American novelist David Baldacci is well-regarded as a prolific writer, having sold over 150 million books worldwide and inspired film and TV adaptations afterwards.
He's best known for writing legal thrillers and suspense novels - and he's no stranger to tapping into controversial topics, having been subject to death threats in recent years.
He explained limiting himself to safe topics would have negatively impacted his writing output.
"Books can inspire people in many different ways - both for the good and for the bad. I've always felt that if people were angry enough at something I wrote and would threaten to take my life, I'd gotten to them a little bit."
Baldacci is set to speak at the Auckland Writers Festival on January 30th in his first-ever public event in New Zealand.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb Now.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
David Balducci is the master of suspense novels and legal thrillers.
He's had a prolific writing career in just under thirty years.
He's produced fifty novels and several children's books, selling over
one hundred and fifty million copies worldwide. David Balducci is
now heading to New Zealand for the first time. He'll
be speaking at a one off Auckland Writers' Festival event
(00:34):
at the end of this month. David Balducci joins me
now from Australia. Good morning, how are you.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I'm fine, Thank you agreed to be on.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
You are currently in Australia. I believe that this is
the first time that you have been down under.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
It has it's a long time coming. When my kids
were little, the timing was ever right when they were
in school and because of the opposite seasons, but they
came down with us for about three weeks. They're grown now,
obviously and are already wanting to come back.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Because I genuinely think you know, if you've sold one
hundred and fifty million copies worldwide. We are you a visit? Yes, absolutely,
we were very excited that you are heading to New
Zealand as well. What can people expect and when you're
here for your session with the Auckland Writers Festival, will't
it be very similar to other author talks within a
(01:21):
writer's festival?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah? I like one to tell some funny stories from
the road because I always like intersperse my talks with
serious points, and I found over time that if you
add some humor to it, folks are much more likely
to remember the serious points as well. So I want
to make it fun. I want to make it inviting
and inclusive and just you be engaging and listen to
(01:44):
other people, listen to the writers and just having a
good time. I think we'll all do that.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So when it comes to the serious stuff, what kind
of topics are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
A lot of times my books deal with politics, economics,
social issues. Even though I write thrillers and escapism, I
try to put some points in there that I think
are important that people should think about. So I'll probably
deal with some of those things now. The world is
changing at an incredibly rapid pace right now. Lots of
things are happening with technology, everything from bitcoin to cryptocurrency,
(02:14):
to AI to political strife, and you know, movements growing
across the world that are important and people need to
think about. On top of that, we have climate change
as well. So those are some of the probably the
issues that I'll talk about. Obviously I can't dwell on
any of them too long, but people should be thinking
about them because they impact everyone, regardless of where you live.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
David, I know that you are a king follower of
world politics and things, But is it true that you
have had d threats because of some of your books?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Yes, I mean I've always felt like if you didn't
rile up some people, then what was the point of
writing the book. I must have written a pretty plain
vanilla novel. I mean, books have changed the world. Books
can inspire people in many different ways, both for the
good and for the bad. So I've always felt that
if people were angry enough it's something that I wrote,
they would write and you know, threaten to take my
(03:04):
life that I had gotten to them a little bit,
and maybe they might think about it a little bit more.
Nobody likes to get those types of threats, but it
just goes goes with the work sometimes.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Is it ever in the back of your mind or
does it become a fact when you do think about
writing controversial topics.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
You know, if I did, I might as well just
hang my pen up. I would have paralyzed myself and
taken out any real power that I might have as
a writer. If you start second guessing what do you
want to write about and running through a sieve of
you know, is this going to be safe or not?
Then I think that you know you're done.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Your first book was published in nineteen ninety six, it's
about twenty eight years ago. You've written over fifty novels,
several children's books. As I mentioned, do you ever stop
writing or thinking about writing books?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
No, you don't. It's not for me at least. It's
not a nine to five. It's not a job. It's
not a hobby, it's not even a passion. It's really
what I identify as as writers. So the stories. I
can't just tell my mind to stop thinking about stories.
