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since 1979 we've been your primary source for capitol hill providing balanced unfiltered coverage of government. taking you to where the policies are debated and decided with the support of america's cable companies. c-span, 45 years and counting, powered by cable. >> hi, everybody. welcome to barnes and noble. today we are joined by the offer martin do guard, the author of a great many books on a great many topics including "to be a runner," into africa further than any man. with bill o'reilly is the co-author of thell best selling author of killing history books most recently killing the whichis about the salem witch t. his book, his series on world war ii, taking paris, taking berlin, continuess with taking london winston churchill and the fight to save civilization. please welcome martin do guard.

[applause] >> i've been told i need to make sure i speak into the -- can you hear me okay? it's not on? and you hear me? okay. so, let's start with here's what it looks like. i want to make sure the camera gets this. [laughter] very important, most important thinger ever. it's called winston churchill the battle for civilization. early reviewers found that misleading because really what it's about is a lot of winston churchill but it's also focused on the battle of britain itself, the period from may 1940-september 1940 where literally civilization hung in the balance. if they lost, hitler and nazi germany would have beene able to invade england and then everything would have changed,

herschel would have been imprisoned and executed. the king would have beenso taken off his throne. everything we think of when we think of england was changed and solidified that month.h. so, as kevin was saying politely, most of you probably know me from -- i've been a writer ever since i quit my corporate job, well i didn't quit, they fired me. [laughter] no one wants to get fired but when my boss told me i should find something else to do with my livelihood, i was probably the happiest guy in town. so anyway, i've been doing this a long time. the first 15 years, my first books which were more sports at the start then transitioning in the history of the first 15 years it was a solo act working on my own and then i got connected with bill o'reilly.

we worked together and did 15 bucks. we just finished the 15th. the number one bestseller, so it kind of boosts my name a little bit, but it's time we kind of broke it up the band a little bit ago and i think it's better. we are getting to the point where i need to reestablish myself as a solo act and i think it's a greathe way to do it. of all the w books i've written, and i've probably written i think somewhere between 25 and 30e since 1994. i think taking london is easily the best thing i've ever written. so if you've read killing lincoln are killing candy or any of those, my book about i think that this is the summation of everything i've been doing and i'm really proud of it. so, for those of you that don't know my story, and i look around and see a lot of familiar faces and most of you probably know the son of the pilot, this guy

sitting right here, 92. when you, grow up on air force bases you develop a certain fascination with flight. and some of the bases we lived on when we did live on the base near the flight land, you wake up at two in the morning you can hear them running in the middle of the night to the maintenance crews doing their work. so again, flight became part of i wouldn't say my identity but very much the background noise in my life literally and i don't know where this came from. i like to pinpoint it as the movie that came out in 1969, but i developeds a fondness for spitfires and i'm really not sure why. my dad was going twice the speed of sound and i am on and i kind of let it go for a while so, you know, when i left the corporate

world and mostly at the time writing magazine stories about running a triathlon, 30 years ago and at some point because i was freelancing the whole time and was traveling almost three months of the year, at some realized i needed to stay home and i began writing books. that led me into history. and i had always loved history when i was in college and i loved history even as a kid i had these children's books with my 6-year-old name written in them, books like captain hook and all these people. and as i began writing history, i realized that the one thing wrong about history is it's written in properly. it is a very boring academic manner. and from my very first book

which was about captain cook, i went on this mission and i'm on thatak mission to the state to make history readable because i don't like history books that grind you and i think most of them do. i think history is the core of a thriller and i think it reads better than any modern thriller and i try to read the books in a way that when youea read it you don't feel like you're writing about history but some distant people or distant time. i want to put you in the action. it should feel like you are watching a movie or waiting on a greatti spy look like a bourne identity. that's what i try to do with this. there is a lot of pushback. the better things go and some of the techniques i use i write a lot of stuff in the present tense. the research, i want them to be

there with me as i go through that mystery right and we do that with taking london. we open with churchill long before when he predicts what nazi germany is going to do and what they are going to be, and then we tell the story through the eyes of the four pilots, brand-new pilot, veteran pilot and american pilot joins and then an oxford student who has so many conflicting issues he doesn't know if he wants to be a pilot or a poet. you bring all these people and that is the story of taking london. so, and again ever since i left the corporate world and decided that i wanted to do history and focus completely on history, i don't do fiction even though i would like to one day, i don't write about sports anymore, although i obviously follow them, but the thing i want to do is i literally want to change the way that we read history.

