goo. that's where all the action is approaching the dna all the molecules to be discovered later. >> detected the two published in nation's also difficult to imagine when nature would publish it whoops nevermind. >> it's deafening to his credit. there definitely people would not say whoops. they thought they had grasped

turned out to be really wrong and could not admit it. they would be left out of science. they would harbor bitter resentment for decades until their death. it is a risky business to try to ask what life is peers become going to do that i'm going to ask what life is. your book is for a bunch of different criteria pretty have metabolism, maintaining internal balance known as homeostasis, reproduction and evolution. difficult the definition or set of criteria that satisfied you >> no. and the more i thought about it the less satisfied i was. that does not mean i have some insight beyond the great minds

i'm writing about in this book. when you see scientists over the centuries coming up with one definition after another after another, you notice that each definition hasn't awful awful lot to do with what that particular scientist is interested in. when biochemists were first figuring out some of the molecules of life the enzymes and so on, they define life in terms of biochemistry. some might francis crick co- discovered the structure of dna really thought about life very much from the perspective of genetic information. so, clearly. but yet it's strange because we always have a sense there is something live. starting with ourselves.

think that's over get into trouble. part of the trouble through the philosophical problem maybe we are training these questions incorrectly. part of the problem is sort of a psychological one. we have intuitions about life and death. those are the products of natural selection. they are the survival traits i would argue. those are great for jeans getting passed on purpose and not necessarily going to give you a guide to whether there does need to be live. the irony is we feel live in a way that is so obvious, surely life must be obvious. as we write in the book there's a psychological disorder where people are just as convinced they are dead.

and they will explain to their doctors how is they can be talking to them even though they are dead were they come up with very elaborate that make sense to them. we actually have these sort of circuits in our brains that register our own existence which can become faulty. we are very keenly aware of the lives of others. we sense the biological motion and so on. so i think that makes us think this question should be easy to answer or there must be an answer. maybe there isn't. >> you have really wild examples of key aspects of life and showed the huge variety there is in the world. i remember reading about the visited basement, when did you find out when you explored these different forms of life? >> i thought a good place to

sort of center the book will be with these hallmarks of life. the things we generally agree are the kinds of things that make life life. so metabolism of something. : : : >>. >> they can eat really big things half of their own

weight easily and break it down and turn it into more. so i went down to test colusa at the university of alabama and hung out with a biologist who studies snakes and we went to a place where basically giving snakes he is studying as a snake obvious his whole basement is full of these gigantic pythons and constructors. beautiful animals very well taken care of. and then what is going on once the rat goes inside. the python actually has to

burn fuel to get the fuel out of the food. you have to spend the energy to get the energy. he basically determined the metabolic rate of python to break down a rat or rabbit is about the same level as a horse. a horse stops after a couple of minutes but a python can keep that up four days. so metabolism at its finest you hang out with the python and watch him feed on things. one organism most people don't even know exist but if you see jellylike stuff on the forest floor it is a slime mold jelly mold it is like protoplasm

extending its hands out so basically it's like trying to find food hidden behind a wall one has protein and one has carbohydrates. they make decisions about where to go and where to get the food. they don't have a brain. it's decision-making at the most basic level. and it just cannot be random. and with those decisions to help you survive. and with that. example and that intelligence almost. >> they are definitely alive.

so they are the stranger edge cases of real life or possible life that you explore in this book. so what is the strangest you uncovered? >> what is familiar to us like the virus. they don't have a metabolism. so they cannot be allies. here is something that is not allies that can evolve, replicate, things that we think are unique to life. if you pull the metabolism out it is not alive or it kind of is? so for example these little animals sometimes named water bears they live everywhere in the ocean.

