. >> next on book tv, laurie edwards reports on the over 133 million americans who live with a chronic illness which constitutes about three-quarters of all health care dollars. the author examines the obstacles that the chronically ill face, including the limits of medicine, skepticism about many illnesses, and criticism that many have diseases that could be prevented. this is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> hello. thank you all so much for being out there tonight. so much of the writing process takes place alone or in my case when the rest of the war of the sleeping. so it is really nice, at this point in the process, to be able to be out and connect with readers and see people, especially at the to greek menu. it is nice to see it kind of come full circle because when i was a graduate student i was here all the time. so it is nice to be here. so i am going to talk briefly about the book itself overall and then read to passages. then hopefully we will have some good discussion

laurie edwards writer dot com. >> what fascinates me about the situation in afghanistan in '78 and '79 was just how different it was from what we face today. many things are radically different. there are no radical leftist parties or secular parties in afghanistan today. that has all been pretty much wiped out, but in the 1970's those are really the powerful forces in afghanistan. the president, much of the 1970's was a secularist modernizer not unlike the shot of a round, and he was replaced by the afghan communists who began trying to remodel society according to their own utopian design. and they very quickly ran aground with that. the whole country rose up against them, and that is why the soviets had to come in. what is amazing is the way that that invasion and the almost on ending civil war that has followed compounded by the u.s. intervention in 2001 and after has completely wiped out that old afghanistan that we saw in the 60's and 70's that was really the radically different. >> revolutionary is on call market revolutions, the pope visits poland, and cracks start to appear in

. >> next on booktv, laurie edwards reports on the over 133 million americans who live with a chronicness, which constitutes about three quarters of all health care dollars. the author examines the obstacles that the chronically ill face, including the limits of medicine, skepticism about many illnesses, and criticism that many have diseases that could be prevented. this is about 45 minutes. >> hello, thank you all so much for being out here tonight. so much of the writing process takes place on my own, in my case when the rest of his sleeping but so it's nice at this point in the process to be able to be out and connect with readers and see people. especially at such a great many. it's nice to see a kind of come full c