Bestselling author James Patterson is our guest on book tv. Author of about 150 books or so. The most recent is a nonfiction. Yes. Welcome to my house. How many nonfiction have you written . I dont count so probably four or five. The first one was jeffrey epstein, filthy rich which is now, they just dropped the video today. It is for parts, i think the 25th of the month or Something Like that. Then it was Aaron Hernandez did that and then this one, john lennon coming out later which is interesting. This connected to a house john owned, a bridge between these two houses. Who used to live in your house . Nobody famous but it is a disgustingly big house. [laughter] they were here for a while and she held onto it for a while. Another in his florida fami family, why did you choose to write about kennedy . It seemed to me this was the Great American family story a royal family and what i wanted to do was write about the whole family. There were plenty of stories about jfk and robert, etc. But in the same way the crown, they tell story about that era through Queen Elizabeth. It was great to tell this story to the Kennedy Family and these characters are more interesting than Queen Elizabeth was. She is a great lady but not as interesting. Second, joe kennedy senior, the book starts house of kennedy, it starts with a scene that sets the tone in my opinion and joe senior had a stroke, he cant communicate very well or speak, hes in the house and he is really cold and he finally gets the attention of his knees and she goes rummaging around the bedroom and the first thing she finds what she can cover joe in bed, of flag so she covers him with this flag and the flag is the flag that covered jfks coffin. To me, its a great scene and thats what this book is, scene after scene after scene to tell the kennedy story. We often think of the family beginning with joe but it kind of began with the grandfather . In one of the interesting things, he died 105 years to the day jfk was assassinated. Patrick, my story, the story i tell pretty much begins with joe senior. Then it goes to the whole thing, people talk about the kennedy curse which has to do with the tragedies in the family but on some level, i found an unintended curse, and i think joe and rose to some extent, created in the they pushed all these kids to be the best they can be so they were all super motivated including poor rosemary who couldnt live up to that because she was a little slow and there was an accident when she was born and trying to deal with that and get her up to speed, they brought her in for an operation which was considered promising in those days, lobotomy. After that, she wound up institutionalized the rest of her life but in terms of this person, you have all these people incredibly motivated but also joe was big on take a risk, climb that tree. If you fall and break your arm, dont worry, im again. Go out there and take the risk, be great. You should be the president , we have four president s in the family as it should be. What was his motivation . I think he was just driven. My grandmother used to say the hungriest dog needs best. I think he was a hungry dog and he wanted the kids to be that way. Was there a desire to rise above . And he did. When he originally got involved with rose, that was the first step because roses father was more established in society. So probably a half step down because he was irish but a higher station than what joe senior came from. Where does his money come from . A lot of it came from liquor sales so it started with joe, to have a guy like that winding up running Internal Revenue and fdr, this is pretty amazing, joe was ambassador to england. This irish guy and fdr was an of breaking his chops and he was in his office and he said joe, your this job . Pull down your pants, i got to look at your legs and he knew joe was not but that was the thing in english society, he would have to show your legs with short but i think he was more than anything else, having fun with joe. For the liquor sales legal or illegal . I think they were illegal for the most part. What did the boys bring from joe . As far as motivation. I think the same thing. Ironically, once joe and john had to go to world war ii, he didnt want them in the war. They were both, they had the desire to go out there and do it so they both did Dangerous Things and joe, several, he finally got shot down. Once again, we try, i try to deal with each kennedy in the book in terms of, there three or four chapters on young joe and take you to where he had a tragic accident and meanwhile, john winds up there and put their lives at risk. When joe junior and jack, were they different people . Joe was the family but they thought he was going to be the start. He was very sickly as a kid and continued to be sick. Hes been hospitalized, even as a student, like what kids are going through now, is homeschooled because he was ill. What was roses role . I wish i had gotten more on rose. We are working with barbara, the show runner on madam secretary she wants to do this notion of the american crown and i think shes going to make more of rose, i just didnt get enough on rose. I kept trying to get more and more. She was behind the scenes, 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 could be. While you are working on the house of county, we also writing a thriller . Oh yeah and a good book. You cant see it but there were manuscripts, i would say 20 manuscripts along here and theres a shelf back here, this new script of kids book. It is a process. It is another nonfiction, things im doing now, a friend of mine, that was the actual do you remember the movie black hawk down . He was the actual sergeant portrayed in the movie and he went on to become a first sergeant. We are doing a book now of walk in my combat books boots which is an interview with all of these people who have gone to combat and i will take 30 page interviews into five or six pagn our mission is if you went to combat, he will go. If he didnt you are somebody who thinks they know about what soldiers are about, he will read it and say i had no idea. Well see their loved ones, they want to