Kurt Andersen on Channeling President Trump

[Music] how do you write a memoir by President Trump when you are not president Trump Kurt Anderson joins us to talk about his faux Memoir you can't spell America without me co-written with Alec Baldwin who are some of the key code Breakers of World War II Liza Mundy will be here to talk about her book code girls our children's books editor Maria Russo will talk about this Fall's best book for kids and the winners of our 65th best illustrated book awards Alexander alter will give us an update from the literary World Plus we'll talk about what we and The Wider world are reading this is inside the New York Times book review I'm Pamela [Music] Paul Kurt Anderson joins us now he is the co-author of a book with Alec Baldwin that is ostensibly written by Donald J Trump I'm going to give the full title it's called you can't spell America without me the really tremendous Inside Story of my fantastic first Year's president by Donald J Trump a so-called parody by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Anderson all right that is a mouthful but I guess appropriately so Kurt thanks for being here my pleasure okay how did this project come about this project came about early this year when the the notion had in some fashion of doing a Trump book had occurred to Alec Baldwin and we are acquaintances and friendly acquaintances were now we were close very very close friends of course but he called me and said you think this is a good idea and I said what's the idea he said well I don't know what some kind of book I thought about it and we talked about it and decided it was a good idea done in the way that we did it and so that's how this idea came about a germ and then we turned it into a seedly and here we are and then kind of a a mad rush right because you oh yes it was a mad rush it was indeed a mad rush because also the idea was born as I was as I was still finishing the cuts and final polishes of a whole other book that took many years to write and then uh the writing and photography and everything else for this book had to happen within a very few months in the spring and early summer right because Fantasy Land came out in September so there's like a two-month window where you have two books come out you're also the host of Studio 360 on public radio Alec Baldwin also has a couple of projects that he does so like what was the collaborative process like the collaborative process was that we met a bunch of times and talked a lot and I said I have this idea and this idea and here's my here's this narrative Arc could do this and then I started writing and gave him the first half of the book and he responded and then it became a as they say in improv comedy a kind of yes and thing where he you know as you know it's written in first person as as Donald Trump and so he because because he's he's thought about Donald Trump a lot as well would say oh and then he could say this also here and oh and down here on page 28 he could also do this riff and as he said he was incredibly gracious as a collaborator and said of course you you're you're the novelist you're the writer you use my stuff as you will and so a lot of it was great and I used it and Incorporated it and so that was that I was happy and he was happy and then went on and so it was just it was a normal collaboration but a great one because he let me do the heavy lifting that I wanted to do that's a very kind way of putting it let you do the the heavy lifting because you jokingly said at the beginning that you were sort of the words and he was going to be the pictures and I don't think there's any pictures of you in the book actually there are are not not intentionally but as we were on these sets of these fake oval offices and fake maragas and white houses wanting to do pictures and we had the ideas for the pictures going into these two days of shooting but we suddenly the photographer and the creative director decided oh we need some AIDS around and and so suddenly these photographers assistants were enlisted there you are but then but then we needed somebody who wasn't you know 29 as well so there I am playing some I don't know what Steve Bannon unfortunately I don't know who I'm playing there is actually a passing resemblance I I have to say I hate to say that yes it's the hair it's the hair mostly the hair so you have a history with Trump the episode that stands out in my mind is the Czech episode but I'd love you to tell us that story and just talk about your Trump related writing experience going back to your spy days yeah we we started spy magazine Gren Carter and I uh and our other partners in 1986 and in our very first issue of spy the cover story was called jerks the 10 most embarrassing New Yorkers and one of those 10 embarrassing New Yorkers was the young and not very well-known 40-year-old Donald Trump whom in that very first issue to explain why he was included we we quote him talking about how he could do uh nuclear missile negot ation with the Russians with the Soviets then so much better than anybody's doing now because he he knew everything he needed to know about missiles and he could learn what he didn't know in an hour so that was our first look at Donald Trump and because he was so responsive and and Rose to the bait and was just an extraordinary character uh we we covered him a great deal in spy both journalistically and and just uh juvenile name calling short-fingered Bulgarian and so forth and so that was that and then he went on to go bankrupt and become a reality television star and I went on to other magazines and write novels and I had a 15 or 20 year internum where I spent almost no time thinking about or writing about Donald Trump until until he was running for president and I was in the middle of writing this other book that was also Fantasy Land which was not about Donald Trump but then he he he kind of barged into it and became a poster boy in its final chapters being a student of Donald Trump back in the 80s and 90s became a commodity again that people were interested in here in the last couple years and it has ended up and you can't spell America without me so you made Donald Trump essentially um or please I I no I I tried to kill Baby Hitler that's that's my version of it or at least you're you're a an established Authority on Donald Trump that I am that I am but the check episode would you mind just telling listeners about that yes we decided when we were doing spy we did pranks occasionally and so we had this idea of sending a dozens of well-to-do well-known people a small check for $1.11 about 60 of them and from and we made up a company called the national refund Clearing House and and sent them a letter saying oh there's been a computer error and you're du a1ar 11 cents and we apologize and we wanted to see who would cash them and so about half of the 60 cashed those checks and we said okay we'll do it we'll try it again we'll send another check to the people who cashed it for 64 cents with the we're sorry about this second computer error that you're do you under reimburse du you're due 64 C more and saw that a dozen people cash those checks and so we we did yet again sent a check uh a new check we're so sorry here's 13 cents that you're due we we under reimburse you two people cashed those checks one of whom was the Saudi arms dealers Adan kogi and the other one was the then teetering on bankruptcy Donald Trump and the day that happened