i know i'm not the only one watching. i could probably go at least another hour discussing these issues and potential solutions. thanks to her audience for joining us tonight, and beth and brian, consider this an open invitation to both of you to come back together or separately to cincinnati to the mercantile library. again, folks, if you want to buy this book, press the by the book here button. and if you want to know more about the mercantile library we are atan mercantile library.com brian and beth website or in the check. and again thank you so much for joining us and happy reading and have a good night. >> thank you all.. thanks for everybody for coming on this virtual thing. i miss being in person but it really appreciate the opportunity. >> booktv on c-span2 at the

weekend for the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for booktv comes from these television companies who support c-span2 as a public service. >> we are very happy to welcome grace olmstead to talk about her new book, which is here, called "uprooted" for its come out in a couple of weeks but you can preorder from amazon so if you like what you hear we think you should run right out. it's really an amazing book. grace has written for a number of publications including the book a few years ago, and has focused a lot on the themes that are reflected in this book and has also a remarkable and wonderful newsletter, sup stack of whatever, i'm too old to exactly what you call it but

it's wonderful content that she's been circulating around. today we're going to speak a lot about this book as well as some other related questions which i think comes up with the core issue of to the american character, combined with human natural nature, which is to lay down roots come to know wht tradition is. in the country that sometimes doesn't care about that too much. and so how those things interact especially in her own life, even how she comes to where she is. we're 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 which i i can tweet t once the initial presentation and then a couple of other questions i might have to get us

started. we will go through anybody's questions that they put in the chat and then at the very, very end i will and i minute or two so we can learn about the russell kirk center. grace, if i could leave it off with you and just tell us where does this book come from, what kept you going as you go through it, and as you read it what themes or topics should we be looking at in looking for as we read through it? >> well, thank you so much. it is an honor to get to be with you all to talking about this book. and and i hope that if you ret you will enjoy it and come away with some of the themes and ideas that mattered so much as i was putting together. "uprooted" is wrote a book about and inspired by gratitude. it's a book written for my

forebearers, , in particular for my late great grandfather who we fondly called -- he was in his 90s when i was a child, and some of my fondest childhood memories are the times i spent with him listening to his stories, helping shucked corn that it grew on his farm or helping players old favorite gospel hymns on the piano on the violin at family gatherings. he was in his 90s but his mind was just incredibly sharp and he loved to tell stories about his wife, his memories of farming pre-tractors, of the silent movies he watched as a boy at the old theater. he lived and died in the same community where he was born. he spent all 90 plus years of his life caring for the same acreage outside of cat and going to the same church.

although -- i find remarkable that grandpa chose to stay come and to bless his people and his place in addition to the work he did volunteering in the local to me to come frequenting local businesses, teaching sunday school, working with and for his neighbors. grandpa dad also thought to bless his committee with the cropsey group i've often called grandpa dad sweetcorn crops his passing in accordance with proverbs three which commands the reader to honor the lord with thy substance and with the firstfruits of all by increased. grandpa dad group sweetcorn just to give it away. he planted it specifically to bless his neighbors, family members and members of his local church. after he had harvested it he would bring to my grandparents house and we would shock and cook and freeze the court altogether. it was a crappy crew to nourish and bless us.

so back when i was in college i had picked up learning as a way to get away from my desk and just 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 in the air. i remembered freezing in my tracks because all of a sudden i remembered grandpa dad but in some ways it seem more appropriate to say i felt grandpa dad, because in that moment i could feel his presence as if you were standing next to me. i remembered his old clingy work shirts, his laughter come his country voice, his calvinist or hands and the stupak and i felt i could hear them say my name the way he used to. it's a hard moment to explain even a because in the moment it almost felt as if i'd been visited by a ghost, a presence never seen but intensely felt. i've often wondered whether russell kirk the master of the

stories might have convinced me that it did indeed feel the presence of a ghost. but regardless i did feel his joy and is left in that moment. as i thought about him that day i realized that everything i am and have achieved is -- to his determination to bless future generations of his family and that small farm community. i begin to ask myself that they whether i might own something to the past and the place because of grandpa dad's life and his firstfruits. and so "uprooted" came to be. it is the result of the years of study in interviews and reading that followed that job. the book has some personal notes that i consider the role of nostalgia and homesickness complaint in connecting us to the past into place. i asked whether our world might be highlighted by what wendell

