If you have a question for speakers, thick on the q a button at the bottom of the screen and will get to as many as time allows. In the chat ill be posting a link to donate and support of the sensors and destroy. Your purchases make events like to let possible help ensure the future of a language independent bookstore. Thank you so much for showing up in june in in support of our authors and the triple step of booksellers at Harvard Bookstore. We appreciate your support now and always. Finally as you may have experienced in virtual gatherings, we will do our best to resolve technical issues and we appreciate your understanding. Im so pleased that it is tonight speakers, Nicholson Baker is the bestselling author of ten novels and numerous works of nonfiction including anthologies, the mezzanine, substitute, owing to score with 1 million kids and New York Times bestselling award. He is one the National Critics circle award, the hermit has price and an award for American Academy of arts and letters. He will be joined i chose to host of wbur open source christopher light. They were discussed baseless which was discovered as a colorful engrossing regression of senator history. The Seattle Times called it a genre transforming blend of history and memoir offering behindthescenes glimpses of his home life and his work appears. That makes baseless and essential reading for anyone trying to grapple with the role of the u. S. And Global Affairs since the end of world war ii. We are happy to have them both your tonight. Without further ado the digital podium is yours, christopher and nicholson. Hilary, thank you, and its almost as much but as being in the Harvard Bookstore. Thank you for inviting me. Nicholson baker is a friend and weve had this kind of conversation actually quite a number of times before and its always an education to me. Let me just say i dont really need to introduce Nicholson Baker to this audience that i think of as really he writes the kinds of books. One is what i would call photorealistic pros, minute about small things including shoelaces, his most famous opening book but theres also his childlike dare i say but very grownup and the. But then theres a special category, and this book baseless is ended, of lets say nonfiction sort of political history in a certain way but history has never written i wont say never but its a method of looking at history how to describe the . It is antiimperial, antichurchill, it is not the grand scope of how the englishspeaking nations took over the absolute total universe, all that. Its miniature, its intimate and at the center of it always is this incredibly selfconscious vaguely consciousness, modern consciousness in a nightmarish world. This genre in the Nicholson Baker world is my favorite. A sort of pacifist history of war or to, at incredibly moving book both in substance and in the way he went about it. But having said all that, speak as you have with me before, its a kind of detective story. Its a story, a reporters story but also at the highest levels of writers diary up there with all the great writers most intimate diaries. Yes. Well, first of all i want to say hello to everybody and thank you for tuning in. Its amazing to be, these things can happen and a bunch of people come 60 people are here. I cant see you but im so happy you are here. A big crowd at the Harvard Bookstore. Yes. The Harvard Bookstore is one of those places in my memory. I can remember individual books that i have bought there. I remember buying edmund kosice father and son down in the basement there, and its just a place that has a particular flavor and i love the bookstore and im happy to be part of it even if im not in the bookstore. I was trying to write about something that happened a long time ago in this book, and but it just occurred to me that since i didnt know everything about what happened a long time ago because the documents were being withheld, that i would write about what was happening while i was trying to write about what happened a long time ago. I ended up, instead of having one timeline which is a timeline of the early cold war, harry truman, korea, china, a a gathering sense of suspicion and paranoia. I also wanted to write about my own life as i was trying to make sense of that early. It just happened early period. My wife and i got to rescue dioxins the day before dioxins. Start the scene comes to the book but happened weve gotten two very difficult but very lovable dogs the day before. They kind of accompanied me through it and into the very important to the story. So its a book about trying to write a book about what happened a long time ago. A lot of stuff i did know or i forgotten that george kent of the famous exletters defining the cold war was deep in this story. Allen dulles seems to have put one of the main players, frank wisner senior into the job pick up new weapons. Harry truman was more involved than he suggested later. Who are the main players . A lot of players, including Henry Cabot Lodge later but vannevar bush, huge figure, present at mit. I can see on the cover of time magazine. Must make it or something but this cast of characters postwar we have not postwar entering formerly along cold war with russia. Vannevar bush was one of most famous and fascinating characters at the time, or life for summary said he looked like ichabod crane. He had a shock of hair, a very