ii era for about a year. and he used to talk about he was on a bus and was asked to give up his seat while in his army uniform. to a white teenager. and he to obliged, but he never forgot. but the thing that was remarkable about him was he would tell that a story, but he never, he never allowed anger or bitterness. to overwhelm him. it deepened his resolve. he's a part of a generation that loved america until america learned how to love him back. >> you can watch all of these and also tune in sundays onrg. c-span2 to catch all of your favorite authors. finish. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> host: and thanks for joining us for the "about books "program and podcast produced by c-span's

booktv. this series looks at the business of publishing with news updates, insider interviews and timely information about new books. ♪ >> host: and many a few minutes on "about books" we'll look at the january 6th tapes, the 20-hour audio book of the house january 6th select committee hearings about the 2021 riots at the u.s. capitol. but first, here's some ofest news from the publishing world. well, at the end of each calendar year, many publications postst their favorite books of e year. here's a look at some for 2022. the financial times announced that the chris miller won its business book of the year award for his book, chip war: the fight for the world's most critical technology. and from the world of historical literature, tia miles won

mcgill university's history prize for her book, all that she carried: the journey of ashley sack, a black family's keepsake. that's about the seventh major award that all that she carried has won. of 2020 to amazon's bet nonfiction books list includes beth macy's raising lazarus, which continues her award winning look at the opioid and drug crisis facing the u.s.. also on that list is scientist david cuaron's, breathless, which chronicles the fight to trace and create a vaccine for covid. and mark bergen's light comment subscribe about the creation of youtube is also on amazon's list. here is a portion of a recent talk mr. bergen gave for book tv. so i have been covering google since 2015, and then it became alphabet and and really it's an expanding business conglomerate empire.

and during that time, youtube, its media division, became increasingly important for the company's bottom line. it also became increasingly important for the company's political hurdles and some of their major business problems in the past seven years. and so during that time, i was reporting on a lot of the major crises that that youtube and its parent company dealt with, sort of fire after fire. and what i saw was a really fascinating in a short period of time, this whiplash where you have these employees at google and youtube who see themselves as an underdog to traditional media, to traditional corporate world and hollywood. and then within a few short years, they're google. and youtube is viewed almost equivalent to big tobacco. and you've seen the social media backlash google has faced intense amount of unprecedented political scrutiny.

i thought this was a fascinating story about this media platform that's really despite its size and influence, just not have the same level of attention as some of its peers. and i thought within that story that you have plenty of fascinating characters on youtube, and then inside the company, you have this whiplash of going from the underdog to sort of seen as big tech and seen as something that associated with a lot of problems in democracy. now, book tv has covered discussions with all three of these amazon best books of 2022 authors. they're all available to watch online in their entirety at book tv, talk. well, another best book list of 2022 was put out by the los angeles times on that list. david maraniss with his latest, the biography about the native american athlete, jim thorpe. it's entitled path lit by

lightning, which was jim thorpe's native name. also on the list is jack davis, the bald eagle, about how the bird became america's national symbol. and pulitzer prize winning author stacy schiff was also picked by the los angeles times for a best book of 2022. her most recent, the revolution era, samuel adams. here's a portion of a recent author talk by stacy schiff. samuel adams is an extraordinarily astute, very enterprising, ingenious, i guess we would say, sort of america's first politician. he's a little bit of a political operative. he's a 19th century downwardly mobile, but brilliantly educated, tight double graduate of harvard who has an obsession with politics and has a tremendous sensitivity to rights and liberties being infringed, which we can talk and we can talk about where that comes from and who has at his disposal to

rather unique qualities. one, he has an a tremendously fluent pen and in fact, he first comes to prominence because he is largely burnishing. other friends pros they know that they can give their pages to adams to be, as they put it, burnished and polished. and he is also a tremendous changer of minds. i guess i would say. he's extremely good at. with or without brass knuckle tactics, persuading people that their rights are vital and that they need to stand up for their rights and connecting people who would otherwise not be connected into a civil ultimately designed them various efforts at civil resistance like boycotts and pickets and extralegal meetings. so i'm not sure what that is. he's like a convincer in chief. he's a champi psuader in mas. and again, all three of t books, biographies of jim thorpe, the bald eagle, and sammy all adams citehe los angeles times as best books of 2022, can be viewed in their

