the problem is that the enormous paper trail of atticus. all of the paperwork to the rebellion and then the criminal trials then the investigative files that going for years, then the civil litigation, this is thousands of boxes of information and i cannot get any of it. some of it was officially sealed and some of it is not. when you file a freedom of information request it comes back heavily redacted. i learned that you need to keep asking the question of differene people.kind o bureaucracy does it always redact the same thing in the copy of the file. you can extrapolate what just happened. i was forced to rethink how we write this time, how we write about the 60s and 70s. frankly i was humbled torstand understand that there's so much that we don't have a clue about. we don't have any idea how history actually happened. we know the results and we know the black panther party was largely decimated by the end of the 70s but we don't have a clue about what the mechanisms were or similarly with this i was able to get quite a bit but i suspect

atticus. atticus finch. hey, everybody! you're very kind. folks, thank you so much. welcome to the "late show," everybody. i'm your host, stephen colbert. ( cheers and applause ) man, there's so much to talk about tonight, i'm going to do two monologues. okay, all right? can we do that? let's do the first one. you can feel the excitement in this room right now. i-- i am excited. ( cheers and applause ) it's-- it's-- it's the most magical night of the year because it's comey testimony eve. i'm ready. i have the decorations up. i hung my socks up over cnn. got to put a few more of them up. i can still see wolf blitzer. i mean, you can feel the anticipation? ( cheers and applause ) i can feel it. i can feel it. ♪ i can feel it comey in the air tonight oh, lord ♪ ( drum riff ) thank you very much. ( cheers and applause ) i'm not the only one ready to party. because tomorrow, bars in the capitol are opening early and offering drink specials like the covfefe cocktail. ( laughter ) absolutely true. not made up. covfefe is made up, but the cocktail is real. that's a cute nam

importantly on september 9 because they were reminding us in the last 40 years, 45 years because we got atticus so wrong because we allow the state to tell the story instead of the people inside, prisons are worse today. they are more overcrowded. people serve more solitary and one of those prisons in michigan where i'm from these guys as we speak here on the stage, these guys are held in solitary for daring to protest and we don't really know what's happening to them because again, these institutions are public. we pay for them. they are ours and we don't have a clue what happens inside of them. >> the walls keep us out and then in, so if there are any people interested in asking a question, please step over to the microphone over here and while people are going over i will just ask one more question and i might not be able to resist as a jump in, so historians in this-- it's receded a bit, but there's this real charge against timing if you call a historian work president, that sort of a knife in the gut that you are too involved in the current moment and you are being too roped into the conte

even followers of to kill a mockingbird sometimes get offended because atticus finch turns out to be someone different later in life than they thought he was but that's kind of human nature, that we are complex people and he evokes that complexity in atticus and in herself. congressman bradley byrne, thanks for spending a few minutes with book tv. >> book tv wants to know what you are reading. unless your summer reading list by a twitter at book tv or instagram at book ótv or posted to our facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. book tv on c-span2: television for serious readers. >> one of the things we like to do on book tv is preview some of the books that will be coming out this fall. joining us now in new york is an author and a photographer whose name is pete souza. mister souza, what do you do for a living? >> right now i'm trying to finish up my book. it's pretty much done but there's still a lot of last-minute production things that we are dealing with. >> what did you do for a living?