explore the area's history and culture with local authors. >> for 50 years this country after the great fires of 1910 was r which traumatized the u.s. forest service tried to take fire out of the landscape. the problem is we took good fires as well as bad fires out. the last 50 years, half the history of our engagement we tried to put good fire back in. it's tricky, too, because once you've taken fire out, restoring it is like trying to put an endangered species back in. >> we also spoke with civil war and presidential historian brook simpson. >> i make the past come to life, all right? it's like the musical "hamilton", who lives or dies and who tells the story? >> i'm the one who tells the story and make it as on as i

can, as balanced as i can, i get to do something fundamentally creative and say this is what i think happened. >> we begin our look with author david berman and his book arizona's seven-term governor george hunt. >> if you're going to write a history for arizona and you want to tell it, you can't ignore george hunt because he was so much involved in everything that went on from 1890 to the 1930's and the new deal. a lot of reforms and the right to the water from the colorado river. he was at the center of everything. george hunt was born in a place called huntsville, missouri, named after his grandfather. and he was in a part of

missouri that was settled largely by the upper south. tennessee and north carolina. his family came from that area. and he was raised on a farm which was devastated terribly by the civil war and raised in poverty, really, and had a tough time subsistence farming. they had to live on what they grew. had little education. and more than willing to do with his life and decided to head west. he wound up in new mexico.

came quite wealthy, president of the bank and in the meantime, to get interested in politics, largely the people who ran the government were the republicans because they were appointed by a republican president but the settlers were democrats much of arizona was settled in populous areas in tucson and the southern part by southerners. the fourth was settled by northerners. you had yankees here, southerners there but in the legislature, democrats largely controlled the legislature. the division among democrats, the most populist movement, and

the most strong moment of minors. and and in business for yourself, the miners became wage slaves, and minor safety page, there was an agitation, and this led to the populist movement.

there was a time he into it, and and detecting the people becoming wage slaves, at attractive young man. he gained a lot of weight, couldn't ride a horse, 300 pounds at one time, not 5 foot 9 and had a walrus mustache and the handsomest of men, a common

guide. he did worry about what he thought of them. and on the hill, he spoke horribly, looked terrible. he was not made for the modern age of television by any means. he had a great talent for one on one politics. people would think they knew him, he thought he knew them. he would go talk to people about their children, their aspirations, their lives and he would write this down and when he came to the town again, how is that son of yours? is he working? people are so impressed that he remembered these things.

it was so good, at the time of the state of small towns and mining camps, you could get to know them in half an hour. with the help of index cards, remember people and that style by other politicians is so effective. governor hunt, elected for the first time in 1911 shortly before we became a state, once in office and political issues, work on and area he took a lot of interest in and that was prison reform. had a snake hole where they would torture people and have terrible things and got rid of that. he was a believer in scientific prison administration, people not necessarily bad when they

are born. they are educated and science can to that. education can do that. he let them get the mail they wanted. he was trying to treat them as human beings who needed help, not necessarily -- george hunt was a progressive, focused on progressive issues until 1920, 1924. he was -- in 1916 they said he lost the election. the votes came in in 1916, the end of the progressive period. he didn't think he did. he refused to vacate the office of governor, barricaded himself in the building. the fellow who beat him couldn't

get in. hunt set i am still governor, go away and they had be governor of arizona and the supreme court, vacate the building so he did that, next year 1917 kept challenging the results and got it reversed so he came back in august but after that he wasn't going to run for governor in 1918 so had an appointment to siam, president wilson to be ambassador. that was done largely because he threatened to run for the u.s. senate against conservative democrat who was close to wilson and smart as smith, do you think we can yet another job for george hunt and make ambassadorship and somewhere far

away? where hunt went for two years largely spending time planning to come back and run for reelection, he bought a lot of antiques and trinkets and the correspondence at the library, he was applauding and trying to figure out who would go for him, whether he should run or not it decided to run against 22, he ran in 22, 24, 26, lost in 28, came back in 30. by that time the issues changed. not so much progressive issues, organized labor had weakened, the driving us. this issue was saving a river in arizona. a proper proprietary interest,

the water came through arizona, why can't we use it? didn't think about the downstream people. he didn't think of the interest rate stream at all, they will need it for day and need to protect yourselves from california. they were trying to get it in southern california. hunt spent a good deal of the 20s not so much on progressive issues but saving arizona's water going being diverted from the colorado river and southern california. that was his cause and because of the state. and went to that period. he died in 1934 and lost in 32 and he died on christmas eve. much of the establishment democratic party, 32, 34, his career and influence was pretty

low. he was very relevant to the minds of contemporary progressives. he was saying what bernie sanders is saying and a lot of progressives are saying today. there are spokesman there. he left that legacy. >> overlooking downtown arizona, c-span learning more about the literary scene. up next we speak with arthur stephen pyne about his book "between 2 fires," a fire history of contemporary america. >> for 50 years this country after the great fires of 1910 the traumatized u.s. forest service tried to take fire out of the landscape. the problem was we took good fires as well as bad fires. the last 50 years, which was rather a long time, half the history of our engagement, we

