operation. >> starting in just a minute on booktv, andrew maraniss recalls the life of late gwen burke, the first openly gay -- glenn burke. and then three women who were war reporters in vietnam. and later, neuroscientist jeff hawkins explains how simple cells in the brain create intelligence. find more schedule information on your program guide or at booktv.org. >> my name is kay, and i'm the events assistance here at parnas us books. tonight we are so excited to welcome new york times best selling author andrew maraniss for his new book, "singled out." you can still get signed and specialized copies. there will be a link for that, we will also be taking questions

so put those in the facebook comments for a chance at having them answered. andrew is joined by former new york times best selling author jeff perlman. i'm so excited to turn the it over now to -- tush it over now to andrew and jeff. >> that works. all right. thank you, kay. well, andrew, i guess i'll -- i guess i'm the moderator, you're the special guest. so, first of all, i just want to say, or as i said briefly, i spent yesterday and today reading "singled out." i thought it was great. for people who may not know, it's the biography of the first openly gay major league baseball player. and i guess i am kind of interested right off the bat, we're sitting here, 2021, there as far as i can tell are no openly gay major league baseball players since glenn burke's

existence. why'd you write the book? >> yeah. first of all, jeff, i just want to say thank you to you for doing this. you're wearing the most appropriate hat, i guess wearing a dodgers or an as hat, and the as hat is kind of cool. glenn played for the dodgers and the as, and i know you're working on your own book right now, so it means a lot that you'd take the time to do this. why i wrote this book, my mission right now is to write books that are sports-related books with a mission to them. perry wallace was the first african-american basketball player in the sec, my second book, "games of deception," was about the first u.s. olympic basketball team at the 1936 olympics in nazi germany. those books were dealing with racism, fascism and anti-semitism. and with this book i found a

chance to write about my favorite sport which is baseball and the homophobia and gay rights movement in the 1970s and the backlash to that movement. with all of these books, you know, i want to tell the story of the athletes who are the central characters, but even more important than that, i think, is the context of what's happening in the country or in the world at the time. you know, the place9 and the time that these characters exist. and with glenn burke's story, it was very natural to make the connections between his life and his career as baseball player in what was happening with, say, iowa knee the that bryant in florida, you know, her anti-gay rights campaign or the rise of harvey milk in san francisco while glenn's living in san francisco. and milk's assassinated while glenn is there. bills in the legislature in california that would have stripped gay people of their right to be employed. glenn is worried that if people find out he's gay, he's going to lose his career as a major

league baseball player. so i was able to bring all these themes together in the story. >> i have a lot to ask here. do you feel like if glenn burke were just a straight ball player, we're talking about mickey rivers, a guy who has a 15-year major league career as a leadoff hitter, was he a limited ball player? >> i think he did have potential to have a successful major league career. people debate that, especially people who don't want to see glenn celebrated will say he wasn't rub out of major -- run out of major league baseball because he was gay, he played himself out of the game because he wasn't a good enough player. this is a guy who pit -- who hit over .300 five times. the longtime dodger player and coach said he had the potential to become the next willie mays, and there's plenty of players that haven't filled potential,

so he could have fallen in that category, but i don't think so. dusty baker said glenn burke got a better jump on the ball than anybody he'd ever seen, he had a great arm. he was a good enough player as aing rookie to start two games in the national league championship series against the phillies in '77, start game one of the world series at yankee stadium. the dodgers had a lot of hope in him. but it was in that '77 off season that dodger management confronts glenn, you know, and says basically we know you're gay, we would like you to yet married, we'll pay you $-- to get married, we'll pay you $75,000 to cover this up. and glenn says married to a woman? no, i'm not going to do that. so that's when they start to put out word to the press that glenn's not a good enough player to cover up the reason they want to trade him. when he gets to the oakland as, billy martin says he's not going to let glenn contaminate

his team. so i think it's unfair to say he wasn't good enough to make it. i think at that point in major league baseball, as you said, there was room for an outfielder who was a good defensive player and could steal bases. you didn't have to hit 30 home runs. so i think he could have been that type of player. >> i was thinking about the book, and i don't know if this is an answerable question. is it -- do you feel like he was more burdened or his career was more hurt by all the pressures of having to keep this secret, or do you think he was more hurt by guys like tommy lasorda, like billy martin who just didn't really want to have a gay player on their team? >> right. that's a good question because i think you could make the argument either way that the literal decisions that drove him from the game were more by those authority figures. but i think that the day-to-day burden of trying to either keep