entirety on our website. book tv talk and now a focus on a recently released audiobook, the january six tapes is a 20 hour unabridged audio book of the house. january six committees hearings about the 2021 riot at the us capitol. it was released by pushkin industries brendan newnam oversees the audio book program at pushkin. and he recently joined us to talk about the project. mr. newnam why an audio book? what are we going to get from that that we can't get from reading the hearings or watching them? well, you're speaking to someone who's worked in audio most of his career as a broadcast journalist. and i do believe the audio medium in general has an intimacy and a portability that other mediums do not. you can't read a book while doing the dishes. you can maybe read a book at the gym. so in general, i think the format allows itself, you know,

it allows it's a media that allows people to take a different places, specifically with these hearings. the testimony is so compelling. it was so well put together. the committee did such an excellent job in creating our filling the mandate of house resolution five of three that we thought it was best to share directly with people, as opposed to just a summary of it, which, you know, they'll produce the summary, it'll come out into the world. people will be able to read that book. also, they'll probably be a narrator reading the summary of the book, but it really isn't as moving as hearing the testimony from the capitol police officers, from the former attorney general and all of the witnesses and testimony that was gathered for the committee. so this audio book will be unabridged. it is unabridged. we do put interstitials in to kind of help a listener at home who can't see something. so, for example, if someone nods their head instead of saying out

loud, no. we have a narrator who says, tells the listener clues them in on what's happening. so we will fill in the dots, the blanks for visual cues. but other than that, it is unabridged. how much production went into this audio book? it's a fair amount of production. it's just in bulk. i've worked on all sorts of documentaries. i would say the committee and their team did the hard part, which is collecting the voices, editing it, putting together a narrative. having hosts. and they did a pretty darn good job of cluing people in at home on who? who you're listening to and repeating things for people joining halfway through. so they did a lot of the legwork. but as far as producing this, it was a matter of gathering the raw audio. listening to a closely, finding those moments which would be disorienting for someone who's listening instead of watching or reading. and then having a narrator fill those moments and then mastering it in organizing it in a way that's accessible and easy for people to listen to. now, brendan newnam you also put an introduction on with preet

bharara. why? well, as you know, preet, who now has a podcast state freed, but is the former u.s. attorney for the southern district, is very qualified to speak on constitutional matters which the january six events of january six really touch upon. he's also covered this a bit on his podcast, talking to jamie raskin and others and we just wanted someone to kind of contextual wise these hearings. i think the other reason we wanted to put them in the world is people are busy, i'm busy, we're working day in, day out. when the hearings were happening, you would catch a little bit at night on television or maybe a little bit in the morning on the radio. but to understand how rich they were and how well executed they were, it and to stop it, to take some time your life, to actually listen to them requires an invitation. and preet seemed like a great person to to provide that invitation to people. so this audio book is available

now. is that correct? that is correct. how many how many downloads? so far are you know? that's a great question. i haven't i honestly haven't checked since we put it into the world, because i've been on to my next project. but at least thousands last time i checked in. but i don't have the exact number at the moment. and if people were interested in downloading these january sixth audiobook hearings where would they go? they could go to pushkin dot fm, which is our website, where we have an audio book store where people can download it and purchase it directly. the advantage of that is they can download the january six tapes and they can listen to it in any place. they normally listen to podcasts so they can listen to it in apple podcasts or they can listen to it in their spotify app or podcasts. so you can listen to it anywhere. or if people get their audio books are more accustomed to getting them through apple books or through audible. they're available there as well. how much does it cost that is.

that is an excellent question. you caught me off guard there. either i'm on the little embarrassed that i don't have the exact number. i can look it up, but i don't want to i don't want to disrupt our conversation. and so i apologize. perhaps a producer can help us with that. well, mr. newnam, what is pushkin industries? so pushkin industries is an audio publishing company founded a few years ago by the author malcolm gladwell and jacob weisberg, who is the former head of slate. and it's an audio publishing company that works in two formats primarily. one is podcasts. we have several dozen podcasts in the world from revisionists history, which is malcolm's. michael lewis is against the rules. joe la pause. the last archive mostly made up of nonfiction, popular nonfiction authors. they're intelligent. they have the integrity. they're journalistically rigorous and they're whimsical and they're engaging.