berry identifies as the absence of present ms. and be present of absence ms. in his book. the book both begins an instant with the town graveyard where the question of what we owe to the past and where we will be varied. but the book explores these concepts of indebtedness and rudeness within the soil of my great grandpa is farm ten. looks to the past and considers its history, economy and culture and tries to trace the legacies of both blessing and brokenness in its path. then the book turns to another generation considers the farmers and tells people living there now, a larger cultural and political pressures urging them to either stick in place or to leave it behind. i think it's important to consider all of this because our society has such a long history of cultivating and promoting closeness. it was once called the united states two populations, the

boomers and the stickers. argues our country has been populated, 24 and rebuilt repeatedly by these groups in their various guises. but even while the stickers have played an absolute vital part of our history, it often feels the groomers have failed our cultural megaphone. stickers are those who settle down and invest. boomers come to its track value from a place and then to leave it behind. but another way to understand this concept wraps is to think of these populations as consumers and stewards come those who deplete a place for their own gain and participate in our larger throwaway culture as pope francis put it, or those who seek to be rooted come to cultivate fruitfulness in place for present and future generations. in the west, deeply rooted in places are exceptions rather

than the rule. the one thing he explained all western places are new come for another minute people establish them came to the village or to work for privileges rather than to settle for life. this becomes obvious when you look at the boom and bust cycles in places like idaho were many aspects of the natural landscape -- gemstone timber sold, water, silver and gold come just to name a few have been severely decimated by the cycles throughout the decades and centuries. for as long as idaho has been settled, it seems people have come and gone and things have gotten hard. it seems at this point the cycles of complex and depletion have gone on for so long that they often seem normal and just accepted at this time. patrick argues in his book why liberalism fails, a favorite of

mine, that liberalism itself is largely responsible for this sort of consumptive destruction as well as for the individual and group which incentivize their spread i think. he writes in his book, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are 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 toward promoting consumption, appetite and detachment. in our culture seems -- one's ability to leave a place behind. the american dream in essence of the economic and class transient, the ability to move from poverty to wealth, and american economist, politicians, celebrities, even teachers often log will really a progression instead of any sort of planted mentality. we tell promising and people you

will go far. our cultural touchdowns in disney movies to pop songs generally suggest that separation and departure are inherent to triumph. our elites are usually the most transient boomers of us all. well it's a longer built through her allegiance to community or town for rather achieved in isolation by individuals. we were well most often through rootlessness rather than through loyalty. when prosperity abandon the place, we abandon it, at least if we are able. the wealthy and corporate success stories of her own world i think are generally jetting from coast to coast with country to country. christopher lasch wrote it's important for us to understand that modern man is fully unconscious of his debt to the past. our elites find it difficult to imagine a community that reaches into both the past and future and this constituted by an awareness of intergenerational obligation. but if there isn't a better

definition of what it means to be a conservative, i think that might be what it is. sadly, he read that most ambitious people understand that a migratory way of life is the price the beginning ahead. rootedness in community stewardship i believe are indispensable to communal flourishing especially in our world community because in rural towns, literal forms of rootedness on ecological level such as the health of soil, plants and animals are most often undergirded by rooted mutual giving communities. by people and associations who care about permanence, about what edmund burke called the democracy of the dead and unborn that make up our past resident in future in a place -- present. in the book quest for commuter account is more than a simple place of residence and occupations. it was itself a a close association and its members were

bound to live up to its articles in customs. the villages kept alive sacred obligations of mutual aid, religious space and political responsibility. but he argues and on society and time, capitalism has substituted quantity for quality, process for function, big news for small this, and transform intense community is a purpose into the sprawling relationship of the marketplace. i think america's farm towns by nature are enforced rootedness. held onto the virtues of medieval village longer than most. but they have dwindled if not disappeared in more recent decades, especially probably since the 1980s on prices. even during world war ii and after, farmers were being told that international trade should take precedence over the cultivation of local markets and

sales. army was no longer to be understood as a primarily regional enterprise meant to people and established rather a global and heavily political enterprise. we have created a system that judges the 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 the prophet and utility. when i was working on my journalism fellowship back in the day, which is about the struggles of family farming and farm towns i remember i had to sell a lot of people in d.c. on the idea by explaining why farms mattered for national security or global trade or the like. it was weird to find people who leave in rural america or its farmers for their own sake, at least that's how it often felt. a co-author of the book hollowing out the middle about real americans dreams, and she told me she also ran into this problem while she was working on