I went to the Australian Museum today and they had
a big exhibit on Machi Peaci, which my wife and
my kids have actually seen. I was in Canada while
(04:14):
they were there, but and I started taking some pictures
of some of the exhibits and some of the background
about them, and because I was intrigued by it and
might later show up thematically, at least in one of
my novels. So no, you never turned that off. It's
really part of who you are. There's no way to
separate that out from your other personality.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I had the joy of reading to di For released
in November over the Christmas period, and I think, just
you know, coming up, we have your new novel, Total
Control out. How do you manage that workload?
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I am you know, I think I'm so prolific because
I've never treated it as a job. I never think
about deadlines. I'm just an eight year old kid exercising
his imagination all day, every day, and the words come.
I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. You can have
very frustrating days where the words don't make sense, plots
seem ridiculously trivial. But when I have some of my
(05:11):
friends who are you know, best selling novelists, sold a
lot of books, and they complained to me about deadlines
and you know, the stories aren't coming. And I said, look, guys,
take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember this.
You make a wonderful living off of making stuff up,
so not many people can say that. So just figure
yourself privileged and blessed and get on with it. That.
(05:34):
I know that.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
You also take your writing seriously, though. Didn't you undertake
some military training for the John Puller series?
Speaker 3 (05:42):
I did because I thought if I was going to
write about that, I needed to know sort of what
that life was like. So I went down to one
of the big fort's, Fort Benning it was called back
then in Florida, and spent three days down there getting
my butt kicked from one end of the base to
the other. Parachute jumping, army, functional fitness training, sniper training,
humbe rollover tests, lots of stuff. But the best research
(06:05):
of all for that was just sitting down with all
the soldiers from the privates on up to the two
star who commanded the facility and get into their heads
and hearts of why they were doing what they were doing.
And that allowed me to bring that human visceral core
into the novel through my characters, because really, readers don't
connect on a visceral level with plot. They connect on
(06:26):
that level with humans with the characters and the novels.
The more authentic you can make them, then all of
a sudden you find that readers are either rooting for
them against them because they really feel like they're actually
authentic people. And to do that you have to really
get into the heads and hearts of the people you're
writing about, at least in their professions. And that's what
I was doing with the John Puller series.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
And I'm sure that your legal career, you studied law,
and I think you practiced it for sort of just
under a decade. I'm sure that that contributed to your
legal thrillers, maybe in slightly less of a painful way
as going and doing military training.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, and it also made me great at negotiating my
publishers lament the fact that I read and understand, which
changes all of their contracts over time to make them
a lot more fair to writers.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
That's brilliant. Would you we ever got you?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Miss law? I missed the sort of gladiator in pen
strike suits love. I love trial work. I loved having
a thing quickly on my feet, being surprised and then
having to work myself out of a corner. I love
the research. I love the command of the material, going
in and performing. I loved all that stuff absolutely. So
when I go on tour and I go up on
stage and I try to take over the stage and
(07:34):
command the stage and command the audience, and then after
that's over, I crawl back into my little you know,
introvert well and I go back to doing.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
I love it. I really want to talk to you
about the foundation that you sit up with your wife, Michelle,
the Wish You Well Foundation. It supports family and adult literacy.
How needed was this foundation?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
The need grows every day. I mean, we have roughly
two hundred and thirty million adults in the US and
roughly half of them read at the two lowest levels
of literacy, meaning they can't even read a grocery list
or directions to a doctor's office. So it's profound. And
it's not just EESL and English as a second language.
It's native born Americans as well. The education system has
(08:19):
failed at many levels. You know, we have I don't
know how it is in Australia, but are in New Zealand.
But when we have budget shortfalls, the first thing that
politicians cut as education because those people are too young
to vote. So we've done that historically over the years,
and we've paid the price for that with low information voters.
And it's not just so these people can read my
(08:39):
books on the beach, so they can be an informed
participant in a democracy, so when they go to the
voting booth, they can make good choices based on real
research and real information, not a Twitter or clickbait or
something they're read online by some guy they don't even
know who he is. That can really change election outcomes,
and election outcomes can change how you live. So our
(08:59):
foundation we funded programs in all fifty states accounting we
poured millions of dollars into this. We've helped millions of
Americans to learn how to read at a higher level,
made them better, able to find better jobs, support their
families at a higher level, make better informed choices at
the voting booth, and just become better people all over.
And I found, you know, just my I've been a
reader since I was a kid. I know the profound
(09:21):
impact books had on me. I came out of Jim
Crow in the middle of racism, segregation of the races,
and I could have ended up being a racist, but
I went to the library and I read about people
who didn't look, praise, eat, think, dress, speak like me.