intense guy. He liked to carve pipes and give them to he gave a carved pipe to allen dulles. To the people he really admired he would give a pipe. He was a tremendously powerful figure at mit and he was in charge of the atom bomb project in world war ii. But he was also in charge of the biological warfare project and thats what all begin was in world war ii. It just so happened that after the war was over he stayed on in the government and he started, because he was deeply, deeply suspicious and unhappy about the russians, he decided what was important to do was to ramp up the Germ Warfare Program in the United States in order to triumph over the numerical superiority of the russian army with germs. That was his solution to the cold war was to make russian plants sicken russian people sick, and it was a really bad idea. Was he ever explicit that we cant beat them on the ground in human force . We have to have Something Else . That was a refrain repeated over and over by the secretaries of defense, by all the people in the pentagon. Where every minute of every day, if we tried to fight, the chinese armies and the russian armies and the east german armies that we are going to lose and, therefore, we had to come up with a smarter solution, a new kind of weapon. Because by 1949 the russians have developed the atomic bomb so that was parity there. So what would be going to do . How would we win this war that seem to be in the offing . Was going happen in 1952 they thought and then they reschedule it for 1954. But it especially became worrisome when the korean war itself started. It was a war that was not called a war by harry truman, but because there had been an artificial line drawn across the country of korea by two functionaries meeting in the pentagon, the north became communist and the south became an ally of the United States and, therefore, there was a sort of politicization. It became, and the United States became involved in the civil war in korea. As soon as it happened it was as if the western electric shock that went through washington. And everything that had been plans and schemes and worries and in a general way about the evil empire of russia suddenly became very specific, especially when the United States started losing. There was a feeling that, well, the russian tanks were better than the american text, for instance, and things, very concrete things, question start of the past. Main question was what do we have and what do have in our arsenal that will win this apocalyptic war that is just around the corner . That are two i would say two very specific questions you ask in the search, and what is did they actually put all these bugs and chemical agents together . We knew they lusted for but did they actually ever have serum or whatever is going to be . And secondly, the final smoking gun question, did they ever use it . They never quite denied they wanted to find something and they were working on it. They were commissioning scientists but the always denied that they ever used it. Chief of the government in north korea, also china eventually, accused the United States of planting smallpox during that war. Get to the fundamental question. Did we or didnt we . Did we have ended we use it . Unfortunately, i think the short answer is yes. The chinese and the north koreans were very serious when they brought these charges. They sent a cable to the united nations. It wasnt something they just did casually one date of the this would be a nice thing to say. It was a very serious set of charges, and what this had initially in november of 1950 when the americans led to the south of korea after a massive defeat after the chinese counter attack, that the americans had left behind diseases. The american said thats ridiculous and silly, and, of course, we didnt do that. Several months later a mysterious new disease appeared in north korea called korea hemorrhagic fever, and had existed in a series the little dots along the belt of korea, along the 38th parallel which mystified the american epidemiologists here that i think actually happen. Then there was a second, a massive propaganda battle between the timeliness and the anticommunists, the americans and the british and the french. And that battle, what hinge on whether the americans had flown over individual airplanes and dropped mysterious insect bombs, if you can believe it, in the snow of the very rural areas of china near the korean border, and that i think is come has a slightly different answer and it hinges on the books title. The books title is baseless. The reason it is called baseless is because operation basis was a name of a topsecret air force program that aimed to perfect biological and chemical weapons at the earliest possible date. It was a project that spring to motion on an emergency basis as the korean war got bigger and became more, well, just everything got worse in korea. So project baseless, what was interesting about the word is it has denial built into it. Because the state department was this is a baseless accusation, these are baseless charges, and the expectation was that these particular weapons, if they were used, one of their advantages was come one of the advantages of dialogical weapons is its very hard to determine whether these things happened spontaneously because they are diseases endemic to a country or whether they happen because some other