your book. she win them sure asking her, so what if real 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 but many rural towns are considered interchangeable and expendable, valuable not for the own sake but because they are resources that can be exported to other places by large corporations. but many rural or small towns is contingent on whether other states think of them, take from them or offer for the pic this is something when the bear and economist john have both referred to as economic colonization of rural america. rural people and cultures are exploited not to benefit rural people but to increase the wealth of corporate investors. and dash of agriculture is the primary means of rural america's

colonization because it is extracted and emphasizes profit over long-term health. as we build the fewer, larger and more specialized farms and decreased both local markets and locally purchased input you can see that many rural communities seem to have lost the 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 light on the degree to which we are undervalued though small connected farm villages, the fonz of life to cultivate in their lifetime and the virtues that fostered matter deeply for communal health. while farmers build a culture and a shared set of beliefs, values, goals and practices, that emphasized stewardship, volunteerism and responsibility. the farmers that undergirded this community worked hard to build a job opportunities for

the k2 grew up there and did the best to keep health in the soil. when a farm community is working i think will be neighborly and multigenerational. it will be made at the farmers are training the next generation, whether sons and daughters are completely unrelated young folks who just want to get a start on the land, a farmer community is a membership, village that preserves culture and tradition and place. members of past and carries it forward into the future. its membership which i think conservation can be linked innovation which we preserve and protect even as we continue to create. a turn of the century botanist who studied to stand agriculture in india suggested that soil regenerates through this life cycle of death, decay and regrowth. to cultivate we must be investing as much or more fertility in the earth as we take from it. if we instead deplete the grants resources, future generations had the price.

my own ancestors were not rich when you first arrived in idaho, along with other relatives from kansas who had what was called the idaho beaver. my great, great grandfather traveled i don't around the turn of the century and to begin developing a 40-acre farm to this date outside just a few miles west of him it. the hardships of holling c, travel, clearing the land and building -- they became discouraged. everyone moved back to the heartland except for walter and his wife who decide to stay fixing place was not easy but they were proud of what they built. when the big depression roles run walter and leanne opened up their home and farm to families in need of shelter and offered hospitality to them. they didn't have a lot but that enough to share, to serve others in the community when you are

called upon to do so. and i think that my grandpa dad learned the importance of rootedness in committee service from seeing his grandparents come just as i learned from him. there was a change of membership and belonging that the handed down along with the virtues i kept that team strong. not everything of course planted in the soil during my great grandparents time was good. farmers can and do abuse the land and its inhabitants at times in exploiting natural resources and people surrounding them. many forms of industrialized agriculture in our day i think have continued to see subjugating workers, , animals, soil and water so desire for larger crops to eat. the sort of image there are often still traces of arsenic and other chemicals that were once sprayed in old orchards in the soil. chemicals from past generations that continue to poison the ground. there are farmers currently working in their lifetime to

restore that depleted and broken so, and to so help and wellness instead. in the book to ask the reader ms miss of whether we also ought to think of our lives as nourishing or depleting our own home soil while there a good and we can reap benefits for future generations of whether our consumerism and transients might poison the ground long after we're gone. i fear those of us who grew up in the soul of our small town farm sleeve come we remove the life that should have remained the wood resulted in nourishment for the next generation. this matters because the price that would build on the part of america's upper class isn't educated class. it's jew by those who either do not have the money, the opportunity or the desire to leave. people left behind in aging towns often see few opportunities for the future. unlike both social and economic security. there's those who stay in place or second-place -- the

assumption there were not enough or are not enough to do something more with their lives. but i believe the farm community can't ensure nurture life of its inhabitants. i think him it is testament to the look and work of many past and present community members to click in every person testifiedd generation hardship it has legacy that is beautiful but also marred in trouble in various places. a needs to be loved for its own sake. opportunities need to be loved not for anything they might do for far stretches were but from what they can do for the own community members. i believe this is the only way we can begin to fight off the exploitation and abuse that is often characterized our world homeland. it's a week begin to go places that trot newcomers and keep the children of the land in place by valuing places in local vocations just as our medieval forebears did. and by keeping that local location paramount as our --