and so that is kind of the broader programs and our podcasts deliver that seasonally, and they're free and available on all podcast channels and then we also have this audio book section, which is what i work on, which is another way people listen to information. and in that world we do two sorts of things. one, we create auto audio originals, which are documentaries or audio books that we make from whole cloth. i recently did a project on paul simon that was a musical memoir. we thought this was a story better heard than read because when you're talking about the sounds of silence, you want to hear the sounds of silence. and we did just that. and so far we've created around a dozen of these audio originals. and these you can purchase as audiobooks through audible or directly through our website. well, one of the compelling things about the januar, three, six events and hearings was some of the visual elements, the members running through the halls of congress, etc.. how do you address that in this

audio book? you know, video outstrips audio in many, many departments, and audio also outstrips video and others. so as i mentioned earlier, every time there's a visual element where the listener might be disoriented, we have a narrator come in explaining what happens. but if you listen to these as i have in their totality, there aren't that many blind spots, maybe certain element of urgency that you would get a visceral feeling you might receive from seeing something is dampened because you're not seeing it. but i would say that that's maybe counterbalanced by the deep inside you get into the human voice and the emotion in many of these people speaking when they're talking about the events that happened, you know, for example, on, i believe it was day four, which is when they talked about the president's pressure on election workers. you had ruby freeman, you had all these georgia kind of election workers. they were so you can hear in

their voice, they're quaking from this. it's just the anxiety and pressure they felt put upon them by the president directly and just the the importance of their position and the fragility of a democracy generally. and honestly being not seeing the visual element, just sitting with someone speaking and hearing their breaths and hearing those beads provides a certain emotional immediacy that i would argue is maybe more profound than visual. so brendan newnam this is about 20 hours of audio book. the january 6th hearings, correct? that's correct. what about when the final report comes out? do you plan to follow up with the final report at the the final report is the summary itself, and that will be available many people will make that available if there is an additional hearing. yes, we will add an addendum chapter. there basically are chapters are days. we have day one through nine. if there is a day ten where they release their findings and have a ceremony around that and do

kind of a committee hearing around that, we will release that as an additional chapter. so what are some of the pitfalls? what are some of the mistakes you can make when creating an audio book. i think what we look for at a project and we talk to many people about many sets of projects, i think the key element is there needs to be a reason to tell it in sound. you've asked some questions about what about this versus print, what about this versus visual? if a story is better told that way, if something happened, if it's a historical story that happened in the 18th century and there's no audio component to it, then we'll probably stay away from it because there's maybe a better way to tell the story. so that's where we center most of our projects that are around music are around actors. they're around things about the voice or certain scientific things where sound is an important element. and so i think the one pitfall would be not doing that and undergoing one of these productions without thinking,

thinking about that. the other is, i think, some audio is, is akin to writing where a lot of people can do it. now we have voice memos on our phone. we're used to zoom now after covid communicating with family members, but quality audio, which is mixed and clear and clean and and the brand is groomed. is it it does have a different feeling and it and if you do not do those things, it tries the patience of the listener. and so i think they're just it's akin to film versus a video shot on your phone. there are qualities that can make it richer and a more satisfying space for listener. and i think if you are hobbyists were to try it i think they could get run up in in in in that as well. so brendan newnam of pushkin industries the growth of audio books has continued for the last ten years or so has been a big growth sector. yes. audio in general with podcasts

has grown and we can see that continue to grow in the publishing industry. audio books is one of the most successful profit centers of print books, actually. and so those rights are valuable and continue to be more so and yes, more and more people appear to be listening each time there's a study or an analysis done, the numbers appear that that people are growing. it's not too much of a surprise. i'm speaking to you right now. i'm wearing airpods. these didn't exist a few years ago. they make it even easier to be listening to things and also the offerings are richer. pushkin, as well as other companies are making things for the ears specifically that makes it more compelling. and i feel like the barrier to entry is a little bit lower and people are are listening more. how did you get into this? that's that's a that's a good question. years ago, out of out of college, i saw an ad in the local newspaper to date me. and it was for a research

