please join me in welcoming anthony mccann. [applause] [laughter] >> there's a lot of excitability in the story. if you are familiar with that. this book is a nonfiction book but it is not in the same vein as many such books. in the introduction i come to this not as a traditional journalist. as you heard in introduction i come to this story not from a career as a traditional journalist but as a creative writer and as a poet. and that informs how the project was a fraction how the book was written so i will be sharing a sequence of passages that follow a certain thread through the story to which very important content is attached. there are many strands of the story. i'll explain how i came to be obsessed enough with the story to write this book that i've lived in the mojave desert and around the time i had moved to the desert i was writing what i thought was a very different kind of work may be more associated with poets and poetry are at a that's what i was doing. turns out that's not what i was doing. i thought i was writing