we all felt like there is a God and and we scored and and it was no it was extraordinary and we we didn't even intended to be a Donald Trump story but he in his way made it one well Donald Trump being now the president continues to be Donald Trump continues to do things continues to do things that presumably are fod for satire so given the fact that you had this short window did you find yourself constantly saying well we've got to add that we've got to put this in we've got to update it actually what happened much more but Illuminating the same phenomenon is I would create a fictional thing and suddenly it would come true the chapter in which he Muses early on about firing Comey was well before he fired James Comey for instance and then smaller things I I had this whole fictional episode that I thought about taking out after it became true where where he he he wants to fire somebody he he hates that the people working in the White House don't actually work for him they're civil servants and can't fire them and then I have R prus say no but this head Steward this woman you could fire her she's actually at will and they do just to make him happy fire this woman and then weeks after that this woman is fired so that happened again and again of cases where where these these seemingly uh impossible but also vaguely plausible fictions came true and then I we had to decide oh are we going to keep that or or will it just look like we're reporting what happened so that was more the problem than than uh oh let's add this certainly there were things that happened in the summer that we stuck in there as as bits of this this Memoir just to keep it as current as possible and also made some large narrative choices about how it would end this book that I don't want to give away and spoil but would account for and accommodate practically whatever happened in between the final lockdown of the book at the end of August and today so you're either the master Puppeteer or you were secretly writing realistic fiction as opposed to satire what was it like for you to channel Donald Trump what was the experience to say okay now I'm going to adopt this language and this way of thinking and and write in this voice well you should talk to my wife who said I became a much more unpleasant person for several months sincerely she thought that and and I I said more unkind things about people and was shorter with her than I was ordinarily so that but it was interesting and I had never had to write something as substantial as this in such a short period of time so that was just a an interesting new literary writerly professional experience that I think did actually have the benefit of really making me like a fictional he's not a fictional character but as if he is a fictional character and of course for this purpose he is inhabit him fully and I can't say that I became more sympathetic to what I imagine his inner psychological state is but but I do feel I came out of that understanding it more viscerally understanding the insecurity and the iffiness of his connection to reality better and more deeply than I did before I began well it's interesting because it's like it's like foreign language they say when you speak a foreign language you begin to think differently because the way in which that language is structured and because not only is Trump's way of thinking so very particular but also the language he uses is highly specific and I I would imagine it's it's kind of catchy like did you find it in infecting your your way of thinking and writing I hope not but but it's but it's so true what you say about the language and it is why or it's connected to the fact that before I began and and reimmerse myself in all these unedited raw transcripts of interviews with the New York Times and other papers and places which were so useful in in kind of learning to speak the language you know and become fluent in the language and I even created a lexicon for myself of oh here's the here's the adverbs he uses here's the negative adverbs here's the positive here's the adjectives here's the here's here's how he zigzags off away from what he's been asked about as though it was a a primer in this strange language but I don't think I I don't think it you know you know affected the way I think or right but time will tell although like an interesting brigh early exercise to to presumably edit your own voice out of your own writing exactly right and often I would write something and think nah that's too coherent that exactly I mean too logically consistent exactly all those things and so you had to let it flow which was you know a kind of giddy writerly experience of being bad in exactly the right way to to do this particular thing not to get to meta but you're also in a way channeling Alec Baldwin channeling Donald Trump right because his performance preceded this book it's true and one sees what he does on Saturday Night Live you know in sketches written by talented comedy writers but what was really interesting is in our collaborative work together he would as he was like riffing and saying oh but he could then he could say this he would naturally fall into that voice and a in a more naturalistic version of that voice like the one he does in the audio book version of the book and that was both fun and hilarious and helpful to me as you say to sort of create that hybrid of Alec doing Trump with what I imagine Trump thinks like and talks like and and what we see him doing and then even more amazingly and entertainingly these the two days we spent doing all these pictures he almost non-stop be partly because he was in the whole drag and the fat suit and the hair and all everything he he was Donald Trump in an almost Daniel de Ley way for those those days and uh very hilariously so you're on the record as as not being a particular fan of trump or his policies was it a challenge for you to maintain your sense of humor around Trump well you know it it is I mean that's an interesting question for all of us are you know spending time sterzing parodying whatever Trump when we also are worried that that he's a dangerous person and and it this could all become catastrophic more than it is already but on the other hand I'm a professional I can maintain my sense of humor and where this book ends is pretty dark and weird and not just oh look he's orange he's got funny hair so I'm happy as a writer SL citizen that it goes where it goes in its sense of humor about this creature what was the easiest thing for you to sauze the well-known it's fabulous it's it's all those things so we know what he does which is the hyperbole from a fairly small pallet of of superlatives so the challenge was to to as I build this lexicon to go a little deeper and say here are the other words he uses other than huge I don't think I don't think the word huge is in the book book because that's the one that became the cliche so right well I guess I meant like it's almost too easy to sauze some things exactly and so the qu the trick is to try to remain surprising and go places that he hasn't gone but that one wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow he did do you know because he was first person in his familiar first person voice there's a lot of actual material that then one can extrude and reproduce and extrapolate from again I don't want to say writing is easy because it isn't ever easy for me anyway and I I never say oh that was fun this I got to say