disasters in u.s. label history. in the prison letters of nelson mandela they look at the 255 letters mandela wrote during his 27 years in prison under south africa's apartheid regime. in the brain, mark recalls one of the most tense periods of the cold war and the nuclear brinksmanship between the u.s. and the former soviet union. in the fall of wisconsin, dan kaufman reports on the republican takeover of wisconsin and the democrats working to reclaim the seats in the state house and senate. also being published this week, anna clark looks at the flint michigan water crisis in the poison city. in give people money, annie lowery makes a case for universal basic income. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week. watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> thank you. i thank you all for coming

tonight and thank you also to barnes & noble for allowing me too speak in this sort of iconic, l.a. location, the growth. of course as you know the growth is not always been at the red-hot center of l.a., in fact, time that i write about 1900s, 1930 the growth was really the boondocks as the name the grove and sat in of this was an intercultural area , a guy named arthur fremont gilmore had a dairy farm out here and around the turn of the 20th century he was digging a water well and he struck oil so suddenly they went out in the cow pasture which is kind of a phenomenon you can still see in the area today and started an oil company which he called the gilmore oil company which was pretty successful, but really the area remained agricultural and nothing really happened

here until after my time. in the 30s. even the farmers market didn't start until the depression. it was essentially 18 local farmers who paid the gilmore son, his name was earl gilmore, they paid him 50 cents. day to sell produce out of the back of their truck and that was the start of the farmers market. gilmore made a little money and in 193047 build myself a stadium. he called it the gilmore stadium. for a time, he held midget car races. there were these small but powerful racing cars that will very path popular in the 30s. he thought this would help promote his oil company and he was right, the oil company got bigger and eventually became the largest independent owned oil company on the west coast and he made a little more money and so he decided he was going to build a baseball field which he called gilmore

field, the gilmore's are very proud of their name, and for almost two decades this was the home of a aaa baseball team of the hollywood stars and there is some actual genuine hollywood stars who are part owners of this team. barbara stanwyck, bing crosby also owned a part, and this was a team that if you were an angeleno, you would come to see a ballgame, you would come here but then of course in the late 50s the dodgers moved west, dodger stadium was built and that was all she wrote for the hollywood stars in the gilmore field which was promptly razed to the ground and fast-forward to the 21st century, rick caruso decided to build the grove and the

rest is, if not history then retailing legends. they say that 18 million people. year come to the grove, that's more than disneyland, and thank you for being among that 18 million. i think we maybe have a few fewer than that tonight. anyway, i'm not here to talk about the grove, i'm here to talk about early l.a., the subject of my new book the mirage factory, allusion, imagination and the invention of l.a. this is really the third book and what i regard as a trilogy of city books. the first one appeared in 2012, it was these ground rules about chicago. the second appeared in 2014 that was empire of sin about new orleans, and now in 2018 the mirage factory about l.a. this one took me a little longer to write mainly because

the reading load was unbelievable. for every one book of history about new orleans, there's probably four or five or six about l.a. history. in the course of all this reading and thinking about cities, i've really come to admire many things about cities. i regard them as one of humanity's great inventions. i really think they're one of the principal incubators of innovation and creative energy in the world today, and, although there have been some backsliding in recent years, i think the reason for this is because the act o as reservoirs of diversity. the bring together people of all backgrounds, all races, all ethnicities and classes and they bring them into close proximity to each other. while this proximity can create a lot of friction and conflict and really, a lot of

what i read about in these books is complex, i also think it can serve as a catalyst for new ways of thinking, new ideas, new ways of solving old problems. it's been fascinating for me too see how each of these three different cities went through a different kind of growth cycle as they became great cities. the first city i dealt with was chicago, and that is really kind of the model. it's the quintessential big industrial diverse american city and it followed kind of a growth logic that served as a pattern for most major metropolitan areas in the united states. first of all it was located strategically for commerce, chicago is located at the point where you would be between the mississippi water watershed and the great lakes that point east and of course

when the railroads came in it was ideally located at the railroad hub sitting right on the doorstep of some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world, and also it was within relatively easy reach of natural products like wood. there was plenty of timber nearby. there is plenty of iron or an coal and these things that serve as the basis of heavy industry. if you have heavy industry that creates jobs, the jobs bring immigrants from all the world and presto you have a large, diverse industrial city. new orleans was an exception in many ways, a much older city, much smaller city and i had this unique french, spanish, caribbean history and heritage that really set it apart from virtually any other american city, but even new

