c-span: meantime, johan holten finds the body, gets the sample, sends it back -- >> guest: and he already had that sample when he was on the committee with her. holten had told -- he was saying we have another sample, we have another sample. but holten had told the eskimos that they were going to be the ones who determined when he made the announcement. he said he wasn't going to sort of spring the media and all the world on them, that they could decide how to release this information. and so he was waiting for them to give him the go ahead to say he went up there, he'd gotten the samples, there was this mass grey. c-span: did he pay for this by himself? >> guest: yeah, he did. it cost him about $2,000. he went up there immediately. the next week he was up there with his pick axe sleeping on the floor of the one-room schoolhouse on an air mattress ready to dig this those graves. he got the permission of the eskimos, and in 1951 he did it all by himself. this time they gave him a couple teenagers to help him dig which helped him a lot. c-span: now go back to norway. >> guest: right. they h

johan holten was amazing looking for old newspaper articles, old photographs, old documents. held try to do anything he could to help me reconstruct his story and go beyond just his memory of what had happened. c-span: we're out of time. there's a lot more in this. here it is. it's a book called "flu" by gina colatta, the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it. thank you very much. >> guest: thank you. >> the redesigned book notes web site now features over 800 notable nonfiction authors interviewed about their books. there you can view all the programs, see the transcripts and use the searchable database and find lepgs to the author's blogs, facebook pages and twitter feeds. book notes.org with brand new look and feel. a helpful research tool and a great way to watch and enjoy the authors and their books. >> well, people don't understand how it works with bookings. a lot of people write books, and then they spend the next two years trying to get somebody to publish their books. i've never really experienced that. so when peo