you can see them under a microscope and they go about their business of regular animals and the proteins in the water doing with the proteins do. they can go into space and survive. the reason is they are adapted for basically going into a third state. so what happens is that the water disappears from their body and is replaced by other chemicals sugars and proteins that form a glass. now they are not metabolizing at all. they can't. they have no water which is

essential to carry out their reactions so what are they? are they dead? pour water on them and they are back in action. wait 30 years and poor water on them in and they are back in action. so with the strange examples as soon as people come up with a definition of life but what about this? that's it makes life so endlessly fascinating it keeps slipping away from the definition. >> have they changed the definition of the virus is alive? >> that's a great question and a wrote an essay about this in "the new york times" recently and adapted from a book. what the pandemic did is made people aware of viruses. someone like me i have viruses

on the mind that most people don't you go about your day, you get a cold sometimes we don't think much about it. but viruses have been extraordinary sick on - - existence, we will call it. and the coronavirus just pushed it into everybody's faces. suddenly everybody was incredibly obsessed with exactly which protein on the surface of the cell it binds to to get entry. people started to know on their own they are not dna they are the rna viruses and that coronavirus is can

evolve. so now that offers the opportunity now that you see the coronavirus in action making copies of itself all over the world and civilization to a halt, what is this? is that alive? it is question not made to coronavirus people than asking this basically since they discovered viruses. in the 1930s the nobel prize-winning scientist discovered he could turn viruses into crystals like salt or i.c.e. and store them away and then bring them back and put water on them and

could infect cells all over again. so viruses are a hard case. so thinking of them as part of life if you want to be a stickler that has a metabolism you can say okay. it is an incredibly important element of the world. >> computer viruses are weirder because they require the energy to exist in some form. they produce, they change are they alive? >> that is a really interesting question to ask a scientist. especially have a computer scientist and a microbiologist right next to each other which i have done sometimes. then you step back and watch the sparks fly. i don't go into artificial life that much in this book.

but there are people who study artificial life and create digital organisms and they very much think if they are not alive they capture what is interesting about life and they can evolve in interesting ways and ask scientific questions studying these organisms. but kate at the university of minnesota i talked to her a lot during this book she is trying to build cells from scratch that are alive. she has made a lot of strides that there is a way to go in she and her colleagues are still working on it. but i said artificial life is that life but she said no.

absolutely not. absolutely no. no exception. really? why is that? she says i have the goo rule of it does not have goo cannot be alive. so that question is is it alive? but again in a fascinating way. artificial life has become so sophisticated the past 20 years it is extraordinary that people can do with it watch the evolution of sexual reproduction but i don't think we settled the question if they are really alive.

>> this settling that question even matter why does defining life even matter? don't we know it when we see it? >> i don't think so. life is life. the fact that we are alive gives their lives meaning. i feel very fortunate i have this life for whatever decades i am here on this planet. what is that i'm experiencing? when do each of us become alive? when does the life and? that's a lot of differences. the beginning of life as well is an important political issue in the united states and

nasa is spending a lot of money going to places like mars with one of the conditions to see if there is life. we have an amazing space program and mars with the helicopter on board one of the things the probe will do is look around to see if there are clues to whether or not there is life on mars so what do we mean? what are we looking for? to be have to see people running around to be convinced it is life? or is there a broader definition that we need to set up to know what we're dealing with on mars? now we cannot get planets and other solar systems through telescopes what are we looking

for? how do we know life if it hits us in the face? >> i remember in your book you talk with a scientist of the jet propulsion laboratory almost the opposite reaction that she actually tries to not let the strict idea of life constrain her work. why was that quick. >> yes she was from the jet propulsion laboratory in a proposed it to her what kind of definition of life does she have? she would like to send a mission to one of the frozen moons of saturn and see what is underneath there. and i said you have a definition of life that would guide you? she said i don't want to be

stuck with that. it's not that important to me to come up with the definition i want to go there to see if there's and one - - anything interesting. with chemistry. and if there is maybe then we take a closer look at what is going on and maybe we might agree if there is life. 's old glory build chemical gardens in her lab. you mix chemicals together with these beautiful structures in liquid. we make these chemical gardens so she is doing it as a job with the crazy chemicals that