orleans had the same kind of growth logic credit was located at the mouth of the mississippi river so anything coming down the mississippi had to be offloaded in new orleans and loaded onto oceangoing vessels. there is a certain logic to wide new orleans grew up where it was. and then you have l.a., and there really is no compelling geographical reason for there to be a major urban center in this area. there's a number of factors working against it. so, to make that happen, to make a city grow requires a lot of imagination, a lot of out-of-the-box thinking and, i contend, a certain amount of deception as you'll see, the city that resulted from this extraordinary process of growth turned out to be extraordinary in and of itself. now i did something a little different with the prologue. all three of the books have

prologues, but in this one i included the section that more or less explicitly lays out the thesis of the book. to give you some idea of what the book is about i will read that part of the prologue i will stop halfway through to make some of the remarks so you will hear the whole thing. he goes under the title implausible city nanny begins with a quotation. it struck me as an odd thing that here alone of all the cities in america there was no possible answer to the question why did the towns bring up here and why has it grown so big. morris markey, journalist and california historian. l.a. california, 1900 - 1930, it was no sensible place to build a great city. this corner of southern california, often bone dry lacking in natural harbor and isolated from the rest of the country by expansive desert and rugged mountain ranges

offered few of the inducements to settlement and growth found near major cities and other places. the spaniards who first explore the region in 1542 declined to put down roots here for over two centuries. even then in the 1700s they mainly sent soldiers and franciscan friars to establish missions and convert the local indians to christianity. when the mexicans took over in 1821 they settled the area little more heavily but still regarded it as a hinterland, a backwater without the water. only after the mexican war of 1826 to 48 when southern california became part of the u.s. did anyone really start to postulate a grand trouble us in this desert centered on a narrow, unreliable waterway known optimistically as the l.a. river. only americans it seemed could dream of something so unlikely, so contrary to simple common sense, a necessity that the place would

have to be forced like in amarillo are the season, a certain amount of trickery would be required to bring resources, population and industry to place that lacks them all. but eventually, the implausible became actual. by the end of the 1920s the world city of l.a. california was reality. in urban giant grown up in a place where no such city should rightly be. this book is a story of this extraordinary transformation. it begins in 1900 when l.a. was still a largely agricultural town and one that the national irrigation congress regarded as having no future of anything larger. the explosive growth that followed over the next three decades had nothing natural or inevitable about it. each step in the city's evolution had to be conceived, engineered and sold to an often skeptical public.

and, as with any evolutionary progress, not all visions of the city future survive this test. some would die quickly and fruitlessly, others would prove unsustainable over the long ter term, pushed aside by the interest of richer and more powerful elements of the population. a few would leave an outside mark on the city, taking root and giving rise to a metropolis unlike any other in the world. the pivotal period from 1900 until 1930 would witness, most notably, the realization of one of the largest and most controversial public works projects in history. second in magnitude only to the panel market now at the time. the invention of an entirely new form of entertainment and a new kind of industry to produce and sell and the flowering of a seductive urban ethos, the birth of the whole idea of a lifestyle based on utopian notions of leisure, physical wellness and spiritual fulfillment.

this combination of urban growth factors was unique and proved to be uniquely effective. by 1930, l.a. emerged as a major city of over one point to nine people and one with a distinctive identity as a wasteful but alluring garden in the desert and the focus of the entire world with the dreams and often its moral center. as a heliocentric mecca of spiritual seekers across the country. every city can be regarded as an artificial construct, and audacious projection of human will, imagination and vanity onto the natural landscape but none was more artificial or our gracious than this one. so that's the story wanted to tell in this book. how l.a. pulled off this miraculous feet of self invention, but i really want to give this history a human face. there are schools of history that try to downplay the role of individuals in the making

of history and emphasize things like social forces and economic forces and movements, and really that's fine, but that's a valid way of looking at history, but i regard my audience as nonspecialists ordinary readers and people are just interested in people. i really wanted to find some characters to sort of hang this history on. these would not necessarily be the people i would regard as the most important people in this part of la's history, nor were they the people who single-handedly created the city. that doesn't happen. individuals don't do that, but i wanted them to be representatives of or avatars for the major forces that did play a role in the growth of l.a. during this era. so, i took many weeks, many months thinking about this and i finally came up with three.

