LEVAR: Hi everybody, I'’m LeVar Burton and this is Open a Book, Open the World, the Library of Congress National Book Festival.
You know, a good book can take you on a journey.
And after the last year, we are all ready to plot a new course and books can be an amazing compass.
Join me as some of our nation'’s leading literary voices bring us a sense of renewal, discuss their newest work, and open up a whole new world of possibilities.
The National Book Festival is coming up next.
♪ ♪ LEVAR: Hi everybody, I'’m LeVar Burton, and books and I go way back, not just in my own journey as a lifelong reader, but in the decades I spent bringing books to life right here on public television and inspiring a love of reading across generations.
If you are an avid reader, one thing you know about books is how they can open up the world, they can show you who we are, help you see through someone else'’s eyes, and maybe most importantly, connect us with people and places we otherwise might not know.
So if we'’re going to talk about books, what better place to do that than in front of my public library, right here in Los Angeles.
But another nice thing about doing a book festival this way is that we can also jump right over to our National Library and our Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden.
CARLA: Hello, LeVar, we'’re so happy to have you with us.
Thank you for everything you'’ve done to inspire young readers.
I'’m here on the balcony of the Library of Congress with its wonderful view of Washington, D.C.
The Capitol'’s east lawn was actually the site of the very first National Book Festival on September 8th, 2001, 20 years ago.
And now, it'’s our pleasure to bring you this year'’s festival on such a special anniversary.
For the next hour, we'’ll be highlighting plenty of names you'’ll know, and some others that might be new to you.
But one thing is for sure, books have opened the world for all of our featured authors, and now they'’re paying that forward.
One of these is the talented wordsmith and poet, Amanda Gorman.
A few years back I asked Amanda to come here to the Library of Congress and join me with then U.S. poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith, and that'’s where Dr. Jill Biden saw Amanda read her poem, "In This Place: An American Lyric," sparking the now-famous invitation and the rest is history.
I had the chance to catch up with Amanda again, and we talked a bit about how much books have meant to her.
AMANDA: Books have been everything for me, I'’ll just jump in and say that.
I mean, ever since I was young, they'’ve been the place in which I can open up a page and discover a world, and also at the same time, discover myself.
I always say I feel the most at home in a bookstore or a library.
And I don'’t remember, the first book that did it for me, it was kind of like literally hooked on it from day one but I do remember in third grade being read Ray Bradbury'’s "Dandelion Wine" and that'’s first and foremost what made me want to become a writer.
I just remember hearing the language and just falling in love and thinking that that'’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
CARLA: So Amanda, what have books and reading meant to you during the pandemic?
AMANDA: I think particularly in the pandemic, books have meant their own form of normalcy in a time that feels very disruptive and unstable.
And so staying at home, quarantining, not being able to gather in the same places, still being able to read books and feel a connection to humanity, to discuss and share ideas that are important to us, I think that'’s really everything, particularly when the pandemic started, I began thinking a lot about the writers who wrote in solitude and also wrote in the dark, whether it be Martin Luther King'’s letter from a Birmingham jail, or I did a lot of thinking about Anne Frank and what it must have been like to be writing a journal while hiding away from a society that would want to destroy you.
And so I think there'’s something so powerful in understanding that when times become so isolating and so dark, often it'’s storytellers who bring a type of light to that power of understanding differences and also similarities.
♪ ROXANE: I'’ve been reading, like most people, since I was a little kid and books have always just shown me just how big and how small the world is.
SYLVIA: I think there'’s many places that I'’ve met for the very first time through a book and not just places, but time periods and situations that I might not have known about that I read.
And that was the way I began to understand the world.
So it'’s a passport into a lot of different realities, both imaginary and real.
BILL: I was super lucky that a grandmother in particular read a lot of books to me and my sisters and that developed a love of books.
She picked Dr. Doolittle, lots of fun stuff.
And then when I was able to read, I was very avid.
And over the summers, there was always, a public library would have a contest about who could read a lot of books.
And an addiction to reading has been a key secret of my success.
DIANE: What books do is they take you to another world.
It takes you in different places.
It can make you travel, it can make you understand the suffering of others.
It'’s enlarging your horizon, books are everything.
MISHAL: I grew up in the Middle East as an expat kid.
And there were no public libraries that I can remember.
And there was one little library in our sports club and that was where I pretty much feel I read the whole children'’s section.
So I feel like I owe so much to that tiny little collection of books in a building that I'’m sure no longer even exists.
VIET: I think Amy Tan'’s "The Joy Luck Club" had a huge impact on me because I read it when I was probably 18 years old and I had never read a book by an Asian-American writer before.
And that opened up the possibility for me to think that I could write about people who were of Asian descent and that there was a space for someone like me as a writer who could write about my parents, could write about the Vietnamese refugee community, could write about Asian-Americans, and that opened so many doors for me at that time.
