You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Robert Ward, the author of The King of Cards, a novel, recently published

by Pocket Books.

He's the author as well of three other novels, Red Baker, Catalani and Little Bridges, and

a first novel, which was called Shetting Skin.

And I thought that I would go on a circular route here, because this is a novel that's kind of set in the 60s with a boy who learns to forge identity by inventing ID cards,

laminating them and making it possible for other people to do things that they're not yet ready for.

If one had to define the 60s in any way, I would like to suggest that it was a time when

identities were forged almost in mass production and that the people who received their

new identities from the time were almost all of them unprepared

to try a new personality on for size.

Now, I know that you were very politically involved in the 60s.

You were involved with the diggers in San Francisco, and I wondered if you'd talk a little bit about that.

Well, I think that's a smart comment about the ID cards and identity.

Because I always felt in those days that I was inventing myself on a daily basis almost.

I moved to Hayd Ashbury in 66 first before everything was really geared up and the media had gotten

there and all that and i was stunned by what i found because i was a kid from baltimore who had started

smoking pot and growing long hair probably a year and a half earlier.

And in Baltimore, the scene was among hipsters, and they were much more hipsters and they were hippies.

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