talk about it. How many interviews will you do . It is too much done. We did a couple hundred interviews. And you didnt use all of them, obviously. When you talk about the manuscripts sitting around, you wake up with an idea . This morning i did. I was in here about a quarter after 5 00 a. M. Where you going . A while back, not too long ago i brought the shadow, i had an idea about something to do with that character that would make the character more relevant. I was mulling these couple of scenes that i thought were important and the sense of new york in the era the book would take place so i rushed to this computer started playing with that. Is that computer offline . Yeah. So nobody can access what youre doing . I hope not. Probably they can. Whats the difference between writing nonfiction and fiction . Here is the weird thing about nonfiction, joe bryson dealt with this, he wrote a book about shakespeare and in it, he talks about the fact that nobody knows anything about shakespeare. We know the play, theres one or two images of kind of the way he looks, theres one piece of Court Proceedings and thats it. There are hundreds of books about shakespeare. Are you kidding . Are they all novels . They fiction . We dont know anything about shakespeare. Bizarre but anyway. The hard thing for me is i cant make things up. One of the things i learned in the house of kennedy is the number of years they spent in new york. And in london. The family was in london about a year end a half. And they are down here, too. The little details, one of my favorites is when jfk was president , he called her up several times and asked to send over the rainbow over the phone. It is kind of cool. A neat thing was when john junior, he had this magazine he said he put out before he died and he would go around to older investors and he would say the weird thing is, you all knew jfk, i didnt. That is interesting about this book, a lot of people who live through it will go on like god, i thought i knew everything. But theres so much i didnt know. For a lot of people, they dont know anything. Younger people dont read history now, they dont know any of this. It is an extraordinary story and i hope younger people read it. When i say younger, i mean under 40. What does it like to have a big book in the middle of what we are going through right now . Theres nothing like this in my lifetime, i have nothing to compare to. I guess because what was going on in world war ii where you had this incredible number of males out of the country in danger, for 20000 americans died during world war ii. But even that probably wasnt as extreme as 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 say goodbye remember the name of . They go, patterson. This book is doing great. One of the cool things, this shows you about around the world, this is the london times, frontpage in the london times, and six pages inside, thats how interested in england they are, it was extraordinary to me. New york times, not so much. You miss the book to her or do you not enjoy those anymore . I did a big one with president clinton and that was fun, big audiences and we might do another book so we will probably do another big to her. Ill do speeches now but its more big groups of librarians or teachers. I did one right after President Trump was elected, about 3000 librarians in indiana and you can imagine librarians, a small number would have been President Trump fans so you want to go into a dead room at like 8 00 a. M. The next morning, it was interesting. I miss things like that but im sure we will do more. We go and you come to my office, we do it like this. Its okay. We love to take a tour of your office sometime, to. I would do it right now but yeah. Do you consider yourself a historian . No. I consider myself a storyteller. Kennedy to some extent, a lot of information is out there but it hasnt been put in one place. One of the things about nonfiction is, an awful lot of it is written for academics people worried about, i happen to like the u. S. Grant but for a lot of people, it is more than they want. They just dont want 1000 pages. This is more, the house of kennedy reads more like a novel. 400 and some pages, its very readable. Its not everything about the kennedys but is a lot. People who know the story, they say theres a lot i didnt know what it reminded me of a lot of stuff i didnt know. How did you get into childrens books . I had a kid. [laughter] i had a boy, when jack was, he is an interesting little dude. In l. A. , he said are you going to miss me . He said not really. I was kind of taken aback and he said love means you can never be a part. Im like wow. I told him, if you Say Something in our house, i now own that line. [laughter] i can use it in my books and he was always and still is that way but the interesting thing, he wasnt a big reader and when he was eight, my wife and i, we said youre going to read that summer. People should be doing this now, it is important. We got him about a dozen library books, a dozen books we thought would turn him on ranging from Percy Jackson to a wrinkle in time and we said youre going to read every day this summer. He said do i have to . I said yeah unless you want to live in a garage. But we were careful to measure the books we thought would turn him on. By the end of the summer, he read a dozen books. They are all going to get a lot better. Right now, in this country, more than half the kids in this country do not read at grade level which is disgusting. That should be in every president ial debate, it should be dealt with every day. Half the kids in this country dont read at grade level . It is correctable. I work with the university of florida, we are trying to work with the governor right now, they have a program in the mid 80s. They figured out some things, we can correct this. I dont know how to correct global warming, i dont know how to influence it as an individual but we can solve a lot of this for kids at grade level. You can do this with your kids and grandkids and i guarantee, i think my kids book are some of the best books. I am doing one now, they said james, we want the world to