LEVAR: Now, with that little bit of inspiration, let'’s dive into our first group of authors whose stories best help us understand ourselves.
ROXANE: I have always, from early on, enjoyed working across different genres.
And part of it was because especially as a Black writer and a Black woman writer, people want to pigeonhole you and suggest that you can only write in one vein.
And I think that limits our potential in our creativity when, especially writers of color, have so many different kinds of stories that we want to tell.
And the industry rarely affords us the opportunity to express that creativity.
And I wish more people would recognize that, that everything I write is about identity, but it'’s not about identity in the ways that you might expect.
"The Sacrifice of Darkness" graphic novel, began as a short story that I wrote and was published in my short story collection, Difficult Women.
And I wrote the story when I was living in Michigan'’s Upper Peninsula and going to graduate school.
And I was living in a place where there was a lot of poverty, a lot of rural poverty, which is not something that gets talked about a lot.
When we talk about poverty in the United States, it'’s often in the context of urban poverty.
And it really struck me that there were a lot of contributing factors to that poverty, and one of the main ones was that there used to be a copper mining industry and when the copper mines ran dry, the mine owners picked up and left, and all of a sudden, the primary form of employment in the area disappeared, and there were repercussions, and there are all these sort of hauntingly beautiful industrial ruins that are a constant reminder of what happens when you prioritize profits over people.
And so I wrote this short story about a world in which a man who has been mining for his entire life is so consumed with darkness after the mine owners demand more and more labor from him that he flies an air machine into the sun.
And so I was really just thinking about inequality and the sacrifices that people make at the altar of capitalism.
But I love to, in addition to writing from a place that is research and fact-based, I do think it'’s important to introduce readers to subjectivity and what it means to live in your shoes.
And I have always understood that nobody will understand the world the way I do.
I'’m just opening up my experiences in the hopes that someone out there is gonna connect with it in some way and feel seen and recognized and maybe even understood.
MISHAL: Hello, everyone, I'’m Mishal Husain, author of "The Skills From First Job to Dream Job: What Every Woman Needs to Know."
And I'’m delighted to be speaking to Adam Grant about his latest, and again, very successful book, which is called "Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don'’t Know."
So welcome, Adam, thanks for being part of this.
ADAM: Thanks, Mishal, great to be here.
Yeah, I didn'’t expect the book to be so timely.
I started working on it in 2018, having no idea that there was gonna be a global pandemic that forced us to rethink so many assumptions that we'’d taken for granted.
MISHAL: What is the core argument that you set out in this?
ADAM: Well, I think the basic premise is that being smart enough to be good at thinking and learning sometimes stands in the way of rethinking and unlearning.
The more intelligent you are, the more reasons you can find to convince yourself that your beliefs are true, but we live in a dynamic world where everything around us is constantly changing.
And that means that there'’s a danger of our old beliefs becoming mental fossils, that they need to be discarded and abandoned, and we'’re pretty reluctant to do that.
And so what I'’m really interested in is how we can find the curiosity, the humility, and the courage to question our old ideas.
MISHAL: However, if you find a method, a way of working, a system of processing information that works well for you, and I'’m thinking as an individual here, in an organization, you probably call it a best practice.
You'’ve discovered that works for a reason and it'’s kind of tried and tested.
But is it a dangerous thing to try and hold on to?
ADAM: My hope is that in 2021 and beyond, we do our rethinking more proactively and more deliberately.
And one of the best ways to do that is to get out of this mode of preaching and prosecuting, and into thinking more like a scientist.
When I say think like a scientist, I mean, don'’t let your ideas become your identity.
Look for reasons why you might be wrong, not just the reasons why you must be right.
Listen to the ideas that make you think hard, not just the ones that make you feel good and surround yourself with people who challenge your thought process, not just the ones who agree with your conclusions.
So one of the things that I'’m planning to do in the second half of this year is, I'’ve actually scheduled a check-up.
It'’s a little bit like going to the doctor even when nothing is wrong.
You do that once or twice a year.
I think we should do the same thing with the important decisions in our lives to pause once or twice a year and ask, do I have the right values?
Am I actually prioritizing those in my daily life?
And have I encountered any experiences or any data that might suggest it'’s time to rethink where I want to live, who I want to spend my time with, or what kind of work I want to do?
And I think having that structured occasion, that scheduled moment to reflect is a great way to pause without having your life in constant flux and say, "Oh, no, I have to rethink my principles and who I am on a daily basis," which is probably not a healthy way to lead a life.
MISHAL: Adam Grant, it has been a pleasure, thanks.
ADAM: Thank you, I hope you don'’t rethink your enthusiasm for this idea of thinking again.
MISHAL: Definitely not, I'’m scheduling my own, where am I in my life check-up immediately after this.