one of them is kind of a no-brainer. you cannot tell the history of l.a. without this one character. for the second one, i had a choice between maybe two or three people who could conceivably have worked. i chose the one i think was most representative and has the most interesting story. the third one may seemed like it comes a lot of leftfield particular if you're not that familiar with california street. today this is not widely known outside of california but in her day she was at least as influential and probably on a worldwide basis more famous than the other two. i will finish reading the prologue and probably won't have any trouble figuring out which of the three is which especially since i've given it away with the feminine front. single individuals do not build cities but three l.a.

icons, an engineer, an artist and an evangelist embodied and drove the three major engines of the city's rise from provincial player to world-class start. the mahalik engineer was the favored waters are who's wildly ambitious vision of the aqueduct brought water to the desert and allow the city to grow far beyond its natural capacity to support urban life. david griffith the artist was the film director who almost single-handedly transform the motion picture from a novelty into a major creative and fabulously lucrative industry, important enough to help build the city. aimee semple mcpherson, the evangelists was a charismatic faith healer and radio preacher who founded her own religion and cemented southern

california's reputation as a national hub for seekers of an orthodox spirituality and self-realization. in this marginal and unfinished corner of the country, each of these three innovators discovered a kind of environment offering enough physical and mental space to permit their ideas to develop and ultimately flourish. far from the entrenched attitude and rigid power hierarchies, each was free to create a distinctive vision of the city's future and do the hard creative work to give a concrete form. the images they conjured up of a blossoming city in the desert, of a thriving factory of dreamworks, of a community of seekers finding personal salvation under god good sunshine all had elements of the swindle about them like mirages whose promises to evaporate on closer inspection. each was tested by a strong countercurrents of opposition as scandals and accusations of corruption and malfeasance

corrupted continually to threaten their chances of realization. but, the images proved resilient. more important they succeeded in bringing the l.a. we know into being. people were enticed by the images. they came to live and work here. the city grew. in the end, mulholland, griffith and mcpherson all paid a price for the ambition. each self-destructed in the 1920s in spectacular fashion, finally subs and chance of coming to technology and change. they all found themselves humiliated and reviled as a fickle public turned against them. while these individuals fell, the city they had worked to build barely registered the loss and entering the 1930s is the largest and fastest growing u.s. city west of the mississippi. few people could've imagined it all back at the turn of the h century when the dusty town of l.a. seemed destined to remain the 36th largest in the nation.

it was behind indianapolis, toledo and massachusetts. what made the difference for l.a. with a combination of many active imagination and engineering supported by a great deal of sometimes deceptive advertising. these efforts, large and small gave the city what it needed to thrive. in the process, this improbable place, the grand metropolis that never should've been moved from the margins to the center of american life and consciousness. what they do is weave together these three narrative lines and weaves together to create a single narrative art that carries the history of the city forwarding chronological time.

you see this story telling a lot on television these days. they intercut between various storylines but have a metanarrative that carries the story forward. this really mimics another aspect of urban life that really intrigues me, the sense of narratives unfolding in the same place at the same time, it's that 8 million stories of the naked city that we used to hear about. i tried to capture a little something of that in this narrative history. there really are any number of ways you can write l.a. history. i did briefly consider doing a single subject narrative history but really there have been a lot of books written about the water story in l.a. there have been a lot of books written about early hollywood, and i just didn't want to add

that pile. elsa was not interested in doing a nonnarrative street history of l.a. which would have followed these various trends but independently and not in any kind of narrative way. instead i chose this morning on holistic approach. i think it has a couple advantages. first of all i think it's more interesting to read for the average reader. i also think he gives readers a better sense of what it would be like living in the city in real time. you can see how these various things influenced each other. how amy was really learning a lot from the techniques being developed in hollywood just up the road in terms of using dramatic elements to get her message across to a mass audience.

of course it really helped that these three characters were all larger-than-life, multiple dimensional people who had these character flaws, these huge honking car character flaws that were as big as the talent and these laws ultimately led to a downfall for all three of them. they all felt that they had different trajectories. william had a sudden fall from grace. he was near the end of his career and one of his pet projects failed catastrophically releasing this horrible flood that killed hundreds of people. a lot of people blamed mulholland personally for this and it kind of ended his career, literally overnight. griffith had more of an agonizing and. his career ended not with a bang but with a whimper. he really just had trouble

