>> stacy schiff, author of at least four books. what is the best training to become a biographer? guest: probably a career as a private investigator. if there is anything that i sadly >> i had been working in publishing. i was surprised, i was coming off of great books.

i was struck by how lucid and brilliant of the writing was. it was a pretty lousy aviator, his aviators were constantly clearing out the ball of paper. no one had really delve into all the pieces. >> simon and schuster. how many years? >> only a couple of years.

in fact, the timing was particularly fortunate in terms of that book because i was starting just at the point where people were beginning -- they were still alive. his girlfriends were still around. in terms of hitting a project it just the right moment, i was lucky. >> was there a biography you had edited that made an impact on you to do to our doing? >> and orson welles biography. viking had the good fortune to publish the biography. he had just died, which is always the publishers greatest dream.

it obviously been a terrific education for me in terms of how to shape a book proposal. for the writer, biography has an obvious structure. that's the beginning, a middle, and an end. you also have the pleasure of killing of your subject. it is a particularly gratifying kind of work. >> now, correct me if i am wrong, i was actually able to closely pronounced, is not a household name, is it? >> i think for a long time my publisher field -- felt out only be able to write about difficult names. it was an uphill battle. as much as he was a best-selling

writer, his work is largely forgotten, or regulated to a great french class. -- eighth grade french class. >> he amused himself with these little drawings. is the book that most obviously survives. >> again, go back to the beginning of your first writing. have you written much before you had become an editor with biking or simon and schuster? >> nothing of any length. with a possible a exception, i did a corporate, annual report. i did a lot of cutting down. one of the other editorial

assistance at viking in those days handed me her job of cutting a biography down to the embarrassing parts, like frank sinatra beating his children or whenever they were. >> what would you say from your experience of editing and writing that the public wants? >> something that is streamlined, were you are always looking over the shoulder of the subject. you do not want to lose sight of your subject. you want to feel as if you are somehow involved with the center of the biography. i think you always want to give your reader that feeling of the pages turning, whenever that feeling is, work time, or something more domestic. the big names are always hungry for another book on toward washington or another take on thomas jefferson.

something that is mystified, a name that is familiar or somehow foreign. like in the case of cleopatra. it is known, but in that moment you realize you do not actually know that much. >> the four books you have written are what? what year? >> what a good question. 1994. the next book was about -- another non household name. that was really a portrait of a marriage. the third book was about ben franklin and his years in france. it was very difficult to research, but a thorough pleasure. and now, "cleopatra." >> a lot of your stories, said the nine states. is there reason for that?

the road about his time in paris. -- you wrote about his time in paris. >> he was washed up in new york as a russian exile, from germany, to france to the u.s. with ben franklin, there is this unknown piece of his life and a very unknown franklin. in paris during the american result -- during the american revolution. this is a man speaking a language she does not speak particularly well. i thought i was somehow playing with day original idea in some way. i'm not sure the answer would be, cleopatra could be anywhere. it's about the salem witch

trials. i felt i'm back home in some way. >> and when will that be? >> many years i am afraid. this is someone in the future still. i'm a couple months into the research. >> de still live between canada and new york, or canada and boston? >> yes. >> but you married a canadian? >> i did. >> how long ago? >> 22 years ago. >> do you have children? >> how old are they. >> what do they think of a writer being like this? >> i think that for the most part they think i type for a living. i do not know, it is a really

good question. maybe that is a good thing. i think the are grateful for the fact that i'm a negligent parents. >> do you think your father had an impact on you and in what way? >> my father never read my first book. he died right around the time of publication, which was a huge disappointment to me. i obviously think of him often. it was that first moment when i had changed careers. i'm sure if you were to really look into this, studying people out of context, working in different locales, something to do with i grew up. the whole point of a biography is you do not want to the pitcher own life, you want to look at someone else's life. >> what did he do? >> he owns a clothing business. in adams, mass..