LEVAR: From changing our world view to looking at history through a more personal lens, here'’s historian, Annette Gordon-Reed, on how writing about the past can help shape the world today.
♪ ANNETTE: My editor has been after me for a number of years to do a book about Texas and to write about Texas history, but with a with a sort of personal slant to it, because he knows that I grew up in Texas.
And I thought that this was an opportune moment to sort of turn the focus on myself to a degree.
I mean, it'’s still a history book, but to talk about how history influences individual people'’s lives.
And I wanted to talk about Texas and the history of Texas, speaking of this issue of race and how this has influenced that, the development of that state in ways that people don'’t typically think of Texas in that way, because the image of Texas is one of the West and they don'’t think about the sweep of American history and race relations in Texas.
What I think people can learn from it, and what I take from it is that African- American people have been on a journey from literally, again, crossing the ocean into slavery, out of slavery.
Juneteenth is a hopeful time when people at the epicenter of all of that down in Galveston learned that there would be no more slavery in Texas and they had hopes and they were happy about all of this.
And we know that their hopes were not totally realized, it took many, many years to realize those, and we'’re still trying to realize them.
The things that have happened recently, the murder of George Floyd, all of those things, interest in thinking about voter suppression, all of those issues are part of this struggle, this journey that we have been on.
I wanted to try to open up a little bit and make it personal in ways that I think young people might relate to.
I mean, we like to read about one another, and it'’s a book that I think is accessible and will get people thinking about their own families and to think about their families in terms of not just what happened to them as individuals, but as a part of history, we'’re all a part of history, and we can tell that story through our family lives.
LUPITA: I grew up in Kenya, which is a predominantly Black society, but I still found that there was a preference for lighter skin when my younger sister was born when I was five and my relatives and my family friends would coo and kah at the skin and say how gorgeous she was with her light skin.
And so my little five-year-old brain took that to mean that my dark skin was not beautiful.
And it started a long journey of feeling inadequate in my skin and trying to change my skin color to like her, which includes some of the things that Sulwe does, like rub off her skin, pray for lighter skin, I did that.
And so I wanted to write a book that addressed the problem of colorism to help younger kids feel beautiful sooner than I did.
Because we all want to see ourselves reflected and in the position that I find myself in and the stories I want to tell, I want it to be a reflection of myself.
So what happens if you have only one type of person behind the camera, only one type of person sitting in the executive chair in the studio or producing, writing, you will find that what'’s happening in front of the screen reflects them.
So I think it'’s very important for us not just to look at who'’s performing in the stories that we'’re telling, but who'’s telling the stories that we'’re telling.
That changes, then we'’ll have a sustainable sense of inclusion.
DIANE: I was very lucky, when I was growing up, I didn'’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be.
I wanted to be a woman in charge.
So I was lucky to become a woman in charge, which means a woman independent very early on.
People would ask me, who is the woman you design for?
And I would say, "Women in charge."
So two years ago, I was thinking, what does it mean really to be in charge?
What it is, it'’s a commitment to ourselves, it'’s owning who we are.
Whatever it is, whether you are diagnosed with cancer or whether your husband leaves you or whatever may happen, you go bankrupt, whatever, it'’s always the answer.
The first answer is always own it.
You own your imperfection, they become your asset.
You own your vulnerability, you turn it into strength.
In this book, everything leads you that the secret to life is being you.
When you embrace who you are, you become yourself, you become glamorous, you become powerful, you become as invincible as possible because you have character, and character is the only thing that you have complete control of.
So I think that when you have a voice, it'’s important to use your voice, your experience, your knowledge, your connections, and your resources if you have built some, in order to have other women to be the women they want to be.
CARLA: One great thing about libraries is that they are always full of possibilities, especially this one.
Research done here has inspired generations of readers, authors, and scholars.
The Library of Congress has the papers of 23 presidents and champions of change like Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, and Thurgood Marshall.
We even have Martin Waldseemuller'’s map from 600 years ago that used the word America for the first time.
Talk about opening the world.
♪ KAZUO: When I try and create a work of fiction, one of my one of my big aims is to create an entire world.
I don'’t just want to tell a story, I want to create this entire world.
SARAH: And I think that kind of fictional world and how we see characters express their thoughts and feelings, that for me is opening up the world.
I think you learn to see how other people think, how other people feel, how other people experience things.
YAA: I was an incredibly shy child who felt as though her world was very closed and it was literature that opened up so many pathways, so many possibilities for me, reading books not just from Southern writers, from Black writers, but writers all over the world.
It'’s been the thing that has made me feel like I have a kind of separate passport.