this secret from the world or only being willing to share it with certain people, the overall sense that he just couldn't be himself, he couldn't be free, i mean, baseball being such a mental game, to have that weighing on you every single day over the course of a long season, i think that that probably had the greater impact on him not, you know, being able to fulfill that great potential that he had. >> it's actually really interested. so i covered baseball for a long period of time, we're both interested in baseball, and i've talked to ball players who if they're worried about picking up their kid on time the next day can't focus at the plate, or -- >> right. >> -- a movie they really want to see. i can't even imagine the damage of i am really petrified that someone's going to find out about my sexuality. >> glenn said he was playing, basically, with his head over his shouldering wondering what

people were going to learn. of after he's traded from the dodgers to the as, there are oakland as fans that are starting to he heckle him from e crowd yelling the f-word. everybody could hear it, and so not only is he concerned about what his teammates might think or say if they were to find out, he's worried about the thousands of people in the stands as well. and also think about how he's living this sort of, you know, this very split life. this is pre-social media days where in the off season he's not hiding who he is at all. he's living in the castro district of san francisco, and is very popular in the neighborhood and at the bars there. his gay friends are coming to watch him play. he's not really concerned someone's going to take a picture in the off season and his secret will be exposed. it's almost like he's protected in that cocoon where he's supported, loved, but then every baseball season he has to step into probably the most

homophobic environment in the country which would be a professional sports locker room. so that dichotomy if, i think, weighed on him as well. >> the title of the book is "singl singled out." was he openly gay or -- was he openly gay by choice or because enough people speculated that he was gay? >> yeah, i think the latter's probably true. you can't fit the nuance situation in the subtitle of a book necessarily. and some people would say, well, you know, he didn't actually have a press conference or a big national interview until after his playing days were over, two years after his last professional game. but the reason he was driven from baseball was because people knew he was gay, you know? tommy lasorda, billy martin, his teammates with the dodgers knew it. when he was traded from the as, reporters in the clubhouse said they said steve a garvey

and don sutton are sitting at their lockers crying because the life of the clubhouse had been traded. dusty baker confronts the team trainer and says why did this happen to see if they will admit it was because he was g answerer y. as i mentioned, in the off season glenn's not hiding who he was at all. thousands of people in the castro knew who he was. so i think it's fair to say that he was open in most ways but just not to, you know, the entire public. >> it's interesting, i'm researching a book right now about bo jackson, the former ball player, and and he grew up in a very still racially divided bessamer, alabama. a lot of the white people he grew up with, you get a great amount of, oh, no, we didn't see color at all, it was great. we loved him. and i wonder when you're interviewing guys, you interviewed a lot of names that i recognize, remembered, shootty babbitt, you know, davy lopes, and they're like -- mike norris,

and they're like, no, i didn't care. didn't matter to me. considering it was the late '70s, do you have to have a level of skepticism, or do you believe them at their word and, okay, i believe you? >> yeah. well, no, i think there was a little bit of self-selection in who agreed to talk to me also. and i don't know if you ever run to that, jeff, because it seems like you interview 10,000 people for every book. seems like no one ever turns you down for an interview, but there were several ex-dodgers who wouldn't return my request with for an interview, and i wondered if that was because they didn't get along, didn't want to admit that, didn't want to talk about it. there were a few guys who seemed nervous discussing the topic which was a little surprising to me. there was one of his high school white basketball teammates who admitted to me that he didn't go visit glenn at the end of his life when he was dying from aids because he was squeamish about being around someone with aids,

you know? and so he was willing to go that far. mike norris said that there are a number of as players at the time that didn't treat glenn well at all. it was the dodgers in the minor league that already knew him and had developed these relationships before they really figured it out that seemed to stick closest to glenn as friends and teammates. shootty babbitt, who you mentioned, it's just fun to say that at a book talk, you know, he said that when they were aaa teammates together in ogden, utah, there was a game where the catcher kept bouncing the throw down to second base, and shooty babbitt's playing second base. he was getting pissed off that the catcher couldn't get the ball there, and he confrontedded the catcher. -- confronted the catcher between innings, and they got into a fight in the dugout. and glenn burke was the one who broke it up. and three black guys fighting --