>> was he a reader? >> he was not a great reader. my mother was. >> is she alive? >> she is alive. >> what kind of an academic issue? >> she is a brief tour of european fiction as opposed to american fiction. i think to grow more on the borderline between american fiction and what people were writing did europe -- were riding in europe --were writing in europe. >> what are your own rules about how you want to bring your kids up? >> i think all of my kids are good readers. they have read everything except my books. i should have said that. although books have always been

a feature in my kids' lives and a happy one, i think i have been more recessive about pushing those books along the way. some of them are better read than their mother. >> what impact did it have going to williams college and where is it? >> it is in western massachusetts not far from where i grew up. it is a great school where i did a lot of philosophy and history, much more than i did any other kind of literature courses. a fabulous faculty and the library. great student/teacher ratio. it was a tremendously good education in terms of writing and intellectual probing. >> if you look back at when you were at williams, was the best

biography you had read at that point? i had read are biography, great question. i read a lot of fiction. i still do rio of fiction. -- i still read a lot of fiction. when i was reading cleopatra, all the more about women who had died or were somehow diluted. there were either joan of arc, sylvia plath, they seemed distressed in some way. i love those books. helen keller. there were not many women in that period. those books were informative. >> which book has sold the best? >> i think that "cleopatra" has sold more than the others combined. >> y de thing that happened? >> i do not know.

i do not know. it is one of those interesting things. you never know what people are going to find in your work. you hope someone might read what you have written in the end and understand or even enjoy it. i am interested in the ideas of women in power, the remnants of the east and west, those teams have certainly hit a home. there's been a lot of interest in terms of female empowerment. a lot of men have come to readings and asked me to sign books for their daughters. going around and poisoning your relatives is not necessarily something you want to encourage, but there's certainly a sense of a smart, canny, smart woman. i think we're always interested in solving a mystery.

the human mind works like that. this is a book that said our misconceptions are wrong. we have so many ideas about her that are misplaced. the basic ideas about her our fault. she is not egyptian, she is rich, she is not beautiful. it has been alluring to some people. >> you do speaking for a living? >> i would not say that. i occasionally have spoken. >> you write books for a living? you write articles from time to time for publications, all of this, and you're on a book tour and it is a long book tour. many stops and all that. of all this, the resurging, the writing, the speaking, what you like the most and what you like the least? >> there's nothing to compare

with that day you go into the library -- aspen lot of time in libraries and archives. you find that one document for that one passage that just restores you or keeps you going. ford bridges to pieces of narrative you had never put together. there was an enormous bags of correspondents over her lifetime that had never been filed. in that bag was a postcard from the 70's from a woman she met in berlin in the 1920's. the friend reminded her of a conversation they had pushed -- they had shortly after they were married about how there was a book to be written on the importance. it is exactly what i was writing about that she had denied her

whole adult life. that postcard kept me going. or might be an interview. i saw steinberg when i was working on that book. he walked in and said he was so glad to see me -- it was very early on and i was still apologizing for what i was doing. i walked in and he said you could write a book about vera but you could never write about him without writing about her. i felt very validated. i did a lot of that with cleopatra. he says something like murdering your siblings, as happened in the best of families. you realize that is what cleopatra's entire history of perspective is. >> on the vladimir nabokov book, how many books did he write? >> i don't know that i know the

answer to that. a lot. more than 20. each one was dedicated to vera. >> when you saw the book dedicated to the arab that impacted you and led to you doing that book on her. is that you? -- is that true? >> i was interested to see if it was possible to write a joint biography, so to speak. i thought one life would eliminate another. he was very difficult in terms of interviewers and hard to get to. people have been scared to -- people have been scared off. i knew very little about him. he was jewish and that was a note -- she was jewish and that was an unusual combination. she had a gun and every book was dedicated to her.

the odd facts that i had to blend together. >> how did you find out that she had gone to every class? and did the students know she was in the class? >> basically, yes. the students thought it was strange that she came to class every day. you're never a class of the college professor's wife was in class? she was called upon occasionally when he needed help. needless to say, this is not the kind of behavior you're used to. it was so odd. the cornell students remembered her vividly and had a great attitude about it. they're very curious about what she was doing in the classroom. that is what i began to play with. we did not know what cleopatra was doing there. i let the students speak with their own theories.

he was blinded she was a seeing eye dog. there were great theories. the answer was that he was playing to an audience of one. he wanted her approval. he was not educating these undergraduates, it was his wife seeing his performance. >> this book that you have, you dedicate this way -- finally, 4 mack, millie, and joe. who are they? >> those would be my three children. they have repeatedly pointed out to me that although they have not read my books, i have never dedicated them to them before. finally, meaning -- my children point this out to me, but those would be the three neglected

children. >> go back to how you got into all of these different books. how did you get into franklin? what tipped you that way? >> i had always been enchanted by ben franklin. franklin is the most lucid, gorgeous writer. he talks in his autobiography about how he trained himself to write beautiful prose. i'm not a great fan of the autobiography. i began to think about how in his '70's he went to france to essentially and list the french in our revolution. is a seminal chapter for him and our history. the documentation is, for the most part, abroad. so many people have not touched it because it is hard to get to.

