two youngest members of the senate when i was first day. we were the kids. wewe have been good friends ever since, and i'm delighted to see him down there. i don't think anybody else could have brought our allies together the way he did. the warar in ukraine. >> host: senator patrick leahy, , thanks for your time ad congratulations on your new book, "the road taken." >> guest: thank you very much. >> weekends on c-span2 on intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the lest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 c-sm these television companies and more including media,. >> at mediacom we believe that what you do here or right here,

our way out in the middle of a newish up access to fast reliable in it. that's why we leading the way. >> mediacom, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> good afternoon, everybody. welcome to barnes & noble. today we w are welcoming author martin dugard. is the author of several best-selling books of history including taking paris, into africa and explores, and with bill o'reilly he's a co-author of the killing series, most recently killing the legends which is a a current bestsell. so without further ado to talk about "taking berlin," his latest book, martin dugard. [applause] >> every -- could you come in? my voice does that kerry and

you're out there were not going to hear anything i say. the nice people at c-span have told me to let you know ahead of time if we get to the q&a portion of today, if you have a question we will bring a microphone to you. everything is going to be on mic. so if you have a question raised her hand and they will bring the mic to you. they will do that. anyway, thanks for coming out. used to be as a writer things this were fairly common. you know, you would have book come out andou you do a dozen signings and travel around the country but because of covid and the change in shape of the book world, book signings are kind of where these days so it's really fun to be out and talking about "taking berlin" which is my latest labor of love. i see my cross-country team out there. i see a lot of good friends in all it is. for coming out. you know what? we have some chairs upfront of people to come sit. ideally this kind of russia come on, come on down. don't be afraid.

it looks good for the camera. help me out here. i'm kind of look like i have a following. there we go. there we go. so let me tell you a little bit about "taking berlin" and will get a little back story about me and about the writing world. it's like a citizen to have some of my writers are today because he usually just seen in sweatpants and sweatshirts and this is the only time you come see me in a button-down shirt ever. so it feels good to not be wearing sweatpantss today. "taking berlin" is ssi couldk into s taking series and the taking series was something i wanted to doer some stand-alone books after dozen years writing the killing series with bill o'reilly. bill is a great guy, nothing against bill. we sold 20 million books which is great, but at some point i wanted my voice to be the voice that made its way onto the page, and so in "taking berlin" last year and "taking berlin" was

about may 1940 through august 1944. .. then ultimately it's its liberation. and it was a lot of fun. the problem with writing taking paris was that worldwide pandemic thing. i couldn't actually go to paris too, to write about taking paris. so i cover i used to cover the tour de france during my journalism lifestyle, >> and so i had all the notes from the towns and the cities i had gone in the 10 years that i covered the tour so i was able to lean on those for description of taking paris, but as any writer would say nothing beats travel and being at the location where the story is told best. i got to do that with taking berlin, the last year of the war. why is that important? first of all, i wasn't done with the story when we got to

august of 1944 and paris was liberated. there was still a war going on, still had a lot more fighting to do. and also, too, in the big scheme of things, the last of the war has shaped everything about our modern world ever since 1945, and especially right now with the things going on in ukraine, it's a carbon copy. putin is doing-- like right out of the stalin playbook, so it's nice to kind of visit some history to see that, so when i was writing this book, you know, paris was about paris and everything i could just do events in paris and some of the atrocities that happened and the fighting in paris. because berlin is a different book. berlin. it could have been a thousand stages because we've got the big battles, d-day, the battle of the bulge, russians had an operation bigger than our d-day landing. those are books this

themselves. i tried to show in this book the action, through the eyes of individuals. we have george patton, we have bernard montgomery, winston churchill and the wife of hemingway, a journalist in her own wife and she was crazy brave and she was in a hospital to cover the d-day landings and went ashore even though she wasn't supposed to be there. a phenomenal journalist and a two star general in american history and had a torrid mid war affair with martha. and not only you get a write a war book and a romance in the middle of it, which is kind of cool. let me backtrack, for those who don't know me and some of the students who have wondered how do you become a writer, what that life is like. i always wanted to be a writer.