inequities going on in the seafloor on this planet and what is happening on other planets or other moons with a liquid ocean. so these are be the kinds of places for life begins on earth and may be separately it could have begun or maybe it hasn't began yet. maybe find there are big interesting molecules. but maybe it's not quite life? come back in 1 million years? so it is interesting to meet somebody who studies life on other planets who is trying to avoid getting stuck in that definition of life. >> mentioning the origins of

life on this planet and it sounds like on broad strokes there is still debate were those first daddy membranes and chemistry actually formed. what is science still investigating? >> the order of life really does require you to define your terms of what began and what came before it. this is something charles darwin really try to avoid. i haven't seen that evolution but the origin of life i just want to go there. it is too much it's too complicated we don't know enough about it. things have changed tremendously since then. first of all to know about the chemical nature of life.

and then to know more about the fossil record. we have fossil records of microbes going back three.5 billion years and a lot of beautiful research going on and laboratory experiments how do you go from a raw material to living things? that doesn't mean how life began is the only way it can start, but how did it start? i am focused on one scientist i have reported on for literally decades. he is convinced that life began on volcanic islands in little ponds a little bit like darwin bit more sophisticated

elaborate of rna forming sandwiched between old and new membranes and then becoming the's cells. other people are convinced it's all happening at the bottom of the ocean with the chemical garden. both cannot be right. they can't. it is fascinating to see these models becoming more fleshed out and more fascinating and they are discovering more chemistry as they go. and as david was trying to think about how it originated in the volcanic islands he got an idea how to get genetic material to pull that into them but this would be a way to sequence dna that is known

as sequencing the way to sequence dna right now and it's possible nasa has a sequencer because the probe could fly through one of the sea water coming out of the cracks in the manafort sequencer to see if there is dna or rna coming out of there. maybe has genes or the technology can help us find it somewhere else. that would be cool. we will see if that happens. that would be cool. >> you interview scientist you have known for decades so what

is the wildest space you encountered while researching this book? >> i really wanted to report on homeostasis by getting to know bats. because they are amazing as lifeforms to keep their internal state in balance. they can fly through the air and keep themselves stabilized. they can keep their temperature stable. they are warm-blooded and even through the winter by doing something amazing by hibernating. they shift their bodies to a new state a homeostasis type of balance.

so i went on a trip with new york state biologist and they go where the bats are and then they go into the abandoned mines. they were created from graphite in the 18 hundreds from pencils so they put in timbers to pop things up and then all the graphite did is go to madagascar are it all collapsed and now is just home to bats. so they went into this mine it's not really doing very well it is collapsing in on itself. but yet there were the's beautiful bats spending the

winter there. waking up every few weeks to drink a little bit of water than going back into this strange state of theirs. so that was a wonderful experience made particularly wonderful to get out of that place in one piece. before we went in they were saying just don't touch it. it just goes to show life is everywhere. and nina can cranny were there is water and conditions you

will find life. probably more likely a microbe than a bad but it is everywhere. and his extremes of possibilities you have to go to extreme places. >> and that was before the pandemic started? >> yes. that was right before the lockdown. so after that it was very much over the phone, zoom interviews. walking around in connecticut. and also writing about the coronavirus now here is this amazing saying taking over the world and everyone's consciousness that was the perfect illustration of how hard it is to draw the life between life and no life.