TANA: To me, this is probably the core point of the arts, of any art, is that, it gives you this chance to see the world even for a brief glimpse through someone else'’s eyes and to realize that this other person'’s reality is as vivid and as present and as real as your own, and that they'’re experiencing this world entirely differently and they'’re seeing you entirely differently from how you see yourself, and that'’s at the heart of every book '’cause it'’s this glimpse into somebody else'’s world.
MARTHA: Taking in all these different ideas and these different voices and learning how other people thought and learning to see different perspectives as well as just seeing different parts of the world through these books, I mean, that was hugely important to me and I don'’t think I would have become a writer without that.
ANGIE: One thing about Mississippians and being from a place that has such a colorful history, to put it mildly, is that as a writer, I feel as if it helped shape me so that I can write stories that reflect the world better than maybe some can, because I think Mississippi and its history and the fact that it has such a past, I think is reflective of us as a society as a whole.
And I think it was William Faulkner who once said that if you wanna understand the world, understand Mississippi first.
So I think as a writer, that'’s how I approach everything that I do, so I'’m thankful for these experiences, I'’m thankful for these stories, I'’m thankful for the fact that I can learn from the past and hopefully craft stories that help my young readers create a better future.
LEVAR: To better understand one another, it'’s useful to step inside each other'’s lives and see ourselves anew.
Books help us realize that, hey, maybe we'’re not all that different from one another after all.
But you don'’t have to take my word for it.
♪ YAA: I think, you know, all writers will talk about how you work your entire life toward a debut.
It feels like you'’re collecting all of this stuff that goes into that first novel from childhood, from birth.
In my case, I was born in Ghana and then I wound up living in Huntsville, Alabama, from age nine on.
And it was that kind of juxtaposition of being born in this place that had this role in the slave trade and then ending up in a state in America where the effects of that trade are still so strongly felt in many ways.
The kind of irony of that, I think, is what set me on the path to writing "Homegoing."
I wanted to find a way to connect these two places and this lineage of the slave trade together somehow.
I wanted a history and "Homegoing" is a book that is, in many ways, about connecting the dots, reconnecting a family that has been torn apart.
And in that way, I think restoring a history to myself, When I started "Transcendent Kingdom," like so many other Americans, I had been reading about the opioid epidemic for years and I felt like the reporting around that was really excellent.
These pieces that we'’re willing to kind of investigate the role of pharmaceutical companies in creating this problem, pieces that looked at the science behind addiction, pieces that looked at the families that were surrounding the person who was himself suffering from opioid use disorder.
I found these to be really incredibly moving.
I feel like a lot of addiction discussion in the past has not been particularly around the crack epidemic of the '’80s and heroin epidemic of the '’60s.
And what I note about those two previous epidemics is that they largely affected Black people in cities as opposed to this current crisis, which is largely affecting White people in rural and suburban areas.
And so what I wanted to do with this book was to kind of approach that topic with the same kind of sensitivity, nuance, curiosity, investigatory spirit, but to do so in a way that placed Black people at the center and to recognize that that we deserve all that same kind of compassionate reportage.
And so "Transcendent Kingdom" was an opportunity to bring hard science into a container that made sense to me and how I see the world.
VIET: Those of us who are immigrants and refugees and who have come from other places to the United States, I think we can see the transformations that take place in our parents who had their own lives in their other countries, and then they come to the United States, and all of the sudden, they'’re are no longer the same people that they once were.
"The Committed" and "The Sympathizer" are about a Vietnamese spy in the South Vietnamese army.
And so that'’s loosely inspired by a real life spy, named Pham Xuân An, of whom there have been a couple of biographies written in English.
What I did was I grafted his story with the refugee experience that I'’d had.
The only interesting thing about my life was that I felt like a spy when I was growing up, like I was an American in my parents Vietnamese household spying on these strange Vietnamese people and their customs.
And then when I stepped out of that household, I was a Vietnamese person spying on these strange Americans and their customs.
And I took that seed of feeling of displacement and always feeling at ease and always observing.
And I greatly exaggerated those feelings and put them into the character of this spy.
CHANG-RAE: I don'’t know that in this particular book I set out to comment upon, say, suburban American culture, which I do a little bit.
I think it'’s just a function of having a character and see to it and having that character as clear eyed as possible about what'’s going on.
And yeah, it'’s mostly in good fun, satirical.
But at the same time, it'’s been a kind of pleasure for me where people will read about, say, the towns that Tiller inhabits and they'’ll say, and the main town is based upon Princeton, New Jersey, but people from all over me and say, "Oh, that'’s just like my town."
And of course, I wanna say, "Well, (laughs) there'’s a reason why it'’s just like your town."
This is what Viet'’s talking about, right?
About the ways in which we'’re not seeing the way how these places function and why they function in those ways, why certain people are left out of those towns, why certain things are are upheld as successful and noble and other things not.
VIET: So the point here is that as someone who grew up with this, I learned, I think, an innate sense of empathy for people who are undergoing transformation, who are cast on the outside, who have dual lives and so on.