for an airplane has dropped feathers doped with various diseases. Let me just say, i want to quote your man tom kennedy because i didnt get in the podcast we did on this book but its very striking. Training government of course denied this hemorrhagic fever. No less than New York Times with big story saying there is no evidence at all. But you spoke to an exmarine ee tom kennedy who had been there. You talk to him in manhattan and he said that he had been told, mustve been in the hospital, that he had a new disease, hemorrhagic fever, that was carried by a tick on a rat. And what he said to you was, among other things, there was no history of hemorrhagic fever in korea until its use as a germ weapon. This was in an autobiographical note in 2015. He said i was one of those servicemembers expose to the secret crime against humanity. Thats pretty close to the horses mouth. How do we way that . Well, hes a guy who woke up with a fever one day in korea and he was medevac out in a helicopter and you is put in a mash unit, like in the tv show and they said there three quonset huts. If you go into number 3g will die. Number 22 you have a chance and number one youre okay. He went to hunt three and he worked his way through andy barak survives and he was discharged with completely false diagnosis. Hemorrhagic fever was something that just spontaneously happens. I think hes trying his best to explain to himself something i missed that happened to him as a young man in korea. Ended up into a number of men and there were people, americans who died. Hemorrhagic fever is still a problem in korea and theres a problem that was studied by japanese germ experts during the second world war. It was purified and intensified by them and then the americans hired the same germ warfare expert and miraculously somehow this fever appears. I think theres a strong case to be made that a small and very evil program happened somewhere around november of 1950 in which the americans decided to use japanese know how to, in fact, people along a belt in korea. I do think that is true and i think one of the victims was tom kennedy. Can add just a little bit of the japanese background which i happen to know only because a wonderfully marvelous writer gene gillman, dear friend of open source and of all good people, gene gillman wrote a book about basically about the tokyo war crimes, tokyo trials of war crimes that never really took place. We all know about the nuremberg trials, the germans, sort of a matching pair of trials in tokyo which we were left out of it in some fashion because we would have been called on the carpet about the Nuclear Weapons that we dropped on nagasaki and hiroshima. But there was no question and he documented in a marvelous book that the japanese had dropped all kinds of evil bugs on china in the 30s before pearl harbor, before the world war, but the japanese were the World Leaders in this technology, and part of the story you are revealing or confirm is the United States caught onto this and for using the japanese in some fashion into so project. Have got it right . This is a global monstrous story. Gene gillman really did a beautiful job in hidden atrocities telling the story and its a absolutely indispensable book and im sorry that she is gone. Im heartbroken. She would be an incredible witness in this covid moment. She was the wife of matthew matt olsen who is also a major figure in this book. I quote both of them in the book because the above so important to it. But what she chronicles was the fact something of people talked about but she did the best job of it was that there was a desperate attempt to get as many of the japanese germ warfare expert as possible and get them away from the russians and get them into the american orbit and then hide them from view. The russians decided the war crimes trial should take place and that they had a few japanese germ experts. They held their own war crimes trial and theres a full transcript of these trials and its really an appalling book because theres no question that everything people are saying in that book is absolutely, its an absolute transcript of what people actually said and the japanese scientists said i so regret what i did. Its just an amazing book actually come an amazing book. What the result of that was that the russians were upset, worried, frightened of the United States plans and the United States meanwhile had teams of experts in reviewing all these japanese savants of biological weaponry and figuring out how best to take what they had learned. Had done experiments on humans so it was absolutely priceless to their way of thinking, and pull those things back to camp dietrich, the hub of germ warfare and the United States come and see if these particular suite of diseases could be further perfected and intensified so that we could then apply them in a in a hoste matter to the russians. That was the flow. Quick parenthesis and that i want to go someplace else, but here are trump calling coronavirus the china virus. China and once in a while mumbles under its breadth maybe this is an american bio weapon. Maybe this is all bogus. With your incredible depth in history, what is possible in the manipulation of the coronavirus even now since you finished your book . The history of germ warfare in the United States, the history of american scientists getting sick from the own weapons. Lab