You are watching book tv on cspan 2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Book tv, television for serious readers. [applause] good morning. Im director of the center for learning, literacy and engagement at the library of congress. One of the major programs of this new center at the library is oversight of the National Book festival, whose overall theme this year is change makers. This is why im especially excited to introduce our new panel devoted to change makers. The focus of much of the programming at the library of congress this year. We are currently celebrating change makers at our Thomas Jefferson building, with an exhibition called shall not be denied, women fight for the vote, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment. And this december, we will mount an exhibit devoted to the life and influence of one of our great civil rights icons, rosa parks. I invite you to visit the library to see these exhibitions. You can also view our exhibitions and examine the rosa parks collection online at loc. Gov, where we offer millions of free educational resources. The subject of the books on this panel may at first glance seem to have little in common. But they have one essential trait that all successful leaders share, they made change, significant changes that are still being felt today. Frederick douglas, Rachel Carson, jane jacobs, jane goodall, alice waters and Winston Churchill changed the world forever, and our lives are enriched by what they did. Im pleased to introduce our change maker panel authors. Andrea bar net is the author of visionary women how Rachel Carson, jane jacobs, jane goodall and alice waters changed our world, a finalist for an award. Also the author of all night party, the women of bohemian Greenwich Village and harlem 1913 to 1930 which was a nonfiction finalist for the 2004 literary awards. Andrea barnett was a regular contributor to the New York Times book review for 25 years and her work has appeared in smithsonian magazine, harpers bazaar, elle, and many other publications. David w. Blight is the class of 1954 professor of American History and director of the Guilder Center for the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition at yale university. He is the author or editor of dozens of books, including american oracle, the civil war, in the Civil Rights Era and race and rewrun i dont know, the civil war in reunion, the civil war in american memory as well as annotated editions of Frederick Douglass first two autobiography. David blight has devoted himself to douglas during much of his professional life and has been awarded the bank croft prize, the Abraham Lincoln prize and the Frederick Douglas prize, among others. His new book is Frederick Douglas, prophet of freedom, winner of this years Pulitzer Prize in history. Andrew roberts thats worth definitely [applause] Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of the storm of war, a new history of the Second World War, masters and commanders, how four titans won the the war in the west, 1941 to 1945. And napoleon, a life, winner of the l. A. Times book prize for biography. Andrew roberts has won many other honors including the woolson history prize and the British Army Military book award. Andrew roberts frequently writes for the wall street journal and is the roger and martha murts visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at stanford university. His new book is churchill, walking with destiny. Finally, our panel will be moderated by historian kai bird, who cowrote the Pulitzer Prize winning the triumph and tragedy of j. Robert oppenheimer. Since 2017 hes been the executive director and distinguished lecturer of the center for biography at the City University of new york. He is currently working on a biography of jimmy carter, during the white house years. His most recent book was the good spy, the life and death of robert aim. Please welcome andrea barnett, david w. Blight, Andrew Roberts, and kai bird. [applause] good morning. Can everyone hear . Im sufficiently micced up. My name is kai bird. This panel is sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for biography which is a very unusual thing. Our whole thing is to defend and promote the art and craft of biography. Ive spent the last few decades doing only biography. Im obsessed with it. So im glad to see so many fans here of biography. I want to say to those americans who are not here something important, something heart felt, perhaps something a bit provocative. I want to say that if youre not reading biography, youre not trying to understand your world. Now, i know i dont mean to down play the importance of novels or poetry or other nonfiction, but biography is really the foundation for understanding our world. Now im not saying if you do read biography, youre going to understand the world [laughter] you may in fact come away more confused than ever about the complexity of the human being and our history and our world, but it is the effort to read biography is what counts. And if you know any biographers, you know that they are obsessed with another life. You cant write a biography without this obsession. We have with us today three really eminent biographers and their subject spans two centuries. One explains america in the 19th century and our nations original sin. Another life chronicles two world wars in the 20th century. And our third biographer tackles the lives of four women whose lives explain the cultural transformations that took place in the 1960s. I want to remind everyone, near the end of the 75minute session, around noon, well stop and start to take questions from the audience. So please think of your questions. And afterwards, i believe at 1 30, each of the authors will be signing books. Were here to discuss more than one great life. But the word great has been so greatly debased in recent years [applause] im