And that sense of empathy is good for anybody, but it'’s also particularly important, I think, for writers, because that'’s one of our most important tools, is the capacity for empathy and not just empathy for people who are like us, like our own family members, but people who are not like us.
CHANG-RAE: For me, I haven'’t probably been as intentional about certain kind of cultural or political critiques of society.
But I hope that my work is always on the edge of that just because of, in my hope that, again, I'’m trying to open up truth, I'’m trying to see clearly.
And if you do that as a writer, I think all those notions they end up seeping in, if not absolutely directly, then at least subtly, and certainly just by osmosis.
LEVAR: One thing for sure, we all see the world in our own unique way.
Here'’s Tana French in conversation with NPR'’s Maureen Corrigan about her new book, a murder mystery set in Ireland, and that magic trick books do, getting you inside someone else'’s head.
MAUREEN: I'’m Maureen Corrigan, I'’m the book critic for NPR'’s Fresh Air.
I'’m also a regular contributor to The Washington Post Book World.
I am here with the superb suspense writer, Tana French.
Well, let'’s talk about you and let'’s talk about "The Searcher," your latest novel.
You have an American who'’s your main character and you'’ve set it in rural Ireland.
TANA: Well, he'’s a middle- aged American guy who has just retired from the Chicago police force after 25 years there when he'’s basically lost all his faith in the job and he'’s just had a tough divorce and he is kind of having a moral crisis.
And he reckons that by getting away from all the places where he was a police officer, where he was a husband, where he was a father, all the things that he feels he'’s somehow made a mess of, morally speaking, maybe if he gets somewhere that will be simpler, he'’ll be able to find his sense of right and wrong again.
It kind of doesn'’t work out that way because a neighbor kid whose teenage brother has disappeared demands that Cal, the protagonist, investigate, and of course, he gets drawn in for one more investigation.
MAUREEN: I think you do a wonderful job of giving us this character who has some sense of how his life has fallen apart a bit.
But he'’s not sitting around at night doing deep analysis because he'’s not that kind of a man.
TANA: Yeah, he'’s not introspective, MAUREEN: No TANA: and that was deliberate.
I really didn'’t want to write an introspective character '’cause I just finished writing "The Witch Elm," where the main site of all the action is inside the main character'’s head.
And I did not want to write anymore introspective.
I was very done with that.
I wanted to write somebody who was all about action, for whom the defining elements of anyone, including himself, weren'’t what does this person think?
What does this person feel?
What does this person say?
It was all about, no, no, no, you'’re defined by what you do.
What does this person do?
And I liked doing that and going, the person who you think you see has reasons that you will never know for being who he or she is, has layers underneath that we may never understand.
And you'’re writing mysteries and the most fascinating and beautiful, painful, all of those things, mystery of all, is the human mind is other people.
And so I think it'’s a, mystery is a really good genre to let you into trying to touch on that mystery.
SILVIA: Gothic heroines are interesting because they, just like the gothic genre, they tend to be different things at the same time and sometimes contradict each other.
Gothic is a lot about atmosphere and psychology and the interior being reflected by the exterior, right?
So those windswept moors and those stormy nights, the wind banging on the shutters are reflections of the interior psychology of characters.
My book, "Mexican Gothic," it'’s based on a real mining town that is called Real del Monte or Mineral del Monte and it'’s in Hidalgo.
It is kind of cold and chilly and it was in fact an English mining town in the middle of Mexico at one point in time.
So Noemi is a socialite, that obviously implies a certain amount of wealth and resources that other characters might not have.
So she'’s very aloof.
She is a modern girl for the time period for 1950.
She smokes and drives a convertible and wears really fancy dresses.
You look at the press of the time and how people are reacting to womanhood and things like that.
There are some people who are very critical of that, and they want, they'’re like, why are our daughter'’s now going out dancing instead of getting married and having children?
So there'’s some of that also embedded in the narrative.
SARAH: I think for me, "The Sanatorium," the building, the soulmate, as it becomes within the novel, very much uses that sense of place to create a sense of unease.
And I think you have within the main character of Elin, that psychological, that you mentioned, that almost chipping away at her sense of self as she sort of sees lots of things that happen within the sanatorium but also the external environment.
And I think that kind of weather is very much, again, the sort of trope you deal within the gothic novel.
And I think it for me, it very much reflects Elin'’s internal character and how she'’s feeling.
I think we see the house and weather in the sanatorium is very much something I wanted to build for the reader and for Elin alike, that kind of sense of intention.
Elin as a strong character.
I think for her, a lot of people have said they don'’t see her as a strong character because she is quite open about her emotions, she'’s acting in what would be described as kind of an emotional way.
But I don'’t even necessarily like that kind of description.