accidents are just a constant. In this book theres National Institute of health, a man who decides hes going to study q fever and is going to study it because its a very, very dangerous and very were some disease and going to weaponized it. So takes it to the National Institutes of health and people start getting sick there. A person dies. This is a refrain of, in the history of American Laboratory science the diseases get out of laboratories. The first thing, if theres a murder and a couple, the person you want to ask is did the husband do it . The first thing you want to ask always if there is an unexplained, exotic disease that breaks out in a certain place you always want to look to see if there is a laboratory there. At i do not think that the chinese are involved in some sort of evil plan to cook up a germ. They are very concerned about getting a lucrative vaccine for various viruses. All of the american laboratories were doing the same kind of work the National Institute of health were paying the chinese to do this kind of work. The fact is that it may be something to happen in a laboratory, but the first thing you want to do is ask the people who are in charge of the laboratory to open their freezers in their notebooks and explain what happened, and that hasnt happened. I want to digress, nick, because as you sing at the outset this is a historical inquiry but its also, we love nick baker, theres a lot of nick baker. We just read a paragraph, and i bet you will find it, i think it is page 225, which are talking about your method, your house, your wandering, your dogs, your wife, your weather. So you are in name but why do you write these books . The book is, this chapter, the type of the chapters april 15, 2019, monday. Each chapter is titled by a day of the week and and i just had gotten very want up and i sort of have revealed my theory about what happened with the mysterious 700 bowls that strip dropped from the sky and stuff. Then i ran out of steam. Everyday i tried to write something and get exhausted and be done. The next day starts the edges of old secrets are blurred in the middle of spongy and there are frangible bits of recorded truth spread rent in the secrets like pieces of in ceramic. Its raining on tax day. Ive been awake thinking about japans rice crop and then have a few other fragments and then i go upstairs, come back downstairs and then i make a note. You to so many, much of your best work on the next page. Thats a nice of you. Upstairs i thought what do i really want from the book . I want truth in every paragraph. Of what surprises. I want a sense that everything is not hopeless, that we can do better. I want a sense that life is a complicated mixture of emotions and inconsistencies. Life is a sandwich. I want to include or simulate the pleasure of eating a sandwich. And then a final essay, and ive got to get to this, i cant come because the dogs are so important to me. When i woke up whenever it was, hours ago now i guess, i reached out with my hand and found that cedric, had screwed it up so he was elongated late sleeping between em and me. I held his paw for a while and felt the braille of joy of his paw pads. This is so wonderful. I have to acknowledge that are nasty critics out there who cant imagine why you write that sort of stuff in a series book, but to me its where you grab all of us at 4 00 in the morning, just offspeed, awesome message, really concerns the sum which we know and are so much vastly more that we havent the foggiest way to get our arms around or our heads around, emotional ministries, political mysteries. Is trump going to rebound in november . But you are groping their for all of us. I love it. Theres another piece i would love you to read from, and that is simply coming you are revealing this grotesque machine in american life, American Government to kill people. The more the better. Theres an incredible signs of mass killing and destruction. At the same time like a lot of us you are madly in with this country. Read a passage we talk about the context of all this craziness. I thank you press me to do that and i would have to find one. I could give you, i could suggest whyd you find the page number i just want to say, i guess the thing that excited me, the idea that some people there is a bad review of their and is very painful, im sorry it is there, but it is there. Its that im trying to do something a little bit new here, for gosh sakes. Trying to say there are plenty of novels that come look at the past but then have the person who is researching the past eating a Peanut Butter sandwich, and ive done that and i like doing that. But this is trying to chronicle an actual life all its a minor, trivial ups and downs as it is mapping itself onto the quest to find out and separate come back and focus again. Out of your depth and also when theres so many facts swarming in your mind that you cannot possibly find your way through them. Those moods, the moods of confusion and grief and frustration when secrets are withheld all part of the process. We have to i think have that kind of soundtrack of the actual historians voice as well as the larger band of the account of what happened. Well said. 331 and 332 you go from the sort of nightmare to the dreamscape, starting with jfk and then comes kennedy. We are in vietnam but carry on the page 332. I will. So i was talking that kennedy and