tried to put good fires back in. that is very difficult but that is the thing to do. not generally communicated because what we see in the news media are the bad fires. that is the conflict. that is what stimulates character and choices. the sort of deep, patient cultivation of good fires is much trickier. it is difficult to tell. we don't have a strong narrative. we have a powerful narrative, taking out hundreds of people, destroying communities well into the 20th century. we have great stories of firefights, the crew tagging in, hiding out, trying to find some refuge, often when people write

about it, and default to a platoon and you follow that through the campaign and the personality, can be adapted to fire but it is not what the story is about. it is hard to tell the story of how to put good fire back in. really horrific a catastrophic fire genuinely disastrous fires in the 19th and 20th century, the 1910 blowup in the northern rockies traumatized the forest service, going to handle the fire menace and they decided the way to handle it was take every fire because every fire cannot become large, you can never have the potential full-scale resistance model, any potential threat before it has a chance,

this took a lot of effort. not until the 1930s with the new deal in civilian conservation that had the wherewithal to begin tackling this in the back country and at that point the forest service adopted the 10 am policy, universal standard across the country. all environments all settings, control of every fire by 10:00 the next morning and if you fail, by 10:00 the following morning and so on, a sense that we could once and for all by putting enough political capital, putting enough resources and people into it which we now have available we can solve the fire menace and this lasted until the 1960s and then you started getting real pushback, institutional pushback, people didn't want the forest service to set national policy, surprising landowners who wanted access to fire because they traditionally used it. a civil society emerges to

challenge what was becoming a government monopoly, a research station in florida, nature conservancy becomes involved and what they saw was a series of problems. part of it was the sense of monopoly and monolithic narrative that evolved as the vocal institution which part of it was the landscape consequences so grasslands and shrub lands were becoming overrun with trees, force that had been used to frequent fire, every two or three years, longleaf pine in the southeast, santa rosa pine in the southwest, environments like that were not getting frequent fires so stuff was building up. all the stuff that fell down was no longer being flushed out, the character of the forest was changing so you had the continuity of fuel on the

surface of to the canopy so you are getting different kinds of fires resulting, fires to which these particular forests are no longer adapted. they are adapted to a particular pattern of fire, not just fire in general. and areas that simply have evolved with large replacing fires but seemed to incinerate large chunks through the canopy and then received. this is the kind of fire they need so all these fire regimes are sort of out of whack. we need to get fire back and partly because if we don't we have diseased, unhealthy environment. we also have fuel building up to the point, really disastrous fires we can no longer control. even from a fire control standpoint, fire protection perspective you are losing the game. the more you keep doing that.

most live in urban settings so they see fire in that context and understand it and that doesn't apply to wildfires. they are different entities. for every fire you put out in the city is a problem solved. most fires you put out a wildland are simply problems put off and they become worse. the catalytic year is 1994, the first billion-dollar suppression budget, 34 firefighters were killed including 14, in colorado. and why that particularly mattered when norman mclean published the best-selling book, young men and fire and the cultural context it had not had that proves is that did make intent if we think so what,

people -- this book really did matter. this changed how the fire community thought about fatality fires resolved they would not let this happen again. it took a long time to work the mechanics out and that is pretty well embedded in the culture of firefighting and fire management. and in the 70s there were divisions of fire management, find ways to work with fire and put fire back in where we can. and have some room, what does that actually mean. and they are working in the west with the concept of a managed

wildfire, and try to control it in its tracks. they are going to contain it or work with it, pooling it here, pushing it there, protecting critical assets, keeping fire out of communities, protect municipal watersheds and so forth. and get good fire back on the ground in the process. part of that unhinged, the fire revolution, this awkward stupid geeky term, in southern california. the consequences of urban sprawl moving into areas that are -- the fires that results, really unhealthy and lethal

consequences mingling two things that should be separated and the ball is continued, we were re-colonizing a lot of rural landscapes but not in the west. that has restricted a lot of room for maneuvering partly because the public doesn't want wildfire in their backyard, they don't want smoke fingering for weeks wildfires burn themselves out, they have by forcing the protectorate around these areas they really shrunk the area and the large landscape space that had been there that you could play with, and efficient, safe

and ecologically useful way, and one quarantine and the narrative, and california misbehaving. they are in the southeast, and particularly want to hear. people moved to qualify rule setting, and some kind of nature, they want peace, privacy, they don't want to be burdened with all kinds of regulations and taxes and the rest of it but if they do that, and they don't want to fire service to fall back on. and there is an effort to build volunteer fire departments and

federal programs through the forest service to help build up capacity, efforts to reintroduce controlled burning in many of these areas, in a relatively benign way of keeping the problem under wraps. even legislation to speak to landowners right to burn. there are certain rules but if you follow those rules you are fine. florida even changed liability considerations to support a bias in favor of burning because the alternatives are so awful so there's a lot of movement going around but we had a lot of experience with our cities. we fix that by political decisions, won't have towns and cities burn like this anymore. we are going to put in codes and enforce the code, the protection