or two guys fighting in the dugout, glenn was like we don't need to be fighting each other right now. and shoot item y babbitt admittedded to me that at that moment when glenn broke up the fight, he said if i should have just let him kick my if butt instead because i didn't want to have to owe glenning something,u know, sexually. he said that was such a stupid thought that i had, but that was my mindset as a ball player back then. >> i actually thought that was, in many ways, the quote that stood out to me the most because it was preposterously honest. >> right. >> i didn't know if he was going to want sexual favors from me. and him actually stating that, i mean, i always loved shooty babbitt, i was covering baseball, and he was the go-to guy. that was really honest x a lot of people respect that honest about how they were thinking at the time. >> yeah, i agree. and the guy who said he wouldn't go visit glenn on his death bed regrets that to this day. you always appreciate it when

people are willing to share that honest sentiment. >> so i'm kind of a nerd about writing, and i am interested. you decide you want to do this book. it's not a marquee name. it's not like everyone in america or even all sports fans know who glenn burke is. how hard is it to get a book teal for it, and sort of what was -- deal for it, and sort of what was the process of writing for you? >> yeah. it wasn't -- i've had books in the past where i've had to basically shop around four or five ideas and hope that one of them will stick. with this one, my publisher went for it right away. and one thing we can talk about is this book is marketed as a young adult book, you know, for teenagers. maybe like your son evan. but i think -- >> [inaudible] >> i'm sorry? >> good name drop. >> yeah. yeah, no problem. i like the jerseys you make him wear. so, you know, there was an excerpt in "the new york times" that shows it's for adults too.

it's not just speaking down to kids. but i think that teenagers are ready for a book about a gay male athlete, you know? they're ready to talk about that. i was speaking in a rural school in tennessee, in north carolina last year with my previous book, and this kid would ask, well, what are you writing next, and when i mentioned this, none of the boys, like, snickered or seemed like, well, why would you want to read that? there was tremendous support for the topic which was really encouraging to me. the process in writing it, the first potential i got in touch -- person i got in touch with was eric sherman who's a sports writer in new york, baseball author, who had sat down with glenn on glenn's death bed e and interviewed him over the course of a week and helped him write an autobiography, ghost wrote an autobiography for glenn. and i was concerned here i am writing about a subject that was very close to this man's heart. first of all, i wanted to let

him know that i was working on, kind of treading into territory that he had been on 25 years ago, and i spent a day with him in new york, and eric was terrific. he shared interviews that he had done, tapes of his interviews with glenn, letters he had gotten after the book came out that had stories about glenn that he wasn't necessarily able to use in my book that i could follow up with on my own. then i tried to interview as many of glenn's minor league and major league teammates as i could. there's great books written about baseball in the '70s, so it's fun to read all of those. and, you know, newspaper writing was terrific back then, especially in and l.a. and oakland where he played. and i always try to immerse myself in the time period that i'm writing about too, so i was listening to disco the whole time that i was writing this book and, you know, worked some of that into the stories. glenn was a tremendous dancer, he was the best disco dancer on the team. is so i think in writing nonfiction, probably just like you, jeff, the research is by far the most important part of the book.

more important than the writing skill, i think, is the ability to talk to as many people as possible, find as much documentation as you can that, the advice i learned from you but i saw you say in an interview one time those people on the periphery of the team or maybe were there for ten days probably have the best story because they're going to remember those ten days they spent with the dodgers, right? every single detail whereas maybe the bigger names have had so many interesting things happen in their life, they're not going to to have the best stories to tell. finding the clubhouse manager if or someone who played softball with glenn, some of those were the best interviews. >> who was your best periphery interview? >> well, steve, the clubhouse man for the oakland as said, well, you know about glenn being the first guy to wear nikes, right? i was, like, what?

[laughter] glenn burke was not only the inventer of the high-five, he was also the first mlb player to wear nikes in a baseball game. and i found the frozen malt vendor from dodgers stadium who also worked for this fledgling company called nike in the 1970s, and the one handed glenn a pair of soccer shoes that glenn dyed blue and wore in the playoffs in 1977. bill was one of the first employees of their baseball division, now every major league player is wearing nike uniforms. that goes back to glenn burke in 1977. i also found a friend of glenn's who owned a resort, a bed and breakfast on the russian river, and spent a lot of time around glenn in that 1982 period where glenn comes out publicly on today show. and he went to new york city with glenn for that trip and had great memories of that.