assistant for a job for a show that you may be familiar with called fresh air with terry gross. that was my first job out of the gate. i would run to the library and research actors and whoever terry was speaking with and i got bit by the bug. i loved the i loved the production, i loved the people that work there. at that time. they were cutting tape in order to put together the interviews. i, i loved being surrounded by arts and culture and cultural journalism generally. and that was the beginning of my career and kind of love affair with audio. and you have your own podcast as well, correct? that is correct. over the years i've had a handful of podcasts. i and most recently i have a show called not lost, which is a podcast put up by pushkin. it's a travel show ostensibly where i travel from montreal to mexico city, visiting cities, and i tried to get invited to a dinner party in each town. the theory being that only by breaking bread with people in

each of these towns can you truly understand what it means to live there and be there now. brendan newnam your physical book brunch is hell. have you done an audio book of that? i have. i did many when i released brunch as how we did the audio book and we narrated it ourselves. and that was kind of in the style of what you'll hear many audio books, but not the ones in pushkin in that i went into an anonymous studio in manhattan and they just ran me right through it. i read it straight, straight through, didn't even do pick ups or or or slow down. i read and then they threw it out into the world. fortunately, i had some experience doing radio, so it worked out, but if i had to do it again, i probably would have been more deliberate and made it a little richer. brendan newnam is vice president at pushkin industries. the january sixth, 20 hours of unabridged hearings is available as an audiobook at pushkin dot

fm. for 1499. mr. newnham we appreciate your time. thank you so much for having me on. and you're watching and listening to about books, a program produced by c-span's book tv. well, each tuesday, dozens of new books are published. one of the latest is a little bit unique. it was put out by a news website called publisher's lunch, and it's entitled the trial the doj's suit to block penguin random house's acquisition of simon and schuster. the book is being billed as a compilation of the news websites day to day coverage of the antitrust trial. it was a trial that ended with a federal judge's decision to prevent a proposed $2.2 billion merger of two of the largest publishing houses. now, the hardback book also includes trial analysis and an edited version of the full

public testimony, as well as various pre and post trial documents. it retails for about $100. it's nearly 1200 pages long, and it weighs in at over six and a half pounds. well, coming up on book tv is hour afterwards program. and this week, it's entrepreneur and aol co-founder steve case. he talked with atlantic magazine ceo nicholas thompson about his new book, the rise of the rest, about his efforts to create startup opportunities, spur innovation and create jobs. we decided to make these investments. we said to the investors, we ask the participate and we went out and talked to some of the the most celebrated entrepreneurs in the country, celebrated investors, the country people like jeff bezos, who founded amazon, or howard schultz from from starbucks or tory burch who started her her own company or investors like ray dalio ran the

largest hedge fund in the world. mike milken, who's been an innovator in the financial world. eric schmidt, the former ceo of google and several dozen others. and we said, we want to launch this fund, this rise of risk fund that's going to back these entrepreneurs. all across the country in these rising cities. and our goal is to generate top tier returns, top tier investment returns, because that would not just generate returns for you all, but also would signal to investors on the coast to pay more attention to the entrepreneurs in the middle of the country. and so it has been very important, even though there are some broader impact ideas, as we talked about in terms of job creation and economic vitality and in these communities. first and foremost, we've got to generate great returns because that really will, you know, get some of those investors paying less attention to the entrepreneurs in their own backyards and silicon valley and more attention to these dozens of cities all across the country that are showing real, remarkable momentum. and a reminder that after words

airs every sunday at 10 p.m. eastern time on book tv. well, thanks for joining us for about books, a program and podcast produced by c-span's book tv. book tv will continue to bring you publishing news and new author programs, and you can get this podcast and all other c-span produced podcasts on the c-span now app. you can also watch any of our programs online and any time at book tv, dawg. >> booktv has featured many politicians who are also authors who won elections in this year's midterms. democrat wes moore became