system and despite all this voluntary effort going on, many communities are responding, that is what it is going to take. unlikely that will happen on a national level but states are making those choices. doesn't help with the backlog of bad sprawl but may help in the future and the fire agencies are refusing to defend, they won't put people's lives at risk to save the structure. that has impact. a lot of talk about letting the markets come in but fire insurance hasn't worked very well. these fires are not big. one category 4 hurricane, these fires are the same level as

tornadoes. very graphic, capture the imagination but in terms of numbers they are just not fair a political decision will establish the base level for the market. that is how we did it with cities and how to deal with these, the interface which is most divine in some ways. houses around us, we could invert that and say this is an urban fire problem with funny landscaping. if you read the fine it the solution is obvious what you have to do. people may not like it but that is what it takes. this is not a technically solveable problem. it is more or less under our control but the larger issue is not a problem we fix but the relationship.

we have had a relationship with fire all our existence, the monopolist for the planet, fire to find who we are. that is not a problem you fix. it changes. we are always going to be between fires because fires are always changing. we are changing in ways that change fires so you have a mobius strip going on and i think that is important, is not something to enact legislation before tens of billions into this, fix the problem, it goes away. it is never going away. it is part of how nature works, part of how the face nature and that is a lesson we need to hear. >> at sun devil stadium on the campus of arizona state university in tempe, arizona, booktv is here to learn more

about the rich literary scene, we learn about inventions that were discovered by accident in the book "accidental genius". be change i had known before i started writing this book i had known about many of these accidental scientific discoveries and i learned about them in some degree of detail but i had not really looked at them analytically. what makes this possible? once i was writing it and begin to collect more anecdotes and look at them in more detail and scatter people's papers that were published, reminiscences that happened after the fact, when i put those together i realized there were three elements that had to be part of every accidental scientific discovery. the first is preparation. many people have seen evidence

that scientists later on said this is something cool but because we were not prepared to recognize something unusual in what they had seen, they didn't pay any attention to it. the other is the actual circumstance itself, whatever the accident is. i call that opportunity. the opportunity needs to be there to create or make an observation, create something you observe or just observe something in nature and the third element is once you see, you know what you are doing, you know what you expect, something unusual happens, you are in the circumstance and something unusual happens, now it is very easy in many environments to toss is that aside scientists are like everybody else, got a job to do, investigating how to

create a new die for clothes and that not necessarily occur to them to look at that die and see if it could be used to cure disease so when you see an effect like that you can't just say that is not my job. i'm working on making a die, you have to have the desire to follow up the accidental observation you have made. just about everyone heard of larry -- louis pasteur. he's interesting because he is in one major sense the father of vaccination. he did not do the first vaccine but he was the first who created a vaccine where they had an idea how things might be working so he creates a scenario which ends up being the framework for all modern medicine really. louis pasteur had a very controversial theory, that

diseases were caused by microorganisms. cholera was and still is when it occurs a very debilitating and dangerous disease and also very economically important for agriculture, killing a significant percentage of poultry in france. louis pasteur said i believe this is due to this infectious agent so he pulled this infection agent out and put it in broth, would make a soup and would grow the microorganisms by feeding them like soup. and he would take the broth and injected into the chicken but when he took the broth and injected it into the chicken they died. this was kind of proof that this organism was causing the disease

but people were not that easily convinced of the strength of his argument at the time so he had to do this over and over again. he's doing this for a long time and time for summer vacation. he says i got infectious agents here three days from now, inject the chicken so pasteur is on vacation and like a lot of employees do when the boss is gone they put their feet up and say time for my vacation too. his assistants took off without injecting this broth. two weeks later the broth is there, pasteur says what did you do this for? you know how hard it is to get these things? i wish you had injected these chickens ahead of time. the guy says sorry but i can do it now. do it now so he injected the chickens with the broth that was now two weeks old and none of them died. they got sick but none them

died. pastures is you ruined broth. make a new batch and this time make twice as much because we are behind schedule so we got to infect a lot more chickens. so they infected a bunch of chickens. some of the ones that had been injected with the old broth and some that were not. every chicken that was not earlier injected with the old broth died. every single chicken that had already been injected for the old broth lived in pastor said let's do this again and he repeated the experiment. it turns out he had the wrong idea why his injections worked. now we know when the body detects an infectious agent,

manufacturing weapons against that infectious agents. normally your many times, the infection, the infectious agent is deadly, your body's response to that agent slower than the agent can work and you get sick or you die. but slow down the infectious agent, if you weaken it ahead of time so that it is slower, not as healthy, can't fight back as well against your body's defenses your body's defenses can get ahead and next time you get the infectious agent your body is prepared. what you do is inject someone with a weakened portion of that infectious agent is nowadays we have fancier ways of doing it but a weakened version of that infectious agent, when the real thing comes along you are set, your body says i'm ready for

you, you are gone. it was all because of that accidental discovery. it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't taken summer vacation. the story of louis pasteur and is accidental discovery is very interesting and has ramifications for the modern world but one of the interesting things about accidental discoveries is the person who makes the observation, they need to pursue that observation to its logical end's for pastor it is easy, two guys working for him, what he said went but when he wants to look at something they looked at it. it is tougher in the corporate world not only today but in 1938 for example. in 1938 a dentist was working for dupont and his job was to make new refrigerators. things like free on, cfcs. they had a process of doing it,