>> between juggling your reporting on the coronavirus and cancel travel. but wound up getting left on the cutting room floor for the book you wish you could include? >> there were certainly things i did leave out artificial life is an example of that i said that would be great that's a chapter i'm not going to write. part of that books can get very long and the last book over 600 pages. i decided it's time to write a book of a good reasonable thickness. wasn't going to try to pretend to have encyclopedia of all living things. or all ideas and theories of which there are many but a

representative sampling on this journey. just to take the trip from life as we know it to the edges were not sure what we're dealing with anymore. >> you did manage to get into the lab before the pandemic started for this book to look into it yourself to adapt and evolve. what was that like? what did you learn? >> i learned i'm not a great scientist. [laughter] i don't have that exact attention to detail. another hallmark of life is capacity to evolve. everything that we consider

some people don't think they are alive but that is stitch into the nature of life. and for darwin, evolution is something you saw the tail end of in the products of evolution the way the species but adapt to their environment or other species in the products of millions of years of adaptation. but now scientists can actually study evolution over the course of weeks and days because they can study bacteria. and there is a scientist at the university of pittsburgh that they could create a kit for high school students and see if they can do it then i can. so i go over to yale to asked

scientist to took pity on me and babysat me over the course of a week where i basically drove the evolution of bacteria. these form slimy coats on services. . . . . the movement was so challenging. it would sort of just be for her, what in the world is just

full of bacteria and fungal spores that could totally ruin your experiments. she's always trying to create the zone of sterility around her experiments. if i rushed a pipette against the counter, change out. that's ruined. [laughter] >> so, you can see but you have to be real careful to see it. but you know, this might seemed like kind of an abstract exercise, the fact is this is actually directly and medically important. this kind of evolution happens with microbes inside of our own bodies. they are forming biofilms in her own bodies. for people with cystic fibrosis a relative of the rectory i was sitting can caused infections by performing these on their own. by studying how they evolved you can actually come up with strategies to force them to

become vulnerable to antibiotics, and be unable to make biofilms. so again, like you said well does it really matter what life is and how life works? yes it is a matter of life and dealt if you have got cystic fibrosis. >> yes. so, it makes me wonder, looking at all of these different forms of life, a few had to put philosophers and scientists and duke it out over, how would that go? [laughter] it would not be pretty. [laughter] so, scientists have a way of coming up with definitions for

like a lot. there are hundreds of definitions of life scientists proposed over the years there still coming up with new ones. you don't really see a real steady convergence or people say you are right, i was wrong, were not getting down to one definition. if you bring philosophers in, then they will start saying what are we doing here? what are we trying to do? what is the goal here? what do we mean by these words that we are using? and so some philosophers have talked about ideas that people like witt can dine promoted, instead of life, let's return to games, how do we do that? we come up with a list of things that all games have to have to be considered a game? that would be hard to do.

because games are somewhat to each other and different. some games you play for money, some games are for free. some games involve winning and losing some are completely upper end and we consider them all games. they are associated, they are connected, they have what you called family resemblances. maybe we should just think about these things that we can call living as having these resemblances to each other. we don't have all the things that we have is we think of as being life, but we have a lot. they are part of the said network of living things perhaps. but there are other philosophers who are just radical and they say define water they're going to define

it according to concepts that are just wrong. they do not even understand that there is a molecular basis to this thing they're calling water. trying to define it is meaningless. he did lots of experience get lots of data and put a series in place. once you have chemistry than a water a lot more sense. and you can start with these things that's adams and hydrogen and they do things in it interesting ways. they would argue, we don't really have it. that is a work in progress. >> we are starting to get some audience questions come in. the first one is how do you think humans will approach discovering life on other planets? if we have found a creature on

march but we look at intelligence? >> wow, if we found a worm on mars that would be amazing. [laughter] i have to say, i am hoping for something like bacteria. living right below the surface , maybe a little damp patch. i think bacteria are fascinating, don't get me wrong. i think it will be a lot to expect to find a worm on mars. i think we do, in order to understand something you have to analyze it. that means pulling it apart. there might very well be a sample return from march effort find something that looks like life or a fossil.