kissinger and things that we know about a little. Sometimes, and and i worked myf up into the the paragraph before that and then comes kennedy. And then comes kennedy who approves defoliation and for denial and operation mongoose. Kennedy appoints Henry Cabot Lodge to be ambassador. Ambassador lodge becomes filled with a murders sort of petulant in saigon and rights in june 1964. It would help here and possibly in thailand if there were some of screens from North Vietnam that theyd been hit. The most be a number of different ways to make them scream. He mentions rockets implode and protects the returning fire. One method he offers is redacted lodge uses the word screen four times in one telegraph. Then comes the gulf of tonkin incident and rolling thunder. The war is in a new phase, thanks to the president great decisions, lodge road to clark clifford, the light about the bombing. Endless thunder. Anything that flies on anything that moves, said kissinger, relating nixons orders. In comes a space break, thank goodness. A little moment to breathe. Sometimes i dont believe in the history of the United States. When i say that im not saying as a general everyday of my life, every hour of every day, but i dont believe that this place deserves to have any sort of moral standing in the world as a country. It has been the source of incalculable disruptions. I understand americans individually have done good things, paintings, songs, cars, toasters, locomotives, holdings, bridges, billboards, sunglasses, topiary, dance steps, casseroles, corn mazes, speeches, ad campaigns, youtube videos. The new yorker of the Catherine White and eb white era is a Great American achievement, no question. I always go back to the midcentury new yorker, and theres john sergeant, operation sinks, this homegrown american plan to kill 5 million human beings in the space of which have almost all civilians . Just too awful to think about. You will have read the book to find what operation sinks was about. Thank you for nohitters on that list. What could be more beautiful . I dont even fully understand baseball but when you get into that zone and your far into a game and the sound of a baseball hitting the glove is, theres so much conviction, its so american. How do we reconcile these things . Really we dont. We have had so many good conversations over the years, and a lot of them have this, its not simpleminded but it is very appreciative, very grateful. One thing you talked about, a character who us a lot of things in common with you but he was talking about also leading to the point that when you suggested what you just read, but is it anything more glorious, even in poetry than the american songs and was or ever in our real lifetimes a more moving part than lorenz hart, very hard as you know him who wrote songs with richard rogers, but also hoagie carmichael. Were speaking of the song for which you wrote the music to skyline. George gershwin, i am a gershwin. His lyricist but someday he will come a long, the man i love. I believe in wonderful poetry at again thats the boy, nick baker, and all of us who is not simpleminded but conflicted, shall we say . I want you more about you. Lets look more at nick baker. Well, the reason that sometimes i want to write a book, first of all, yes to all that you are saying about song lyrics and poetry and the american enteritidis and the comedic playfulness of internal rhyming which carries on now in hiphop. Theres tremendous ingenuity that is being displayed kind of sleight of mouth that is happening thats very characteristic of this real american originality of inventiveness of rhine and metrical sophistication. Continues. Its not as if we are looking back of a mess. Its all happening. Were in the middle of it. Theres no end to theres a dance of words in good crap. But as far as what i like to do is i of course want to write about happy people and i want to write books that are evidence for why life is worth living and good, but there are these kind of chasms that open up in history and they are unpleasant and unfortunate. They are not just unfortunate. They are terrifying and one of them was world war ii, and in the cold war that immediately followed it. I sometimes think that its my job to write about those things and try to figure out a way to heal over them or to make them i understand them make them less distracting so that i can get back to writing about why straws float or whatever little tiny things that are actually part of the delicate texture of ongoing existence, which is what i really ive always been drawn to. This gossamer fabric of lived life, thats whats really important. But sometimes theres a crack, a fissure that opens in front of you and its like a disaster movie. What is it . Its a piece of history that is so awful that you cannot ignore it, and so i sometimes write a book about that in order to get past the thing and make a bridge beyond it. Can i remind people listening and watching that you are invited to submit your own questions and answers questions for nick baker to answer. If you want if you want to submit the answers, too, that would be helpful. You get royalties for that. We have two questions. One series, one not so. What part of you, nick baker, do you think allows you to write books to slow down time and action, go extremely, as in mezzanine or a box of matches . Now the serious question. Your