partly because it was a this this circumscribed period of time I I I didn't have to invent the character from scratch as one does when one is writing fiction it was more fun than writing usually is I I have to say and in a certain sense easier than for me than writing usually is because of the the constraints okay it's Donald Trump it's his election in first eight months in office when you're when you're writing a book you're thinking up a book you you rarely I rarely have it so clearly worked out ahead of time and the character so flesh ahead of time so so in a sense I don't want to understate the my accomplishment but it was it was easier easier than than much writing I have done you're doing that opening the door for sequel thing here I am oh good I I didn't even realize that's what I was doing good I want to ask you to read from it but then there's the challenge then of of you having to I don't know possibly imitate Alec Baldwin imitating which I would never do except you know privately and what I would suggest actually is that you perhaps use a bit of the Audi book instead of me doing it all right here is a clip from the audio so that we don't have to hear Kurt Anderson channeling Alec Baldwin channeling Donald Trump the chapter you just read was written personally by me Donald Trump I swear it on the life of my youngest daughter what you're reading now now I am also personally writing this entire book me all the words and sentences and larger sections the uh paragraphs the chapters all mine not as told to or with some pathetic lowlife parasite Ghost Rider this Trump book unlike my many previous excellent Trump books which were typed up by subcontractors who interviewed me is being created one 100% by me it will be if I can be completely honest the best one it already is one last question if you could write the script for the scene or the chapter for the scene in which Trump actual Donald J Trump receives this book gets this book in his office perhaps in the Oval Office how does that play out and he actually reads a book well that would be an astonishing thing wouldn't it and I would have done something for my Republic to have made this President read a book um I I guess what I would love to have happen is that he would start reading it and think this this does sound like this this is great I I've hired all these writers in the past to write my Memoirs and and books but these guys do it better than it's ever been done that would be the scene so this is secretly an audition to be Donald Trump's presidential Memoir ghost triter exactly and and then of course at the end of the scene he would realize when I don't know Ivanka or somebody told him that no but Daddy it makes you look bad then he would send out a dozen tweets saying what horrible disgusting people Alec and I are and then my day would be perfect your work would be done all right well since so much of the book apparently already has proven prophetic perhaps it will all come true Kurt thank you so much oh it was my pleasure p thank you Kurt Anderson is the co-author with Alec Baldwin of a parody book it's called you can't spell America without me the really tremendous Inside Story of my fantastic first year as president by Donald J Trump [Music] Liza Mundy joins us now fittingly from the newsum in Washington DC to talk about her new book code girls the untold story of the American women code Breakers of World War II Liza thanks for being here thank you so much for having me so you just an event with the author of hidden figures there's kind of a moment right now for these books it seems about women you know having done great things in the past and curiously overlooked for having doing it absolutely margar Le shedly made the point at our panel that it's as though somebody flipped on the light and there were all these rooms full of women there who had been there all along I thought that was a great metaphor what brought you to this story how did how did the light switch on for you uh my my husband was reading a Declassified NSA history about one of the smaller codebreaking projects during the war and it mentioned that 90 % of them were women and I just thought that was extraordinary and I went out and spoke to the historian at the NSA the National Security Agency and the curator of the national cryptologic museum which is our version of Bletchley Park they were both women and they laid out this much larger story of thousands of women being recruited to come break German and Japanese and other codes during the war so you know as they were sitting there laying it out I I again I couldn't believe that it hadn't been told okay I have to go back and just break apart that sentence a little bit because you said very casually that your husband was reading this recently Declassified document as if he were reading the latest issue of Sports Illustrated why was he reading this well I'm lucky to be buried to somebody who reads Declassified documents for fun and pleasure on weekends he's he's always been interested in the Cold War period and this particular document had to do with our project to break the Soviet code systems during the war which we weren't supposed to be doing they were our Ally and the project was called venona it was top top secret and it was mostly women who were doing it and most of them were School teachers and then that particular project continued during the Cold War for many years actually and it continued to be mostly women who were working that project so so that's what he was reading so it started off not with the school teachers recruited by the Army but with the Navy in 1941 is that correct right and that's what I learned once I once I started diving into the research that immediately after and even a little bit before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the Navy realized that it needed just infinitely more code Breakers Communications Intelligence Officers and I actually found a document at the National Archives it was produ the Navy was producing weekly memos about where it was getting its Crypt analyst where it was looking to find people who could do it and there was a memo that said new source women's colleges so somebody in the Navy had the bright idea to start approaching the women's colleges why did they go to women's colleges they went to the seven sister schools right yes the Navy had been historically it would recruit its intelligence officers from the ivy league so when they uh and and obviously immediately after Pearl Harbor and we entered the war the men started shipping out I mean suddenly men were unavailable so the Navy thought well the next best thing uh we've been recruiting from the ivy league so we'll turn to their female counterparts and so that's where women received these Secret Letters selected women from the senior classes at Welsley and Smith and brinmar were secretly invited to these meetings where they would be asked do you like Crossroad puzzles and are you engaged to be married and and I should say that the Deans and presidents of these women's colleges were very eager to serve the war effort they were also very crafty and they realized that the war was an opportunity to give their female undergraduates more job opportunities so they were also working closely with the Navy to identify and then train their most promising senior women who was behind this effort to recruit these women was there one person in the Navy who made this decision who was the driving