But I know we share that common core of amanity
because I had met them in the books. I wasn't
afraid of the other the boogeyman the politicians sometimes throw up.
Because I had met them in the pages of books.
(09:42):
I knew who they were. I wasn't afraid of them.
I wanted to include them in my life. That's what
books can do for you. They can make you better.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Oh absolutely. And it's really interesting because we're hearing a
lot from professas at American and often universities in the
UK as well, saying that you know young people college
students that don't want to read books anymore. And it's
and I find that quite intriguing because I mean, I've
(10:09):
got two teenagers who love to read and will still
pick up a book and understand the joy in reading
a book. But there is this thought that it's not
that they don't want to, it's not that they can't,
is that they just don't want to. Why when I
can have be entertained with short snippets of entertainment via
social media? Does that concern you at all?
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Oh? Absolutely it does. But the fact of the matter
is that you know the short snippets that you get
on TikTok, or you know that you a two minute
video or going online and doom scrolling for six hours,
one story after another. It's it's an addiction. Unfortunately, it's
like eating too much sugar. Your brain tells you, I'll
want more and more of that at the end of
the day, when you experience life like that, they're empty calories.
(10:50):
They add nothing to your mind, and you come out
of it even emptier than when you went into it.
Whereas a book, a book is never finished until the
last reader turns the last page. Because you bring your
own experiences, perspectives, highlights, and past and opinions onto those pages.
Every reader comes away with a different version of what
that book is supposed to be, and that's why it's
(11:10):
so profound. So those are not only not empty calories,
there's some of the most densest nutrition you can actually
provide for yourself.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
I love the way you put that.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, And you know, you avoid books at your peril
because at the end of the day, how many readers
we have will end up dictating what sort of society
we live in. The few are the readers the worst
of society, because unfortunately, those people will just follow the
herd over the cliff and take the rest of us
with them.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
And I also want to touch on the growing movement
to ban books in America. And I know that you
and fellow author Michael Connolly have donated towards the battle
against this. How concerning is it?
Speaker 3 (11:46):
It's crazy. It's like every twenty years in America we decide, oh,
we need to ban books. Here's the reason why we
ban books in America. Where are we you banned books anywhere? Poll?
You know, something happens in the world that people don't like.
There are too many gay people. Where are all these
trans people coming from? Where are they getting these ideas? Ah? Books?
We got to get rid of the books. So we
(12:07):
get rid of the books, we get rid of the
gay people, we get rid of gay marriage, we get
rid of trans people, because that's where these ideas are
coming from. That's why people ban books. They did the
same thing years ago with race, they did it with
gender everything else. So ninety nine percent of the books
banned in America have two issues in them, race and sex.
And they don't want that because they don't want those
(12:28):
sorts of people who they consider are not real people,
and that's why we have book banning. But that shows
you on the Congress of that how important books are
because he's seeing people are realizing the power of books.
They can actually change people's minds about things. So that's
why books are so important.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
David, I just want to finish off by by asking
you about a key we connection that you might have.
I saw that you got involved in a fundraising effort
with the New Zealand women's lacrosse team and they were
auctioning off the chance for someone to be a character
in your next book.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Is that right, Yes, it is. I was so thrilled.
Like one of my really good friends and one of
my financial representatives, his daughter has lived to New Zealand
for probably the past fifteen years and raised her family there,
and she knew I was coming and she reached that
to her dad that she was part of this effort
to raise money for the lacross team and she played
across from college. And so Tom, her father, reached out
(13:20):
to me, and I was like, absolutely, that's auction off
the name and they can use that to help their
fundraising drive. And so they did, and it raised a
lot of money, and I think I'm going to meet
with them actually when I'm in Auckland and it'll, you know,
help them get to where they need to go for
the competition, and I will and whatever character wins that auction,
(13:41):
it's going to be a hell of a nice ride
for them. In one of my books, I can promise
for that.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Will you be kind?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Well, I've always found that people really love it and
when I make them evil, we all have that, we
all have that secret inspiration to be bad.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I love it, David about that. It has been a
pleasure to talk to you. Cannot wait for you to
get to New Zealand and enjoy the rest of your
time down under. Thank you very much and David Baldacci
will appear in Auckland on Thursday, the thirtieth of January.