there was well-defined chemistry for making these things, they put certain elements together and trying all sorts of different things to get something that would make a good compound for working in refrigerators and other things. that was his job. to make a new refrigerant. one day they left their batch to sit overnight and opened big gap bottles they did their reactions in, and incomes out and he says shoot, it must've leaked. right there he could have said it must've leaked, you could've thrown that bottle out and started over again. what if it didn't leak, let's way this bottle so he weighed the bottle in the bottle weighed just as much as it should have

with all the things in it. weight a second. it didn't leak but there is no gas in there so what is going on? a little bit of white powder looking like shredded coconut, what is this? they sawed the bottle in half, pulled it out and there is white powder coating the outside of the bottle. his job is to make a gaseous refrigerant that his company, dupont can sell to make money in their refrigerators and other things that require that capability. this material is cool. look how slippery this is. he was able to get the buy-in and he himself has curiosity and gumption to say this thing looks

really interesting. teflon, nowadays we think of it most commonly in terms of nonstick pans, and teflon was the nonstick material but also many other things, wire insulation and similar products but in the 1930s, late 1930s there was another problem happening. the world was discovering atomic energy, one of the things they've discovered was they needed this uranium and uranium comes in the form of fluoride and very caustic, very toxic and toxic and anything around. when you have a process where

you want to push through a factory operation, and make these things to disintegrate. nasty stuff and radioactive on top of that. you need some kind of material, and bearings with it. and maintain a good feel and so slippery and resistance, and the perfect answer. and the united states and particular. this is interesting because, and

the chemist, and something strange happened. they would make the new material, could easily not had to follow through. and ignore that job because it was something interesting here, to be interested enough and say this is really cool. to take a look at this thing. opportunity and desire. one of the prototypical examples of accidental discovery in the scientific community. and in germany, x-rays are known as roentgen raise, to acknowledge the seminal role in this discovery, it is an

interesting discovery, makes it very clear you need a lot more in preparation and opportunity, around that time, the natures matter, in the way we are exploring it now this was before his concept of the atom. the idea of a nucleus and electrons surrounding it. a state of matter called cathode rays, you could make a cathode-ray, by taking it like a lightbulb, putting it like a filament, high-voltage, more complicated than that, you see the theme of something, what we call the cathode-ray.

we know those cathode raise our electrons but at the time they had no idea. they were investigating these cathode raise but it turns out something else was happening as well. in addition to this cathode-ray there was another kind of radiation coming from this. he put some photographic plates down and he saw there was an outline of an object, that is not from the cathode rays because cathode raise don't do that. they don't have this effect on this film so he said i will take a look at what these are. the cathode-ray, put cathode rays in a magnetic quill, they will bend. will these things bend? they won't bend.

cathode-rays don't go through very much. they don't go beyond, it will go through a piece of paper. he did a series of experiments over six weeks that truly -- it has been said that in six weeks he learned everything that would be known about x-rays for the next 100 years. other things have been learned since then but he did such an exhaustive investigation of x-rays for those six weeks by the time he was done he had a complete understanding of the operation of x-rays. he didn't understand everything and in this sense he was lucky. what he did not realize at the time was x-rays are ionizing radiation, and nonliving material, they will knock off pieces and destroy it a little bit and bit by bit, over time it

could be dangerous but luckily for roentgen he did these experiments and it lead lined dark room. what he didn't know was he was protecting himself from the dangerous effect of the x-rays. over the next couple decades people were exposed to them and began to develop lesions on their hands and other things because of that. x-rays continuously used as a medically viable important tool, very important, nowadays we learned methods to significantly reduce this by making the sensitivity of detectors much higher but without x-rays, it is not where it was today, if not for 6 weeks spent digging into this. one of the interesting things about it, not only did roentgen get a degree of fame for this which he did not enjoy, did not

like the fact, not only did he get that same, they had, you can look in their notebooks and what did they do with it. they say that was funny and they left so this is one of the things that is difficult for people in the scientific field and can't be just lucky, take a lot more than that. got to have reparation to see something unusual has happened, the opportunity to see that unusual thing whatever it happens to be. part of that is the more you look at things the more you will see. you need to have the desire.