great story about glenn bringing his gay softball team from san francisco up to this little town on the russian river to play against a straight team from a bar in california, the gay team from san francisco, you know, won the game decisively, and then the players from both teams met at the gay bar and the straight bar in this little town, and it totally the changed the attitude tuesday of some of -- attitude of some of these guys in the town who now accepted these gay men and their talent. finding this guy who was retired in hawaii was a lot of fun. >> you have to be, when you're writing a book like this, do you have to be careful not to fall into a trap of and then they met glenn, and everyone understood it was okay he was gay. you know what i mean? >> yeah. >> i don't know, something you think about when you're writing a book like this. >> yeah, for sure. in some ways it was nice to have a chapter like that where there was sort of a happy ending because glenn's life, ultimately, is quite tragic. he ends up living homeless on

the streets of san francisco. he does die a very painful. i'm writing about the toll that aids took on so many people in san francisco in that era. the assassination of harvey milk, violence inspired by people like anita bryant, the inaction of the reagan administration when aids came along. so there's a lot of dark periods in glenn's life too that i, you know, have told honestly. and so this one bright moment where glenn has this positive impact on the town, it was just fun to write about. >> it seems like a real challenge that i don't think i'm that good at, but you pulled it off well here, is the weaving of a person's story with a movement and with the times. that was really, really well done. especially sort of harvey milk and the assassination of harvey milk. i don't know, like, do you -- when you tart a book like -- start a book like this, do you view are it as, initially do you

view it as, okay, this is a glenn burke biography, or almost like this is the times of glenn burke biography? >> yeah, i would say i view are it more as the times with him as the central character in it. you know, he needs to, you know, not disappear from the story for too long. and you don't want to have those contextual sections feel forced. you know, in this book i felt like it was the, oh -- [inaudible] glenn did spring training in florida at the same time that anita bryant campaigning in florida against gay rights. he talked about he's living in the castro just a few blocks from harvey milk's camera store. i saw the exterior of glenn's house, i walked down the street to the store, like, two blocks away. so it didn't feel forced to me, and i thought that was important in writing this history, was to put his story in the context of the times. just like inning writing about perry wallace, pioneering basketball player, him growing up in nashville and traveling

through the south, you have to talk about the civil rights movement and how scary an experience that was. i think it has the potential to elevate a sports book that could be looked down on. i had a huge chip on my shoulder about sports books, i love them, and a lot of people do. i think when you can't build in that -- when you can build in that societal context, you have a stronger book. >> i didn't know that much about anita bryant, and i saw she's 80 years old, still alive in florida. when you're in a book like this, do you call the villain? >> in this case i didn't call her. i did try to get in touch with tom mila sor da. you know -- tom tommy lasorda. i don't think he would have talked anyway, he's never acknowledged that his own son was gay or died of aids. i got in. touch with his daughter, and she asked that the family be left out of the story.

i didn't do that, obviously. so in this case, those two villains i didn't get a chance to talk to. >> wait, i have to ask. so you called tommy if lasorda's daughter, and she literally said can leave the family out of it? >> yeah. >> what did you say to that? >> i didn't know what to say. it was a facebook directing message, and it just seemed absurd to me. her dad was the manager of the dodgers. it's been written about, you know, in plenty of other books and magazines. i'm not going to leave the lasordas out of the story. i couldn't honor that request, so it didn't seem worth replying to. >> it's interesting because when lasorda died not very long ago, i thought about his gay son and the peter richmond story in gq, and i thought about you working on this book. and, you know, i think it happens when someone dies, to obituaries are glowing and people remember tommy and the pasta and, you know, blah blacks, blah.

blah, blah, blah. should his legacy be hurt by the way he treated glenn burke and the way he treated his son? >> it should be part of his legacy, is and people can decide if that hurts it or not. i think he was sort of a larger than life character in a lot of ways. someone my age remembers him as a manager, but also, like, on the baseball bunch. [laughter] >> yep. >> he was ever where, right in he had celebrities in and out of his office all the time. i think certainly there was an element of b.s. to his persona all along that his players recognized. when i talked to a lot of the minor league guys that never got called up, they didn't have good things to say about tommy. some of the dodgers themselves appreciated they were a good team when he was managing and they won the pennant but kind of saw through his motivations, you know? talking all the time. i think when you talk about tommy and his son, i do think