Tickets are on sale now. You can find more details
at Writers Festival dot co, dot MZ. His latest release,
To Die For is installs now, and keep an eye
(14:17):
out for his next book, Total Control, which is due
before the end of the month.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks a B from nine am Sunday
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb Now.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
David Balducci is the master of suspense novels and legal thrillers.
He's had a prolific writing career in just under thirty years.
He's produced fifty novels and several children's books, selling over
one hundred and fifty million copies worldwide. David Balducci is
now heading to New Zealand for the first time. He'll
be speaking at a one off Auckland Writers' Festival event
(00:34):
at the end of this month. David Balducci joins me
now from Australia. Good morning, how are you.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I'm fine, Thank you agreed to be on.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
You are currently in Australia. I believe that this is
the first time that you have been down under.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
It has it's a long time coming. When my kids
were little, the timing was ever right when they were
in school and because of the opposite seasons, but they
came down with us for about three weeks. They're grown now,
obviously and are already wanting to come back.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Because I genuinely think you know, if you've sold one
hundred and fifty million copies worldwide. We are you a visit? Yes, absolutely,
we were very excited that you are heading to New
Zealand as well. What can people expect and when you're
here for your session with the Auckland Writers Festival, will't
it be very similar to other author talks within a
(01:21):
writer's festival?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah? I like one to tell some funny stories from
the road because I always like intersperse my talks with
serious points, and I found over time that if you
add some humor to it, folks are much more likely
to remember the serious points as well. So I want
to make it fun. I want to make it inviting
and inclusive and just you be engaging and listen to
(01:44):
other people, listen to the writers and just having a
good time. I think we'll all do that.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So when it comes to the serious stuff, what kind
of topics are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
A lot of times my books deal with politics, economics,
social issues. Even though I write thrillers and escapism, I
try to put some points in there that I think
are important that people should think about. So I'll probably
deal with some of those things now. The world is
changing at an incredibly rapid pace right now. Lots of
things are happening with technology, everything from bitcoin to cryptocurrency,
(02:14):
to AI to political strife, and you know, movements growing
across the world that are important and people need to
think about. On top of that, we have climate change
as well. So those are some of the probably the
issues that I'll talk about. Obviously I can't dwell on
any of them too long, but people should be thinking
about them because they impact everyone, regardless of where you live.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
David, I know that you are a king follower of
world politics and things, But is it true that you
have had d threats because of some of your books?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Yes, I mean I've always felt like if you didn't
rile up some people, then what was the point of
writing the book. I must have written a pretty plain
vanilla novel. I mean, books have changed the world. Books
can inspire people in many different ways, both for the
good and for the bad. So I've always felt that
if people were angry enough it's something that I wrote,
they would write and you know, threaten to take my
(03:04):
life that I had gotten to them a little bit,
and maybe they might think about it a little bit more.
Nobody likes to get those types of threats, but it
just goes goes with the work sometimes.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Is it ever in the back of your mind or
does it become a fact when you do think about
writing controversial topics.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
You know, if I did, I might as well just
hang my pen up. I would have paralyzed myself and
taken out any real power that I might have as
a writer. If you start second guessing what do you
want to write about and running through a sieve of
you know, is this going to be safe or not?
Then I think that you know you're done.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Your first book was published in nineteen ninety six, it's
about twenty eight years ago. You've written over fifty novels,
several children's books. As I mentioned, do you ever stop
writing or thinking about writing books?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
No, you don't. It's not for me at least. It's
not a nine to five. It's not a job. It's
not a hobby, it's not even a passion. It's really
what I identify as as writers. So the stories. I
can't just tell my mind to stop thinking about stories.
I went to the Australian Museum today and they had
a big exhibit on Machi Peaci, which my wife and
my kids have actually seen. I was in Canada while
(04:14):
they were there, but and I started taking some pictures
of some of the exhibits and some of the background
about them, and because I was intrigued by it and
might later show up thematically, at least in one of
my novels. So no, you never turned that off. It's
really part of who you are. There's no way to
separate that out from your other personality.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I had the joy of reading to di For released
in November over the Christmas period, and I think, just
you know, coming up, we have your new novel, Total
Control out. How do you manage that workload?