it is a very different franklin from the one we knew. again realize it until i was in paris, frankfurt went to work -- went to court every week as an ambassador. everyone of those ambassadors was also writing home about franklin. one of the great jewels of that project is in the portuguese archives and the vietnamese archives and not benison denmark and elsewhere were fabulous reports and quotes from ben franklin. there was actually new material and the franc and the we had never heard from the 17 seventies and his time in france. there was a wonderful moment between franklin and john adams because they are at tremendous odds. it was great inter-american

drama. >> biography. let me first ask you -- you may, about autobiography. yeah, the you're not a fan. >> i'm a great fan of reading them more and autobiography which i could live on. i try to think if i ever edited one. i gobble them down one after another. >> because you have seen both sides of this, what is the difference between a biography and autobiography? >> the wonderful thing about an autobiography is he not have to understand anything about yourself. the funny thing about the cleopatra book, that i'm sure other biographers notices well, when you have a subject will not reveal him or herself, the biographer has no choice but to step onto the page a little bit more. there's a lot more of me in that

book. as little as i have in common with cleopatra, there is a lot more of me in that book than in any of the others. i found that a little bit frightening. with the other books, i was has some sort of touched down, or a model of the genre. with the cleopatra book, i did not know anything about the tone or stands i wanted to take. subjects were there are very little documentation. there was nothing that took the approach of wanted to take. wanted toe where i start the book. >> what was the magic moment in the "cleopatra" the to discover something that was unique in your research?

>> there were two. one was reading plutarch and one was about mark antony and cleopatra. of the he is the best military commander of the day, he cannot fish. he catches pre codfish to his line and cleopatra catches him in the act. in that scene, plutarch and gives us a dialogue. he gives as cleopatra's voice. it's a velvety, caressing voice. you could not come in contact without being captivated. she is really resisted this aand teasing him in front of an audience. there are some blanks in the story, but if you have a scene that is as strong as that with actual dialogue, even though it

is hundreds of years later, you can really craft some kind of narrative. in going to egypt, there is a wonderful place it would of been the eastern frontier of egypt at the time, it is extraordinary. standing there, in the desert, which looks very different than it did and cleopatra's day, is the sedimentation. is still evocative. you can imagine the young cleopatra, the 21-year-old cleopatra, the army that she herself has raised, caesar has arrived in alexandria, and she has to make a way back pasture enemy which is led by her brother into the palace. standing there, it is a

cleopatra we do not normally think of. >> i want to go wealth topic to talk about something you did in 2006. you wrote an article for the new yorker or new york times about wikipedia. the reason i want to bring it up is because it is about truth and how often you find that when you are trying to find the information on biography. what is the story of you taking on wikipedia? >> i'd written a piece for the n.y. times which i have written a lightly mocked the idea that encyclopedia could be built from the ground up. the founder of wikipedia was inviting me to come see what's they were doing, which i forgot about. i thought and a couple years i

would look into it. and then wikipedia began to take off. having finished the franklin book and beginning to realize the people were increasingly consulting wikipedia, i decided it was a fascinating project. it spoke to many of our ideas about who is an expert and where does this information come from? was actually a viable way of aggravating knowledge. wikipedia at the time had a headquarters of four people. it is so much not a centralized organization in a way. what was fascinating was how knowledge generated and where was it coming from and who is an expert? >> but the cella -- fella you outed was representing himself as an editor and a college

degree from a literary school -- >> no such thing. >> wikipedia has a tremendous audience. what was your reaction? the jurors see him? >> i did not meet him. we spoke on the phone. he did a massive amount of editing. obviously when one edits any peace, certain people have certain territories, so to speak. there may be someone who edits a hockey page. if you make a change, that person will notice it in two minutes, where other mistakes may exist for logger. of times. this person was so actively adding that it was unclear when he slept. he was a good person to profile. there were super active

wikipedians. there were some warriors who were battling over the pages. >> his name was ryan jordan. >> i think that is right. >> he was 24-year-old. >> he was claimed to be a professor of theology. >> they found out that he had attended a number of colleges in kentucky and live outside of louisville. >> that does not mean he does not know what he was talking about. he may have been lying about his credentials but posting perfectly accurate information. >> what you make of all this? you are writing books that people are reading on kindles and places like that. if i wanted to find out about

you, the first thing i would do is go to wikipedia. >> and you may be wrong. >> have you noticed that there's also was a falsehood on your wikipedia entry? you always want to consider your source. it took me a long time when i was working on cleopatra. if it may long time to realize i had to sort out who was who. who is writing for sensationalism. who was riding because they want to use her as an example of moral figure -- moral failure. that is all that different when you talk about who builds an encyclopedia into contributes to an encyclopedia. somehow we always prevail over history.