the first person that challenged me after i'd kind of written the book by captain cook which was my first, when i worked the james patterson and he came up with some really cogent things to think about. write chapters that are shorter because people feelen successful when they finish the chapter and become a scientist like psychologically uplifting to finish a chapter so if it is 2,000 words instead of 10,000 words and you feel like you got stuck, you feel better when you finish the chapter. you have a strong opening. anan opening where you put the reader in the moment and finish the chapter with a cliffhanger so the reader doesn't want to close the book and go to sleep instead of saying one y more chapter. that's what we are going to do. and then of course the research, the research has to be so deep. patterson i told me you can't fe anything don't even fit to be be

staying. researching this book about the battle of midway i literally spent an hour this morning researching the guy that discovered midway island in 1859 and what happened to him and i found out his wife died, she drowned at sea, but i can't find this guy and instead of writing 300 or 400 words in that hour, i justst was chasing his life andi guarantee when i read the book it will be a sentence. but it has to be that level of commitment to the detail. so, anyway, thanks for coming out. i tell you i just love taking this on. this is the publication it camen out tuesday, june 11th. so whensp it goes on c-span, i don't know but tomorrow is father's t day i think is the perfect father's day gift i call it top gun meets the nazis. that's my elevator pitch.

so that is it you have these amazing pilots, they are equally good but it's one of these things that this book is, you know when you write a book it's just a thing that is near and dear to your heart you hold it close and your proud of it it's not like a v child but it's something very close. then it's like when your child graduates high school or college and they go out into the world. when the book is released, it's like tuesday it finally came out and i turned this into a publisher a year ago. it came out and i spent the whole week kind of wallowing in my sadness and i realized what it was i was learning the other day and i had to stop and think you know what i'm sad about his i've got to say goodbye and now it's out into the world and people can see wonderful things about it, horrible things about it and there's nothing i can do. for the rest of eternity the books out there haveha to say goodbye to it and break up with it as it were and then move on

and finish the new book. but anyway, i look out here and i see friends. i see family, i see my runners, thanks for coming out. thanks everyone for coming. i appreciate it. before we sign books and stuff, let's open the floor for a few questions for anyonene who migh. we have to make sure we get the microphone to you. >> in doing the research did you come across something that was fun or exciting in your research and was there anything you found shocking that you discovered? that's a good question. i'm going to start with the churchill thing.

people say if you could have dinner with three people, which one would it be, i'm not sure who else but it would be i would love to sit down with churchill because it would be he would have a scar and his cheese and he would talk down over everybody but he said something interesting. two interesting things happened. when i wrote this book we were in hawaii and i was supposed to bero a lifelong honolulu to lonn to do some research and my wife was going to fly home. we changed plans from la to london, we were jetlagged. earlier that day we went to see

the ted lasso set which was super cool. i got to fly and a spitfire. you wear p a parachute and haveo learn so in other words if it goes down i know how to pull the canopy off and jump out of the plane. it's not like the dreamliner it's a little different but it was super cool. and then we stood in line to see and we were tired. it was late. the line was super long past the tower bridge, way down. we got in line and about 1:00 in the morning we finally after about eight or nine hours we finally got to the final pass andat it was a moving moment tht was. it made it really special. soso i got to out of the three. what's three, what did i miss? >> anything shocking. >> here's the thing.