because scientists are going to look at this up close. but we do need to respect the possibility is life as we do know it or don't know it on mars or other places and be very careful about the probes that we send there. nasa is doing its best to try to make these probes completely sterile. because the last thing you want us basically see the planet with bacteria from back on earth that are going to mask the things that you want to see on another planet. >> that question also really gets out dealing with consciousness and intelligence and life all rs concepts and how difficult to understand them individually or together. go ahead, sorry. >> is going to say for consciousness is a very much

wrapped up in our concepts of life. leader e-mail me at ten consciousness is life. okay, tell it to. [inaudible] the thing is our existence is very much still organized around our brains. some scientists would argue that mobley define life, we define it by the integration of chemistry and other processes. in a microbe, that integration takes place just within the cell. whereas in us, the most important integration happens in our brains overtaking information from ourselves and integrating them into an awareness of her own bodies, of our own selves of those around us or consciousness.

and again, that feeds into these very important issues like when do we declare people dead? this idea of integration is why brain death is such a wide spread standard for death. it's not that her cells are clicking along, it's like to be have an integrated existence still? so will be bring up consciousness we talked about in the book along these lines. >> we have another question, can you talk about the breakthroughs in the human realm like the double helix that can be applied on social equity the connection between the innocence project. >> i mean science is not somehow severed from its

social, science is a social process. people do it, they do it together, they do it in society. some people are the nonscientist. extremely, when robin franklin and james watson and others figured out the structure of dna, they did not have the innocence project in mind. saw some prisoners were actually innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. they are saying like we are going to get to solve the mystery of life. which are incredibly powerful and should be used in

potentially good ways. the fact that once you understand how dna is structured and what its function is in life, oh, i can tell two living things apart by looking at their dna even to members of the same species. if the dna are do not match my clients that person should be able to walk free. there is the potential for unexpected good things, practical things to come out of this fundamental basic question that we are still wrestling with. i think that's always true of science. we should not have scientists get to peg down trying to

answer really specific little questions. feel it scientists run wild until these big crazy questions and fail over and over again things like the innocence project will come out. >> exploring just basic life and making this discovery that's fundamental to dna sequencing right now. >> that's right. the sequences are, because they take care of -- they sort of mimic david diemer imagine where the most primitive basic processes in life. he imagines like a strand of dna or some other genetic molecule going through our poor brim what ghostly ports going to go through a little

change electric charge that you can measure. a decade later now, the are these little devices that can do that. they are being deployed on there's a big outbreak of ebola in west africa. people were sequencing genetic material that have a fancy machine sequence them. they can see this more and more in our lives. being used to sequence coronavirus two. that just came out of thinking about what is the minimum of life that i can imagine. >> yes. you have been covering scientific advances for decades in this audience member wants to know what you are most excited about on the

next -- ten years. >> you know, i feel like were going to start hitting some really interesting on recall a phase change in our understanding of a lot of different sciences. including life really interesting to think about ourselves be living in a time before in helping to understand why we get sick. doctors talk about humor and whatnot. very unsatisfying when things

start to fall in place. think maybe in ten years, maybe, some of these series of life will come together. maybe we will look at life as sort of a property of matter, like superconductivity. superconductivity is really weird what is this substance doing? how is this that it disappeared from this material customer it seemed arbitrary did not fit into physics great minds like einstein, failed to get an answer. but eventually some people came along, they offered a theory and now we kind of understand what has to happen to certain kinds of matter in order for this phenomenon to

emerge. be really exciting is not necessarily have to be made of dna. life emerges when fulfill certain things. i'm pretty optimistic that as scientists measure life and incredibly fine detail that a really strong theory is going to emerge. meka think we have time for two more questions in the next four minutes. that's when it's also about life on other planets. hard your own ideals and personal biosystems include to instinctively think of as life on other planets? from how you detach? >> that is a great question.