force not so much at the Navy I mean there had been a woman an incredibly important woman civilian at the Navy all during the 1930s she was a Texas school teacher she was a genius in math and languages her name was Agnes Driscoll and she had sat at a desk day after gay in the 1930s diagnosing how the Japanese Fleet code worked the the main Code system that the Navy used it was what was called a super enciphered code and she was basically doing decryption and so the Navy did have a history of using some female civilians to do this work Agnes Drisco was legendary the men who went out to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor uh and became famous later they were all trained by her so there was a a history of of women doing this work which sort of a little bit of it seemed secretarial and it wasn't that important before World War II uh people didn't believe that codebreaking could be used in battle that it could be done quickly enough but during World War II with the Battle of Midway which completely turned on American code breaking and and all the guys who did it have been trained by Agnes Drisco that's when it was suddenly put on the map and they realized how important it was going to be so I'm sorry this is a lengthy way of saying that there had been some women in the Navy operation back before it was truly prestigious and so it didn't come as a complete 180 Dee turnaround she mentioned that some work was secretarial or seem secretarial in nature but what was the work of these code Breakers it was not in the day-to-day all that interesting necessarily right yeah it varied and once the women got recruited I mean there were 4,000 women doing it for the Navy there were 7,000 women doing it for the Army there were innumerable code and Cipher systems being used you know during a global war where Communications had to travel for thousands of miles so the German uboat Commander was communicating with all his uots the Japanese Army was communicating with their headquarters and we were snatching all these signals out of the air and different systems require different methods but the one that I just talked about the Japanese Naval code all the words would be rendered as figit code groups so it might be like 6 S8 89 but then they would be enciphered and another uh set of numbers would be added to them and that's what would be radioed so the people doing the work had to strip out that additive in order to get down to a code group that might announce say the no position that a ship was going to be at the next day so they had to do it very quickly so it was repetitive but it was also stressful and Urgent and they all had brothers or fiances or husbands who were in the war so they felt enormous responsibility and they were always told you know you cannot make a single mistake so even if it was repetitive it was it was urgent and stressful and the hours were long the hours were long they worked 24 hours a day so they were on shifts and ultimately the Navy opened up the Navy created the waves uh and even enlisted women who hadn't gone to these you know Elite colleges if they had aptitude and intelligence they could join and they joined the military and they were on what what the Navy called watches which is what we would call shifts so they might be working in the middle of the night so for people who are familiar with sort of The Bletchley Park version of this story over in the UK what was different about America's decrypting sort of operation we had a bigger operation actually it's not as well known as Bletchley Park I think because really there's not a sort of a a place like Bletchley Park Bley park has sort of a glamour to it and it's one location we have the Army and the Navy doing this work in two separate locations you know anybody who lives in Washington like me is not surprised and Bley Park had tennis courts tennis courts yeah and the sort of the glamour of the debutants but we actually had a much bigger operation we had more women and we were working more code systems The Bletchley Park was mostly concentrating on the German Enigma machine that was used by their army their Air Force and their Navy the Germans we were working a lot of different Japanese code systems we were we were also cooperating with the British on on the um the German Naval ubo codes in fact we pretty much took over that operation and it was it was pretty much e exclusively being done by by women by the end of the war how successful were they well we completely cleared the Atlantic of the of the uots they were completely eliminated from the Atlantic Ocean so that the convoys could travel to England to bring our sailors and soldiers to make the D-Day Landing so I mean that was completely successful we uh we broke the Japanese naval fleet code over and over and also the battle midway's very famous but one of the most important efforts during the war was the sinking of the supply ships that were supplying the Japanese Army on all the islands they had captured and the land masses and that was literally School teachers who had been recruited by the Army uh civilian School teachers who traveled to Washington uh I have a number of them in my book they didn't know what work they would be doing and they were put to work decrypting the enciphered system that the Army used and they sank Supply ships they sank thousands and thousands ofly of Supply ships and I I even found a poem in the archives about school teachers thinking the shipping of Japan and that doesn't get talked about as much because it took place over the course of months but in the end Most Japanese army deaths were as a result of starvation or or or disease and that was because the supply ships had been sunk and they couldn't get food and they couldn't get medicine so it it had an enormous impact on the Japanese Army and the course of the war in the Pacific what was life like after the war for these women I mean did they just sort of pack up their papers and and go home to their former lives did any of them continue after the war was over in in some capacity yes but the women had been told during the course of the war that they would be shot if they talked about what they were doing you know you couldn't it was treason to to talk about a top secret project during the war and so they they told people that they were secretaries and because they were women people believed that the work they were doing couldn't be important then after the war most of them went home they were given a medal if they were with the Navy operation they were told never to show it to anybody I had to persuade some of the women to even show it to me now and they were told never to talk about what they did and in fact that that oath of secrecy was lifted in the 80s and 90s when some of the men started talking and historians started writing about this but nobody ever told the women so they went through most of their lives never talking about it and the majority took it to their graves but there was a cohort of women who continued with the work after the war and Rose to very high positions in what is now the NSA the National Security Agency so the first female deputy director of the NSA was a 22-year- old codebreaker during the war and those women tended to not get married and not have children because if you were going to be in highlevel government intelligence work after the war you if and you were a woman you really had to just completely commit yourself to that work