Folks, almost every day, and some days more than once, we get either Chad Nakhineishi or I get

pitches from book promoters, from publishers, saying, interview this person about this book.

And truly, 95% of the time or more, we don't do it. Because unless it's something that we think fits in with the values of our show, and unless it's something that piques our interest, frankly, something that we're very curious about, we just don't do it. So I hope you know that when we have a book author on, it is because we're

interested in that book, or we've read that book and we found that book worthy of

commendation for you. And particularly at this time of year, people are thinking of good gift

ideas. This may be one that you either read or gift or both. And as long as you don't

mark the book up, you can buy it and then also mail it off. But I can't do that because I write

all over my books and I make notes in the margin of what I'm going to repeat later. And we have

just such an occasion today. The author's name is Kevin Baker. The book is called America

the Ingenious, How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers changed the world. You'll remember

we interviewed Michelle Malkin after her book about 10 tinkers who changed the world and great stories. And there's always an immigrant

overtone to that. It's part of the nature of it, which makes it very interesting.

Anyway, Kevin is our guest, and I want to know, first of all, what drove you to write this book?

Well, thanks for having me. And, yeah, what drove me to write, it was actually an invitation to do so on a part of my

publisher, Leah Ronan, at Artisan.

We had done a book previously.

We had done the companion volume for the History Channel series, America, The Story of Us,

which I like to say is, you know,

which I wrote in about three months, which I like to say is maybe not the best history of

the United States, but it certainly was the quickest. So that was, you know, a lot of fun working

with her. And, you know, we, she came up with this idea for things Americans had invented.

And we sat and, you know, thought about it and came up with, we wanted to come up with 76 things.

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