i mean, since i was a little kid, but i remember literally six years old telling my mom, mom when i grow up, i want to be a writer and the first thing she said, don't be silly, writers don't make any money, find something else. so that kind of informed my thought process. you know, i'm a bad example of how to go into your career path because i mean, i got fine grades, but when i got to college my favorite thing to do is skip class and go to the beach and read two or three books and that made me happy. i knew i wasn't allowed to become a writer and that wasn't a viable career path, i graduated from college, got a corporate job and my wife and i had had a condo, two kids, every day came home from work and was miserable. my wife says maybe see a career counselor, what are you

supposed to do with your life? and i paid a woman $350, an enormous amount for the tests and a week later, she came back and have you ever thought about becoming a writer? here is where we are. i couldn't just up and leave the corporate world, i'd write on the side, in the morning before i went to work. i wrote at work, when i was supposed to be doing other things, i wrote at lunch and what i did was, i started very small. i just covered triathlons and marathons for endurance sports publications and grew so i started working with the triathlon today and competitors and working with outside and, you know, became sports illustrated and esquire and got to the point where i had to pick one or the other and i got a chance to go to madagascar for a journalistic assignment and two to three weeks and my boss brought me to lunch and

fired me and i think he thought i was going to be devastated. but i went back home to my wife, i got fired today. and she said that profound, she said if you're going to be a writer, you're all in. i don't want you looking at want ads, you want to do writing, you're going to do writing. since february 24th, 1994 when i walked out of the corporate world for the last time, i was writing. my writing day is pretty simple get up 6:30, read the paper, i edit what i wrote the day before. i sit down and break, and take a break for a workout 11-ish and go to cross country track and coach, and spend that day. one thing i've learned about writing. is that it's, yes, it's a feast

or famine profession, but it's revitalized me. i was reflect today. working in the corporate world, i was 25, 26, 27,s and every day i'd go to lunch in the corporate cafeteria and i would hear these people in their 60's talking about oh, i've only got four more years to retirement. two years to retirement, 65. when you're 25 you don't want to hear people start to go live their life when they're 65. when i retire then i'm going to do cool stuff and it's been great. because of writing i have traveled the world, i've flown around the world on the concord at twice the speed of sound, i have, like i said, covered the tour de france and met amazing people and so i've been able to live that life for all of these years and i would have been in the corporate world which withering away.

i'm sure if i was in the corporate world i would drink too much coffee and smoke and angry at the world. and instead of 61, oh, i can't wait for retirement and instead i'm 61, i've got way more books to write and sharpen my skills, get better and so i've got the best job in the world and i love it. so, fantastic and the great thing is, too, when we do the travel for a book like taking berlin, my wife gets to come with me and we see the cool places and for instance, when we're doing the latest research trip, we were, it was kind ever frantic because we were about-- i was halfway through this and i was working on taking the legends book with bill at the same time, so i wrote the two books concurrently and so it would be literally three hours of me and three hours of bill and bill is calling all the time trike to get me to edit his stuff and i'm trying to,

literally trying to write two books, like a slow walk through hell, it was six months of creative craziness and you know, so in the middle of all of this, valentine's day was approaching and i thought wouldn't it be cool to go to paris for valentine's day? that would be amazing. and i could dress up as a research trip which was great. so we flew to paris and we went in and so it's not like, hey, honey, we're going to stay in paris and do romantic things, let's go to belgium and see where people died, that's kind of our thing and we went to, you know, we went for the bridge too far stuff. we went to, you know, we went to dunkirk, we went to normandy and then in the middle of all of this, i'm working on the book with bill and bill doesn't know i am ein paris working on my own thing and so he's calling me and he goes, hey, let's go to work right now and edit the last chapter, and so,