on wikipedia, you can get some tremendously good information. you just have to know which information is -- some of it was extremely effective. i certainly would say use it, but use it with care. check elsewhere as well. >> as you go about the country talking to audiences, maybe about cleopatra, was the first exit -- what is the most asked question? >> a lot of people want to know what she looked like which is a question that is very hard to answer. there's no accurate representation. on the coin, it is the image that she wanted to project to were people. as much as they are indicative of what she looked like, they are cleopatra at her most pejorative i would assume. i could ask a great deal about

whether she was in love with mark antony and julius caesar. i see more as a political alliance. is an affair of the state rather than an affair of the heart. in my mind, anyway. i did ask a great deal about how she died. aghast about how she could have been so powerful. -- i get asked about how she could have been so powerful. >> why do you believe plutarch writing 100 years after the event? >> he is a somewhat unbiased source. he is closer to the offense than most chroniclers. the one other person would of been lucan who is a poet. he manages to do that, but i pretty much discounted him.

plutarch is riding what he considers to be a biography. is writing what he considers to be a biography. he is getting eyewitness accounts. no other biographer had that. a he is really the only person remotely near the scene who is getting stories handed down from the actual scene. everyone else is much later. >> we have the party, vera, franklin, cleopatra are all at the table. where the characteristics? >> the amusing one. this is a man was all charm and

childish pranks. he would not doing his magic tricks. >> he died at 44? >> he died at 44, exactly. a very perpetual child. very whimsical. his letters are deliciously amusing. i never read about anyone who wrote a less interesting letter. i met a lot of people. that is why say the timing was really gratuitous. many of the women in his life, a lot of people that knew him were still alive. >> and they talk to you? >> yes, and since some cases they had never spoke to anyone before. i did not get the recycle stories. these to walk her dogs together.

they used to walk her dogs together. there were some letters he had written her. it was incredible these people were still around. >> what would vera have been like in that letter -- in that dinner? >> she would be very protective of her husband. very competitive -- very combative, fierce. very much of the politics of someone who had escaped russia during the revolution. >> wasn't she a nixon supporter? >> yes. she was actually a macarthur supporter. many peoples told stories about heard walking out of dinner parties and saying something a little hostile which would dampen the spirits.

>> and she would of had a russian accent and he would've had a french accent? was bad.and's french he assumes that after all those years in france that franklin should speak fluently. adams is appalled by this. he can get over how bad ben franklin's french's. the frenchman replies, -- it is horrible and difficult to understand when he speaks, but obviously yours is not much better and he crushes adams. >> when he went to france -- you road he was there for eight years? >> he was there for eight years. i think we all think of franklin as a verbal gymnast.

he is so incredibly were the on the page. my sense of him in those years is that he is rather taciturn, interestingly. he sits back and observe everything that is going on. suddenly, a perfectly formed epigram falls from his lips. that is certainly how he operated when he was in france. >> how would he of gone along with vera and her politics? >> the politics for sir different that it is very hard to translate. i like to think that vera would have been susceptible to his attitude. >> what would cleopatra have been like? >> to see franklin and cleopatra, to master strategists, that would of been interesting.

>> she died at 39. what would that put her at the table? >> output the table at 25. she married two brothers. at of thing that is more than a trick of nomenclature of the king and queen together. she is the kind of person that walks into the room and the temperature changes. ridiculously charted. -- ridiculously charming. i suspect it would of been she. this is quite a dinner party. >> how long would have lasted? >> where we serving? >> i do not know. what would you serve? >> cleopatra understood better than anyone the value of pageantry. let's assume that she is our

