Recent the house of kennedy is a nonfiction. Ive had a little nonfiction, welcome to my house, we are sheltering in florida which is a good place to shelter. How many nonfictions heavy written. I dont count, probably four or five, the first one was jeffrey epstein, filthy rich which is now they just dropped the video today, and i think its like the 25th of the month on netflix. That was the first one and then aaron hernandez, i did that, and then this one, john lennon coming out later in the year which is really interesting. Actually this house is connected to a house that john and yoko owned, there is a bridge between these two houses. Who used to live in your house . Nobody famous, but its a disgustingly big house. As is londons and yokos, they were here for a while and he held onto it for a while after he was killed. Another Famous Family were the kennedys, why did you choose to write about the kennedys . It seems that this was a Great American family story, there are royal family such as this, this is the american crowd in my opinion and what i wanted to do is write about the whole family, when there has been plenty of stories about jfk and robertson et cetera et cetera. And in the same way with the crowd they tell the story about the whole era through Queen Elizabeth, i thought it was great to tell the story to the Kennedy Family and almost always, these characters are a lot more interesting than Queen Elizabeth just as a person, she is a great lady but not as interesting. Joe kennedy senior, the book starts, the house of kennedy starts with the scene that sets the tone in my opinion, joe senior has had a stroke, he cannot communicate very well, he cannot really speak, hes in the house and hes really cold and he finally gets the attention of his niece that he is cold and he goes rummaging around the bedroom and the first thing that he finds is that he can coverage owen bed with a flag so she covers him with the flag in the fog she covers him with is the flag that covered jfks coffin. To me, that is a great scene and this is scene after scene after scene, you could tell the kennedy story. We often think of joe, it begins with the grandfather. One of the interesting things, he died 105 years to the day that jfk was assassinated. But patrick in my story, the story that i tell pretty much begins with joe senior. And then it just goes through the whole thing and people talk about the kennedy curse and that has to do with all the tragedies in the family but on some level, i found the curse, it was unintended and i think joe and rose to some extent created it and that they pushed all these kids to be the best that they can be so they were all super motivated including poor rosemary who could not live up to that because she had she was a little slow and there had been an accident when she was born and in trying to deal with that and get her up to speed, they brought her in for an operation which was considered promising back in those days and it was a lobotomy and after that rosemary wanda institutionalized but in terms of the curse, you have all these people incredibly motivated but also joe was big on taking a risk, climb the tree, if you follow and break your arm, get it again. That is the real kennedy legacy, go out there, take the risks, ge the president , if we are for president in the family, that sounds should be. What was his motivation . I think he was just driven my grandmother always used to say that the hungriest dog needs best and i think he was a hungry dog and i think he wanted all the kids to be that way. Was there a desire to rise above i am sure, when he originally got involved, that was the first halfstep because roses father and still halfstep down because he was irish. But a higher station than what joe senior came from. A lot of it came from liquor sales, is started on there were so many things with joe, to have a guy like that winding up running Internal Revenue and at one point fdr, this is a Pretty Amazing joe was sent over to be ambassador of england, the cyrus guy, fdr was trying to break his chops and he was in his office and said you want this job, pull down your pants, i have to look at your legs because your legs he knew that joe was locked need and that was the thing in english society, you would have to show your legs with shorts and whatever but i think he was really more than anything else having fun with joe. Were the liquor sales where he made a lot of his money legal or illegal. I think they were illegal. What did the boys bring from joe. As far as motivation. I think the same thing, ironically once joe and john had to going to world war ii he did not want them in the war, he wanted to protect it. They had the fathers desire to go out there and do it and take risks, they both wind up doing Dangerous Things and joe, several flights and he finally got shot down and thats in the book and once again, i tried to do with each kennedy in the book and take you right to the point where he has a tragic accident. Meanwhile john whines up in pt 109, both of them put their lives at risk. Big time. Were joe junior and jack different people . Are pretty competitive. Joe was the one that the family put, they thought he was going to be the start, jfk was very sickly as a kid and continue to be sickly, one thing after another, he had a terrible bad back but he had been hospitalized, even as a student. It was like what kids are going through now, he was homeschooled a lot because he was ill. James patterson, what was roses role . I wish i wouldve gotten more on rose, were working with barbara, the showrunner on madam secretary and she wants to do a notion of an american crowd and i think she is going to make more of rose, i did not get enough on rose, capturing to get more and more and we went through a lot of the archives in the World History and whatever is available, we could not get enough on rose but she was the mom and behindthescenes and it was a different era but she was strong in her own way and influential in terms of the kids being driven as good as they can be. While you are working on the house of kennedy, where you simultaneously writing a thriller. Oh yeah, you cant see it in here but along the wall there