not sure it has any real meaning. So lets just say that were dealing with men and women who led large lives on historys stage. And each in their own way were game changers. So im going to ask each of our authors to begin with five to seven to ten minutes to talk about their subjects, but please begin by explaining why each of you chose your figures. And tell us how long you have been laboring to write these biographies. Andrew, do you want to start . No, youre going to be micced up now. Wheres our mic . He can go to the lecture, oh, okay. [laughter] lay disand gentlemen ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor to be invited to address you today, and thank you very much indeed kai. Extraordinary to see so many people. I once spoke at the seven oaks Literary Festival in kent, in england, where fewer people turned out than there were oaks. [laughter] and you ask about where the obsession comes from. Of course i dont really think im obsessed, the fact that im english, and the best we get is extreme enthusiasm. [laughter] but when theres a subject like Winston Churchill, i some years ago saw a rather nervewracking survey which said that 20 of british teenagers it was a huge survey, 5,000 teenagers, they asked, and not young teenagers either, quite old ones, 18, 19 said that they thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. Whereas 47 of them thought that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, and 53 thought that Eleanor Rigby was. [laughter] so in a sense attempting to fight against this nervewracking ignorance about the person who i believe to be the greatest englishman who ever lived. I would like to take you back to friday the 10th of may, 1940, the day on which churchill became Prime Minister and on that morning, on dawn that day, adolf hitler invaded luxembourg and belgium and holland shortly afterwards was set to invade france. Churchill said of that day in his war memoirs, i felt as if i were walking with destiny and all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. What i have tried to do in my book is to investigate the extent to which the jobs that churchill had, first lord of the admiralty and chancellor, home secretary and so on, had prepared him for this great hour in trial of 1914. What i also try to do is look at the beginning part of that sentence. The bit about walking with destiny because i think its absolutely key to understanding Winston Churchill that one appreciates that he had a driving sense of personal destiny, one that at the age of 16, he to his best friend at school, where he said Winston Churchill by the way was almost completely selfeducated because he had to be because he went to harrow [laughter] he said to his best friend there will be great upheavals and terrible struggles in our lives and i shall be called upon to save london and save england. He believed this when he was 16 and all the way through his life, especially through his close brushes with death, this was underlined for him. You have this sense of destiny. I subtitled my book walking with destiny not as a friend told me because all americans are interested in destiny [laughter] but because i believe it was central to his life. When people see the things he did and extraordinary attributes he had, including many blunders and failures, he made mistake after mistake in his life but unlike many politicians he learned from every one of them. And as a result, he was able to ultimately not only as he predicted for himself as a 16yearold school boy, not only save london and england, but also civilization itself. Thank you very much. [applause] instead of having you go to the podium, ive been instructed your mic is now live. Andrea, youre up next. Can you hear me . Okay. Hi. Thank you all for being here. This is a really tough act to follow. One of the things that people ask me is why did you decide to write a biography about four women who didnt know each other, who were in different fields, who were arguably in different generations, and how could you think about writing a group biography . And the genesis of this book really grew out of a conversation i was having with a friend, and i realized there were four great women, each of whom an interestingly similar and adjacent ways had changed the way we think about a swath of the world. Rachel carson, who wrote silent spring in 1962 completely changing the way we think about chemicals and the environment. Jane jacobs who in 1961 wrote a book called the death and life of Great American cities and also stood up against robert moses and saved the Greenwich Village from urban renewal which was a whole new idea, changing the way we think about cities and Old Buildings and old neighborhoods. Jane goodall who in 1960 discovered chimps using tools changing the way we think about animals and our kinship and how close we are to them. And alice waters who in 1965, on a semester abroad in france, fell in love with everything french, particularly french cooking and came back to berkeley, california, and five years later started the first local fresh organic serving restaurant kicking off the Sustainable Food movement. So i thought that was interesting, and then i started looking into sort of reading their work, and i realized all had been uncredentialed outsiders. Two of them goodall and jacobs hadnt even graduated from college. All had been green thinkers before any of us had incorporated the idea of green or eco into our collective vocabularies. They had waded into their fields in respected fields, gotten their hands literally and figuratively dirty and against all odds, they had spoken to the power, in carsons case the pesticide industry, in jacob the whole juggernaut of urban reyule, in goodall all the people who thought animals were mechanical machines and then prevailed even though they had been mocked and marginalized, they stood their ground. All