other distant populations. our lands come towns and cities have always needed people who will stay and try to heal broken ground who will try to restore -- [inaudible] to bless future generations. what i think is perhaps less technology is the fact that we need to stay for own sake is with her that it is good for us to be rooted in healthy soil and that our deep indebtedness in place and any community. to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognize need of the human soul. by virtue of natural participation in the life of the community which preserves certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. pope francis in a speech he gave

in 2018 noted that there is no worse form of animation than to feel uprooted, longing to know when. i land will be fruitful and people bear fruit and give birth to the future, only to the extent it can foster a sense of belonging among its members, create bonding between different communities and avoid all that make us insensitive to others and lead to further alienation. wendell berry used that as an embodied hymns we cannot get ourselves apart from faith or community but even what obvious distinction can made between our body and of the bodies and our body in the world, it is also true that all these things that in his words appeared to be distinct are nevertheless, caught in the network of mutual dependence and influence that is the substantiation of the unity to such a beautiful thought. body, , soul, community and word

are often susceptible to each other's influence and conductors of each other's influence. our health is inseparable from the help of workplaces. but the work of being held back to these candies will be as wendell berry has said is difficult and uphill work that will probably require several generations. we need to reestablish local cultures, restricting our sense of communal memory and reanimate traditions of care. bringing back help may require some chin genetic part of h conservatives and progressives over the social political and economic that mr. we created in our country and how it does often make it difficult to live a rooted life. for instance, i think conservatives should grapple with the argument that capitalism is especially prone to fostering the patient of the eponymous individual if you wrote capitalism is great and personal system sees humans is

individually energy and production rather than as members of society or a place. while that doesn't mean we don't a lot of wealth over the course of our history, it also means a deeply ignored deeper spiritual and communal needs and broken down the social path that is 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 and well-being under own. the fabric of is not enough on its own to meet the needs of its citizens. humans create membership within localities and associations and rather than building a cultural or political environment that would foster this sort of belonging, liberalism has historically done the opposite. we could do about in rural america by not just investing in individuals like for instance, giving subsidies to individual farmers but also by looking to support fictitious and networks

that support them. that could involve protecting farmland the agricultural easements, providing lands that help past land down from one generation to the next, revitalizing straggling downtowns, and countless other measures that also connecting members at a local community and enabling them to help and support each other. reform could also happen by investing our capital stewardship in long-term care rather than an temporary profit. for instance, private actors to invest madrid of its kind in rather than cash crops. efforts like this would make a massive statement about our priorities as a country, whether what to encourage short-term profit or long-term fidelity and healthier it would require people to stay in place and cultivate something for the long haul. i think when have a simple but yet incredible difficult of us.

we need to reanimate people's love a place. we need to make rootedness great again and convince more young people it is, in fact, a good thing to live in a quiet provincial place and to love it well. this is in many ways the work wendell berry has done his entire life. during his essays, novels and poems. these examples suggest to me it is perhaps first and foremost the work of poetry and art, drawing the souls of men and women toward homecoming by animating their imaginations and him up. but i think it can also play a big part as grandpa dad's story make clear. if not for his example i would not have written this book. i think each of us choose service, to love placeable and to live. and my mind returning home or speak at the importance of rootedness shouldn't be about nostalgia. there is a place for nostalgia

and it can be a good instinct to think in some ways they can also form as a distraction from the actual level that we should be forming. one thing i know, percocet loving a place well means loving it for what it is with all its brokenness and all its vice and seeking to dress and reform the sinks rather than to ignore them. anything less is idolization, not love and a fear that would create a blindness amongst home comers that would prevent them from truly knowing, serving or loving their land space well. ask for me a own life i don't know yet when the weather i will return to idaho. i hope to someday if job and life circumstances allow. but i'm also committed to living like my great grandpa as i'm able, as a transplant and hopefully display the same stewardship and love in virginia for as long as i'm here. i hope that's a helpful message to all those people who perhaps cannot return home or don't have home to return to. not all of us are called to

homecoming but i think all of us can try to live a more rooted life. >> thank you. that was wonderful. i do want to catch up on a couple of things you had said, which as an example, going back home. .. >> that's' what happens. if you're stuck in your town, you should just get up and leave. not that the market is a human-designed system for certain prefaces, certain common good, it just happens. and then destroys your town. and then someone like bill kaufman, i don't know if you've heard of, who's one of my favorites, he spent a large part of his high out of his hometown that he grew up in in upstate