keeping up with the times. he clung to these kind of victorian notions of melodrama, of womanhood and morality, meanwhile the roaring 20s was happening, jazz age was changing attitudes about everything, and griffith just started seeming really kind of creepy and old-fashioned, unlike some people in hollywood he did make the transition too. [inaudible] he made two of them, but the second one was just so embarrassingly bad that after that he just couldn't get anybody to hire him. he just couldn't work after this. he did get some honors but they were kind of empty honors because he wanted to work and nobody would give him work. anyway he kind of drank himself to death in the knickerbocker hotel on hollywood boulevard. and the sad story. amy had a more interesting and, she had her fall from

grace and she kind of redeemed herself in the end. some people in this audience know the story as well as i do or maybe even better than i do, but for those who don't, she was really, in 1926, at the top of her game. she was a real celebrity, she was a tourist attraction. people would come from all around the world to come to hear amy preach at the temple. then one day she goes to the beach and she disappears. six weeks later, after this frenzy of media speculation, what happened to sister mcpherson, she stumbles into a little mexican desert town with this wild, very difficult to believe story about being kidnapped and being held in a hut in the desert and she made this james bond like escape and ran across the desert until she found help. official l.a. was not buying any of this.

they thought she was lying either for publicity or to conceal a rumored affair she was having with her radio engineer and she was eventually tried for fraud. the case was dropped, some said the da was paid off, but anyway, the relationship between the city and its beloved evangelists was never the same after that. as i said, she kind of redeemed herself in the 30s and 40s during the depression she opened up a soup kitchen out of the temple, there was an employment office, she helped a lot of angelenos in a tough time and when the war started she was instrumental in selling liberty bonds. she did win a lot of hearts back, but for many angelenos they just could never take her seriously after that whole kidnapping debacle. so we have these three, almost simultaneous downfalls in the late 20s but the city of l.a. went on to bigger and

better things and to close i will sort of very quickly bring things up to the present day by just reading the last few paragraphs of the epilogue. >> by the mid- 20th century, the artist, the evangelist and the engineer were all gone from the scene. but the marks they had left were evident everywhere. l.a. was now the city that boasted the greatest religious portal of its own in the country and served as the world's most secretive, creative industry and sustained by an ingenious water system not substantially different from what its creator first envisioned half a century before. granted, the depression hit southern california as hard as it hurt elsewhere stopping the city's rapid growth and turning the town into the 1930s and 40s. life with all the urban

anxieties, melissa both corruption immortalized in the literature of the period. rapid industrialization during world war ii give the city the broader base economic foundation it needed to become a true world world-class city. thus one of the countries least industrial cities become the opposite. it was already obvious that it would never be like any other major american or european city. l.a. was, as one writer put it, a polycentric dispersed, decentralized and lacking monumental structures and appointment the brooklyn ridge or chicago loop. these characteristics struck many access flaws. it felt not quite real observed the always scornful new york times. what has 13 -- 13000 people

out here on the edge of things. they have been similarly condescending to norman maller's knock on the place as a constellation of plastic spread as late as the 1980s x were still skeptical of its urban. [inaudible] calling it not so much a city as a gigantic conglomeration of theme parks, life space composed of disneyland. even today, 21st century city's downtown revival is increasingly sophisticated cultural life and its thriving diverse population have rendered most of these well-worn criticisms obsolete. the question remains, should l.a. given its geographical disadvantages, have been allowed to grow so large with water becoming such a dire issue in southern california and throughout the american west, the connotation may be to say no but it's worth noting that thanks to

enlightened conservation policies in recent years the city consume less water in 2015 than it did in 1970 despite gaining over 1 million more residents. short of some kind of disaster scenario recalling a hollywood blockbuster, l.a. is not going to disappear anytime soon. thanks to mulholland, griffith and mcpherson and many others before and after them the mirage in the desert has become indelibly real. it's up to a new generation of urban image makers to ensure that it continues to flourish. thank you. [applause] [applause] >> anyway, i'm happy to take any questions you may have. >> what characters did you drop? the hollywood one was the one is considering several different people. the main contender besides

griffith was so, so who is a present from the beginning. he was a silent director and really, it's interesting because a lot of the sound films i really kind of hokey but he made some really good solid movies. that was kind of a revelation to me. he was also kind of a larger-than-life personality. he was extremely arrogant, but i ultimately felt that so many of the directors i was reading about said griffith is the guy. he didn't do what he sometimes claimed in his later years that he invented the close-up and he invented the tracking shot, those things were invented by other people, but he really was the guy who took all of these elements and put them together into a grammar of visual storytelling. he was in many ways a horrible human being. his major movie is virtually