so you mentioned that some of the women were kind of reluctant to talk about certain things you interviewed more than 20 former code breakers for the book I did I found them and and you know since the book has been published I've heard from more they tend to be online because they were code Girls then and they tend to be code girls now so yes I I did track down 20 and in some cases I had to convince them that they wouldn't be put in prison anymore if they if they did talk about what they did yeah and and but at this point I think most of them realize that books have come out on these efforts and that they were essentially neglected in the official history and they were very understandably proud of their work and eager eager to get credit and one of the women said to me during my reporting you know I I just hope that I live long enough to to see the book published wow and she did I would love to hear about one of your conversations tell us about one of the code Breakers you interviewed in person about their time and how you found them and what those conversations were like and what her story was so a friend of mine went to visit at her mother Welsley class of 43 in an assisted living facility in Maine and she came back and she said okay I've got three for you so up there at that facility in Maine there were three former Cod Breakers who had been recruited from um Welsley and Smith but one woman Jane case Tuttle who had actually joined as an enlisted woman she came from a very affluent uh family her father was a physicist Theodore casee and she she when she enlisted in the Navy she thought she would be made an officer cuz she had gone to music school but they didn't consider that to the equivalent of college so she uh went in as enlisted woman and she had great stories about what it was like from her upper class background to go through the enlistment process she was nearsighted and she had memorized the eye chart so that she could make it through that part of it but she wasn't prepared for the naked physical uh when she had to actually take off her clothes because men in the Navy did and um somebody a woman actually drew the number I think it was nine between her breasts and said okay go stand between 8 and 10 and so because she was so nearsighted and had had hidden her spectacles she had to go around peering at other women's breasts in order to make it through the physical but what was so wonderful was that simply because of her intelligence she got routed to the codebreaking facility uh and she had some wonderful Tales she was tested one time when she was walking the streets of Washington she was picked up in a car because during the war people were told to pick up members of the military and give them a ride and this person in the car started saying he was a man wearing a raincoat his wife was there he said so what do you do in that big facility up there in Northwest Washington what do you all what do you Navy women do there and she said oh I I fill inkwells and I sharpen pencils and I give people what they need and he said well what is that c patch that you all wear stand for and she didn't have a script for this and she said oh well it's a it's it's cue for communications because a Navy can't spell and when he let her out he reached over and opened the door and she the hike the sleeve of his raincoat hiked up and uh and she saw that he was a Navy Admiral and he had been testing her ability to keep a secret and she passed but she also talked about realizing that she was in fact very very good at math she had grown up um being sort of discouraged in that realm and she had to do she was working the Japanese naval fleet code she talked about the stacks of mess me she would have every day the volume of the Japanese Naval messages and knowing when a fleet action was about to happen or something was about to happen in the Pacific because the stack would get even higher so even though the women were landlocked in Washington they were they were Tethered to the action in the Pacific and and and a number of them knew what was happening to their brothers and and their their fiances wow well the secret is out now Liza thank you so much for being here oh thank you for having me it's a great honor to to be on your podcast the book again is code girls the untold story of the American women code Breakers of World War II by Liza Monday joining us now Maria Russo our children's books editor hi Maria hi Pamela so this is a very exciting time of year always it is our biggest children's book issue of the year as well as the time when we unveil our best illust Ed Awards this year in its 65th year which is tremendously exciting these are books that of course are about illustration so you want to look at them so I will give the URL it is NY times.com books so that you can go online and check out these glorious illustrations for yourself but Maria tell us a little bit about what makes this list exciting and special well this is a great list this year as always it's really International one thing about our award which is different from other illustration and picture like the cicott the cicott is only open to Americans whereas we consider all picture books so it's as always it's a very International list there's Akiko mioshi from Japan the way home in the night there's winners from France Remy kjan has a adorable book called feather of course beatric almana on a magical do nothing day and England of course Laura Carlin there's an Australian winner Mark Martin so I really encourage people to go and take a look at these books on our website and if you can get a look at the whole book because we only give you one beautiful image they're really worth looking at and again one thing about this list too is they tend to be more picture books that appeal to grown-ups and children so by all means show them to your kids but you'll enjoy them too they're just stunning artistic achievements another thing that differentiates the list from the cicott for example which is about sort of the book as a whole is that this is an award really for the illustrations right our judges we pick an independent panel of three judges they don't look at how the story works really they're just looking at the achievement of the Artist as an illustrator and picturebook illustration right now many people are saying this is at a is at a height there's so much really great illustration happening in picture books and this award really focuses on some of the the best practitioners right now and this also I think brings home a point that I know Maria you feel as strongly as I do about which is the importance of picture books not just about getting kids excited about reading and about the text but really about that kind of exposure to great art and visual it's true picture books are an art form in themselves you know the story is told through the pictures as much as through the words and children especially children who aren't reading yet or who are just starting to read really appreciate that and they know how to do that they know how to read through pictures because that's how they get through their days so we have in the rest of the issue too lots of other great picture books that aren't on this list this year but certainly could have been you know by some of the great this we have reviews and these are about the the stories and the pictures right some of these these books like for example we have the boy in the whale by the great morai