I think she is a person who'’s just very much her.
So, yeah, I think Elin is a strong woman because she is unafraid to be herself, and I think she lays it all out there for the reader and, in a way, for herself, she'’s going on a journey and exploring who she is through what happened.
SILVIA: We really want women, when they are in a certain active role where they'’re the the main protagonist and they'’re in this kind of narrative where they'’re facing off against somebody or something, we want them to take an Ellen Ripley approach to get the flamethrower and burn the alien down immediately, and be like, I'’m a bad, tough lady.
And if a woman stops for a second and says, "Oh, my God, I don'’t know if I'’m going mad "or what is happening here?
I don'’t understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit."
We just say, "Oh, what a weakling, and what a silly lady that is," or even worse.
But I think that has to do a lot with how we envision women, that mentions that we allow women to inhabit and how uncomfortable we are with what I would call complicated women.
♪ ANGIE: When I finished "The Hate U Give," I thought I was done with those characters, done with that story.
But my readers, they'’re the reason "Concrete Rose" exists.
When I was touring for "The Hate U Give" and promoting it, the character I was asked about the most was Maverick Carter, who is Starr'’s dad in "The Hate U Give," and you wouldn'’t expect the father to get that much attention in the book, you know?
From the young people telling me they loved Maverick to the moms telling me they wanted to marry Maverick.
(laughs) So a lot of people wanted to know from me how did he become the man and the father that we see in "The Hate U Give" knowing about his past?
I think that for a lot of young people, this was a story that addressed things that concern them and it reflected the world that they were seeing around them.
I think for a lot of especially young Black kids, it was a book that showed them themselves and affirmed a lot of them to them.
You know?
I think, too, that this book allowed a lot of people to have some conversations about society and about issues happening in our world and to have those conversations in a safe space in the form of a book.
If nothing else, the summer of 2020 and seeing the death of George Floyd caught on tape and seeing more Black men become hashtags, it reminded me of the importance of humanizing Black men and Black boys.
And I think that as an author, I have that responsibility.
If you look at Maverick, if someone were to just look at this character of Maverick, and just take a quick glimpse at him, they would assume, oh, he'’s a troublemaker, because he'’s involved in a gang, and he does illegal activities at times.
But we are also talking about a 17-year-old kid who just wants to be loved and protected and cared for.
And those are all things we can all identify with no matter what walk of life we come from.
So I wanted to humanize Maverick and further humanize Black boys and Black men so that when we'’re saying Black Lives Matter, when we'’re saying those words, maybe people will understand them a little bit more and get while we'’re saying yes, even when Black boys like Maverick are in trouble, their lives still matter, too.
♪ ISABEL: I believe that narrative nonfiction is the closest that many of us will ever get to being another person, it requires going very deep into the motivations, into the experiences, into the responses that individuals may have to whatever the circumstances they might find themselves in, a phenomenon that they may be attempting to survive within.
CHANG-RAE: Empathy, the lives of others.
It'’s made me realize how much I love this world and everything in it, even the stuff that gives me heartache and gives me rage sometimes, we need it all to make sense of ourselves.
And that, I think, is what I enjoy from a great book.
It gives me a little bit of everything.
MICHAEL: I had books that I don'’t even think of, like this room I didn'’t think I have books in but I have like 50-60 books in this room.
And I know this isn'’t even one of my rooms with a lot of books in it, and books are everywhere in my life.
ADAM: As a shy kid who'’s very introverted, reading a book was a way to connect with other people without all the discomfort and awkwardness of having to approach someone for a conversation.
ANNETTE: I grew up in a very small town and I spent lots of time in an even smaller town where my grandmother, grandparents lived, and we visited them sometimes in the summer and usually on the weekends, and I read books.
It was the thing to do after you'’ve played enough and you'’ve run out of all the things that could be done in rural East Texas, I would go inside and read books so I could discover new worlds in those books.
And it took me outside of that very, very provincial area.
So it opened the world to me, actually and literally.
CHRISTOPHER: I was homeschooled my whole life, and so I really had an exaggerated version of experience that so many of us do have with books where for me, books were a way of learning about the world and experiencing things I had never experienced before.
LUPITA: And in so doing, it gives me more of a complex understanding of humanity, which I think is the power of stories, right, that we'’re able to see ourselves in all manner of different character.
And we realize, yeah, we'’re so different, but we'’re also the same in many ways.
CARLA: The Library of Congress has books that date back centuries, but just as importantly, it adds new books and other items to its collections every day.
One of our most recent collections has focused on capturing our collective creativity during the pandemic.
Here, the Library has amassed artistic endeavors from people all over the country.
Collections such as these offer us new ways to relate to each other and maybe, just maybe, make some unexpected connections.
The same is true of books.
Our final group of authors are all about finding connections and focusing on what we all have in common.