what people outside scientific and technological fields think of the role of chance, something is like winning the lottery. win the lottery and that is why you do this. know. you cannot do it unless you first put in the groundwork to understand the basics, what should happen, when something happens that shouldn't happen you have to know enough to question him and have the desire to follow up and that is why the story is an interesting one. the more we prepare ourselves for the baseline of knowledge for whatever we are doing the easier it is for us to identify when things are unusual and when you are in a situation where you are given the opportunity, it is in your hands now. you prepared yourself, worked hard, whatever this is, you had

a chance observation, the hand of fate stepped in to show you something and you have the desire to follow it up as simple as something happens, accidentally you do something and say that really worked and say that is not the way i am supposed to do it or you follow it up. you make it work. that happened, we can apply those principles in many different ways in our lives and enrich ourselves by being open following those chance opportunities that present selves. >> booktv is in tempe, arizona to learn more about literary culture. the secret historian on how he does his writing and research. >> when do i like to write q early morning, the house is

quiet, nothing else going on. i like writing late at night for the same reasons. i can pay attention to my daughter and my wife and everything else and early mornings. i make the past come to life. like the musical hamilton, i am the person who tells that story and i will do it the best i can, as balanced as i can but i get something fundamentally creative and this is what i think happened. my routine in writing is pretty nondescript. sometimes i take notes on things i talk about, sometimes some ideas and phrases i want to try out and drive a good idea by the time i get in front of my computer what i am going to do

but i have usually thought about it for quite some time before that. most people know me as a historian of the 19th century america, especially political and military topics. in that area the place -- best-known in the reconstruction period where i have written about the united states military and local leaders and associated most notably with ulysses s grant but other people as well, abraham lincoln and other people. i spent time writing about presidents as a whole. i now bear that title of being a presidential historian. this election year is busy for me just as the civil war was a busy time for me. one of the challenges, you are not working with everything that happened, the material we have,

what happened, things survive, other things perish, trying to take that material and say let's find out what really happened, forget what you think about it, forget how you interpret it but what really happened? something historians don't understand, what did happen? that can be challenge enough. forget this notion some people have that historian sit down and have a prearranged agenda, an ax to grind, they want to celebrate their subject or denigrate it, finding out what happened, there is challenge enough many times. when you write about civil war generals you are trying to get your reader to understand what that particular individual thought and understood. you know in hindsight what

happened and hindsight you think would sharpen your understanding but it is very distorted because now you know what the result was an you say why would someone to something so stupid. history goes front to back, not back to front. you have 2 say what were they thinking? what was the understanding of the situation? what was the decision they made? sometimes people made the wrong decision but we have a better idea why they made the wrong decision given what they knew at the time. political figures, that is a challenge in a different way, they too carry their own baggage, and inc. about the decisions they had, the options, and the political reality before them. politics, great political leaders expand where possible

and that distinguishes abraham lincoln who responded to the situation, took advantage of opportunities to move forward, to someone like ulysses s grant who often found himself hemmed in and did not always do very much to expand even when he was frustrated. i want you to understand the moving target in terms of popular awareness. when i start to write about grant, the most famous biography of grant with that by william mcfeely. took a largely negative view of grant. some saw him as an sympathetic or caustic and if you said anything else it was bound to be more positive. that said, by the time i started writing, making some points about grant or in more focused ways, getting interests in grant, might be safe as a

biographical topic and some went too far, people saw me as the anti-mcfeely, i was going to correct the historical record and return grant to his pedestal. we had a flu -- people think it is safe to write about grant. they weren't around, now they are around, writing a grant biography. when the big names come in, someone ripe for revision but the revision has been going on for 25 years and coming in near the end. talk about how they rehabilitate grant and elevated him. my objective is understanding what ulysses s grant was about, what he did, the things he did that are praiseworthy, his strengths, his weaknesses.

in that sense the people i study, i can identify them at certain times, what were you thinking? i don't see myself as somebody who is there to raise grant a few pegs on something, a scale of greatness but i see myself as this is what grant was about try to be very far and dispassionate, and hypercritical. and why was the civil war popular? and someone who fought the american south, many people's interest in the civil war is

identified very personal way. i had nothing to do with this. became very agitated about the confederacy, talk about their heritage and honoring their ancestors, that is all well and good. ancestors may have played. a lot of people get involved in this period, very personal. reconstruction is different. many people were interested in the civil war. reconstruction, in the use of terrorism to reinstitute a white supremacist order in the american south. many white northerners

acquiesce, that is something to confront head on and you must understand why after the civil war the united states came back after a fashion, the struggle for reconciliation trampling over racial justice. i think americans have to look at the dark place, not going to be reconstruction, the musical. the war in many cases continues left so much and on. people react, not enamored with it that is their problem. sometimes i think it is what other people write, assume they do come with an agenda and do

have heroes and villains to celebrate or vilify and story and come to the test with solid ideas, and exalts somebody, i am not into that but it is interesting. they are projecting their own issues on to me. henry adams in the 1990s, a short book and would be controversial and they are enamored with adams and grudgingly affect that. might have a point and when the book came out and the reviews follow, if it was the review simpson doesn't appreciate adams's great literary achievement that is not what the

book is about but how henry adams forged a political career, and critics have not. it is how you put those facts together and bring the past alive and give your insights and things you know. that is a lot of fun when the work is over. will phrase you and could be a delightful moment. >> c-span in tempe, arizona for the literary culture. i speak with carlos velez-ibanez on his book "an impossible living in a transborder world". >> the premise of the book is

simple and complex. let me tell you how it started. i work in a place, central a red mexico, 16 km, brand-new urbanizing area. the two basic questions, how do people survive when they shouldn't, how do they excel when they are able to do that? trying to touch those questions where the field work was. by serendipity. i was asked by whose home i was staying in, it is for -- what is

that? 10 people together and each one puts 100 vessels and take turns, 90 pesos and the other people who remain in the circle, keith is putting back in 100 pesos. you get 900 pesos, i say to myself -- he explained it. mutual trust so people who participate are people who trust each other. the question, how do you avoid getting the money and taking off? it is a matter of trust building on your social relationship which is a nice handy sociological kind of argument. the more i dealt into it, the more i understood that these were in this area of the united

states, these are savings and loan and credit associations, and as i studied them over a period of 25 or 30 years very it amounts between like in this one 1000 pesos or 10 persons. .. in a particular business. let's say a lot of mexican restaurants, for example, participate in these kinds of things. this is one extreme.