that they maintained a relationship. which i tried to be fair in the book. tommy's son, tommy jr., is gay, tommy lasorda never acknowledges that publicly. when he dies of aids, he just says it's pneumonia. there were a lot of families that were basically kicking their gay sons and daughters out of the house back then, and that's the reason why castro was growing, you know? people are moving to atlanta or new york, wherever they felt more comfortable. lasorda never did that with his own son,? he would bring him to games, bring him on road trips, they'd go out to dinner on sunday nights when the dodgers were in town. is -- so they did maintain a relationship that even lasorda jr. in some interviews said was a loving relationship. but how loving could it be if you weren't even acknowledging who your son was? and when it comes to glenn, the fact that they wouldn't allow glenn to be on the team after they found out who he was, i do

think that's a strike against tommy, absolutely. and there are others too. i don't think that he fleeted all of his -- treated all of his players that great. some guys told me stories about some of the women-chasing aspects of baseball that lasorda may have been involved in. so there's, you know, an element to his legacy that, unfortunately, very similar to a lot of baseball guys that we're seeing right now even in major league baseball. so i think you have to take all of that into consideration. >> you wrote something like that, i'm fascinating, i'd never heard before. chapter 11, living in the closet, you wrote about a gay magazine, requesting interviews with players, quote-unquote, living a gay lifestyle. and the twins' pr guy, tom mead, the moral lifestyle of the tragic misfits espoused by your publication has no place in

athletics at any level. your classic gal is just -- gall is just simply unthinkable. do you think that was the general, do you think he was speaking for the majority of the, i don't know, whatever, four major professional sports at that time this america? >> yeah, absolutely, i think he was. first of all, just thinking, you know, you couldn't even conceive that there would be a gay player in these sports according to, you know, the sentiment at the time which, of course, budget true. dave kopay was coming out as a football player around that time. of course, there's been gay players throughout the history of the game. but there were doctors quoted in articles saying there weren't gay men in baseball because they were afraid of getting hit. [laughter] you know? in their private parts. which was so preposterous at one level and also i learned that glenn never even wore a cup, right? >> yeah, that was good. >> so even their excuses of why

they wouldn't be a player were just, you know, beyond the pale. >> all right, so, again, no idea, there are 8 million really fascinating things in this book. i'm not just saying that, fascinating, underlined, marked it up. when he was in waterbury, he lived at the y by choice? >> he did. you know, this was before the song ymca, but glenn lived there by choice. he told his teammates it was because he liked to play basketball there, but really it was so that he could be alone. all of his other teammates were, you know, had roommates in houses around the town or apartment complexes around the town. he had a tiny little room, sounds like basically a jail cell there, and that's where he invited his former teacher from california who was part of glenn's first gay experience, you know? and it was -- and glenn with was kind of figuring out, like, how am i going to deal with this. and he invited his best friend on the team, marvin webb, who

had grown up with him in the bay area, over to meet him and his friends from california. and marvin at that point, you know, early rungs at the minor leagues, knew what was going on with glenn. he told glenn that he knew and that they would always be friends. so even glenn extending that, you know, wanting to share his relationship with his best friend, it was a really courageous thing for him to do at that time. you know, he didn't know how marvin webb was going to react to that. even if marvin webb himself was accepting, if he'd just whispered in the clubhouse about it, there easily could have been other teammates or a manager or general manager that wouldn't approve, and glenn's career could have been over before it started. >> it's actually amazing that considering the insensitivity toward gays and lesbians back in the era, that some newspaper columnist didn't just blow it up. >> yeah. >> it's kind of shocking, actually. >> right. and the sports writers, some of

them were starting to figure it out especially after glenn arrived at the oakland as. you probably know tom weiring, he knew. he talked to mitchell page, the as' outfielder, about it and said, hey, let glenn know if he ever wants to go public with this, that i would treat it sensitively. there was a columnist in san francisco, herb cain, that also found out about it and was supposed to meet with glenn. glenn didn't want to do this interview, but someone else had brokered it. cain wrote anyway that there was a member of the as who could be found in the castro after games and during the off season, and people were able to kind of put the pieces together and figure out that it was glenn. ..