host or hostess, in which case lots of remarkable things would have been served and we all would have gone home with the table where, the furniture, and slaves. >> back in 2010, you wrote for the new times "cleopatra's guide to good governance." the reason i have this is some of your personality and maybe even your politics comes through this. there is a number of things that need to ask you about. but there is a heading -- do not confuse business with pleasure. you write that they have a chronic tendency to invade each other's territory. what does that say about you and not the whole issue? why did he throw that in? >> i think that is how western politicians behave. if they're going to misbehave, why can't they this -- why can't

they have some degree of discretion? cleopatra goes down as the great seductress. she has two men and only two, and they're obviously for political reasons. let's try to separate as far as we can the politics from the pleasure. isn't that a bipartisan crowd that we put together? >> at the kiev john edwards to elliott spitzer, yes. -- i think you have john edwards 2 elliott spencer, yes. why is it that men always seem to do this more than women? why does it seem then initiate that? >> i do not have an answer to that one. my only guess is it would have something to do with the power dynamic and at least until now men have generally been the ones who wield power.

>> would change as women become more powerful? >> you mean it will women change as they become more powerful -- will they become more of a philanderer as they become more powerful? i look forward to finding out. >> there is a lot in that paragraph right there. >> what was interesting about writing about cleopatra is that she had an age of images. the difference is that we watched our images on television and her people came out to see her. why don't you just wear the flag pin already? i did feel that she had handled

better than anyone almost in history was this amazing ability to appear before her people, cater to their greatest needs in terms of what a leader should look like. she changes her tighter repeatedly to answer to her constituents. she passes herself off as a god. she is very, a very good at controlling the narrative of the country -- the pageantry. sailing down the nile with julius caesar for example. an advertisement to her people offer close alliance at the time. it is proof of for diplomacy.

>> if you get on amazon.com, out be adjusted if you ever do this, and you read the reviews of your "cleopatra" book, it seems like there is a wide difference of views on it. yuval but to people who cannot stand this book and think it is boring -- you have a whole bunch of people who cannot stand this book and think is boring. do you read that stuff? >> no. i do not go to amazon except to order a book occasionally. the one break the news to me now? what did i do wrong? >> there are just different perceptions. what do you do -- what do you always do when you are writing a book that makes it interesting? do have certain rules that you

use that you use over the years? >> i find that keeping your subject at the center of the narrative is usually helpful. you really want to be able to answer the question what is he or she thinking. i do not know at any moment what she was thinking. it is very difficult to know what anyone was thinking. keeping the narrative going is very important. cleopatra goes to rome to visit caesar. for the next x number of years, as the war continues and the battle goes on, she is nowhere in the picture. she is off the roman radar so to speak. so how to fill in those years in terms of the narrative will keeping the reader interested -- those of the years -- those are

part of the book that i chose to talk about what cleopatra has done as a ruler and what an intellectual she is and a scientist she is. what was contributed to her and what she built. talk of things that were maybe out of chronological order, but give us a sense wall but roman civil war simmers down. >> under promise and over deliver. you said it paid to sweat the details as newt gingrich reminded us when he shut down the federal government in 1994 when he was assigned a lousy seat on air force one. most of this is about cleopatra, but you have that little needle in there. what is that about? >> it is interesting about how

small minded most of us are. that comes to me because cleopatra's visit to rome it is documented. she comes down with bad books. he had hated her father. he does not like women particularly. he just lost his daughter was about cleopatra's age. cleopatra has a better library than he does. but she promises him a book. we do not know if it was from her library or a book she was going to get in alexandria, which was a lousy place to buy a book. she does not deliver. he is furious. this is a point of honor -- she has made him this promise and failed to deliver. he bans her 40,000 years because

of this lousy book. -- for 2000 years because of this lousy book. >> where did you learn how to learn? >> what a good question. i think i'm still learning how to learn. >> you talk about your mom at being a professor. >> my mother was very good at editing my stuff and teaching me how to write how to -- not necessarily short, but how to cut. >> when did she start that? >> i do not know. fairly early on. >> and do the same thing with your children? >> i would like to think so. yes. any piece of writing can be edited again and again. i take that book and happily make it better if i were to take a pencil to it again right now.

it is an endless process of was the first 264 drafts are no good. the 360 fed is perhaps acceptable. >> where the right? >> i read in an office which has a view of the sky, which seems to be the only criteria for me. i need a beautiful sky and a very large desk. the biographer assembles a lot of paper. would you are doing is a very synthetic process. 190% of that paper to end up on the cutting room floor, but i find i can only worked with it in front of me. when you ask about wikipedia, i should have said look at wikipedia and the internet and how they change research. most of the stuff i write i still go back to the original documents.