new york. and he's, no, i'm going back. that town is just as rich and is just, has just as many moving and important stories that maybe i could write about or i could relive again or explain to my children and another generation. so i don't care what the free market model is supposed to tell me, i'm going back. and so you have one on each side of that side of the story. and your question about what would 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 come in that basically said you all need to leave this island, high school graduates. you should go find another job somewhere. and their families were, like, you're lobster people, and we shouldn't be paying you to teach them to leave us. [laughter] and people have to, of course,

as you say, as a friend of mine explained to me next, there is something sometimes called a vocation. if you feel like you need to be a medical there of some kind that can only be done in certain cities and that's what you feel either your skills or your divine gifts you've begun piven, you have -- been given, you have to go, that's one thing. but you don't belong here because look at this place, it's too small or something, whatever, that is not -- that's a lesson someone can change and say, no, we're going to teach you how to survive and maintain in this community. and i did read in your book, and maybe you can tell us a little broadband -- bit about it, there is a governmental driver in addition to the corporate market working together in this way to say that we want you away from your community. and participant of the reason is -- part of the reason is we can have more control of you. we can turn you into a, you know, a consumer and to the

point that you were making before, sure, you can join some sort of community in your big town that's, you know, maybe political and maybe only agrees with, only has to agree with you on everything. you can't go to a place that's less virtuous than you think it is or has to be in love with its good and its bad. instead, you can stay with us where we all think the same thing. and do you think that those obstacles are, when you say it might take some time, are those the kinds of messages that conservatives or progressives who are, you know, are in our way about small communities and what communities should be, that those are things that still have to be surmounted? >> absolutely. you know, it's interesting because farris march is a rural writer from kansas who's written a memoir called heartland and has written a lot about her own experiences 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 we all too often define value, the value of living in place only by economic profit. and so, of course, by that measure perhaps it is best to leave a small town behind. if you're not going to be able to proceed if up the ladder the greater economic success or perhaps even within whatever realm, profession you're in you're not able to gather greater prestige as you work on your writing, for instance -- >> right. >> -- that could also be an argument to leave. but she said, you know, what are we measuring wealth and value by, and are we able to include in it the ability to look up at the night sky and to see the stars, the ability to live in close proximity to one's family, the ability to live in the land and to love it well. there's all these other forms of value that just aren't getting taken into account. and perhaps they aren't taken into account because you can't

measure them very well generally. [inaudible] the things you can measure on quantitative rather than qualitative measures. i think in terms of the way that our government often times has impacted these communities one thing i talk about a lot in my book is the way that the farm bill9 and the u.s. department offing 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 was a message that there were too many people farming, and they wanted to consolidate land in the hands of fewer people which -- [inaudible] farm villages and farm communities and made it so that instead of being able to rely on each other for support, farmers increasingly had to look to the state and to the federal government in order to give them the emergency help that they need whether it's through comp

insurance, through subsidies, through getting their crops to market because they were no longer being grown for local industries that would, you know, be selling them to local consumers. everything was then at a scale and of a model that left out the village. and instead went straight from individual farmers to the state. and i think it's interesting how how -- foresaw a lot of this and wrote about it in his book, how that breakdown of the intermediary institutions, the associations that results in a situation where individuals are completely reliant on the state for all of their goods that they need in order to have a flourishing life. but it is a broken, a broken form of flourishing. it doesn't have the community solidarity that supports the beauty of a village that they used to have. >> no, i think that's exactly right. and not only should you depend on me, the government, that does

separate you out from all the unnatural connections that aren't the government. and i do think that that's a very -- that maybe at the time it was well intentioned or whatever, but at the end of the day it resulted in a lot of people having little to rely on at the farm level x. then the people they said, no, you shouldn't be farmers anymore now are scattered everywhere else. and shouldn't the government policy at least take that into account and not just say we're an international farming community that would have to feed the world. to do that, we have to get rid of our citizens and where they want to be. so that analysis in your book struck very deeply to me even though i am not a person from the midwest. i grew up in brooklyn which -- although no one believes this, but in the '80s was a lot of

very tiny communities who were stuck together. and there was something in that '70s '80, '90s, there was some movement of making things more expensive. new york city was doing various things to become an even bigger attraction to finance capital, and people started to leave because they couldn't afford to live there anymore, and we're breaking up those communities that had been there for a long time. and one of the, one reason why -- and you say a little bit of this in the book -- people sometimes choose careers or jobs even if it's a place that's not so aattractive to them is so they can stay near their families. you know, i could be, you know, when i was 26, i wanted to be a professor of classics. but that wasn't going to keep me