gersy a book I love I just read it to my seven-year-old son last night and he was riveted and he's getting to the age where I can't get him to look at every single picture book I might like him to he loved the boy in the whale and you know great illustration of a fast-paced story about a boy who rescues a whale and gersen of course is an award-winning illustrator and author who did a book that many listeners who read picture books would know of which is the man who walked between in to he's just a wonderful Picture Book Creator there's also some very different types of picture books that we review in the issue the Argentine Comics artist leners has a fantastic picture book I love this book I know it's called good night Planet it's really fun he works in a very cartoony style so everything moves very fast a lot of the action is told through panels right but there's plenty of words for for early readers about a a stuffed rabbit that takes off in the night and has an adventure but it's it's mischievous and funny and really cool and this book is published by an imprint tune books which believes that children can begin reading with comicx right more visual they talk about visual readers which is a which is a sort of a meme right now and it's really true a lot of kids not so confident reading words can read pictures and help them that helps them get into more text Heavy books and it keeps them excited about books which is so important at that age another picture book that I especially love reading with my youngest child because it has a lot of humor in it is Dan and tats after the fall how Humpty Dumpty got back up again and it's like just when you think that you've kind of had enough with the Mother Goose that some illustrator will come along and do bre new life into Humpty Dumpty it's a fantastic book after the fall I love that one it's really about failure and putting too much expectation on yourself and picking yourself back up after you fall off and and it's it's funny and it's it's kind of inspirational too the ending there's a surprise ending that I did not see coming I don't know if you saw it coming we're not going to give we're not going to give it away cuz it's really one of the greatest surprise endings in in recent picture book history I would say that's another book I would really recommend to read to kids of of any age I think a three or four year-old who's big into nursery rhymes would get it would have fun with it but also seven eight-year-olds are going to get something out of that book here's another interesting book in this week's issue that I think people will not expect to see as an author Mark Twain has a book right a new children's book this is a manuscript discovered recently in in an archive of a story that Mark Twain told to his daughters at their bedtime and and at one point just decided I want to write that down a scholar discovered it it found its way eventually to the children's book author illustrator husband wife team Aaron and Philip dead and they really re-engineered it it's called The purloining of Prince oo margarin and it's a it's a tale set in a sort of nameless Timeless Kingdom it could be 19th century America it could be anywhere and so AAR instead contributed these very dreamy ethereal illustrations and Philip dead wrote alongside Mark Twain so he interjects his own voice in to tell the story and he creates a character of Mark Twain so Mark Twain himself is telling the story along with Philip dead so it's a fun book that if you have Twain loving parents you can introduce your children to one of your favorite authors in a way that will work for everyone all right let's talk about some books that kids might enjoy reading on their own what is good in terms of great middle-grade fiction well as you know I love middle grade fiction and my one of my favorites in this issue is called the Stars beneath our feet by David Barkley Moore it's about a boy who is a whiz at Lego which is something you know I identify with both of uh my sons are real Lego guys and it's really an emotional book this is a kid who's Growing Up In Harlem in the projects has a lot of loss in his life he's lost his brother he's up against a lot of you know financial difficulty but he kind of finds a way through Lego to connect again to the world it's beautifully written and it really gets into the feeling of being a kid there are just there's just great writing there that I think any kid will will really it will really hit home about what it feels like to not have what you want to not know where you're going it's really beautiful and there's another Harlem novel on it's true there's two two novels said in Harlem this year the other one is called the Vander beakers of 141st Street and that one is really oldfashioned now the Stars beneath our feet feels very contemporary and this one the Vander beers of 141st Street is a throwback to those big family novels like all of aind family or the M story mistake right so these these this family lives in a brownstone lots of kids it's a multi-racial family a biracial family which kind of updates it but they're up against you know an oldfashioned d they might have to move out of their beloved home and they have to win over the landlord it's really fun it's really heartwarming and it has a holiday theme ending if you're looking for a holiday a good holiday book I really enjoyed it and it made me feel made me feel good inside do you have any real favorite standout on the list in terms of middle grade fiction I would say it's a tie between those two Harlem books Stars beneath our feet and Vander beakers of of 141st Street but also the Explorer by Katherine Rondell if you want something a little more adventurous it's four kids marooned in the Amazon after a plane crash and our reviewer Elliot Trever points out you don't see that much Survivor fiction for kids anymore so much of that has become non-fiction right the I Survived series and stuff like that but this is a good oldfashioned novel about four kids having to make their way out of the jungle on their own and it's it's really fun all right what about ya both for for teenagers and for grown-ups for Tina as we know many ya readers are in fact grown-ups so we separated our R coverage into two two categories we have fantasy and realism and some people like both but the uh the realism we have the one I really liked a national book award finalist called far from the tree by Robin Benway now this is not to be confused with Andrew Solomon's adult right one of those titles you hear a lot but that is about a 16-year-old who's pregnant who is giving her child up for adoption and in the process she was adopted and she reconnects with her own birth family and it's just really beautifully written and um it soundss like a downer but it's an incredibly good uplifting book then there's one other National book award finalist in our coverage I am not your perfect Mexican Daughter by Erica Sanchez that I really liked too really beautifully written and you know just the the classic conflict between my parents want me to be one way and I want to be another and it's resolved by maybe finding out a little bit more about the struggles of her parents and really really a fun fast emotional read all right I have a question a techn question the books that you have this week on the ya realism list are all marked ages 14 and up and it used to be that sort of ya was traditionally 12 and up there were always folks that