ISABEL: This is a golden age of unfurling, of perspectives that have not been built into the ways the ways that history is taught in our country.
Because so many people are thirsty for knowledge to understand what they might not have understood before, what they did not learn growing up.
This is a time where people are hungering for answers because there is so much that has not often made sense to many people.
And we often in the last few years have heard people say, I don'’t recognize my country.
This is not America.
This is not what America stands for.
And whenever I hear that, I'’m reminded that not enough of us know our country'’s true history.
"Caste, the Origins of Discontent" arises from "The Warmth of Other Suns" in which I spent 15 years to research and to narrate the experience of six million African- Americans who, in some ways, they fled the Jim Crow South, but they were really defecting one part of the country for another part of the country.
They were seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country.
And in doing so, to be able to understand why they were doing what they were doing required me to not just do the research into the archives, but to listen to the stories and experiences of the people.
Once we recognize that we ourselves have been programed to act in a certain way in accord with the assignment based upon our location, the location of the people of the group that we were born to and where that group is located in the hierarchy.
Once we recognize that, that'’s one of the first ways of fighting something is to first recognize that you have something to fight for or against anyway.
And so recognizing it is the first step toward vanquishing it.
And that was the goal of this work, is to first shine a light on us so we can see beneath what we thought we might know about the hierarchy that we have inherited so that we can begin the work together to dismantle these hierarchies, to dismantle the inequities that are built into our society.
DAVID: Welcome, everybody, I'’m here with Bill Gates.
I'’m David Rubenstein, and today, we'’re gonna talk about Bill'’s new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster."
So let'’s talk about what we can do in our lifetime.
If I change my habits or you change your habits or anybody changes their habits, it'’s our great-great- grandchildren that might benefit.
We'’re not really gonna benefit.
Is that true or not?
BILL: My belief in the book is that overall, we'’re not going to be, change people'’s behavior.
So the assumption in the book is that only through innovating and how we make all those things, including electricity, food, and only by changing that so that they have no emissions, will we be able to get realistically to zero.
So in large part, it'’s that process of how electricity gets made or how your car gets powered that we have to drive to zero emission rather than completely getting rid of the demand for all those things.
So if we can electrify fast enough and make these changes, we will get emissions down towards the end of the time when we are likely to be alive.
But your point that, getting the world to start cooling off, even in the best case, it'’s actually way out there in 2060s, 2070s that you start to see that temperature begin to drop back to where it belongs.
And so the whole world'’s in this together.
The only reason we want the whole world to get to zero is that that'’s what it takes to stop the temperature from constantly going up.
DAVID: What do you think is the reason that you still have a fairly big resistance to the idea that climate change isn'’t even a real manmade problem?
BILL: Yeah, the number of people who deny that the phenomenon exists is going down.
The number of people who say, "Gosh, the other countries won'’t go along, so it'’s hopeless," they'’re asking a legitimate question, and that'’s why these conferences, including one coming up in late 2021 in Glasgow will be important to show that people are working together.
We also now have people who think it'’s easy to solve, that is, they haven'’t looked at all the sources of emissions and the scale of change required.
And so they'’re not helping get the research money and the innovation agenda going at full speed.
And so a key reason I wrote the book was to say to the people who think it'’s easy, no it'’s hard, and the people who think that it'’s impossible to remind them that innovation in all these areas is happening.
The only question is, is it happening fast enough?
And what kind of incentives and policies or behaviors should individuals, companies, and governments engage in to give us the best chance of avoiding this climate disaster.
♪ MICHAEL: This book just kind of happened.
I was gonna write a book about golf, I thought I'’d write a book about golf '’cause golf gave me a kind of second wind in terms of socially and athletically, and it'’s a nice thing for that point in my life.
And so I'’m writing this book about golf, making notes and that, then I get this spinal thing, a tumor on my spine, and I had that operated on, then I broke my arm, and I just found my optimism, my much valued optimism leaving the scene quickly.
It just really reached a dark point for me.
And as I experienced it, I came through it with a lot of lessons learned from Gus, my dog, and my father-in-law, not necessarily in that order, but so many people in my life, my wife, Tracy, my kids, my friends, but with gratitude, optimism becomes sustainable.
I just got that, it just came to me and said, that is what it is, you can get through anything if you find things to be grateful for.
And the Parkinson'’s wasn'’t my fault, I couldn'’t do anything with that, the spinal tumor wasn'’t my fault, but the falling was my fault because I was not careful, and by not being careful, I was not being respectful to my doctors and my health care people that helped me.
So my family who stuck by me through my rehabilitation and my friends, and I just felt I let them all down.
And I thought I'’d let the Parkinson'’s community down because I'’m telling them chin up and it'’ll all be okay and look forward to the cure.
And then here I am whining and drooling on the floor of my kitchen.