unwatchable now, but that movie, the birth of a nation as horrible as it is to look at now is really the movie that made movies into an industry. before that, the banks and wall street thought this was just some little cottage industry or hobby, but then birth of a nation came out and despite the racist creed, they came out in droves. it made so much money more than anything before. suddenly wall street said well, you really can make money in the movies and so that money came in, for better or worse because a lot of these people said it was fun making movies before the bank got involved but then the money came in and all the fun disappeared. he was the protége of griffith

and he more or less said griffith taught him everything he knew. the only other candidate was thomas who idea of creative producer but his life ended early. he died after being on william hurst yacht. he was not murdered. we have done away with that story. often people don't really know him as much. it was a tough choice. griffith was my least favorite character. [inaudible]

that's true. i guess that was a little bit before scientology. i don't want to write about scientology. >> i still have not seen any of his films except a couple of his early one real type things. which of his features can a modern person watching really admire? >> birth of a nation is extremely problematic. intolerance is made up of wonderful moments but the whole thing when you put it all together is the total mass. if you just want to watch individual scene, that one shot where he comes from way back and comes in on this grand staircase is an unbelievable scene. it's one of the most remarkable things in music history.

i like some of his more modest movies, there's a movie he made relatively late called in life wonderful which is about germany during the vine more. and it's not that well known but critics know griffith really admired it and it's one that i can wholeheartedly recommend. a lot of the early stuff, i talk here about the long the operator which is a wonderful short film that kind of, you can actually see griffith learning and sort of getting ideas and it was kind of established this classic griffith and a nobody in danger and racing between, it's kind of a brilliant film for the time. some of the more modest, when

he said i'm just gonna make a commercial film, sometimes he could make a decent commercial film but when he tried to regard himself as an artist i think he kind of stepped off the path he should have been on. >> and the time you spent researching the book, did you experience any earthquake, and you talk about how improbable l.a. is as a location, did earthquakes, were there any major earthquakes in the 1900s, 1930 ended that factor into any decisions that were made to develop the cities that there was actually a fairly earthquake free time for l.a. product course 1906 was when san francisco had all of its problems. maybe that took some of the pressure off. i have not experienced an earthquake out here.

two earthquakes i've experienced, one was in brooklyn, brooklyn new york, and the other one was, i think it happened somewhere in maryland or virginia and our porch furniture over which was a horrifying tragedy, but, earthquakes did not really play a role. >> you did a lot of research, secondary research for the book as you always do. do come across any primary sources that no one else had discovered before and ended up in the book was mark. >> i don't know that anyone else has discovered it but i didn't find extensive, there's a wonderful writer who i think you introduced me too and i

was looking for this lecture. he was one of the earliest guys in movies. he was a thespian that had fallen on hard times. when they showed up and said we want you to start and our movie he said of course not what would my old teacher say if he knew that i was acting in movies and then finally they told him how much they would pay him and he said okay. he wrote a lecture that he gave at usc in the 30s and i looked far and wide for this and i can find it and then kerry said i will give you the copy that i have so she made me a copy. it really is chronicles one of the earliest movies made in l.a. i haven't seen extensive coverage. people know about it, it's not

undiscovered, but i really use this diary, i went to the library at the academy and went through his diary and things like that. i tried to create as many scenes as i could. i would say the most original aspect of this was the early scene, i think it's the first hollywood scene in the book where hobart is telling his tal tale. >> did you use your own personal view or did your views of l.a. change. >> the question was, did my ideas about l.a. change in the course of doing this research.

really, before i started on this book i had kind of come to l.a. three or four times, and mostly stayed on the west side of things, santa monica, west hollywood, beverly hills and stuff like that. those are not the interesting parts. the really interesting parts of l.a., i think our echo park or all parts east and south rather than west, and i think that's why you get so many out-of-towners who say l.a. is just not interesting because they only go to the rich parts of l.a. the rich, white parts of l.a. printed notes in the other parts that can where history has happened in those of the most interesting parts. that's where i stayed and where i will continue to come back to you. of course i'm here tonight which is not

exactly, anyway. >> i'm curious about whether or not you, as you are doing your research, did you come to any conclusion about what happened during that period? >> if they did, as a matter fact, and has put me on the outs with the church who stopped cooperating after certain point. there is no proof, we will never know for sure but i don't believe it happened. i don't think most serious historians believe it happened. there is just, it was too wild and it just didn't correspond with the way i know things happen in the real world. it was a little bit too hollywood basically. there was a ransom note that appeared, that was sent to her