had had brought a fresh perspective to their respected fields, and finally, all had had their breakthrough moments in the 60s. This really interested me because it was 1962 that silent spring came out. 1961 that death of life of Great American cities, 1960 that goodall was in africa and 1965 when alice waters was in france. I thought oh well the 60s must be my fifth character, but as i started reading, i realized it wasnt the 60s. It was really the 50s. The priorities and goals of the 50s that all of these women were pushing back against. One of the things as i started reading about the 50s and i agree with kai what happens when youre studying peoples lives is you begin to see that you have to understand the culture that formed them and shaped them. The 50s was a decade of conformity and cold war fierce. Cold war fears. It was a very sqits schizophrenic age, we were terrified of nuclear armageddon. There was an idea of mass production and started making houses. Mcdonalds had followed suit and was making Assembly Line food. The bomb had won the war, and so chemists and physicists were king. All of which is to say that the future seemed to belong to our technological knowhow, particularly sciencebased technology. Insects would be eradicated with pesticides. Farmland would be made more efficient with synthetic fertilizers. Food would be engineered in labs. There was a great push to essentially industrialize nature. And one of the things about these four women, because they were outsiders and because they werent trained, they didnt know what the they didnt agree with the direction of the culture, and they looked at the world very differently, and so they saw different things. So one of the things as i was writing this book, i was trying to figure out is what was it about the culture in 1962 at a time when women couldnt get credit cards without a male cosigner, when a woman couldnt be in a lot of states on jury duty, when there was still headmaster laws . What was about these women that their work carried such power and why at that moment . So i started really reading all of their work. And jane swra jane jacobs one of the things she says most of us begin with a confirmation bias, we know what we think and we go into the world and we collect information that kind of supports our ideas. And jacobs said i dont know what i think. I go into the world and i start looking for patterns, and once i begin to see patterns, then i begin to generalize and know what i think. So i tried to do as i was writing the book is to look at their lives and start to see sort of parallels. One parallel and i love to tell the story is they were all incredible communicators, very very eloquent, and they understood that people will only protect what they love, and that changing minds meant winning hearts. So their writing was very accessible and filled with personal anecdotes which is very much considered a nono. The story i like to tell is jane goodall who to this day is traveling 300 days a year. Shes on the road. Shes got a lot of handlers. One morning she was told by her handlers, you have to be in this room and you have to speak to a group of l. A. Police department the top brass. And she thought what am i going to say to these people . She walked into the room and there were about 50 men, all kind of staring down at their laps thinking why do we have to listen to this primatologist . And she said well, if i was a female chimpanzee and i were to walk into a room full of alpha males such as yourself, i would be a fool if i didnt begin with an act of submission which would be [laughter] at which point she had everyones attention. [laughter] all of these women were incredibly savvy about getting peoples attentions. Jane jacobs who was fighting urban renewal, at one point, when a neighborhood at the time the idea was cities were going down the tubes, and that the only way to save them was to knock down huge swaths of neighborhoods and put up highrise housing towers. A lot of times very anonymous, super blocks of monotonous towers, and jacobs neighborhood had been targeted. It was the west village. So she organized a group of neighbors, about 200 neighbors, and she bought sunglasses, and when a building is condemned, theres an x that is put on its door, on the sunglasses, she made taped xs, so all of these people showed up at city hall with these sunglasses with taped xs. Well, of course the press picked it up. The photograph went viral. And this was before the internet. And so suddenly this david and goliath battle was national news, no longer a local fight. So that was one of the things i discovered, the great communicators. The other thing was that am i running out of time that all of them were looking at the world in holistic way. At the time, the way the most of the world people who were studying things were specialists and they were operating by ideology, and they were counting and categorizing. These women were mapping relationships, which was a real paradigm shift, and i often say this book is really a book about a shift in consciousness. Most people think studying history in terms of great events, but i think really what moves the needle is changes in consciousness, and all of these women were catalysts for that. They started sweeping social movements. Maybe i will leave it there for now. [applause] david, you are up next. Thank you. Thank you to my amazing colleagues, kai, andrew, andrea, great to be here with them. Thank you all for coming. For 10 or 11 months, i have been doing book festival and talks all over, but ive never seen a festival audience like this so thank you. [applause] in fact its been so heartening to learn that there are a lot of americans who want to read books. [applause] theres still a lot that dont, but thats another matter. [laughter] i have come to think that Frederick Douglas in some ways chose me or, you know, dr