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I am you know, I think I'm so prolific because
I've never treated it as a job. I never think
about deadlines. I'm just an eight year old kid exercising
his imagination all day, every day, and the words come.
I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. You can have
very frustrating days where the words don't make sense, plots
seem ridiculously trivial. But when I have some of my
(05:11):
friends who are you know, best selling novelists, sold a
lot of books, and they complained to me about deadlines
and you know, the stories aren't coming. And I said, look, guys,
take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember this.
You make a wonderful living off of making stuff up,
so not many people can say that. So just figure
yourself privileged and blessed and get on with it. That.
(05:34):
I know that.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
You also take your writing seriously, though. Didn't you undertake
some military training for the John Puller series?
Speaker 3 (05:42):
I did because I thought if I was going to
write about that, I needed to know sort of what
that life was like. So I went down to one
of the big fort's, Fort Benning it was called back
then in Florida, and spent three days down there getting
my butt kicked from one end of the base to
the other. Parachute jumping, army, functional fitness training, sniper training,
humbe rollover tests, lots of stuff. But the best research
(06:05):
of all for that was just sitting down with all
the soldiers from the privates on up to the two
star who commanded the facility and get into their heads
and hearts of why they were doing what they were doing.
And that allowed me to bring that human visceral core
into the novel through my characters, because really, readers don't
connect on a visceral level with plot. They connect on
(06:26):
that level with humans with the characters and the novels.
The more authentic you can make them, then all of
a sudden you find that readers are either rooting for
them against them because they really feel like they're actually
authentic people. And to do that you have to really
get into the heads and hearts of the people you're
writing about, at least in their professions. And that's what
I was doing with the John Puller series.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
And I'm sure that your legal career, you studied law,
and I think you practiced it for sort of just
under a decade. I'm sure that that contributed to your
legal thrillers, maybe in slightly less of a painful way
as going and doing military training.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, and it also made me great at negotiating my
publishers lament the fact that I read and understand, which
changes all of their contracts over time to make them
a lot more fair to writers.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
That's brilliant. Would you we ever got you?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Miss law? I missed the sort of gladiator in pen
strike suits love. I love trial work. I loved having
a thing quickly on my feet, being surprised and then
having to work myself out of a corner. I love
the research. I love the command of the material, going
in and performing. I loved all that stuff absolutely. So
when I go on tour and I go up on
stage and I try to take over the stage and
(07:34):
command the stage and command the audience, and then after
that's over, I crawl back into my little you know,
introvert well and I go back to doing.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
I love it. I really want to talk to you
about the foundation that you sit up with your wife, Michelle,
the Wish You Well Foundation. It supports family and adult literacy.
How needed was this foundation?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
The need grows every day. I mean, we have roughly
two hundred and thirty million adults in the US and
roughly half of them read at the two lowest levels
of literacy, meaning they can't even read a grocery list
or directions to a doctor's office. So it's profound. And
it's not just EESL and English as a second language.
It's native born Americans as well. The education system has
(08:19):
failed at many levels. You know, we have I don't
know how it is in Australia, but are in New Zealand.
But when we have budget shortfalls, the first thing that
politicians cut as education because those people are too young
to vote. So we've done that historically over the years,
and we've paid the price for that with low information voters.
And it's not just so these people can read my
(08:39):
books on the beach, so they can be an informed
participant in a democracy, so when they go to the
voting booth, they can make good choices based on real
research and real information, not a Twitter or clickbait or
something they're read online by some guy they don't even
know who he is. That can really change election outcomes,
and election outcomes can change how you live. So our
(08:59):
foundation we funded programs in all fifty states accounting we
poured millions of dollars into this. We've helped millions of
Americans to learn how to read at a higher level,
made them better, able to find better jobs, support their
families at a higher level, make better informed choices at
the voting booth, and just become better people all over.
And I found, you know, just my I've been a
reader since I was a kid. I know the profound
(09:21):
impact books had on me. I came out of Jim
Crow in the middle of racism, segregation of the races,
and I could have ended up being a racist, but
I went to the library and I read about people
who didn't look, praise, eat, think, dress, speak like me.
But I know we share that common core of amanity
because I had met them in the books. I wasn't
afraid of the other the boogeyman the politicians sometimes throw up.
Because I had met them in the pages of books.
(09:42):
I knew who they were. I wasn't afraid of them.