are all these stacks of manuscripts, one, two, three, four, five, six, 600 manuscripts, theres a shelf along here in the shelf here, im not making this up, you have your books, these are manuscripts of kids books. All in process. Another nonfiction thing that im doing now, a friend of mine matt, he was a black hawk down you remember that movie, he was actual sgt and then he went on to become a First Sergeant to Training School et cetera. Were doing a book in the interview with all of these, people have gone through combat and ill take 30 page interviews into five or 67 pages in our mission if you went through combat that these guys got it right, if he didnt and youre one of these people that think they know about what soldiers are all about you reading and say i have no idea, one of the things that we all see again is with our fathers and our loved ones, people will come back for more and everyone talks about it and in this book they talk about it. How many interviews will you do for that . Its pretty much done we did a couple hundred interviews. We did not use all of them obviously. When you talk about all the manuscripts sitting around, do you wake up with an idea . Yes, this morning i was in here at a quarter after five, where are you going in a while back, not too long ago i bought the rights, only the shadow knows for sure, i had an idea of something to do without character that would make the character a lot more relevant in this morning, i woke up at four something and i was mulling these scenes that i thought were important. In the sense of new york in the era that the book would take place. I rushed to the room, this computer and started playing with that. Is at computer offline . Yeah. So nobody can access what youre doing in their. I hope not. [laughter] probably they can. What is the difference between writing a nonfiction in a fiction book. Youre not supposed to make things up, heres the weird thing about nonfiction. Bill bryce had dealt with this, he wrote a book about shakespeare. A short book for him and in it, he talks about the fact that nobody knows anything about shakespeare. Nobody knows anything, we know the place, we have the place, theres one or two images about the way he looks, there is one piece out of a Court Proceeding that is it. There are hundreds of books about shakespeare. Are you kidding, what are these, are they novels or fiction, we dont know anything about shakespeare. Its bizarre. The hard thing for me, i cannot make things up, early on one of the first ones i wrote about king tut and i wanted him to live. [laughter] one of the thing that i learned in the house of kennedy is a number of years that they spent in new york. In london, the family was in london for a year end a half or so. Some of the years in brunswick. Yes and brownsville. In the Little Details or so, one of my favorites, when jfk was president , he loved judy garland and they were friendly, he called her up several times and asked her to sing over the rainbow over the phone. It is kinda cool and anything was when don jr. Was pitching the magazine, he had a magazine that he put up before he died and he would go around to mainly older investors and he would say the weird thing is, you all knew jfk, i did not. And thats an interesting thing about this book and a lot of people, people who lived through it will go on my god i thought i knew everything about the kennedys, i had no idea, theres so much i did not know. For a lot of people they did not know anything and they dont read history and they dont know any of the stuff and its an extraordinary story, i hope a lot of people read it. When i say younger i mean under 40. James patterson what is it like to have a big book come out in the middle of what were going through. There has been nothing like this certainly in my lifetime, i have nothing to compare to. I guess the closest, this was for me what was going on in world war ii when you had an incredible number of meals on the country in danger, over 420,000 americans die during world war ii but even that probably was not extreme of whats going on now. Books are doing fairly well, my books are doing well because people can remember my name so they go online and who do i remember the name, patterson. So this book is doing great, one of the cool things, this goes to show you about around the world, this is the sunday times, the london times, frontpage and the london times in six pages and hide thats how interested in england they were in the book which is just extraordinary to me. New york time, not here so much. Do you miss the book tour or do you not enjoy those anymore . I did a big one with president clinton when we went around with the president and that was fun, really big audience and we might do another book, so will probably do another big tour. I will do speeches now but it is more big groups of librarians or big groups of teachers, i remembered i did one right after President Trump was elected it was about 3000 librarians in indiana and you can imagine librarians there would be a small number that would be President Trump and you want to go into a dead room like the next morning and its interesting. But i miss things like that, i am sure we will be doing more in some way shape or form. When you come to my office, we do it like this. We would love to take a tour of your office sometime to. Yeah, i would do it right now but. You consider yourself as a historian. No, i consider myself a storyteller and with kennedy and john lennon, a lot of information is out there but has not been put in one place, one thing about nonfiction, an awful lot is written for academics were people who are worried about, we will get every single u. S. Grant, i happen to like the thousand pages on u. S. Grant, but for a lot of people is more than they want. They just dont want 1000 pages on u. S. Grant. So this the house of kennedy reads like a novel, its 400 some pages, its very readable, it really moves and its not everything about the kennedys but its an awful lot. As i said, people that know the stories, theres a lot i did not know where it really reminded me of a lot of stuff that i did not know. How did you get into childrens books . I had a kid, i