maryland's first black governor. he's appeared on booktv several times. >> it isn't just about can we make sure police officers have body cameras. >> yes. >> it's not just about how do we, how do we, you know, add on clauses to things like the law enforcement officers' bill of rights or qualified immunity. it's not stopping there. the demands that we are seeing right now are actually dealing with structural racism. and how exactly can we deal with all of these various issues in a way with a very real sense of sincerity and a very real sense of activation and movement. >> republican senator tim scott won re-election in south carolina. he appeared on booktv recently to discuss his book, "america: a redemption story." >> i think it's necessary. i think it's mess for us to wrestle with some of the more foundational issues of who we are, where we're going, how wee

-- how we're going to get there. i think it's interesting and, frankly, helpful for us to go through tribal conversation to see how hard it is to try to make up for past discrimination with future discrimination. >> yeah. >> it's not working really well for us right now, but we're going to try to figure that out and figure it out quickly. the truth is all the tribes that we're putting together whether it's a republican tribe, a democrat tribe, a black one, a white one, a caste system, whether it's centralized control or not, i think all of that will burn off, and what it will produce is an american family that has more respect and appreciation for the necessity of pursuing the american dream as one family. >> in south dakota kristi noem was reelected as governor. her recent autobiography is titled "not my first rodeo." 9. >> what i believe republicans in the house and senate need to do is cast a vision for where we're going, not just be opposed joe

biden even though so many of his policies are bad for our country right now. i do think we also have to be pretty clear on what we're for and be ready to take action should we have the opportunity to get congressional bills passed and get them to the president's desk. >> before his election to the senate from ohio, republican j.d. vance was well known as the best selling hour of "hillbilly elegy", and he appeared at the national book festival in 2017. >> i think we have a pretty significant problem with the fact that you're effectively given a choice when you graduate from high school between going and working in a fast food job or going and getting a 4-year college education. and i think that we should provide more pathways than that. i think it's not surprising when those are the only two pathways that you see people going in those two directions -- [applause] but i also think, but i also think we have to think a little bit more constructively about regional economic development. the way this has gone for the past 10 or 20 or years is that i'm a local municipality, i

offer somebody a tax credit to set up a restaurant in my hometown. that's great, new restaurants are fantastic, but that's not the sort of long-term economic redevelopment that has to happen in some of these areas. and i think it's something that basically all levels of policymakers have to be thinking differently than they are right now. >> and democrat cori bush was reelected in her st. louis area district. she recently appeared on booktv to discuss her book, "the forerunner." >> the sexual assault that i experienced before, most of it happened it was like my early 20s, late teens, early 20s. it was when i was still, like, trying to find moist -- myself, quote-unquote. and i blamed myself. i went through the next 20 years blaming myself every single time that happened. oh, it was because my shirt was cut short and my shorts were really, really short. it was because i was out walking with friends when i met them, and, you know, and i was dressed

a particular way so that, you know, that's why it happened. so when they took me out on a date, they just assumed that's what i wanted. you know, like, i made all of these excuses for what happened to me, and all of the blame fell on me. >> democratic senator raphael warnock was reelected in georgia, defeating republican challenger herschel walker in the runoff election. he recently appeared on booktv to discuss his book, "a way out of no way." >> you know, my dad was like that, and i talk about him a lot. and it's because he had such an amazing impact on me. he was a preacher but not with the credentials that i've been able to gain because of his sacrifice for me. my dad, born in 1917, was an old, had an older father. and he served during the world war ii era all state side for about a year, and he used to

talk about how he was on a bus and was can asked to give up his seat -- was asked to give up his seat while in his army uniform to a white teenager. and he obliged but he never forgot. but the thing the that was remarkable about him was that he would tell that story, but he never, he never allowed anger or bitterness to overwhelm him. it deepened his resolve. he's a a part of a generation that loved america until america learned how to love him back. >> you can watch all of these programs online at booktv.org, and also tune sundays on c-span2 to watch all of your favorite authors. >> and you've been watching booktv. every sunday on c-span2 watch nonfiction if authors discuss their books, it's for serious