How do you fight monopoly power? Senator Amy Klobuchar will be here to talk about her new book, Antitrust.

Did Alexander Graham Bell advance the cause of the death? Andrew Solomon will join us to discuss Katie Booth's, The Invention of Miracles,

Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's quest to end deafness. Elizabeth Harris will be here with the latest in publishing news, plus we'll talk about what we and the Water World are reading.

This is the Bookerview Podcast from the New York Times. It's April 30th, I'm Panelop Hall.

Joining us now is Senator Amy Klobuchar from Washington. She is the senior senator from Minnesota, and her new book is called Antitrust, taking on monopoly power from the Guilded Age to the digital age. Senator, thanks for being here.

Well, thank you. It's just wonderful to be on. You have been doing a few things during the past few years, been busy, why add a book? And I might add, this is not a quickie book. This is not an election book. This is a very heavily reported historical book, more than 200 pages of notes.

Why? Well, because I care that much about this, I started to think about doing this a few years ago, and it really for me started with a call I got way back in 2008 when I got a call from a pharmacist actually at Minneapolis Children's Hospital.

And he said that the cost of this life saving baby heart drug for heart defects had gone up astronomically from like 80 some dollars, a treatment to $1,600 treatment. And he didn't know why.

And so this is a very typical you get these constituent calls. So our staff followed up with a head of Minneapolis Children's and lo and behold, it turned out that one company had bought that drug, but then they had also cornered the market by buying the competitor drugs.

So what happened was that the FTC got involved after I brought it up. It's like your classic new senator and I bring it up. I have the little vial at a hearing and I say, why is this happening to the FTC and they start federal trade commission.

And they start looking into it and end up bringing a major suit and that was really exciting, except then, which is typical of a lot of these cases, the courts threw it out basically and said, oh, no, it's the other similar.

And then it took years for a generic and another competitor to develop. And so literally I thought if a US senator, the entire federal trade commission and a bunch of angry doctors and nurses and parents of newborn babies can't fix.

I'm an optically problem that's so obviously price gouging, then we better do something about it. And that kind of launched my interest in this from the Senate standpoint.

And I ended up as the chair ranking member of the anti trust subcommittee for the last years and it also made me realize how little was going on, legislatively. So I thought, OK, in the past people wrote these books and started movements and it better not be a thin book because it's a big topic.

And so that's what motivated me to do it.

All right, I want to get more into why we have such trouble regulating monopolies doing something about it. But let's start at a really basic level.

Our culture is obviously maybe relentlessly, perhaps religiously capitalist, one of our most popular games and you point out you played it as a child and loved it is of course monopoly.

So let's start with a really basic question. What's wrong with monopolies? Well, what's wrong is that we are a capitalistic economy and that means competition and that means that prices go down and people get jobs because there's competition.

And so if you have one company controlling things, I guess one great example that's easy to understand is the old AT&T. So AT&T owned all the equipment under it that's called a vertical monopoly.

And it also owned all that phone service local long distance you name it that sort of a horizontal monopoly. And so what happened was competitors wanted to get in the market and bring the prices down.

And AT&T had so much power that it was impossible to do as well as how the laws were set up. And so finally the government under democratic and republican presidents actually started suing and legislation developed and that monopoly broke up.

And so when the prices went way down, then that really set off to create a lot of competition and new products. So monopolies are bad because they control basically everything they control the means of commerce they control wages.

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