had a boy jack, when jack he was an interesting little dude, when he was coming to l. A. And they said are you going to miss me and he said not really and i was taken aback and he said loves means you can never be apart. And i told him right there, i said if you Say Something in our house, i now own that line so i can use it in my books et cetera. And he is still that way but the interesting thing was, he was not a big reader, he was not a bright reader, when he was eight, my wife and i said you are going to read that summer, people should be doing this now. We went out and got him from laborers and local bookstores and we thought he would turn them on, they range from Percy Jackson to a wrinkle in time and we said, you reviewed every day this summer and he said to i have to, and i said yes unless you want to live in the garage, we read in our house, thats going to be the deal but we were careful to make sure that we read books that we thought would turn them on and by the end of the summer he read a dozen books and when he took his ss atc got a hundred perfect score in reading. Not every kid is going to happen but they will all get a whole lot better, right now in this country more than half the kids in the country do not read at grade level which is disgusting. If that should be in every president ial debate, that should be dealt with every day, everybody should be talking about that, oh my god are you kidding, half the kids dont read at grade level, its correctable. I work with the university of florida were trying to work with the governor, they have a program and they have that number, the university of florida has in the mid80s, they figured out, we can correct this. I know how to correct all but warming, we will have water problems, i dont how to influence as individual and we can solve a lot of this i kids reading at grade level, the kids watching this, you can do this with your kids and your grandkids, the book set up, i think my kids books are some of the best kids books by the way. Im just doing one now, the einstein estate came to me and they said we want kids around the world to know about Albert Einstein in a scientific theory but theyre very smart as you would expect but you have to make it entertaining and i said all i have to do is write about Albert Einstein in this series make it entertaining for little kids and i said thats it, okay i did the series of max einstein books and their very entertaining and i guarantee anybody watching, if your kids read one of those by the end of it, they will be entertained, they will love the book and they will know more about einstein than you do which is a pretty cool promise. But because of that mohammed alis estate came in they said we would like you to do a book meaning when mohammed was a little kid in louisville and i went out and approached alexander who is a friend of mine and we did a book together which will come out in november about remembering or becoming muhammad ali the name of the book and its a combination, about the pros and quantity write poetry, its very assessable poetry, we tell the story and how he became muhammad ali. As a little kid though. It is a lot of stuff and its cool and its fun its exciting. It keeps me going during this mess. Was what one of the goals. Absolutely. That is to make it easier for parents and teachers to find books that will turn their kids on. Which is important. A lot of times, when i go into a Hardware Store, i dont know to ask for and i dont want to look like a fool, i know i need nails but i dont want to be made fun of by the person at the counter, a lot of people feel that way about bookstores, they dont know what kids books and they dont want to look stupid so they do not go, they do not go when they do not ask, that is terrible, its not their fault although parents and grandparents need to understand, its your responsibility to get your kids reading, its your responsibility, you dont let them come in and track mud all over the living room floor, you make them sit down at the dinner table for a meal a day and you need to get them reading, they are not reading at grade level, you have to tack that on yourself because its a terrible burden for the kids if they go through school now not reading and not confident readers, make school so, so hard. Are you of the school where you see kids on their phones and you shake their heads im not trained to get too crazy, absolutely. Kind of maybe, im not crazy and i dont get angry about it but you do a little bit, okay its a new world, you same with adults, you eat dinner or youll see three people at dinner and theyre all on therefrom, oh my god, theres people there at your table, but who goes to dinner anymore. In the old days we used to go to dinner and he used to be fun. I vaguely remember that, during the current situation, youve also been active in helping independent bookstores, what are people doing . We reached out and i got involved with Reese Witherspoon who is very concerned about authors and bookstores in the books and we established the bookstores. Com and we raised about 1,000,007 and that will be distributed to any bookstores, all of it, no handling fees, we put in half a million or i did and thats a good thing if nothing else bookstore owners will say back window solve their problems but to get some money and people believe in us and there is hope and that made my day a little better and hopefully now as things start to open, hopefully in a lot of these places, they will understand the bookstores are essential as Liquor Stores and gun shops, that would be nice, and once again, there should be a reasonable way where we can take three or four people into a bookstore and everybody can wear their masks and stay apart and you could pick out a book, hopefully we can do it in a nice safe smart way, i would hope bookstore start opening up again now and do it in a safe way, im sure they will do it in a safe way. Does a bookstore owner apply for a grant and are there any strings attached. No. We did it to a group, i am so bad they will distribute, i think theres a couple thousand independent bookstores that are on our list, the money will go out within the next couple of weeks. Is pure