another extreme another person who uses in méxico city, 100 pesos, 900 pesos. buys cleenex and they can be used for that and also ritual obligations. making sure that you, in fact, meet your ritual obligations. mexicans have a ritual cycle more or less in christmas divided by easter. in between christmas and easter there's other ritual celebrations, weddings, funerals, baptisms, communions, confirmations. people will time their turn in order to social obligations. that in and of itself create more density in the network itself. so every time you give a gift,

you're going to give at some other part-time in fact, one of your children -- children's birthday is coming up. the collateral is cans tantly being reinforced and expanded as well because new people are coming in. if you don't know and they want to be rotated in the association, you lend your confianza. you lend your own clattal to the rest of the group to that individual and that individual obligated to you to make sure they meet obligation. along that line you have to understand, as i looked at these are transparency border. put your money in the bank, one of the major banks was caught expanding their service to a whole bunch of people that

didn't need it. people don't thut their money into a standard bank and in fact, select rotating associations for a lot of reasons. banks ask a lot of questions. if you're a poor person or a person of modest income and you don't have a lot of collateral, you don't have a lot of credit, then this is a way in which to get around that and participate in something that's guarantied. a bank asks to fill out forms after forms about own personal identity. ie, highly individualized kind of transaction and this thing called a bank. there's nothing coming back except minimal interest. but the fact it's not. what you're doing is rotating

the same amount of money between 10 or 20 or 30 people. you're not making any money unless it's what's called a debt tanda. you have an organizer that charges a turn for that person to organize everything and make sure that everybody -- that each individual has to money to distribute at the proper point in time. that kind of thing then is earned income for that individual but not for the rest of for participants. part of my obligation and working in this particular area is to provide a closer proximate narrative to who and what the population is. because there are an awful lot of stereotypes and awful lot of negative information as well as what i would call racialized concepts of immigrant population specially the mexican population in this region and being treated differently because of the way you look or what you speak,

this, in fact, balances that negative narrative that is even being even used now in the presidential elections by at least one of the candidates. so in a way writing the book has three or four, five different layers of reasons, one of which is to make the narrative proximate to whom the population and to really provide a kind of understanding, fundamental understanding of the cultural and social and economic behaviors of this population. and three, really to contribute to academic literature really that didn't exist prior to that except in very small terms. >> well, we visited town lake to know more about the city's growth from public information officer chris baxter. >> okay, chris, we are typically in a van not driving around not on water in a boat, where are we

right now? >> we don't do things the normal way. we always try to do it a little bit different. we are in the middle of trnción empe town lake, what's interesting is that most people don't have lakes that are brand new. our lake is going to be 147 year's old very soon. >> tell me why it was built? >> this used to be a stretch of the salt river. salt river runs quite a way throughout arizona and it was dammed up in the 1930's when roosevelt dam was built. people used to dump gar damage and we work hand in hand with the army corps of engineer and we have turned this into a lake

and this lake is responsible for $1.5 billion worth of economic development in our community. >> what changes have you seen? >> pretty much nothing that you see here was here with the exception of the two bridges that you see. we are talking about the buildings around here, we are talking about all of this, all the shops, the restaurants. >> nothing was here before 1999. pretty much as far as the eye can see is all new and the lake is responsible for it. the reason that our city exists is this is a really great place to cross the river and where we are right now is exactly where our city was founded. >> this was the fairy crossing and the building that you see behind you, the white building with columns, that was our first business. between the ferry and the mill,

this is how our city got its start. >> tell me what is the city like now? >> well, one of the most urban and densely populated cities in arizona. we are the number one college town in america. >> wow. >> we are doing amazing things. tempe is known for being innovative. turning a lake into a river -- we had to create a like to become a river again because there's water that runs from the salt water and comes down this way. and it's not we are going to put a wall. we actually have a working dam, when it rains, this lake becomes a river, we can let it as much water as we need to and we can raise up the dam again and have a lake.