I wanted to include them in my life. That's what
books can do for you. They can make you better.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Oh absolutely. And it's really interesting because we're hearing a
lot from professas at American and often universities in the
UK as well, saying that you know young people college
students that don't want to read books anymore. And it's
and I find that quite intriguing because I mean, I've
(10:09):
got two teenagers who love to read and will still
pick up a book and understand the joy in reading
a book. But there is this thought that it's not
that they don't want to, it's not that they can't,
is that they just don't want to. Why when I
can have be entertained with short snippets of entertainment via
social media? Does that concern you at all?
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Oh? Absolutely it does. But the fact of the matter
is that you know the short snippets that you get
on TikTok, or you know that you a two minute
video or going online and doom scrolling for six hours,
one story after another. It's it's an addiction. Unfortunately, it's
like eating too much sugar. Your brain tells you, I'll
want more and more of that at the end of
the day, when you experience life like that, they're empty calories.
(10:50):
They add nothing to your mind, and you come out
of it even emptier than when you went into it.
Whereas a book, a book is never finished until the
last reader turns the last page. Because you bring your
own experiences, perspectives, highlights, and past and opinions onto those pages.
Every reader comes away with a different version of what
that book is supposed to be, and that's why it's
(11:10):
so profound. So those are not only not empty calories,
there's some of the most densest nutrition you can actually
provide for yourself.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
I love the way you put that.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, And you know, you avoid books at your peril
because at the end of the day, how many readers
we have will end up dictating what sort of society
we live in. The few are the readers the worst
of society, because unfortunately, those people will just follow the
herd over the cliff and take the rest of us
with them.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
And I also want to touch on the growing movement
to ban books in America. And I know that you
and fellow author Michael Connolly have donated towards the battle
against this. How concerning is it?
Speaker 3 (11:46):
It's crazy. It's like every twenty years in America we decide, oh,
we need to ban books. Here's the reason why we
ban books in America. Where are we you banned books anywhere? Poll?
You know, something happens in the world that people don't like.
There are too many gay people. Where are all these
trans people coming from? Where are they getting these ideas? Ah? Books?
We got to get rid of the books. So we
(12:07):
get rid of the books, we get rid of the
gay people, we get rid of gay marriage, we get
rid of trans people, because that's where these ideas are
coming from. That's why people ban books. They did the
same thing years ago with race, they did it with
gender everything else. So ninety nine percent of the books
banned in America have two issues in them, race and sex.
And they don't want that because they don't want those
(12:28):
sorts of people who they consider are not real people,
and that's why we have book banning. But that shows
you on the Congress of that how important books are
because he's seeing people are realizing the power of books.
They can actually change people's minds about things. So that's
why books are so important.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
David, I just want to finish off by by asking
you about a key we connection that you might have.
I saw that you got involved in a fundraising effort
with the New Zealand women's lacrosse team and they were
auctioning off the chance for someone to be a character
in your next book.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Is that right, Yes, it is. I was so thrilled.
Like one of my really good friends and one of
my financial representatives, his daughter has lived to New Zealand
for probably the past fifteen years and raised her family there,
and she knew I was coming and she reached that
to her dad that she was part of this effort
to raise money for the lacross team and she played
across from college. And so Tom, her father, reached out
(13:20):
to me, and I was like, absolutely, that's auction off
the name and they can use that to help their
fundraising drive. And so they did, and it raised a
lot of money, and I think I'm going to meet
with them actually when I'm in Auckland and it'll, you know,
help them get to where they need to go for
the competition, and I will and whatever character wins that auction,
(13:41):
it's going to be a hell of a nice ride
for them. In one of my books, I can promise
for that.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Will you be kind?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Well, I've always found that people really love it and
when I make them evil, we all have that, we
all have that secret inspiration to be bad.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I love it, David about that. It has been a
pleasure to talk to you. Cannot wait for you to
get to New Zealand and enjoy the rest of your
time down under. Thank you very much and David Baldacci
will appear in Auckland on Thursday, the thirtieth of January.
Tickets are on sale now. You can find more details
at Writers Festival dot co, dot MZ. His latest release,
To Die For is installs now, and keep an eye
(14:17):
out for his next book, Total Control, which is due
before the end of the month.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks a B from nine am Sunday
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.