if the material is like roger frederick, then all of a sudden i look so much better than i otherwise did. i felt like i had roger on the other side. >> one of the reasons this book feels really fresh, the story is unfolding in real time. i don't mean we don't know how coronavirus will evolve. i mean your character's work infectious disease took on new significance against a black drop of a new global pandemic. they are re- processing and reinterpreting their own past in real time. you are kind of live on this journey with them. in having decades to have a more stable understanding of who they are and what they've done. we will need to rewrite my own understanding on where we are in history. >> it is not unprecedented. the thing poured out of me. from first meeting the characters to delivery of book, and both cases it was a year. did not feel like i needed another day. i think that that is right. they were all a little surprised that i showed up on their doorstep. i cannot tell you how many times. why are you talking to me? i am just a local public health officer. you are really import

weekend from frederick, maryland, headline that the statue that they have outside city hall over the weekend was vandalized with red paint. what are your thoughts about this long legacy of roger taney and how he is viewed in american society? martha: this takes us back to dred scott because it is not only in the 21st century that his memory is controversial. charles sumner, after roger taney's death in 1864, commits himself to defeating any attempts to appropriate funding that would provide for the bust of roger taney to be placed in the u.s. supreme court. sumner fights those attempts time and again in congress. today, these questions are of course cloaked in 21st century terms, a movement called black lives matter, controversy over the flying of the confederate flag in the united states, and taney's likeness is once again said by some to symbolize or glorify a past that should not be honored in this public way. at this statehouse in maryland, we have dueling monuments, if you will, because in 1996, we get thurgood marshall. and so now, the two of marilyn's -- maryland's great supreme court justices are side-by-side, but clearly somebody over the weekend in frederick had a d