protagonist in colleges likes to sing a song, im in the bar, i meant the barn, im in the barn in the afternoon. Its been bothering me for years. What is the tune . How does the song go . That is a friendly question. Im in the barn, im in the barn, im in the barn in the afternoon. Thats the way it was, in the barn. Thats the answer to the second question. The first question, how did you write books that slow down time . Anybody who is writing a a boos trying to slow down time somehow or other. Anytime you take something and list it up into the foyers of your own intention, attention and think about it and turn it around, a momentary parenthesis that has been built around that object or that social moment, whatever it is, that transactio transaction. It is a slowing down of time. A sentence has these wonderful little breath marks, semicolons, dashes in them and all of those have machinery of huffing and puffing, are all basically ways of taking your overly eager leaping mind and putting it on a track and saying just think your way along this with me now slowly. Its almost inevitable. If you write a sequence of words that other people have to follow, they are slowed down because we actually i very good at parallel processing. Im just doing what everybody wants to do, but it feels so good that i may be doing a little more pic i also dispense with the other step somewhat. I sometimes get rid of the larger spine of a plot and just leave the slowed down warm trails worm trails of the thoughts i had. Who taught you . You credited earlier but who does that, thinking actually how we think and how multilevel it really is. The person who first did it for me was, i audited the class when i was in high school and one of the stories that was in the textbook in the class was and it had i dont know, practically every paragraph had this moment where the paragraph you be going along at a normal rate of speed and then is just as if you are in this describe world. Its a surreal, normalcy is what it is. It was very exciting and i thought this guy is doing something that none of the Science Fiction writers, not of the suspense writers i had read was able to do. He has faults. He was a arrogant person but he was just, his most mobile self was when he would just be writing about a rainstorm reaching a certain tree or he wrote, well, people who followed from him. I think updike learned a huge amount from it. I think you learned a lot from priest who learned a lot from george eliot. Theres a long tradition of it, but the 22nd what a beautiful things but the 2020th century is that its the century of the observation and improvisation. But these two things, and it seems mysteriously to have happened most in the United States. Interesting. Other questions . Robert rothstein writes i read the u. S. Bombed virtually every town in north korea. If this is true [inaudible] the Bombing Campaign, thats a very good question. The Bombing Campaign was unsuccessful, even though every single village in every city was burned. Not just bombed but burned. It was an attempt to burn an entire country. It did not succeed because the north koreans escaped by living in caves here so they have spent years in caves. The idea was chinese were assisting them and we didnt want that. The final effort was to frighten the chinese and make them go away by dropping these very traditional looking bombs that were actually leaflet bombs but they were filled with insects, and the chinese made very detailed accounts of all these different insects. My suspicion is that that actually happened, but the chinese charge those insects were dealt with diseases was falsified, that it in fact, with what the americans called a deception operation. It was baseless, it was a deniable effort. So they wanted to discourage, terrify, cause unhappiness in the area of china that was right on the board of korea. Thats what these events supposedly happened. Thats i think what did happen. A message from steve come saluting your work. Steve wrote a Remarkable Book on fort dietrich. [inaudible] he said under Douglas Macarthur purview, the japanese know how in germ warfare was transferred to fort dietrich in maryland where. [inaudible] other floors quickly develop and described these in the book. [inaudible] the name of steves book is assassination in chief, or something. Another level of the sites for i what to Say Something that steve kinzer because i could not possibly have written this book without this man is a great explainer. Its impossible to describe a difficult it is to deal with something as complicated as the cold war and make it clear. This is what Stephen Kinzer has done in in a whole bunch of bo. Amen. One after another. All the shaws mintzberg exactly, and the dulles brothers. One book after another he is a master quarter. Thats another talent that think people dont understand how important it is. Theres things you can quote, you can make a point with 87 Different Things but if you choose the right quote, that paragraph six, the mind is both moved along comforted that something has happened and he does that. Dale evans, as in roy rogers may be, asks the question wife Henry Kissinger still alive . Oh, god. We dont need to answer that. Im so glad you mentioned floating straws. Since Plastic Straws are going way up and think about paper straw and soda in can and the pizza passage mezzanine. How are you writing