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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Goodtember?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm.

I'm happy to have as my guest, Ben Fountain.

I first met Ben Fountain when his novel, Billy Lynn's long half-time walk,

appeared, a book that won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the National

Book Critics Circle Award, among quite a few others. I had known his collection of stories, brief encounters

with Che Guevara, and so now that he's written a work of nonfiction, I was so engrossed in it.

I liked its rhetorical strategies so much that I couldn't wait, say, to get out of the shower and get back to the book.

It's a book about one of the most, shall we say, arresting and fascinating and dangerous periods.

What period? Michael, it is about the election of 2016 and how we got there and why things are the way they are. And you speak as a citizen of Texas. Yes? I do. I grew up in North Carolina and I've lived in Texas for 35 years. So yes, I'm a Texan.

And the book is called Beautiful Country Burn Again, and it suggests that one of the things that

makes us beautiful is that we have burned before.

The title comes from a poem by the California poet Robinson Jeffers. Apology for Bad Dreams.

I'm just going to read the relevant lines. Beautiful country, burn again. Point Pinos down to Sur Rivers, burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water.

Ben Felton takes this epigraph as the occasion for saying the country has burned before it

burns he suggests every 80 years or so when we form the nation when we went to war about slavery, when we participated in the brilliant insight that led

to the New Deal, the beautiful country burned again because we had to burn ourselves clean, we had to

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