things have changed now that things are digitize. >> what you read on? >> i write with a pencil and legal pad for the first draft. by hand. >> pencil? >> and mechanical pencil. >>i'm a very fast typist. i find out when i write on the computer, i find that i'm stronger. and a softer somehow. the pencil and paper slows me down. i will then edit a subsequent drafts from there. >> how long did you research cleopatra? >> i think to spend three years on this book. i thought this would be a fast book to research. there was no one to interview

and there was very little travel, other than egypt. what i ended up finding was that the secondary materials were immensely helpful. i would go down a road that it was easy to recreate what cleopatra had read. there are great things on egypt and the layout of the palace that i had to separate. i kept going off on different tangents. finding out who these men were took quite a while as well. >> how much of the nonstop writing you do post to research? >> i tried to do the research

before i start writing. it is only at the point where i feel i can see the book taking shape. i also of course -- there's usually a deadline at the back of my mind. only then do i start writing. ideally, i do not stop. you always get to a point where you realize there's something you forgot to research. i'd written a chunk before realize there things that the american revolution in america that i needed to know because i was writing about it from the french side obviously. i find that once i'm launched and i am writing, i want to be added every day. i want to be on an uninterrupted course. >> six days a week, what time did you start? >> as early as i can push the

children out the door in the morning. i used to go into the caffeine wears off, until about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. in the last book is about a page or pages that half a day. that is why i was so carefully pursing the materials i had. i was working from tiny fragments. >> you worked in silence? >> i usually work with music. franklin himself was out size. everything about it lent itself to opera. with everything else is been a steady diet of mozart and bach. >> you used to be an editor. how many books you think you edited? >> that is a good question. maybe 50 or 10 a year at the

most. >> you have done for books. have they all done an editor? >> they have all had a different editor. i've never used the same editor twice. >> is a harder or easier? >> it is harder because it's we something you wish you could do yourself. it is like giving yourself a massage. do can't see anything and you have lost all perspective. by resentment of the editor for fixing something is that i would not be an editor in the first place. if there's that toppled back in force of what needs to be in the manuscript? >> you think you would ever want to do a present-day person who

is alive in politics, and if you had to choose somebody in this world right now, in the united states to profile, who would it be? >> i do not think i have ever been tempted to do a living person. i like the idea that i'm working with documents as much as i am with interviews. >> you have a favorite biographer who was alive today? >> i have lots.

there are a number of books. i tend to go back to odd things. there are different books in each case. joe ellis's jefferson book is a perfect biography to me. >> you can imagine sunday night their with us all night long. what would you tell them if you wanted to do with they have done? what is the best way to start experiences that you have had to become a writer of nonfiction? >> the three r's. the rereading is crucial.

i think you see things on second reading. every time i go back to the "great gatsby" is a great book. you come to it as a different person and the book has changed somewhat on the page. obviously, reading the right book is helpful. reading a long book is good because it is like seeing a bad movie. you can see what they have done wrong. publishes out there are desperate for a new book to publish and an exciting new author. there's an enormous hope for what is yet to be done. i think we are writing fewer and fewer complete towns and biographies. we're doing more interesting things with ways of looking at a life and fragmenting a life. >> on your next book, which is

over the salem witch trials? >> that is right. >> where will you spend most of your time? >> i have to spend a lot of my time in salem. there's a fabulous archive in denver, massachusetts. pretty much everything else has been published. it is pretty much shocking to me that this was going on in massachusetts in 1692 when people still have families back in the u.k. they're talking about the unpleasantness of what is happening. i am assuming that there have to be family letters of some kind, although i have not been able to get there. >> stacy schiff, author of effort you are biographies. ben franklin, and the paperback version of "cleopatra" is out

now. thank you. >> thank you so much. >> for a dvd copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us comments about this program, visit us at q-and-a.org. is it c-span for a free broadcasts. upcoming guests on q &a include karl marlantantes, lawrence lessig, and simon winchester

talks about writing over 20 books and his plans for a new one next year. >> this morning on "washington journal" we will take your questions and comments. after that, british prime minister david cameron will speak. this morning on "washington journal" a discussion on the gop primary race. after that, a look at manufacturing in the u.s. with carrie hines, and later a discussion of budget cuts of the marine corps with lieutenant- general richard mills. "washington journal" is next. "washington journal" is next.