in new york -- [laughter] which is where i wanted to be. so i had to try and do something else. new york city happens to be, for better or worse, that city that absorbs a lot of opportunities. mostly for the worse, but -- [inaudible] it turned out to be okay, at least for me. and so the other question that i was thinking of asking is, and you mentioned this in your talk, is that so do you think that wanting to maintain those community habits no matter where you might be, is that do you think specifically a result of your experience, or is that something that you think if you -- each person a little bit and talked to them about it, that's what most people want. even if they can't go home, most of them don't want to come to a big city and move around

forever. but they're being told that's what they should do. to your point, because of the quantitative measures we count. so do you think it really depends on where they've grown up, or does it matter, just what people care about and that's what they need to be encouraged to do? >> i -- it's such an interesting question. i think that the family you come from, the place you live in can probably make that inner voice stronger or weaker. i do think that it is right that it is probably an inner longing for the human soul 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 examples are you going to even draw upon in order to make it real if you don't have that in your lived

experience. and i think that for a lot of people if they have lived in the case where they have examples to draw on, relatives in which they saw rootedness happen and saw that it was actually the an enjoyable life for them, then it makes it feel more possible. i think the average american is somewhere in the -- moves somewhere in the realm of 11-20 times in their lifetime, so we just have had a tendency as a culture to move around quite a bit whereas a lot of our counterparts historically didn't have those same inclinations whether because they owned land and it was kept in place for longer as part of their inheritance or -- [inaudible] i think it's de tocqueville actually who says americans, in part because we don't have the same aristocratic nature as our european forebears, we're just much more used to moving about

and seeking greater wealth. and we are very distent with our -- discontent with our fortunes. and that's not always been a bad thing. but i think when you look at the actual health of our towns and our ecology and landscape, you can see the toll that that is taking. >> and i think that all that is true, and i would put the general although not always disposition of americans to come and move around and look for more money to be different than some of what you describe in this book which is this is the government agency telling you you have to do this. this is what the corporate os are telling you -- corporate organizations are telling you what a consumer should be and why you shouldn't live around there or stay at home. those two -- one is building on the desire for the first, but it tends to have more of a detrimental effect because they're together. i think that's exactly right. and let me ask, i have a question that's come in.

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 seen it or you've talked to them about it? was the challenge at all writing about not your, maybe not your great grandfather or grandfather, but other people in town? and do you think, what do you think their reaction might be? >> i hope that it will be positive. i tried to do a very careful job of writing respectfully of every person that i wrote about and of taking their experience into account of using their own words and of talking to people multiple times so that i wasn't just showing up once, getting the story and then leaving, but i was -- as much as i was able to -- keeping in touch, cultivating a relationship and having a long view of their life and what they're going through.

and so i'm sure that they will disagree with me on some things. that's inevitable. [laughter] and i'm sure that anytime that i am critical, there will perhaps be some defensiveness. that's also understandable. but i, 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 -- >> right. >> -- my point was going to be. and so i really do hope that that shines through. and and i've also been able to share the entirety of the book with several of my family members and have been really blessed to get their feedback and thoughts. so that's been wonderful as well. and my grandpa wally is responsible for a lot of the historical family anecdotes, and so i'm really grateful to him for sharing all of that time with me.

>> that's great. that's great. finish and someone else has written in saying that they're watching or living in vermont which has gone through some con con -- consolidation of school districts. the population's getting small, and there's a lot of concern how to move to a larger scale organization, causing the loss of community identity within those places that are now being absorbed. can you tell us what either emmett or the statewide school organization looks like? are they consolidating with different places, kids have to travel further, whatever the example might be, and are there -- do those communities still have their own specific community schools or are things getting bigger to accommodate the fewer kids to get them all in one spotsome. >> yeah. i know -- spot? >> yeah. i know emmett still has a couple of high schools, middle schools.