So that was the low point, but and it'’s okay to go there.
I mean, that'’s what I learned, so it'’s good to go there.
It'’s good to go to that low point and really look around and get help if you need it and find answers to your questions.
You can be a realist and an optimist at the same time.
In fact, I think it requires being a realist to be an optimist.
You have to look at what the ground is around you.
You have to be real about it and say these facts are non-disputable, these are the realities as we see them.
So of course that reality with respect for it and respect for it that it'’s the truth, and then we can act on it and we can see.
I picture it as a block, that there'’s room around it, there'’s room around any problem, and in that room in that margin, you can find answers.
LEVAR: While there is still plenty that can be done to find what connects us right here on this planet, there are those of us who boldly seek out new life and new civilizations on other worlds.
Fantasy and science fiction conventions have always created their own sense of community, and two writers with devoted fan bases, Christopher Paolini and Martha Wells, recently connected over this phenomenon, and the way they'’ve seen a love of genre bring people together.
MARTHA: When my first book was published, it was "The Element of Fire" and it is actually published by Tor Books.
You kind of just, the book came out, and if you were lucky, your friends, you have friends living near you who threw a party for you and maybe you did a signing at your local bookstore and then that was it.
And I'’m lucky where I live in Texas, especially at that time, there was a lot of science fiction fantasy conventions around, that were within driving distance '’cause I couldn'’t afford to go to anything out of state.
And so you could go to a convention and see your book on a table and people were reading it and stuff like that.
And so that would really be your only idea of how well the book was doing.
If you went to something like Worldcon and your editor invited you to dinner, then you knew you were doing okay.
CHRISTOPHER: I switched publishers for this book '’cause it'’s an adult novel versus YA.
And because I live in Montana and when I toured, I was touring by myself and I didn'’t go to the conventions, I was pretty isolated from the larger authorial sci-fi fantasy community.
and then I started going to the conventions and I love them because it'’s very rare in our day-to-day life to be able to be unabashedly enthusiastic about something in a way that is normally frowned upon.
Basically, at a convention, you can wear your heart on your sleeve.
You walk in, and here are thousands of people who are unabashed fans of X, Y, Z.
Maybe they have a costume, maybe they they don'’t.
But one thing you can be sure of is most people you see at the convention truly love something and they'’re there to learn and grow and share that love.
And I love that because aside from maybe sporting events, you don'’t really find that.
But I try to give back to the fans as much as I can because it'’s their support that has let me do this as a profession since I was a teenager.
I mean, I have not had a real job.
I get to make up stories for a living.
And that is a privilege that I never take for granted.
♪ KAZUO: I think I'’ve always been in this habit of creating imaginary worlds.
I'’ve never lost that.
For me, writing a work of fiction is about creating this and inhabiting this fictional world.
Klara is a is a robot girl with a specific purpose.
She'’s been invented to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely.
And at the beginning, she'’s in a store with other such creatures.
They'’re called Artificial Friends or AFs.
And this really is a story of how Klara tries to save the family of humans she goes to live with from heartbreak.
And how she tries to enlist the help of the Sun to do this.
And then the reason she wants to help, she wants to get help from the Sun is because quite logically, she thinks, before she knows very much about the world that the Sun is the source of all good things, because for one thing, she is solar powered, and all her fellow creatures are solar powered, perfectly logical conclusion.
And when she looks out of the store window at the city street outside, she sees all the shafts of sunlight on human beings.
She thinks that applies to the human world as well.
There'’s lots of things you can do with an AI character.
Questions like, what does it mean to be human then?
What'’s so special about humans?
What is a soul?
What does it mean to love in human terms?
I mean, all these things become very natural questions.
You just have a creature like this.
The question is hovering there in the story without having to say anything.
We torture ourselves about whether we'’re being good human beings.
This is what fascinates me about people and it touches me about people, it moves me about human beings.
It'’s a kind of a metaphor for me, I suppose.
I mean, we put a lot of our sense of dignity and our self-worth into doing something we think we do well and decently.
But it'’s very difficult for us to get a full perspective on where we fit in to the bigger world, and we don'’t ever quite know how we are contributing, and whose side we'’re actually on.
We just hope that we'’re doing something good and we are part of a team ultimately that we can be proud of.
LEVAR: The books we'’ve just talked about in the past hour have opened up the world a little bit more, revealed new possibilities, and illustrated the ways that we are deeply connected to one another.
Hopefully after this, you'’ll find the time to visit a public library just like the one behind me to read a good book or two, and find some inspiration.
I know I have a few new books on my list.
I'’m LeVar Burton and on behalf of Dr. Hayden and everyone else at the Library of Congress, thank you for joining us for Open a Book, Open the World, the National Book Festival.
We'’ll see you next time, but you don'’t have to take my word for it.
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