we were literally in a beautiful, french seaside town coincidentally captured by the germans in the 40's and i have head phones on and we were in the car and what is the meaning of this. why is is this man in the laptop talking to this thing and reminds you how the world has changed because the fact that i could edit a book at this remote beautiful sea side place in the middle of my romantic get away for valentine's day, it was kind of surreal. it was just a little bit different. so, it's kind of the writing world and you've got to be flexible with it. so, for people who have read the killing series, you kind of know the style. books. the books are, when we started the series with killing lincoln, bill kind of unleashed me. he said go out and how the book is supposed to work, a one off,

killing lincoln and so, i set in stone the formula we would use for the books, the short chapters, present tense and cliff hanger for every chapter and evocative opening, couple of sentences for the next chapter and just in a timeline, everything is in a chronological order, and i've taken that, you know, we used that for all 12 of the killing books to great effect and what i found that some of the chapters were a little longer than i liked, i remember i did some work with james patterson 20 years ago and he is like no chapter should be longer than 1200 words and jim can get away with that, that's short. like three pages and i need to breathe a little more when i write. but i tried to keep the chapters to 2000 words and that's about six and a half, seven pages and i think that that works well for this, but the whole goal though, i love

history, you know, in addition to this writing thing, i have been a fan of history, a history nerd, if you will. since i was a child, you know, all of those books that made me want to become a writer and i have some of it at home, some fisher price, children's history books one of captain cook and ended writing a book 30 years later, written martin d, in the four-year-old handwriting in the book and the history thing is real with me and it really -- one of my bugaboos, i feel that history is something that people are drawn to, instead a love the academic history writing, traditional history writing is very slow, and it's dull, and it's an attempt to, you know, put as many details on the page so that you're not telling a story anymore, what you're doing you're throwing facts at the reader. i was reading a book last night

and i got like 20 pages left in it and not going to say the name of the book or the author, and some point i realize the author would stop telling a story and research at me and 30 pages left and want to put the book down and walk away from it and my goal, i don't want anyone to feel that way about anything i write. i want it to read like a thriller, like a ludlum book or a steven king book. i want people to turn the pangs. i don't want this to be a book where you open it, read two pages before you go to bed and fall asleep on the second page. people e-mail me and say thanks to you, i was up until 4:00 reading your book and that's what i want to do. i feel like history should be like that, and as you read it, you're transported just like great fiction and you turn the pages and you can't stop turning the pages and you just want to know more and more and more and you know, maybe you put it down and after a couple

of hours, but the next day after work, you can't wait to go back and get more to it. when i'm not writing history, i don't read history for the most part. i usually read like really good fiction because i want to-- when i read other author's stuff you can see what you're doing well personally and what you need to do better personally. sometimes the writer can transport a phrase and how can we transport that into nonfiction and try to find ways to get better. it goes back to making history books something that you want to read and that's what i try to do with take "taking berlin". we opened in may 17th, 1944, which is, it's this little known moment in history when all of the top generals and admirals on the allied side gathered in north london to hear the plans for d-day, which was going to take place three weeks later and you have the

people and dwight eisenhower says if hitler would have dropped a bomb on that room that day, they would have destroyed the allied war effort. i went back to that place because i tell you this is how much of a nerd i am. first of all, i wanted to go to that place and see what it was like, what the room was like. but in the opening line of the book i describe the room and i talked about it, but i described the wooden doors going into the room and i did my research and i kind of-- they're gothic, they're not victorian, but i was thinking maybe they were maple, maybe they were oak. oak, okay, this is london, big oak doors and the package in the room were pine and i thought the door was pine and i wanted to see this place and make sure i made the write choice and i read the plans and seems like they were pine and nobody knows. it's not there anymore, the

nazis blew it up. they did drop a bomb on it years later. it's a nerd thing and kind of fun and the details that i want to bring to the book and i don't want to overwhelm you with it. let me read the opening chapter, it's short. hang in with me, you've got to listen close because my voice doesn't carry that well, but so it opens in may of 1944 and we kind of, we introduce a few of the characters. my wife is sitting over there, she hates when i do this. prologue, may 15th, 1944, london england, 9:50 a.m. winston churchill is on time. the lecture hall entry doors are thick, pine, victorian, the prime minister does not stand in the long line.