one interesting thing that's happened that i cover later on in my book is that this area is actually suburbanizing because boise is one of the many cities that is incredibly popular to move to right now. so there's kind of a mixed blessing there in the sense that it's gaining some people. but farmland itself is being paved over at an astronomical rate. i think the statistics say that somewhere upwards of 60% of its farmland could be gone in the next several decades. and so that's a problem that we need to grapple with in terms of thinking about the land that we've been given to steward and how to steward well, how to build well so that even as we welcome new people in, we're not losing the lands that we've been given. but in terms of the school districts, i know that they've struggled to get -- [inaudible] make improvements on the local school. one of my favorite experiences

which didn't actually make it into the book mainly because of space was a local farmer on the bench telling me about the one-room schoolhouses and how back in the day he remembers how they would walk to school, and it was much more of a village atmosphere in which not just the town itself, but breaking it down into these very minute regions of these families who were interconnected by their one-room schoolhouses and where they were on the bench outside the town or in the town of pearl which is nearby or ola or these various places and how they each had their own character because of that small, very dense school system. so i know that some of that has been lost, for sure. >> right. yeah, your passage about the paving over the land as it got closer to emmett was heartbreaking at least to me. [laughter] okay. a couple of -- another question. so if you can provide any more

detail about the tension between a desire for localism and maybe some level of capitalism or liberal capitalism or not. are they necessarily always opposed, or is the, the question is can we maintain the good of what capitalism can do which is and has made people who were poor more, more able to live, or do we not at the same time while fostering a love for place and community, they have to be one or the other? >> very difficult question. [laughter] i'm just going to be honest and say i don't feel entirely qualifieded to answer. >> yeah. >> i have really appreciated the work of people over at the open markets institute to look at what it would be like to kind of look at our situation in terms of the monopolies that have been

put up around agriculture, many of which are fed by crony cap limb. you know, it's a situation in which the government in many ways enables the growth of these large monopolies, and they feed off of each other in various ways. that's something that we could be fighting better. and if that were to happen, we might actually have a newer, open and more free market in which smaller players and local industry clusters would be allowed to hopefully rise back up to the surface. and i think that would be very interesting to explore in greater depth. i was recently talking to someone who grew up in pennsylvania on a farm who told me she thought that my next book i should write should be about how actually capitalism and the health of small family farms are incompatible. [laughter] that was her opinion. [laugher] i'll have to do a lot more research before i'm able to come to any sort of -- [inaudible] on that.

>> right. [laughter] you know, in just thinking about in light of this question, i don't think they're necessarily incompatible, but you have to prioritize the good that you want. and if people want to live a liberal capitalistic life are, move to new york, move to san francisco, move to chicago, but don't impose it on everybody else. let those communities live the way they want. it's a big country. what i grew from your book was that this, a lot of these -- i shouldn't say a lot, but a certain amount of driving factors were basically policies and perspectives that these people wanted imposed over the whole country. and they weren't accepting your comment about people should leave the farm, about, you know, who cares about the farms or whatever. that's just a perspective. they should leave. they shouldn't say, no, we're going to have fewer farm owners.

that's going to be our policy. so i think that there may be some ability to accommodate, but it's the unclear. and so i'm going to ask you a question before we leave since we are at the russell kirk center, i do have a comment about russell. in an interview i think you gave, you said nice things about him. at the end, i'd like to hear how you found him and what you thought about about his writing, whatever else you can remember. >> well, i first read russell kirk's work in college, and it just immediately resonated with me on a gut level. as i think often times certain works can when you meet a kindred spirit through the printed word. and one of my favorite quotes is that he said he found himself a conservative once i began to reflect on such concerns. [laughter] and i can relate to that very deeply. i think because of my upbringing

and -- [inaudible] many of these things were imparted to me by, i think, wendell berry said at one point by osmosis. there's these cultural traditions that we take in often times on a spiritual or a subconscious level before they even become if fully clear in our heads. but then as i began to read russell kirk and he began to express those thoughts verbally or on the page, i began to see how much they had informed my character and my view of the world. so the importance of order, the virtues of modesty and prudence and the importance of particularity and distributism. there's so much that he's written in his various essays and written works that have continued to form what i think about the world. and i think he continues to be vitally important to restoring and reforming conservativism

today. and i think that it would be wonderful if i could just go ahead and spend another, another book talking about the work of russell kirk, and i wish i had quoted him on this, but i'm very thankful for the work you guys are doing as well just making sure more people are reading him and understanding the performance of his philosophy. >> well, thank you. and it's funny you should say that, because although we come from different backgrounds as indicated, i read russell's work, and it hit me like exactly what i wanted to read because what he was saying was part of my lived experience, but no one was talking about it in new york city. and i first learned of him in college and did the same thing, boy, this makes much sense to me. and so as i continued to read him and got to hear him speak a couple of times, which was really great. so i want to take, make sure -- did you want to say something