were 14 and up 15 and up if there were issues of drugs or sex or perhaps violence involved they got a higher age ranking and I'm curious why all the 14 and up are there issues in here that aren't suitable for or slightly younger teens that's a great question I think all of these books will be read and and can be read by many 12-year-olds I think the Publishers are just getting a little bit more cautious because as you say ya is really edgy now there's you know there's deer Martin which is about police brutality you know about it's the black lives matter movement basically there's there's a little bit of drug use here and there in these there's definitely sex we have a pregnant 16-year-old and we don't necessarily see the sex but release by Patrick NES which is on the fantasy in the fantasy Roundup definitely has a is a is about you know a gay boy trying to come into His maturity and it definitely has a sexual scene in it so I think you know there are 12-year-olds who are ready there are 12-year-olds who are not ready for these books and I think these categories of ya and middle grade are slightly shifting there's a lot of older middle grade the Explorer for example the Amazon survival story I think would be perfectly exciting and fine for a 12-year-old and a lot of these YA books now they do have mature quote unquote mature themes that you want to just be aware of before you give them to your 13-year-old so pushing the envelope a little bit Maria thank you so much thank [Music] you Alexander alter joins us now with some good news from the publishing world this week I have hi p i have good news all around both from Publishers revenues which are up in the first half of this year and from the bookstore community so we'll start with Publishers the latest report from the association of American Publishers came out in late October and it showed that in the first half of this year Revenue was up by 3.5% for Publishers it was up to 5.72 billion so that's compared to the first half of 2016 which is pretty good I mean a lot of people thought last year book sales were depressed by all the political news and the election was sucking all the oxygen out of the room so so we're seeing Publishers kind of recover this year and interestingly you know we can they always break it down by format and that's fun to look at hard cover was up by almost 10% which you know is kind of amazing th those are the most expensive kinds of books you can buy and that that I think demonstrates just great new books coming out and people respond to to read them exactly and children's n ya was up by about 4.5% adult books were up by more than 3% see this is why Twitter had to increase to 280 characters to compete with books long form yes exactly paperbacks were down not by a tremendous amount but by almost 2% and ebooks were down again by almost 5% meanwhile the fastest growing format continues to be downloaded audio which was up by 32% wow yes so things are looking more than stable I would say things are looking pretty good for Publishers at least in the first half of this year and of course you know the fall is when the big books come out leading into the Christmas you know holidays shopping season is when you're going to see the bookstores sort of really that's when I think they make the most money of the entire year so this is we're entering a critical period right now what to get for Dad and for the grandchildren exactly all right and then some exciting book selling news too yes so a few months ago Publishers Weekly had a report and it was somewhat speculative or they were breaking the news that the Canadian bookstore chain Indigo Books was going to be expanding into the US and those plans have been confirmed Indigo said that they are planning to open a bookstore next year in New Jersey and that will be a 30,000 square foot space in the mall at Short Hills and they expect to do three four or five stores then over the next year or two in the US which is really interesting because as you know Barnes & Nobles has been struggling here Amazon has been pushing into physical retail but to have a new kind of competitor uh that that's a chain that's a successful chain setting up in the United States Market it'll be really interesting to see how they do here what distinguishes Indigo stores from other chains do they do something different you know I don't know if it's what they do or if it's the Canadian book market and if that is different just the Canadian thing it's possible that Canadians have you know warmer feelings towards bookstore chains than Americans but they've certainly been doing well the revenue for the most recent quarter which ended September 30th was it was Up 3 .5% compared to a year ago so I can see why you know perhaps they're spotting the weakness you know in the US market and seeing a potential void that they could fill so we'll see how that goes for them good to end on an up statistic thanks Alexandra thanks for having [Music] me joining us now my colleagues at the book review John Williams Greg Kohls and Jen salai hi guys hi so I've already given a warning here that I very pathetically am still reading the very short Nolla that I began last week so I will talk about it at a very minimum at the end let's start with you Greg because you're also reading also reading a very short novela I I guess officially this is probably a novel it's about 160 pages but there's a lot of white space reads like a Nolla the book I'm reading is another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson best known really as a children's book writer and she really got her start as a poet then a children's book writer but this is a novel for adults very much a Coming of Age novel there'd be no problem with kids reading it too looking at four girls growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s and listeners may remember that last year I recommended Dylan Thomas's child's Christmas in Wales and despite the very different subject matters this book reminds me of that one a lot partly Dylan Thomas of course also a poet writing a nostalgic book as as this one is and in the the compression and the tone The Nostalgia and and the Precision of language I mean it's just a really you can tell it's a poet at work yeah you can tell it's a poet at work is a really beautiful book very sad in the kind of drifting apart the the loss at the core of this friendship and of course it's very much about the narrator's own family and coming to terms with her own personal losses as well so it's uh another Brooklyn by jacqulyn Woodson I'm really enjoying it yeah I found it very evocative of time and place and of a particular you know sort of Slice of New York City that maybe isn't as well represented in other Brooklyn novels yeah and there's there's a nice little ambivalence in the title another Brooklyn because it is giving you a slice of a Brooklyn that a lot of readers don't have access to and and won't know but it's also the character's dream of another Brooklyn besides the one that they have and it's a Brooklyn that no longer really exists at least in that way from yeah that's right Jen what are you reading so I picked up a book this is a book called cold New World growing up in harder country by William finnean and I picked this up because actually it was something that I saw recommended on social media believe it again the the New Yorker writer who wrote the surfing Memoir Barbarian days and I actually had no idea he had