when you write a history book, i like to go into the book knowing what it's going to be like. like i knew about the battle of britain because when i was 8-years-old i watched that movie at the base theater and i still remember that movie and started this book and went back andat watched it. it was made soso soon after, thy were flying the real spitfires which was amazing. the thing that shocked me is how important this battleli was. it's kind of lost a little bit now. we had the 80th anniversary of d-day which of course that changed the course of the western civilization. they just had the 82nd midway change. the battle of britain is that battle in europe. the stakes, were so high. the stakes were enormous. if the british had lost, america

would have been next. it's not that far-fetched at all. the battle in the pacific was broader distances than what was fought between the distance of say london and new york city. so, the stakes were extremely high and i kind of wrote it in the gravity that came around to me. it gave the process a little bit more validation like i was something that wasn't just popular history, it was important. people need to know about it and they can'ts forget about it because it is asas big as d-day and midway. yes ma'am, we need the microphone. you have to. it's the rules. [laughter] >> there's an inordinate amount of time that goes into research

and i was wondering are you the sole researcher or do you have any assistance? >> it's just me. i'm kind of a history nerd. when i worked with bill, the process was that i would research the books completely, i would write the book and bill would put it in his words so that's how we brought them together. with this, when you have a co-author like that they can direct you a little bit like a little bit more of this and that. when i'm doing a book like myself i have to focus on making sure that i cover all the bases and what that means is what i do this morning focusing on the ship but what happens is then he wants the ship native family masts does it have, how many people aret? on the crew, what d they eat, what were the

conditions like. and it goes deeper and deeper. and it's fascinating. and as my wife will tell you it makes for a lot of knowledge nobody wants to hear about me. there are so many times i will say to my wife let me tell you about what happened and she will say no don't want to hear about it. i talk about cross country and i run that. but yes the research is fine. it's like if i start a book knowing just the outlines of what the book is going to be about and then i, at some point it's very intimidating. it's so big how will i learn about the battle of britains it is k you get to know it and then you know it better and the silly little facts, but they are important. they have a little bit of detail in the book and then you feel like you own it. it's a little bit more

confidence. which is why when it finally comes out and it's like it's not just a book. it is the summation of two and a half years of my life of full immersion into the time in historyab that i knew nothing about and i became passionate about enough to go to england several times and do all the churchill stuff and it's just i love the research. it's great. thanks for asking. >> what made you decide to switch to the pacific theater? >> good question. so, the series obviously i'm going to go off my own direction its use that knowledge, but the

first i went and we researched fantastic moments there. we were there and they were taking down the place. and this guy said to my wife and i are you americans.re yeah, sure. he said do you want to help us take down the flags, so we got to take down f the flag and it s wonderful. so, but at some point the battle for our own gets overshadowed. june 5th, 1944, so nobody wanted to hear about it. they wanted to hear what happened on the day. hee didn't tell them until twor three in the afternoon. soca i went into paris because i didn't know much about the expectation other than the movie casablanca so that is the

gateway drug that is how you get into something like the battle of britain movie got me into the battleg of britain, casablanca got me into taking paris. taking burlingame next because it was right after we liberated paris and then straight after it didn't happen that fast. but i wanted to go back to london because i felt like there was unfinished business with thl battle of britain. again my fascination from a young age. and then it just felt nice to shift gears. when i was working with jim patterson one time, he told me always play s on the big stage. so instead of working for a very small story, i keep working for these big stories. andt you've got to learn a lot and find a way to take all these details, this mountain of knowledge and funnel it into simple and concise writing that makes people want to keep turning the pages. and that is where the research comes in. here's the thing.

it's almost done and i don't know what's next. i don't know if i want to do a taken book or if i just want to do something a standalone not taken book but i do like cold war too. it feels like a good place to park for a while. >> when you put together, obviously a lot of stories have been written in history has been recorded on the battle of britain and did you go a different direction to make it more something different and find things that hadn't shown up before? >> there are some topics let's say abraham lincoln and christopher columbus and the category that there had been so

many books about them that the chances of finding some little bit of data that has never been published is tough so the other option is take all the data and tell a riveting story but in a fashion. so there are several books. and i cite them in the back of the book. several great battle of britain books and again as i started the process, it was so intimidating because how am i going to tell the story any better than they did. i had a book to write. i had a deadline. i have a mortgage, man. so you find a way. but what i did was there were so many pilots that wrote books about their experiences in the battle of britain. so it's sort of focusing on trying to outdo them. i found pilots and later on i found their memoirs and