>> now, how is it utilized recreationally, you is young population, does it draw people? >> this lake has 24.4 million visitors every year. the second largest tourist destination in all of arizona. second to grand canyon. our population has grown quite a bit. we have condos. we have condos that are here and across the lake, so just the sheer building of those has resulted in a lot of new residents but beyond that, the companies that you see we have fortune 500 companies that have located here and that's because people want to play in tempe town lake. a lot grab their board, walk out, hit the water in lunch hour or right after work and there they are. we have a lot of tech companies

that are here. we have go daddy's a few miles down the road, this is the lifestyle that millennials want. our average age is 28. this is a really active community. >> do you feel that reflex in the community with new ideas and a lot of energy, how did the students play a role here? >> well, the students played a huge role not only in the community but in the world in general. one of the things there's a huge amount of research that college students are a part of. they are a cure for ebola that originated out of the biodesign institute at university state university two miles down the road from here. they are built components out of asu. the inventions, the ideas, new companies are created here all of the time. >> why tempe, why do the

businesses thrive in tempe? >> i think the reason people come here is because of the innovative nature. there is nobody here that says you can't do that. we think that the best think to do is let's figure out a way to say yes, let's figure out a way to support your dream and that to me is probably what makes us unique. we didn't say we like having an ugly river bottom. we have to have pretty water. how do we get the pretty water and we, you know, spent 30 years figuring out the answer. we started in 1965, this concept was created by asu, arizona state university, james and students came up with the idea and over the 30 years, we figured out how to fund it, we figured out what it would take to support the annual maintenance of it and for about a hundred million dollars we got $1.5 million back, plus all the beautiful places to live, all the great places to work and

truly hundreds of new businesses being again rated from the sake that they want to be. >> you are from tempe originally, what do you want to see for your city next? you have seen all the growth and changes, what's your ideal scenario for your city? >> you know, what i think tempe wants, the city itself, what i really think tempe wants is make the world a better place. not only that but our businesses, we have a lot of young people and really the goal of the city to help residents achieve dreams. that's the goal of any city. we want our residents do what are they want to do. if they want to cure disease, great, if they want to open a popstacle stand, what are they want that's what we want for our city. >> every weekend book tv brings you 48 hours of nonfiction books

and authors and here is a look at some of the programs for this weekend coming. tonight at 8:45 eastern media film professor heather, open to debate, william buckley put liberal america on the firing line. founder of the national review used television programs firing line to open arguments outside of his conservative circles which made him an early pundit. >> as our level of discourse and shouting matches seemed to be increasing, it seemed like an important time to talk about a show between people who disagreed with each other. >> sunday on in-depth, 15th anniversary on the attack of pearl harbor is the focus of attention and will be taking phone calls, tweets and e-mail questions. former senator george mitchell

who served from 2009-2011 looks at the israeli-palestinian conflict in a path to peace. he's interviewed by jane, president and ceo of the woodrow wilson center. >> the palestinian authority have long since renounced violence and have accepted israel's existence and have opted for peaceful negotiation to achieve a state. >> two to booktv.org for the complete weekend schedule. >> amy is our guest and here is a cover of her book becoming nicole. who is nicole? >> nicole means was born and identical twin boy in 144997, bosh and given the name wyatt. this is a child from the age of

2, 2 and a half identified as a girl and when i say identified as a girl didn't say to her parents, i think i'm a girl, said, when do i get to be a girl . when i do get to be a girl. believed she was a girl and two middle class ordinary parents needed to figure out what that was about. >> how did they figure it out or did they? >> they did. the hero of the book is really the mother kelly. twins were adopted at birth. kelly knew there were two things that were most important to her as a mother, make sure that her children were safe and happy anp she knew she could control the safe part. she had to understand the happy party because she also knew that this child was unhappy when she didn't get to play with the toys that she wanted or a father who was, you know, conservative,

republican, veteran, you know, was really unsure about who this child was and resisted it. but kelly was determined and so she did very early what a lot of us do and she googled the words boys who like girls' toys. and that became the beginning of her her audacity. she never heard the word transgender. she begin to understand it and it took him longer but he's probably the one that undergoes the transformation, goes out and gives talks to people about transgender kids and transgender children and being transgender and specially is helping to try to work with fathers to understand the children. >> what about the other twin boy? >> jonas is a remarkable kid.

they are both now entering sophomore year of college in the university of maine. what was wonderful about jonas really probably knew before everyone. kids would come up to him and say what is it like to have a transgender sister and, you know, he didn't know. he just knew he had a twin that was really a girl not a boy and when jonas, when they. >> both very young basically said to his father, dad, face it, you have a son and a daughter. and it was kind of a wake-up for wayne to realize out of the mouths here is my child telling me that -- that his brother is really a sister. so jonas had to go on a journey too to helping other people towns and be protective of a sister when she was discriminated against in the 45th grade and bullied and then

told by staff at the middle school that she would have to use the teachers restroom and not the girl's room. she had already changed her name, dressing as a girl for all intents of purposes was nicole and it was tough on jonas. he had to be sort of big brother and at the same time he said to me very profoundly, you know, i'm a kid and i have a sixth grade vocabulary. it's hard to talk to people to make them understand. he struggled with it too. they are very close and very different in a lot of ways and they've each one another's best friends and protectors. >> what was the first step in becoming nicole, was it clothes, was it name? >> i think the first evidence to the parents certainly were the clothes.