you can't help but think about life on other planets as you see it around us. i look out my window and i see trees. you imagine of giant plans. but it does not have to be the case. for most of history there were plants. so, i try my best to think about life on earth as lively as i can. there are microbes that lives in the rock under the sea floor that are feeding on the radioactive breakdown of elements. that is not feel like life as

we know it. but that's like right here in earth. in trying to push out my own sort of mental models of live here on earth, i think it's useful for trying to think about what life might be on other planets. you know, going to have to be carbon. there going on that they have what it takes to produce we have to go in find out. >> so what is the next book? [laughter] right after you think life what happens next? >> you honestly i have no idea. at the moment, the editors of

the "new york times" of allowing to step away from intensive daily coverage about vaccines and variance in all of the rest of the science of the pandemic. just focus on talking about the book for a little while. i'm hoping when i go back that my services writing about the pandemic won't have to be put in use quite so much. i think it's going help drive down this pandemic finally. so when the dust settles i think i will stop and think like what is next? i don't have an answer yet. i'm sure something will come. samantha: were there any stories from this book that you really just wanted to dive into or tease out even more? >> there are people having

robots run chemical experiments 24 hours a day to see if chemistry can come to life. i got to see that in person. and see how that is going. it's going to be great for going to visit science again and the habitat i'm really looking forward to that after i am vaccinated and the rest of us are vaccinated. >> i'm not buying the tickets yet. but they are planned appear. [laughter] , our thanks to carl zimmer columnist for the "new york times" and author of life's edge, the search for what it

means to be live. thank you so much for joining us for this conversation today part we encourage you to pick up your copy of carl's new book at your local bookstore. if you would like to watch more virtual programs or support the commonwealth club efforts, please visit debbie debbie debbie.commonwealth club.org. i have to slip in there that also buys the support if you enjoyed this program, please visit our website for more information about how to support our nonprofit. i am rachel becker, thank you and goodbye. >> book tv on cspan2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. comes in the telogen companies who support cspan2 as a public service. >> during a recent virtual program hosted by the atlanta history center tubs impact

mothers have of james bollen, martin luther king jr. and malcolm x and their sons. here's a portion of the program for its back so a lot of factors that contributed to their erasure. i think one of them is that yes at the time and even today record histories and people who we deem to be important as a society and the white mail so much of our stories are told to miss white mail perspective. they are not the ones were going to say yes, this black woman mattered. or let's make sure we tell her story and history. let's even record the date that she was born. two of the women were not even really sure what year they were born kind of estimates. no one recorded it. i cannot find her in any census data for example. but it's also something we

speak to each of these three men care deeply about the mothers they credited their mothers with their success. they celebrated their moms because he is the best mother in the world to calls or consulate things all the ones be married next to his mother if he passover seated was have a double plot where should be buried right next to him that whenever anyone came to his grave than see how interconnected their lives were. others example after example, even malcolm x who said some charismatic things about how he feels about women. he also credits his mom and she was the first to teach in this discipline but he found in the nation of islam. in many ways he returned her teaching before he ever met

muhammad. why is it that if we have this evidence and include in the book that we just erased it over time. so part of it is the understanding of sexism in our society racism in our society and the intersectional that black women are facing multiple don't think their lives are worthy of documentation. in that they are not worthy of celebration. >> to watch stresses program visitor website booktv.org. search for tubs of the title of her book the three mothers using the search box at the top of the page. >> book tv in prime time starts now nbc news with jonathan allen and the hill senior correspondent discusses the 2020 presidential election and how joe biden became the 46h president. then historian george nash talks about the past and future of conservatism in the united states but also tonight essayist kathie parks hong her

issues on race and identity as an asian american in america author interview program "after words" the "washington post" joby work or ports on the effort to destroy chemical weapons in syria during its civil war. it all starts now you can find more schedule information about tv.org or consult your program guide. and now jonathan allen and amy parks. >> >> good afternoon and welcome to the national press club the world's leading organization for journalists. the 110th president of the national press club in news as it is for the americas without. substitute muttering at the request of lisa matthews the club's 114th president. thank you for joining us today