the new brief . Oh, gosh. You know, its funny about trying to slow time down, which i try to do in the mezzanine using footnotes and huge paragraphs of description and one there was a footnote about floating straws. Some straws float, some straws do not float. It has to do whether the plastic dash of whether they are plastic or paper. I thought i really nailed this one. It was like the hot air blower in restrooms. Really, thats it. Theres nothing more to be said about this but then time marches on and subtly theres a political element, and what do i think about the floating straws of today . Basically very little experience with them. I dont know very much about the current straws. I think im lost in ags straw time the 80s. I got to do some serious research. Its hard to go to a restaurant straws are completely unnecessary but their part, they are joyful. They are america. As a kid i love the idea you could simply levitate whatever liquid you were drinking right to mouth as if it were an elevator. I love that. I have a question and maybe you can answer as we go. When you look at this was a fascinating range of books you have written, and some of them, all of them something is hilariously funny, just reflective and its hard to account for. Whats the pattern use in the range from your soft to deeply thoughtful Human History to your, shall we say, i dont want to say trivia, but your microscopic examination of all things the ship small things. Who is this guy, Nicholas Baker . If yet 1 mortality. 40 mortality. I could say that one thing that a do think is important is to write every day, and if you write every day, every day is, especially if you ask yourself whats the best moment of the day, you things are always arising. But i guess this scene, if ice going to be grand about it is rescue. I like to rescue everyday life from the kind of neglect of its everydayness. I like to rescue the idea that theres nothing more completely over talked about than sex and say maybe theres more to be said about sex, even sex, you know. Or that this book is the rescue in this book is there were two very nice historians from toronto to wrote a book about this as the book was penned, and they so were such wounded men because of this process, and i thought that they had done, they had written a really and useful book. That part of what motivated me to write this book was rescued in. One of them died before i finish the book, and while i was writing the book the other one died. But always i want to bring something out, bring some aspect, so often, some wayside wildflower of notice life. I dont want to say lets put a frame about that, lets talk about that for a moment. All part of making a tasty sandwich. Do you know what i found what sandwich was . I only discovered this in the last couple of years. Anything, you could make a sandwich out of anything. Because all you need is the crunch, and mixture of cold and warm and just a few different kind of incompatible layers and you have the sandwich joy. You dont need me. My sandwiches dont have meet anymore. Sprouts. You need some sprouts but you need some greasy i have made potato sandwiches. Today i had is going to lay it out, two spanish sandwiches. I put some in a bun and puts some mustard on it. You take a bite of that and that is a complete sandwich experience. Listen, i serious question and as part of the book. Can you please speak of how the freedom of information act plate in your process using a process to allegedly for the transparency but protecting heinous secrets . This is a serious core, political impulse in your book. Well dont you see everything over just put it out there. This word redaction, i mean, just say and i begin to shiver all over. I cant stand it as a euphemism. Its a terrible thing. I actually, i have more radical view which is all documents older than 50 years out to be completely and totally declassified with the redaction redactions. They have entered the world of history and they are no longer state secrets. They are historical bits of richness that we can think about and learn, and if they are mistakes we can learn from those mistakes. Why didnt the foia get its job done . It was a great law and it is a good law. It is a very good law and it took a a long time to get it passed, ten years i think. Lyndon johnson signed into law and almost immediately it began to dislodge all kinds of secrets. Secrets begin exploding out of agencies like the air force at the Central Intelligence agency, and it was all the way through the late 70s there was a tremendous outpouring of knowledge about what it happened in the cold war. And then during the reagan era a contracted, rules changed. I think we are living in a time in which several important switches in the bank of switches of the freedom of information act of Circuit Breakers have been shut off and went to go back and enforce the law, if it is on the books flip the breakers and lets learn what is there. I guess the fundamental frustration of this book is that its a 400 page book and all the time i was writing it or all those eight, ten years, i was waiting for us that the documents to be released. Maybe its going to be done in a hurry. Gary hart former senator from colorado was on our program this week talking about, he and Walter Mondale with the last two survivors of the Church Committee but they unearthed a lot of evil stuff, assassinations, and