At columbia i hope we are back together again next year and the way we annually celebrate these wonderful awards in the memory of one of the great nonfiction narrative writers of any generation certainly a great influence on the generation of writers that i grew up around and probably the folks being honored tonight. What we are going to do tonight is try to concentrate on the substance rather than the ceremonies since zoom is not a place to exchange awards and the like. We will have a series of conversations with our four winners and then when we are done we will take your questions in chat and try to wrap up in an hour using zoom best practice of not leaving you in front of your computer screen for too long a time, especially this time of day. For those of you new to the awards, we have a short video about j anthony with his prizes. People talk about book writing they almost always talk about the process of writing, sitting at the keyboard writing it down is in many respects not the
Leading eye with the intellectuals and colonists and tv commentators and authors. His new book is tonight. How may people have read this book . How many people are goingan to read it after this is over . How many people are going to get autographed copy from david brooks today . So david, thanks for doing th. Before we go into this book, the Second Mountain which have read and its a very good book, will go through it id like to go through about your background. You grew up in new york . Lower side of new york. About, hippies would go just to be. And one of the things they did was they threw their they put the garage can garbage can on fire, i saw 5dollar bill in garbage can and i reached in the fire and grabbed money and ran away. That was my first step to the right. At age 8i read a book calling paddington the bear and decided that i wanted to become a writer and ive been writing pretty much every day since and in high school i wanted to date a woman named bernice and she wanted to da
Much. Now i know its raining outside, but when i come to the podium, i really enjoy a great round of applause. Lets try it [applause] while you all are here in the room there are a number of people watching on cspan. We want them to get the full experience of being here in miami, even in the rain we are very cheery about books but thank you for that kind introduction. Youve read it exactly the way i wrote it. Very well done. But im thrilled to be here to introduce todays author. Im going to come to the gentleman in my left in a moment but before i get there im going to start with Robert Samuels and ask him to come to the dais. He is a National Political Enterprise Reporter for the Washington Post, focusing on the intersection of politics, policy and people. He joins inthe post in 2011 after spending nearly 5 years working at the miami herald. Working at the miami herald. Now you get it. He is the coauthor of the book hihis name is george floyd one mans life and the struggle for Racial
Im standing in front of the concorde Public Library where up next, curator Leslie Wilson will feature some of their specialcollections. The special collections started rolling when the library was founded in 1873 and it was part of the vision of the founder of the library, William Munro who set this place up specifically to collect local materials. He was very proud of concorde story and the literature and wanted to set up something that would both documents and do credit to the town. Because just 73 was right around the time tourism was beginning to take hold and people were coming to town and the library was essential public place where people could come and feel welcome and feel that they could get to understand the place they are visiting. We have major thoreau collections here at the concorde free Public Library and one of the tender pieces of the collection is the survey collection. The more iconic surveys we have in the collection is a survey of walden pond and 1846. And if you
The capitol has a commanding presence in austin. It is at the top of the hill. Capitol square is over 22 acres of parklike grounds. It has this beautiful renaissance revival style with sunset red granite. It is easy to see from almost any Vantage Point in downtown austin. We have a round dome, not unlike the nations capitol, topped by the goddess of liberty at the top of the capitol dome. Texans are proud of the fact that the Texas Capitol is actually taller than the national capital. When the first capitol was completed in 1853, it was very small and was not popular. Officials started to make plans for a grander, more fitting State Capitol for texas. They realized they could not afford what they had in mind and so they were able to set aside acres of land in the panhandle, and trade that so the Texas Capitol could be completed in 1888. It imparts to visitors the story of texas, the story of the land it took to build the capitol but also about the history of the state of texas, not onl