nor does the king of england, but both know better than to be laid. this morning the presentation at st. paul's school is the most important audience event in western history. rules to be obeyed, doors closed and locked at precisely 10 a.m. late arrivals denied admission. british general bernard law montgomery of st. paul's alumnus and host for today's event has made this very clear. as everyone entering the room well knows, monty always gets his way. military police block the entrance, large men, unsmiling americans, polished helmets, side arms, generals and admirals present single file to present their engraved summons. no invitation, no admission. every allied in waits in the queue except for the french, they're not invited.

nor the rrussians, they have plans of their own. british and american accents and an intriguing display. on the stage was a map of the normandy beaches, hinterland, set in slope so the audience can see it clearly and high officers explaining the plan could walk about on it and point out the landmarks. churchill will write. they have relocated to the countryside for the duration of the war. and there's peak roofs, stained glass and chimneys everywhere. and they're planning the invasion of france. the head master's house is now his personal quarters. monty has organized today's event down to the minute. each officer takes a seat on

the hard wooden benches most often used by teenage school boys. the heater is broken, no one takes off their coats. the prime minister sit in padded arm chairs, for montgomery, dwight eisenhower and no less than the british sovereign, george vi. today is top secret. no cameras are present and eisenhower will later joke adolf hitler could have killed every top american and british officer with a single well-placed bomb, but the hitler' europa is hardly a surprise. hundreds have been assembling in great britain for the single purpose from hitler's grasp sometime this summer. coincidentally on this very day, general montgomery graces the cover of life magazine, a

portrait of monty's character is inside and cromwellion. and they will be at the general's life style. he lives in complete simplicity eats the plainest food and has no rec creation except that of reading detective novels and stories. and human fraltty. equally large feature runs under the headline, american invaders, unmasked in england. shows eisenhower, coats and gloves, french beaches drop from the sky. and they don't know the number. allied soldiers transported in 1 1rs 590 landing craft and 6939 other naval vessels. goings down the rabbit hole in

my geek way. bear with me. it's smaller handing zone, omaha, utah, sword, gold and juneau. paratroopers go in first and invasion by air the biggest in history, reads a subtitle accompanying a photo of 100 parachutes over the countryside in the a practice jump. how to treat the disabled of the war when they return to civilian life. hitler is well aware that allied forces will soon attempt to land in france, but the fuhrer does not know the date. d-day in military parlance. and the only man who knows that is general eisenhower and even he is uncertain right now. at 10:00, mp's close and lock the doors. montgomery is famous for giving an audience two minutes to cough, sneeze, blow your nose,

and after that no interruptions. the room is quiet as eisenhower rises to begin the proceedings. supreme commander of the force. the audience is to hear each detail, naval come barredment, aerial assault, and the landing beaches where the soldiers will confront a german force that fortified the coastline with guns big and small. intelligence reports that rommel, germany's notorious desert fox, is personally overseeing a wall designed to throw the invaders back into the sea. i welcome you, says eisenhower, on and it's cut short as a thunderous mounder on the room.

general montgomery stands and glares furious. he gives no indication for the military police, and they know who is the other side, audacious man, and eisenhower is silent. this is monty's show, the general who is not backing down must make the final call. more pounding, louder, impatient, reality sets in, montgomery's carefully scripted presentation replains a side show so long as the hammering continues. whoever is on the other side of the door is a fool or force of nature so determined to walk in not afraid of offending those in the lecture hall.

montgomery ang grily orders the doors open and to no sprites, a six foot two, silver-haired american stride into the lecture hall and winston churchill recognizes him and will order him a whiskey to celebrate this move, george patton. >> that's the prologue when i first wrote the book, you know, you have to find a way into the book and you always want to know, you know, you have to start the story at the beginning, but where is the beginning. my beginning originally was the fall of paris picking up where paris left off and i realize it's funny when you write and sometimes the people you're writing about they want to tell their own story and they kind of yell at you as you research to be more in the book so we don't start with you go a 26th,

