by the time anthony lake became his enemy and others for keeping him out so he went to sarajevo and didsomething i admire. he found a way to get in and outime to feel what the war was and get it under his skin this was oppression and aggression against a multiethnic city and the europeans are standing by and unwilling to stop that we have to be involved. he came back to washington animated with this idea that nobody in the clinton administration wanted to hear over the next two and a half years clinton did not want to confront this bleeding wound in the middle of europe and i hope they take the right lesson from what they took from vietnam is just don't get involved but that was not the lesson of vietnam don't get involved in a civil war that we don't understand and that we can't win but he saw more like a fascist war and in that case we had to be involved. he negotiated non- - - negotiated the end of the war with amazing persistence and like a bully of diplomacy and a great student of the adversary and was willing to spend eight hours eating lamb andat rice but holbrook did not drink b

cannot get a job and went to sarajevo in the salk.it is something i really admire and he found a way to get into this besieged city to spend very little time but enough time to feel what the war was and to get it under his skin. he felt this was a war of aggression and of serb aggression against the multiethnic city and the europeans are standing by and are unable or unwilling to stop if we have to be involved. he came back to washington animated with that idea which no one in the clinton administration wanted to hear and for the next 2.5 years clinton dithered and became distracted and did not want to confront this bleeding wound in the middle of europe and i think albrecht had to take from vietnam the right lesson clinton took from the lesson don't get involved in for holbrook there was nothing dawson but don't get involved in a civil war of nationalism that we don't understand. and that we can't win. but bosnia he saw differently more like a kind of fascist war. in that case he felt we had to be involved. others had been paralyzed

president, you have to end the siege of sarajevo. i didn't understand how hard diplomacy was until i got into holbrooke's life. how much stamina it takes. picture it like climbing a mountain and being able to breathe at high altitude. so dayton was the great crown of his career. he thought it onto my nobel peace prize. he went to oslo to make his case, which you are not supposed to do. >> but it's very holbrooke. >> so clinton said, he probably would have gotten it has you not tried so hard. you look back at dayton and it begins to recede. so here's this passage. history is efficiently brutal with our dreams. nathan wasn't the highest peak after all. it wasn't the marshall plan for the opening to china. it solved a nasty problem but it didn't create anything new and big. for those who lived through the war who suffered on the inside or cared on the outside, bosnia was immense. it was all that mattered. but holbrooke dedicated three years of his life to a small war in an obscure place with no consequences in the long run, beyond itsel

the way we lived before the war in sarajevo, in the same pace all the time. we have an entirely different notion of privacy. my father leans over my shoulder when i'm working on the computer and without any compunction because we all were in the same space. so think that's what makes home fully impossible, is this rupture, this traumatic rupture that dividing of the life into the before and the after, into the here and there. and so the struggle -- this is not necessarily entirely traumatic, but doesn't have to be devastating and entirely destructive, trauma. there are ways i hope to view this productively, one of which is writing, trying to find a new kind of unity to create new homes or to have two homes even. when guy to sarajevo i go home and then come sayreover vote back home to princeton and before chicago. so you can have more homes than one but somehow that unity, that i remember experiencing, that sold solidity, the feeling of homeless is -- i have no desire to own property and could live out of suitcase. this is how i feel because this might all be

he is recipient of the guggenheim fellow inand was born in sarajevo and came to the united states inn he was unable to return as planned through the violence that had present out at home. and suketu mehta is an associate professor of journalism at nyu. his latest book i would u.s. called this hand is our land, an immigrants manifesto and came to the out from india in his early teens. so, it's always fun when you have a group of writer you can just kind of have an extended conversation. to start us off, i was hoping you could briefly describe what led you to write this book. how you nye was as story you wanted to tell or argue. you wanted to make, and also, share with us a passage you think exemplifies that effort. >> hello, everybody. thank you so much for being here today. it's such an honor for know share the stage here with these wonderful authors and thank you carlos. so, a dream called home is a sequel now previous memoir, the distance between us, and in the distance between us, i write but my experience of growing up in mexico without my parents, because they both immigranted t