researched their lives and kind ofof made it in action narrative instead of this british history book where everybody is sitting in parliament and arguing instead of in the cockpit is the whole idea. you should feel like you are in the cockpit with the pilots. that was the big payoff for me. yes, sir. >> a quick question. i'm wondering why you have yet to approach pearl harbor and then may be sort of a different direction. have you ever thoughtdo about doing -- >> you read my mind. a couple of things, pearl harbor in the midway book is something that is so overdone. i can't tell midway without telling pearl harbor so that is in this book.

the hangup i have is i need to write off and an excuse to fly places. i'm not going to rush anything. whatever they call it now. i was wondering what percentage of your time is in research versus getting organized to write his writing and finishing and how do you organize all of that information that you get so you have it at your hands when you are trying to read the book? >> over the course of the history stuff that i did before that, the process you would think that it would be fine to but it's more like get up in the morning, have some coffee, read over what i wrote the day before and if it is horrible, try to forget that it's horrible and fix it a little bit, but you

have to keep moving forward. you can come back but you have to keep moving forward. once i start knowing a story, i literally research it line by line so if i'm going to let's say put you in parliament september 1, 1939 when the war is about to begin, you know i, okay i described parliament. but that's the thing in and of itself. everything is upholstered in green. what year was a belt and all that stuff. that's a little bit of time. then the people in parliament, who were they and you can't just say these five people because you could do that, but that's boring. if you were watching a movie you would want to know what they are about. are they cheating on their wives, are they people who are not to be trusted or people that are extremelytw trustworthy. then you've got to tell those.

line by line l by line the fun part goes when you've got a whole book written and you know the topic, then you go back and take all thatt stuff and then yu make it pretty and use the fancy words and start messing with the timing and just the little tricks. that's where it gets really fun. i turned my manuscript and for taking long then. it was first pass, which is the first look at the manuscript before it starts moving into being an actualk book. they don't like you to make changes at this point. ifif so, they should be minimal. 205 changes to taking london. i had to call and say look i'm super sorry about this but i will fight for this. it does make the book better. no problem, just the second pass don't make any more changes.

then to meet with my editor and say i'm sorry about this, but what do you think. so it just the whole idea you make the book as good as can possibly be but it's a brick by brick process and then you get to the end and get to sign books on a beautiful day like this it feels magical. >> if you could tell yourself anything before writing taking london, what would you tell yourself? >> don't be afraid. sometimes when you write a really big story that there is a world of history experts out there that will, that's the only thing they know about and only thing they care about and they can't wait to write an amazon reviewer facebook message saying you got this wrong. the easiest thing to do is just be paralyzed and say maybe i'm

just going to write fiction. but then you'vee got to go you know what,o i can do this. i'm talented. but it's a day by day process because like this midway book, trying some new stuff. it's an often told stories of trying to tell it in a unique way that puristsig might first o i don't know about this, but i need to bring them in and they start to write where all i don't believe thatw, i'm going to pull it off. so there was taking london there are so many days where i said i don't know. i can't do this pilot justice. i can't talk about marshall downing.as then again it happens and it feels easy. so yes, we need the microphone

again. >> just curious in selecting the fourch pilots, are those based n real-life characters and if so, how did you do the research? every bit of it is all true story? >> the trick is to take the true story and make it sound like it was made up. so take these people who did such amazing things. things you and i could not comprehend doingng and then filling it in such a way people go that never happened. that guyea never flew, playing chickenn at 300 miles an hour that would never happen. all those things if you can do that and if i'm being true to their own written word and their own descriptions about what they did and their own squadron about the events that took place, if you can take that fantastical experience and make something that the reader says now it is all made up, that's magic.