1944 in paris, we start there may 15th, 1944 and go through the d-day landing and chapter one which i wrote about that paris moment is now chapter 14 now because it's funny when you write these things, you know, i could hear patton's voice telling he wanted to be more of the story and hear churchill saying go back to d-day, why aren't you writing about d-day, the biggest event in history. and that's the one of the wonderful things about writing, you have the "taking berlin", it sounds like a very kind of blase' military book, yet another book how the allies captured berlin and i wanted to make it more human and people spoke to me, eisenhower, gavin,

even stalin, and put it in a way that made them human instead of dry historical figures, i think as you read it, that's what you're going to come away with, i'm pleasantry supplied the reviews so far have been extremely kind. but what i like about it, they'll say stuff i never heard of gelhorn, who is gavin? and to introduce them and if i write about the people. they're so real to me, if they walked into my office, i would not be surprised in physical embodiment and to tell the story in a fast-paced intriguing way, maybe the end of the book you don't wait for the next book in the series, "taking london", comes out next year. and you want today know about hemingway, and gel horn,

dissolution of marriage and churchill how he oversaw the demise of the british empire and saddened by all you saw and rallies gave us a great speech in missouri and predicts everything that has happened, predicts the iron curtain, he predicts the soviet empire. predicts there will be a war between east and west for the control of europe. all of that stuff is amazing, fascinating. so i hope you read the book and take this away and don't just say, you know, as you read it, go, i have to read this history book. i want you to say, wow, this reads like a piece of fiction, like something that makes me want to read more and deep into the night. so, that's my thing, let's take some questions. anybody? remember, we've got to do the microphone guy. the microphone guy is here. >> so when you were doing your research, was there-- and you traveled around to europe and germany, was there

anything particularly impactful that stands out, like any location that you said, wow, i really feel this? >> you know, for this book, two-significant places, first, there was, in the dutch city where the 82nd airborne famously, if you've ever seen the movie "a bridge too far", american hero, americans are in flimsy collapsible boats and paddling to where the enemy is waiting on the other side and the enemy is firing at them. they don't have enough pad les and they're using the rifles and the way they died were horrific, they were basically a shooting range for the enemy in plain sight and they were barely moving, it was a horrible, heroic thing and ultimately the paratroopers,

triumphed, those that made the other side were furious and went after the enemy with a vengeance. to are me, it's fun before you travel and the travel is like the cherry on top of the cake there or the pie, whatever. and so we got there and we had driven i think from brussels that morning, a pretty good drive and then you get up on the side road and i'd researched it so i knew like the bridge, the 82nd airborne had to capture and just intuitively i knew if i followed, a series of roads outside of town i would cross that bridge and boom, there it was. 10 miles later we get to a bridge which has been rebuilt since world war ii, but that's not what i wanted to see, i wanted to see where the paratroopers crossed so i kind of did a little map study and figured out it had to be about a mile down river next to a

factory and the factory still stands. and so, we get there it's one of those things where, literally, just my gut told me stop the car right now and i literally stopped at the monument that said this is where they launched the boats. i was so happy, you know, and it's the site of a cross-fit gym and it's not everybody is waiting on history. there's a berm, and they had to pull the boats up over the berm and 300 yards to the water and she's waiting in the car and okay, can we get this over with, i'm geeking out about this. but that was great. and then, you know, i've been in normandy before and i've been to omaha beach, you know, i was at the american cemetery there one time during the tour de france, a cold, misty day that stayed with me. on this occasion i wanted to see the general led, like

chapter four, led to the beach and had the rangers lead the way. and kind of stood on the road where it all took place, and you've got the beach here, you've got the berm, the road, and then the houses and then this cliff and i realized, that the road i was standing on was nothing, but barbed wire and land mines back in the war and the berm down below is where the american soldiers were cowering because the germans were everywhere here and just firing at them and because of the barbed wire, no way off the beach and all of a sudden, this brave general says we need to get off the beach, let's -- we're going to die and they wanted to be inland. and you think it's going to be a seen of devastation, the houses that are still there are largely the ones that survived the war, same houses there then and they're nice summer houses, if someone had a place in, you