know about Albert Einstein and scientific theories but they are smart, as you would expect. You have to make it entertaining and i said all i have to do is write about Albert Einstein and he said thats it. So i did this series and they are entertaining. I guarantee anyone watching, your kids read one, by the end they will be entertained and love the book and they will know more about einstein than you do which is a cool promise but because of that, mohamed ali came in they said wed like you to do a book about cashers claim meaning when mohammed was a little kid in louisville, i went out and approached alexander, a friend of mine so we did a book together which will come out in, i think november, about his life. Remembering, or becoming an elite is the name of the book. We tell the story and how he became mohamed ali, as a little kid the. Its cool and exciting. Is that woman was that one of the goals for the kiddos to read that . Absolutely. Its to make it easier for parents and teachers to find books that will turn their kids on which is important. A lot of times, i dont know, i went to a hardware store, i dont want to look like a book, i know i need nails but i dont know what kind and i dont want to be made fun of. A lot of people that way about bookstores. They dont know what kids book, they dont want to look stupid so they dont go. They dont ask. That is terrible. Its not their fault necessarily although parents and grandparents need to understand is your response ability to get your kids reading. For a meal a day and you need to get them reading. If theyre not reading at grade level, its a terrible burden to the kids if they go to a school and they are not competent readers. It makes school so hard. Are you where you see kids on their phones and you shake your head . I dont get too crazy about it but sure. What they are reading. Kinder, maybe. Im not crazy, i dont get angry about it but you do a little bit, okay, new world. But you do it as adults, you will see three people at dinner and they are on their phones. Remember when we used to go to the . I vaguely remember that. During this current situation, youve been active in independent bookstores, what have you been doing . We kind of reached out, i got in touch with Reese Witherspoon and we established bookstores. Com and it was about 1 million and that will be distributed to andy bookstores, all of them. No handling fees. We put in halfmillion, or i did. So that is a good thing, that will help. If nothing else, bookstore owners will say its not going to solve their problems they will get some money and go okay, people believe in us and theres hope and that made my day a little better. Hopefully now as things start to open, hopefully in a lot of these places, they will understand bookstores are essential as Liquor Stores and gunshots. Peter so does a Book Store Owner apply for grants. And are there strings attached. What will. We didnt throw group. I am so bad. Shoot, think. And they will distribute it. Think theres like a couple thousand independent bookstores that are on our list. What is going to get, the money will go out within the next couple of weeks. Peter is just purely there is pretty. James yes god bless you and here it is print hopefully, this will help. And then if you can, bring some of your employees back. You think we will have a fair number of bookstores open in the next few weeks or month created. Peter are you a fan of amazon. James you know look, amazon does a lot of good things. I dont think they in the beginning, i dont think they did great things for publishers or books or whatever. They do a lot of good things. I think they can do better. Ive talked to them about it. Especially with kids. They can really get kids rating. They can really do number they wanted to. It would be very useful, terrific thing pretty. Peter you have worked with bookstores, not yours during this crisis but in the past as well with scholarships and awards correct. James yes. We have 400 and some scholarships for teachers now and 30 some universities. So we do that. And i work with scholastic, bookstore libraries. Im sorry, classroom libraries read my mother was a teacher. Her classroom library, she bought all the books. We do not have a lot of money. So his wrist right on the family. So im very aware of that. And we put out the call and we said we want to help. We will help you, pay for your Library Pretty sweet and 82000 for help. We helped 18000. So scholastic. I went through the money and and scholastic give them, Half Price Book bonuses the lincoln by the books for a lot less they were buying important. Its a good thing and it is helpful and of course come the schools closed. We have already committed to next year. So hopefully come september or october, will be starting up a bunch of classroom libraries for teachers. Peter i presume by we you mean you and missus patterson. James no me in the from in my pocket. [laughter]. How many books you have coming out this year. James alludes track did i really dont know pretty dont count them. Just keep writing them. The publisher, probably wishes i would slow up a little bit spring of actually working on an autobiography now. I will follow the publisher but it will be interesting. I actually, i have one and i dont if its any good but its been an interesting experience. Peter so many hours today, its worth taking this interview at 330 this afternoon. James i would say five ish. So i will get out of here. With when they walk me and from seven to seven usually. I dont know if she will let me out a little earlier because i was here earlier. Lets say. [laughter]. Peter you made me lose my train of thought spread have one final question. James is my job. Peter if you were to recommend one James Patterson book, look into the harbors tornado what know what deals for god. What would that be pretty. James independence. I think like nonfiction. Black book. Our exaltation braided and you never know pretty noise hope they will work out great. Potty mouthed and stupid with kids books. Gatekeepers prince always something stupid in the title. He is because it is about the words its really funny good book