its got to be put out. But at the very moment we are in, President Trump likes to say, i have powers that nobody knows about. You dont know about. I can do, declare a national emergency. Gary hart says we better damn well find that out and talk ab. What are the secret powers . I think were running out of time, but before i just want credit your friend and mine alexander who told me 35 years ago, you want to see a real writer, go get mezzanine by a guy named Nicholas Baker. I did and he was entirely right. I rejoiced in had to grit i think all of your books, and getting to know you. Ten more of these interviews and will get to know each other. Well, i want to say ive learned a huge amount of you, and every time we talk i feel im getting closer to understanding myself and some of the outside world, so thank you. I want to say one thing, one tiny victory is here is a redacted document that i dealt with for ten years. Its a a very important documet from 1949 that is plan for how to deceive somebody but its all blacked out, what is being to see pictures a document that mysteriously appeared in the mail, the very same document without a single redaction about two weeks before the book went to press, the National Archives somehow got the pentagon to release this thing, and it is the beginning of the biological weapons arms race between the americans and the soviet union because it says the americans are going to deceive the soviet union into thinking that americans have come up with a super toxic germ weapon and once they do that then the russians are going to waste their efforts tried to build the same weapon. Well, it did waste their efforts. In fact, they did build the weapon and meta whole huge mess of an arms race because of this plan from 1949. You write a whole book and theres all these frustrations in it and documents that are not released, and then mysteriously because the book exists, one crucial document gets pride out at the end and its all worth it. Wow. Thanks all of you out there for spending your evening with us. To learn more about this book , purchase at the link in our chat and go on harvard. Com once discloses and on behalf of Harvard Bookstore in cambridge, mass. , keepreading and please everybody, please be well tank you so much everybody. Take care. Today at noon eastern on indepth, are live in depth conversation with jill lepore whose most recent book is if then, other titles include the secret history of wonder woman. These truths a history of the United States and a book of ages. Join in the conversation with your phone calls, facebook comments, texts and tweets. Watch in depth at noon eastern on book tv on cspan2. During our Virtual Event hosted by new york citys strand bookstore New York Times columnist ross started interview tara burton about her book strange rights. In this portion she describes our views on religion are changing in america. Were not necessarily talking about people who are atheists although about six percent of the population although its too atheists tend to undersell for report but were talking about people who for whatever reason are alienated by institutionalism, organized religion, who feel it has nothing to offer them. Who may as in the case or people who believe in the traditional judeochristian god actually still have him form of faith but who are well unwilling to identify with or participate in it as a religion in and of itself so were talking about the spiritual but not religious but were also talking about a broader category and in my book i called it the religious remix which includes not just the spiritual but not religious which i think is the most visible version of this phenomenon but also people who do identify, kick the box as it were with a particular religious tradition but whose personal practices Belief Systems are more eclectic and a statistic that i like to bring up here to give a sense of how widespread this is is about 30 percent of self identified christians believe in reincarnation which is not shall we Say Something one would associatewith christian orthodoxy. So we are living in an age i argue where religious life, the components of a religious life meeting purpose, community, ritual are relating to them in a different way. Were mixing and matching, were unbundling to use a term that scholars used in their work and theres a sense in which were all sort of the end point of this is where all making our own religion. These can include not just elements of traditional religion butthings like wellness culture , fandom, political activism, the sort of vast array of modern occultism, witchcraft and neopaganism and wicca are among the fastestgrowing religions in america and so on and so forth. To watch the rest of this Program Visit our website, booktv. Org. Use the searchbox to look for tara burton for the title of her new book strange rights. Im delighted to welcome Jennet Conant was also granddaughter of James Bryant Conant was an administrative director of the Manhattan Project and one of our nations leading scientists of the 20th century. Shes author of New York Times bestsellers the irregulars, roald dahl and the british spy ring in world war time washington and tuxedo park, wall street tycoon and the secret palace of science that changed the course ofworld war ii. Shell be speaking tonight about her new book the great secret the classified world war ii