know, laguna beach on the water. that's the kind of thing where people went for summer vacation and had that feel to it. it was hard to imagine that a place so inviting and genteel and the air smelled of, you know, the salt from the english channel, it was wonderful. it was hard to imagine that this was the site of tragedy and bloodshed. it's one of my favorite-- a picture of me standing there, one of my favorite photos. great question. >> why didn't they like the french and why didn't they invite them? >> well, a lot to that. had a lot to do charles de gaulle and that's a setup and i can push for taking paris and we talk about charles de gaulle and taking paris.

a, nobody writes about him and he is an an influential 20th century figure, but he was so arrogant. he was so awful, and he was so insistent on getting his way even though he came hat in hand to the british and americans, and nobody could stand him. at the same time he was so sure that the french, that france needed to be liberated and americans needed to go and in get paris not by pass paris like they were going to. they didn't want de gaulle around because he was going to be a fly in the ointment and in the end of the day, they didn't need him, but he inserted himself into the discussion two months later. yes. >> the process of my question i was watching "bridge too far" last night and started the book tuesday and got to that point. in the movie two german generals talking what would happened with the allied troops

decided to invade holland and they said who would they send, patton or montgomery they said of course patton and one of them said i'd rather it be montgomery, and the other one side eisenhower is not at that student. the whole garden market thing. show boating or going up into berlin that way? >> yes, yes to all of those. montgomery was show boating to set the scene for everybody, and in world war ii not to get too deep into the weeds in the low countries, holland and belgium, the british were there and patton after paris, he's south of paris going into germany, couple hundred miles south. and patton's style, go, go, go, montgomery was very british, take his time, gathered his

men, have his armament and only then would he attack and then that was the downfall of market garden because, montgomery, the whole thing was planned and executed in a week, not montgomery's style. he needed to behave like patton to win this battle and he was incapable of behaving like patton. in an interesting side bar about market garden, a great battle and encourage you to learn more about it after you read the book, the dutch war college before the war had done a full war study about, okay, if an enemy is going to come into holland and try to get through holland into germany, which way should they go? and they named like three or four different road, one road they sawed we should not use by any stretch of the imagination

was the one that montgomery used. it kind of failed. it didn't fail horribly, but a lot of people died and it was especially the british. the americans came out of it looking very good. so -- any other questions? yes, sir. >> testing, testing. so i'd like to just get your opinion on this and kind of like a two-part question. one, why do you think that people like kyrie irving are getting slammed to be historic figure and two, going back to the war, is it true that the french were robbed by the germans for their art and culture. >> yeah, and i will -- i'll repeat the question. the question is, why is kyrie irving in trouble, and did the germans loot the french art treasures. i'll start with the second one first. so the french were ingenuous,

they took everything out of the louvre and other major museums between september of 1939 and june of 1940 when the nazis came in and use that had time to hide them in the country in chateaus and that's why the nazis, although the nazis did loot a great deal of art, they didn't get as much as they wanted to. the mona lisa was not theirs for the taking. and you could, kyrie's troubles right now go back to 1933 with hitler when hitler coined the term, i can't remember the german for it, he claimed it was the big lie. so if you make up a lie and it's big enough and if you say it often enough, people will believe it and he used that lie to disparage the jews and blame the jews for civilization and the big lie, loved it so much, putin is using the big lie and made its way into the american

politics and all of those things back then are here right now. repeated. and it's going on right now. i'm not going to go into it, but it's hatching, it's a thing. so can we take one more question? does anybody-- no burning questions? all right. let' call it. so, everyone thanks very much for coming out, i'm going to sit here and sign books if you want a book signed. i see friends, i see wonderful people and thank you very much for coming out, thanks, appreciate it. [applause] ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sunday, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors, funding for

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