i'm doing my job. >> my last question. perhaps a suggestion have you ever thought about doing a children's series? something that -- [laughter]rf what got you into history and when you discuss how boring it can be and how it's just a grind i think that is true for so many children and so ii thought maybe -- and that's a no. he feared i wasf going to be oe of those kids that never left the house and read books all the timeec because i was one of thoe kids. i did little league and all that stuff. it really isto a special skill o write children's books and, i mean, that you have two totally broad story in a limited number of words. but i go back to this question

history is not boring. most history books are boring. the way history is taught in the school, history should be taught as if it was a big story, great. something people should go to history class and what's going to happen today. they should leave, like i never believed that is what history is like. so i'm trying to write my books. i love when people say your book read like a movie. will say i feel some elements of the screenplay with that with just the opening of each chapter and stuff like that but i want people toli feel like they are watching a visual experience even if they are reading about an actual physical experience. we did for the microphone, young man. >> you spent years writing, did

it freak you out when the show masters of the air came on and you're like they stole my idea? [laughter] >> yes. and here's the thing. you always want to feel like i don't write books to be movies. but this is the first book i ever wrote where i said this is a movie. it's visual. it's everything you have all these emotions and feelings and again, it's not just an american. amazing loyalty to the united states air force, but when you see a book like that, okay, so they aredo probably not going to do a mini series about pilots anytime soon. [laughter] but who knows. but iit watched it and i loved . so i really can't complain. one more. >> do you ever reach out to the

relatives and actually go to their house and say this is the resemblance that churchill had, do you get that opportunity? >> no, because the world war ii people are aging out. there's one living battle written pilot, still alive. his name is john hemingway. he is irish, 104-years-old. it has an oma's to him, i put one of the descriptions about his time spent in france in the early days of the war because he deserves it. but if you go on the facebook pages you can see someone say my grandfather flew there, but they can't help me. they can't give me, if my travel budget is not endless, if i'm going to go to london, if i'm going to talk to someone, they have to be able to provide that

information that is going to make it into the book or even if it is just subtext. but on the other hand, if they got in touch with me and said you mentioned so and so, i would definitelyan correspond. i think that is important. everybody, thanks so much for coming out, great showing, great afternoon. thanks. one last question, or are we all done? okay. we are going to pullig the table over and i'm going to sign books. one more. one more. >> i read somewhere that you were very interested in the spitfires and everything. but didav you have -- i'm not se how much is available. did you ever look at the 109's or the aircraft? >> they have one of them

completely refurbished. ith didn't see anyone tends butt the same time it's great because you go to this museum and i feel like i got all the research i a cup of time to get coffee, you turn a corner and there's everybody. okay we are here for a little bit longer. so it's amazing to see stuff like that. and so growing up in the airen force bases, one in nebraska that was a great museum of all these old planes and one of the things my brother and i and our friends would do on a saturday morning, unbeknownst to my dad, is we would crawl under the gate to the museum and then we found out to be 17 and 29, it was

super cool. we went inside this one day and this guy found us and pulled us all out. i think that feeling of being inside an aircraft like that, you know, i wanted to bring that into the book. ..book tv, every sunday

on c-span2 or any time online at booktv.org, television for serious readers. >> saturdays american history tv features historic convention speeches, watch notable remarks by presidential nominees and other political figures from the past several decades. this saturday illinois senate candidate barack obama emerges on the national stage and gives the keynote speech supporting john kerry as president at the 2004 democratic cob venges. >> this year in this election we are called to reaffirm our values and commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up to the legacy of our forbearers and the promise of future generations and fellow americans, democrats, republicans, independents, i say to you tonight, we have more work to do. >> and former massachusetts mitt romney speaks to 2008 republican convention delegates after a

strong showing against senator john mccain for the nomination. >> we strengthen our people and our economy when we preserve and promote opportunity, opportunity is what let's hope becomes reality. opportunity expands when there's excel means choice in education, when taxes are lower, whenever your citizen has affordable health insurance and with constitutional freedoms are preserved. >> watch historic convention speeches saturdays at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span2 and watch c-span's live campaign 2024 coverage of e democratic national convention, august 19th through the 22nd and you can watch the republican national convention any time on our website. >> the house will be in order. >> this year c-span celebrates 45 years of covering congress like no other.