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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

Even the thought of it's so absurd.

Where would we be without boos, where would we be without books?

Where would we be without boo?

Where would we be?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tom to Bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRW.com. I'm Michael Silverblatt and this is bookworm. Today, I'm very

pleased to have as a guest, the writer Ben Fountain, whose new novel, Billy Lynn's long

half-time walk has just been published by Echo, and it's received

extraordinary reviews, not only extraordinary reviews, from extraordinary critics like Jeff

Dyer.

Probably it's one of our significant novels of the current war.

But it's about wartime now, the kind of people who go off to fight, what we do to them,

what we do for them, who they are, what we have done to this underclass, really.

I would say it's a political novel.

I would say that while it's not rabidly one-sided, it's definitely an anti-war novel, and worse, an anti-machine publicity of war novel.

Yes, how did it start?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

...