>> we are working on a book and just having a most four years ago, when you're working over 30 years ago, when you're working on a book. do you feel the emotions of that. is it painful to write about. what is it to write about a person's death in such a tragic isolated play. >> it was emotional for me. i talked to a social worker, who remembered discovered glenn living in the cheapest hotel room that he had ever seen. it was just a mattress in a corner of the room. and glenn was sitting there in his boxers shivering and crying. and to read about a party that glenn's friends threw for him as he was dying of a disease.

a sort of last farewell for glenn. no nba player, glenn had gone to high school with him. he was not able to be there at the but they had a video from him playing on the screen in front of the room and glenn is in a wheelchair, in pain on heavy pain medication and he sees this person talking to him in the sort of hallucination cities and, in the is really their paredes and a man, thank you. and he's waving to him. and people described that is such a tearful scene. i could just imagine that happening. in talking to him, he didn't go see glenn and how much that hurt him all these years later than he didn't do it. that was emotional. dusty baker said there was a game when they were managing the giants back in years when it sounds like in 80 -year-old man calling him printed dusty, dusty. dusty said i can't turn around

every time a fan says my name. but then somebody said johnny b so he turned around and it was glenn burke in a study look like he was 80 years old and he was in his 40s rated so was easy for me to feel these emotions because everybody had talked to can still feel these emotions like it was yesterday and then learning about glenn's a sister who i interviewed any times for the book, an amazing woman and she would tell me stories about how she was that it glenn's bed rubbing his feet. and feeding him oatmeal and pita butter and how they would sing songs together at night. and try to make his last days his peaceful and painless as possible i certainly felt that and i hope that emotion, you want to feel a bit of it. i hope they shine through the pages. andrew: i think that something that shines through which is

dusty baker is the greatest human being. he is the best printed. jeff: i was told that. he's out in california. we are trying to figure out a good time and place to meet and then when a text to me and said i'm in and carolina scouting a minor league baseball game will be right there so i drove there. i'm supposed to have about an hour with him before the game. he spent three hours with me i was like we were old friends. it was just so cool to interview dusty baker. i let him know as soon as the book was ready. i texted him and he texted right back but he was as good as advertisement. andrew: we will take the last question here, 2021 as i said, when you're talking to the kids about this book idea, the teenagers. they said all this is great, like my kids live in a world where there is trans kids and hetero kids and so much less

like you think it is gossipy but they barely even talk about interfund about it. it just is not name 2008 nearly the same way in any sort of degree of scandal or that's my god, did your this. it is so common these days. in 2021, 40 years ago, how have you not been able to - with the baseball player. jeff: it is surprising and glenn said that as he was dying, he had hoped that what he had been through would make it easier for someone in the future. that is how his life would pay off eventually i think you might be disappointed in some ways there's not been a whole lot of people talking through it. i interviewed the second major league baseball player who came out after his days were done and he now works for major-league baseball and he told me how to had a lot to do with the amount of money that major-league baseball that the players are making right now. a relatively short like of a

career. and if you're gay player baseball right now, under making a calculation in your mind, i might be playing for four - five years as a good career. in the ability to make good money, change my families forever. i will just come out when i'm done playing if i choose to do so. is it really worth it to do it now. i also think at the same time that we say times have changed people don't think this is a big deal anymore, while some people think it is a big deal. you see the legislation is being proposed or passed in certain states right now. team owners are not known to be the most aggressive people in the world. you can look at, and football even as the nfl would like to stay and painting slogans well so because the players his career. so you have to decide if you want to be a barter for a call in some way. it so i think out especially

with a male sport, hit is been a big year hurdle in women's sports, using a lot more players come out in women's basketball and women's soccer created nothing for the most part, they've had largely positive experiences. i think it is a major-league baseball player who's especially with a good player come out right now, it would probably have the best jersey in baseball. if that would my opinion on it. andrew: hundred percent i would buy my kid one tomorrow. some questions here, she said you do a wonderful job uniting the world of sports with issues that are relevant today how do you select your next topic. andrew: i'm working on my next topic right now printed not written about women sports in writing a book on this first women's u.s. olympic best ball team which in the 1976 olympics in montréal. so that one takes place in the midst of the larger social movement. as of women's rights movement,

1970, title ix. the really change women's at sports in 1972 is on the book when it comes out in late 2022 it will be the 50th anniversary of that legislation so i'm looking for sports books that have been interesting, sports angles but also as part of a bigger social movement. jeff: will you consider doing a book about u.s. sportswriters. andrew: yes, i think that would be a big seller. jeff: okay, andrew, your book is fantastic and you've done incredible research. educators are thinking about using this book in her class and are there any thoughts you would pass on to them. andrew: while thank you, in my young adult book business, i hope educators will use this book in the class. there's a couple things, the first thing that i would say is sports books are legit books.