mother which was this weird document that sounded like an old jimmy cagney movie and parts in a highly educated and other parts and they would say things like i'm sure you're wondering how we pulled off this kidnapping, well we had sources inside the church, what real kidnapper would give police the clues they need to find them. anyway so when they came back and she told her story, it really corresponded very closely with this document which i think is obviously a created, fake document. her story roughly correlates with this fake document, i gotta conclude that it was all collusion and she made up. of course we don't know that, the case was dropped so there is no final judgment on that, but when i talked to some historians sometimes and say

you don't think this could have actually happened, they usually say now, but there are people who believe, the church believes that and they outnumber us in many ways. >> and they had a funeral for her. >> well, they had a memorial. her mother said she wanted to raise funds for a memorial really did have a service. it happened one day before she reappeared which was kind of interesting. i don't think that was planned, but i'm not sure, the mother was also put on trial for fraud. i'm not sure how much she really knew what closely you just wish there was some way of knowing for sure.

>> during the writing of the book, did you ever go up to what's left of san francisco canyon in whatever ruins might be there? my other question is, what did you find to be the most compellingly interesting memoir, book about old, old hollywood i any of its practitioners? was the one book that was really rich in first-hand memories and that kind of thing. >> to answer the first question, yes they do go up there, and i got lost several times but i finally did find the place where it is. it's hard, there used to be big chunks of concrete there, but now they're mostly gone and it's kind of hard to find. it really is up there in the middle of nowhere. as far as the memoir, it's an embarrassment of riches but i really like williams book which is the movie mr. griffith and m me.

she was a little stiff sometime sometimes, perhaps a little too full of her own seriousness but i think she lent gravitas to every role she acted in and she certainly saved a lot of his movies. and, she was a great believer in griffith. she thought he was a genius. but she told wonderful stories. i don't know whether she got a really good ghostwriter or not, but it's a beautifully written book. there's also a book by carl brown which was just published a few decades ago, what is it, it's about griffith. brown was a very young assistant cameraman who worked with griffith on birth of a nation and other things. he was just this irreverent character and old age who was

full of stories about the making of intolerance and the making of the birth of a nation. his book, the title i cannot think of, but it's in the bibliography and it was a pretty wonderful memoir of the time. >> are there any connections between the growth of las vegas and the growth of l.a. >> las vegas was much later and it was more mob related. but other than that, i think they're kind of comparable in some ways because they were built in an area with you would naturally think that's a place where city should be.

>> the inside cover of your book makes reference to the first well while in l.a., where specifically was that? >> though he needs, i don't think it's necessarily the first one in l.a. but it was still he needs first one. i don't have a hard copy. let me take a look back. >> we actually had to move it because it was initially in the wrong place. i can't remember exactly what corner it is, but it was kind of just west of downtown. sort of north of macarthur park, but then most of the really big strikes happened

after world war i, that was when you had like telegraph hill. i actually thought the oil story was important enough to be another narrative strand, but i thought the four narrative strands would just be too much to keep track of so i do talk about the oil story and other narrative strands in these interspersed chapters between the one about the mean narrative lines. [inaudible] >> that's a good question but i never really thought about that. i think it would've, you do need water so it might've been tougher. my not have gotten as big as it got. i one point l.a. really provided a substantial portion of the world's oil, but it was

soon outstripped by other places. that's a very good question. i hadn't thought about that. i'm not a hydrogeologist so don't take this -- maybe you could have used seawater that probably would've really crowded the equipment or something like that. i don't know. i'm not an engineer. you've written these books about three very different cities, and i'm wondering what happens to your relationship to the cities after you're finished. >> it's like being a serial monogamous. i feel so bad, i'm going to chicago in a few days and i almost feel like i'm visiting a former lover because chicago was my life for four years and

then i kind of threw over chicago for new orleans and now i'm forgetting about new orleans and going to l.a. so i do sometimes feel a little bad about that but i also think that people in these places should write their own books about these places. i'm trying to do a number of different cities because they think that gives me perspective on the cities, but i do think there's people who have lived here their entire lives and know the geography a lot better than i do who please, write these stories because my writing this book doesn't prevent anybody else from writing a book. right. thank you very much. [applause] >> cspan were history unfolds

daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television company. and today, we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events in washington d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. : : >> and now on book tv, we bring you the 2018 ralph reading philadelphia at the franklin roosevelt presidential lie flare hyde park, new york. the festival features new books bout the life and work of >> first up, authormordecai lee recaps the us governments public relations efforts to promote the american entry into world war ii . >> the libraries