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, welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Bradford Morrow, the author most recently of Trinity Fields from Viking.

He's the author as well of two other novels, The Almanac Branch and Come Sunday.

Well, I guess the first and most startling thing about Trinity Fields is that unlike the earlier work,

this book deals with American social issues, American history of this particular part of the

century from Los Alamos on, in particular the effects of the bomb, the invention of the atomic bomb on American

culture and members of American culture. Since I know you as the author of a complex novel

come Sunday and a somewhat mysterious book, the Ormanac Branch, as well as the editor of what I've a long time considered

to be one of the two or three best literary journals in America conjunctions. I wondered,

what brought you to the change of mind involved in writing a novel about society and history?

Oh, well, a whole host of things, not the least of which was illness.

I had an illness and suddenly was brought up short with, just for a moment, just for a matter of months,

to lay it up in the hospital and was allowed

to contemplate, you know, what I had done so far, where I'd come from, and what I wanted to do

if and when I got out of the hospital. I was, I got well, I'm fine. And there was something of a

spiritual journey in this book for me that was present maybe in a more hidden or convoluted or literary even way in the other two novels that I felt this time it was time for me to go home. Now, I grew up in Colorado, not New Mexico, but we were in New Mexico a lot as kids. And so for me, this book,

in a way, was a homecoming to a place to the west, but also a homecoming in so far as my father

worked when I was growing up for the Martin Marietta Corporation, and he worked for the military

...