towards the end? >> yeah. thanks for covering so many different topics and i'm sure a lot -- [inaudible] we didn't get a chance to talk to yet. but i just wanted to say a couple of things for those of you new to the center. russell kirk, author of the conservative mind and so many other books, essentially to transmit an inherited body of learning. and then in that way, to aid in cultural renewal. and i just want to let you know if you don't receive our newsletter, we have a regular print newsletter which is twice a year, actually. it's called permanent things, and it is -- and you can just sign up for that either on the web site, kirk center.org or send me an e-mail and just with your mailing address, we'll get that out to you. i do want to pick up on one thing that gracie mentioned

which is that the kirk center is located in michigan which is, if any of you have been there, is my dad saw it very much as a romantic ghost town because there's a lot of empty stores and abandoned family farms around. it looks somehow row plantic in his eyes. romantic. but it was his ancestral -- that's why he ended up settling there his whole time even though he traveled for speaking engagements and things like that. but something else you said kind of struck me too, because my kids actually call it the middle of nowhere. [laughter] literally what they call it. it's actually, essentially, in the center of michigan. so they affectionately call it that, so i can understand a lot of the connections that people think of with the various places and kind of the rural area and kind of the, a lot of the towns

that my dad, well, when my dad settled there, there was that boom and bust cycle. they came in as lumbermen, and my dad said he was always atoning for his ancestors planting tons of trees in the area. he was fortunate in that time when he was young, he could take the train up through there. unfortunately, there's no longer passenger rail, and i think that's a contributing factor to the fact that there's not a lot of -- what should we say? there's not a lot of traffic through this in a good way. you see some traffic through there, but there is a lovely bookstore, there is a used bookstore. 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 in our town -- >> that's great. >> and this spring it will reopen, coffee and cream. you know, a small -- mostly ice

cream, small coffee shop and things like that. so we're hoping to bring some people back in again. but it is, so when you come to the kirk center, the actual library -- my parents, my mother is, of course, still there. and it keeps that sense of rootedness. i think there was part, for my dad, obviously, it was a very important part for him both in terms of the -- [inaudible] that way as well as the actual, the physicality and locality of it in that. so a little longer than i expected, but there were so many different themes in there i just wanted to pull out as well. thanks, gracie. >> thank you. >> well, thank you again very much. thank you for coming here and talking to us. everyone listening should rush right out and get that book.

it's out in a couple of weeks. thank you again for spending the time with us talking about this book and the important themes that you've put in here. >> oh, thank you so much, all of you, for coming and listening, and thank you so much, gerald and cecilia, for the work you do and for including me tonight. >> great. thank you. >> all right. >> all right. bye. >> bye. >> c-span's long-running series "book notes" is back as a podcast. book notes plus. hear compelling in-depth interviews with authors and and historians. new episodes are available every tuesday morning. on the latest episode, the best and worst, writings by u.s. prime ministers, journalist and -- presidents, journalist -- shares selections from his book, the best presidential writing. book notes plus, the new weekly podcast from c-span. subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and get information at c-span.org/podcasts. ♪♪

>> booktv on c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for booktv coming from these television companies who support c-span2 as a public service. ♪♪ ♪ >> booktv on c-span2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. tonight at 9 p.m. eastern on "after words," in her book remember: the science of memory and the art of forgetting," neuroscientist lisa yes novo e discusses how our memory works. tonight at 11 p.m. eastern, university with of pennsylvania religion professor butler argues

that racism has a foothold in white evangelical racism. watch booktv this weekend and be sure to watch "in depth" in may with new york times columnist and author ralph -- on c-span2. >> and now on booktv's "after words," democratic senator tammy duckworth from illinois talks about her life and career in the military and in the u.s. senate. she's interviewed by politico's congressional editor elana schor. >> host: thank you so much for joining me, senator, to discuss your book. >> guest: thanks for having me on. i'm very excited to be here. >> host: i wanted to start, you know, your entire life story has so many emotional moments. as a congressional editor though, on a lighter note, i loved the portion of your book where you say people tell m