there's a big section of kids in school who might play sports are videogames who are not reading and especially boys in my books for anybody. you don't have to be a boy to read the book but basically baseball player or baseball player on the cover the might pick up the book and then they might get interested in more significant than that printed so the message of all my books is intended to be stand up and do something. or say something in the face of injustice. the thing that shines through for me is any book about civil rights movement or the holocaust or about homophobia and gay-rights. but there's a tendency of people even who think they're the good of people in a situation just stand by and let things happen. it may be there think will i believe the right things, not being actively harmful to anyone. but, you can't remain neutral in

the face of injustice. i think it plays well where every day kids have a choice to make about that kid that is sitting alone in the cafeteria, maybe they can go sit next to them and improve their day. orchid that is being bullied, maybe is not the foolish thing to stand up for the candidate that is being foolish but you do have a chance to do that. don't live without regret like the guy who did it show up to see glenn in this life or not to live with her people that never stood by him while he was being harassed. jeff: definitely. would you consider, enjoys note this would be a book or more towards adults. andrew: i thought it would be well i enjoy writing for the audience and i love going to the schools and try to get kids interested in reading and

writing. there aren't that any narrative nonfiction sports books for that age group printed and then again i write it in a way that just as any adults will read it as well. shorter chapters, past facebook. it kind of the way times things are going out anyway. people are reading twitter. i think anybody can enjoy it printed. jeff: menus because schools do you get rectangular pieces. andrew: yes rectangular pieces especially in a lot of kids, they don't like to or they might not buy a book but you'd be amazed at the things they ask you to sign. like inside of a derecho wrapper. are there altoid box printed on the back of their cell phone. so somewhere, there's a doritos wrapper with my name on it. jeff: and finding that ebay right now. where glenn burke support siblings supportive of him.

andrew: two of the more. 's sister paula did interviews for the book i think some of the siblings were maybe not interested in doing interviews are the project but i absolutely love talking to the phone paula and i sent the other la members copies of the book and they were more importantly the part of the book, there were supportive of glenn. i really shines through with loofah in the way that she nursed him at the end of his life. jeff: did he have family members who rejected him for being gay. andrew: i think he did but i think they didn't want to talk about it in the book. i can't speak authoritatively on it printed and she was the one incredibly supportive of glenn so i can only assume that some didn't. jeff: pride must know, but as a

future of a sports writing in the next ten years. andrew: good question. in the years past people were talking about what is going to happen with the demise of newspapers. i think there's probably more sports writing now and there was even on the more newspapers. as the necessarily better sports writing. but opinion based writing and the reporting, i think the positive thing that will be happening in sports writing as it's getting more diverse. there are a lot more black voices in sports writing and outlets like undefeated and a lot women that you see everything all day in sports writing and a lot of them have been writing about the things they are facing in the industry but at least it is the numbers are increasing. i think the potential of of helping make things better. i think that will have a real impact on people like glenn burke or like carrie wallace

because her stories have always been filtered through pretty heterogeneous filter before. guys like you and me, writing all of the stories about black athletes in the past or know about women athletes about gay athletes. in members of the media, the latinos focused on sports website. has been great work. they're going to be talking to all the ballplayers. no be able to get their interviews in spanish now and they've never been able to do that before. i think there's more diverse voices in it so i think it will improve. jeff: next question. after jeff jeff hawkins of course, whose most famous person to interview you for unit. andrew: i don't know. [laughter] interview me tomorrow. there you go. jeff: and last question from oj

is the book available in audio format and will be in the future. sue and yes. a former football player, yes it is and it is available in audio format and also in e-book format. so you can get it e-book or audiobook. jeff: i been given the red light like at the oscars but this was great and i do want to say sincerely, and when not, this is a wonderful book. a great read i'm going to have my son read it. and really love reading this book and i thought it was just shows your passion and i just thought it was a really excellent job. andrew: thank you jeff that means a lot and thank you everybody, it means a lot. i think people are having a lot of fatigued these days so thank you for joining us tonight if you buy the book, my hometown

store i will go by and sign it and personalize it for everybody and thank you again. >> looked to be on "c-span2", every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. to be comes from the television company, to support "c-span2" as a public service. >> thank you everybody for coming to this book event with elizabeth becker which is the author of "you don't belong here" which an account of journalists who covered the vietnam war. i'm really happy to welcome you here on behalf of the program that i have done which is the technology media and communications specializations as the school's international public affairs. the institute for the study of human rights at