nicole born wyatt loved to, you know, she would pull her shirt over her head to make it look like it was long hair. she we wanted to wear herr's mother's jewelry and wanted to pretend that things were dresses. these are obviously the first signs and a lot of kids go through phases.ta and then there were things saying, she actually would say when daddy, when does my penis fall off.s this was a child who wasn't saying i feel like i'm a girl, this was a child who knew she was a girl but couldn't understand being a child why people were treating her like a boy. >> when did surgery happen? >> surgery happened last summer after she graduated high school. nicole was one of the first

cases of an american child at the children's gender clinic in boston, the first one in this country established in 2007 under dr. norman, her doctor, was one of the first to haves of puberty suppressed so that she could go through all of the psychological test and dress and act and be a girl in order to know for certain that this was who she was and when puberty was going to start for her theygo could see in her twin brother h when it was started, that was when they started her on answer to -- estrogen. she wanted to do it before college. this was a very important step. so many people go through puberty and when they decide to make the transition, don't make it till their adults. it's specially difficult for female transgender people

because they've gone through male puberty and surgically a lot has to be done. she went through female puburety at the right development. she's been able to have the right development as other young woman and she's a beautiful young woman and is happy and thrilled and has a boyfriend and because they are ordinary in so many ways, they are extraordinary in how they dealt with the situation. but they are ordinary in being in every man family. they are your mother and father, they are your sister and your brother, it would be hard not to identify with this family and i think to the degree that that, you know, can normalize for people what it means to bean

transgender and to have a transgender member in the family, i think it spreads the message and educates people by their presence. >> i know you're a science writer at the washington post, how did you find the story? >> the story actually found me honestly. it was first published in the newspaper in the boston globe page 1 of december 2011. executive editor was in the executive editor of boston globe very far-seeing editor whor promoted the story. i read it and fascinated by it and i was contacted -- i didn't know that they were beingco represented at the time by someone i had known 30 yearsrs earlier in boston. she reached out to me because the family were getting publicity request. they we wanted to protect their kids and have them grow up, have them a normal teenage life. but they knew maybe down thehe

line after they graduated high school they would want the story to be told. she contacted me because she knew i had written a book. so the story came to me. but if you think anyone is going to read a book about aive yeo. transgender kid and that was five years ago. the world has changed since then. >> what's the estimated population of transgender in the u.s.? >> honestly, the best estimatesy are grossly inadequate.based 700 and 800,000.st it's impossible to know. it really is. i'm waiting for the, you know,

the next sort of stage of when we can get a better estimate. of course, we face the same problems and people now identifying as transgender or not wanting to identify so, honestly, i think we really -- we don't know but what i learned from doing this book is i always thought the phrase gender spectrum was very nice, politically correct, lovely phrase but it really is true that this is not exceedingly rare that one in 2400 kids are born with atypical, one and 200 with atypical genetelia. there are very different kinds of variation of chromosome dna, so there is no average male or female.re is no we really are a spectrum in many

ways and so i learned that as we are beginning to learn thern science of this your anatomy is sit at six weeks. you think of all the things that can happen between six weeks and six months that affect the brain and this is why identical twins can have the sacramento same dna but they get different chemical messages from the mother even when they are positioned in the womb.si and the agree of variation because of things the mother takes in from the environment that affects the distribution of hormones, the variability in how our brains are set is really infinite. >> what kind of testing did

wyatt had to go through before it surgery happened or anything like that? >> back then it was genetic testing so what she went through was mostly was psychological tests and also physiological tests to understand the anatomy. this is one thing why they delay puberty and suppressed puberty so the child can live for as long as possible to be fully confident that that's who they are a lot of kids who test boundaries and boys who like to dress up as girls and girls that were tomboys and these are temporary, these are things that are experimenting. not all children who do that are transgender but a child who says tat age of two, when do i get to be a girl and says it

consistently and constantly, that's a transgender child.g >> she's the coauthor of teenage brain to raising adolescents in young adults. pulitzer prize for what? >> a serious called the wreck of the lady mary. it was story, based on the sinking of a scallop boat in 24009. six of the seven crew die. the seventh survived. the accident happened so quickly that he didn't know what happened. the story was, on the one hand, a narrative of what happened to these men and families but alsop an investigate, didn't stop and

it's a mystery and investigation and it's a story about people. >> also spent night years as fast checker at sports illustrated. >> that's right. >> becoming nicole is the book that we have been talking with her about, the transformation of an american family. here it is. >> you're watching book tv, television for serious readers. you can watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. >> yahoo news columnist explores how the downfall presidential campaign has shaped today's campaign in all the truth is

out. steven briar look at some of the high courts decisions are stretching beyond america's borders in the court and the world. in 1944 historian jay reviews the decisions fdr had to make regarding d day and the end of world war ii. journalists reports on the lives of afghan women and girls in the underground girls of cobble. another staff pick from the harvard bookstore is black man in a white coat by dr. diamond. in we should all be feminist, everyone should be fighting for gender equality. university english professor john burt dissects seven debates between abraham lincoln during

senate seat in lincoln's tragic. pragmatism. many authors have appeared on book tv. you can watch them on our website. booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] i'm not going to leave you the rules and regulations because i suspect you heard them three times already and in any caseou i've gotteem