written this book this was published in 1998 and he was already a New Yorker writer at the time this on Instagram or Twitter no this is on okay I'll be more specific this is on this is on Twitter I don't even know what Snapchat is this is on Twitter and a couple of writers whom I know were discussing it as people do sometimes on Twitter saying what an amazing book it is and you know it's just sort of exemplary of a certain kind of narrative non-fiction writing I'm just only about probably a quarter of the way through what he did was he spent I think about 6 years living among teenagers and four different parts of the country and this is during the '90s so this was during the time when the national economy was ostensibly booming but life was actually getting harder for a lot of people because a lot of that boom came in the growth in low-wage jobs and also because there was a lot of growth at the top of the economic scale so he's meeting kids who are really living in poverty or right on the poverty line you know finegan himself is he's in it he's in the narrative and also what he does is he as much as he can he does have interviews with them and he did you know try to really sort of understand where they're coming from but at the same time he wanted to give them a chance to show him what they thought were the most important stories in their lives and also he did a lot of just observing and just sort of spending time with them years like behind forever or something like that kind of immersive narrative non-fiction for sure what are the other communities where he himself he goes to Eastern Texas later on and then Washington State and then North Los Angeles sort of all around the country and not just cities then Eastern Texas you're talking like really rural rural rural and there he says you know I haven't gotten to that part yet but there he says that you know he wanted to find a community even though it's in Texas it's really the rural Deep South and then in Washington state he goes to a place where a lot of the sort of farm and agricultural labor is dependent on Mexican immigrants and so that's another section of the book and then Northern La is actually a place I think he spent a lot of time in growing up um but he hadn't really spent much time there since so he goes back to see what's happening there in the '90s you're reading this it takes place in the 1990s obviously many of these issues have not gone away right does it feel like you could be reading about contemporary America I mean it does sort of feel like this is laying the ground for what we've got right now I mean just in terms of sort of the harshness of what these kids are going through the real diminished expectations the sort of sense that you know people now feel more locked in I guess to the class that they were born into that's some of what he gets at and according at least to the introduction that's something that he finds not just in New Haven but all across the country I'm personally still adjusting to the fact that the 1990s can be considered a historical period at this point no I know I know take us away from that John what are you reading I'm reading a book by someone who's also immersed in his in his culture he's a scientist book is called the evolution of beauty by Richard o PR and PR is an ornithologist at Yale University and I just realized looking at his bio in the back he's got this great line that says he helped discover dinosaur feathers and their colors that's a pretty cool you know Resume Builder um but this book is is it's brilliant you know it's hard to put it down in the subway when I get to work in the morning that's how exciting it is New York Times just want to keep reading all these exciting little birds on the cover um it's about Darwinism and it's essentially it's very much an argument that we've kind of lost half of Darwin's Legacy and and ignored it at our scientific Peril but I read a book maybe 15 20 years ago by Daniel dennet called Darwin's dangerous idea which is a great overview of evolution and sort of a a passionate defense of Darwinism in the face of you know um religious objections or other cultural things by the end of that book it it goes so crazily in the full direction of saying that Darwinism can explain like the operas that we prefer you know it just it's it really ad adapts the the meme argument of Richard Dawkins or someone that culture and everything else can be explained by Darwinism PR is very obviously pro-science but he he's taking an opposite attack which is that he's saying that people are so wedded to the idea of Darwinism that they don't remember that Darwin said that there are ways in which especially sexually that animals choose each other for reasons that are purely aesthetic that they don't have to do with the passing on of good genes or Fitness and that this over time results in all of these crazy sort of ornamentations of feathers and colors that really don't have any purpose they're just things that look good my divorce rates among human beings no exactly and I think I feel like a lot of what he's doing is the science equivalent of like the you know economics Theory saying that we're not really all rational actors that it's crazy to act as though we all always make the decision that will benefit us most and he's saying that you know these animals it's kind of a a great idea that they have essentially free will that they they don't care if you have the perfect jeans because they like the way your feathers look but he's a great Breezy writer and so he's he's giving you really profound information but in a very conversational way and it's I think it's one of the most popular science books I've ever read forgive my scientific ignorance here but isn't there an argument that the ornamentation the feathers are are themselves signaling your genetic Perfection what he's saying is is that the the strict darwinist now yes they argue that there has to be a specific reason that any ornamentation that is preferred over time does signal essentially a good Gene something suit and PR is just saying you know it's a podcast I don't have time but I would highly urge people to read the book because he's basically saying that it that that's not true and he's very convincing at least to me so Pamela all right very briefly because I as I said earlier and I'll cop to why due to the combination of some work-related reading about which I cannot speak combined with various work Endeavors pretty much every night for the last two weeks and the additional distraction of stranger things season 2 um I have not read very much and I'm still embarrassingly enough on a Nolla which I feel like you and I don't want this to reflect badly on the book which is morat by Leo Tolstoy I spoke about it last week because it really is actually a page Turner and I I do long to turn the pages but I have only had the time to turn a few um uh it's 115 pages and I'm on a page 102 and there's a lot left to be resolved so um I did think I would have it done by this week you can all really make fun of me if I have not gone to the end next week and I I'll leave it there that's on tape so remember can we make fun of you anyway yes always all right thanks guys thanks remember there's more at nytimes.com books and you can always write to us at books atny times.com inside the New York Times book review is produced by Pedro Rosado from head stepper media thanks for listening for the New York Times I'm Pamela Paul