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 Silverbladden. Welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist, which has been recently

published by Random House.

It's a novel that takes place in New York, around the turn of the century.

You know, there's so much intellectual history in this book, the history of the development

of American psychology with William James, the founding of the Museum of Natural History

with Boaz, you almost get the feeling that this could be used as a textbook, you know.

Well, I was very concerned all through writing it.

I don't like historical fiction that presumes to recount the known deeds of known people.

I was very concerned with making the parts of the book that were real, which is everything

except the central story of the killer

and the people who track them down. Everything else that happens and everybody else that these

fictional characters run into are real. So I was very concerned with being as true to the actual

lives and the actual events and the actual places as I possibly could, and that involved a lot of research.

So in a sense, you couldn't use it as a textbook, I don't think,

although you could use the facts that are cited,

a lot of the facts that are cited as textbook facts.

Well, it's a sort of weird melange,

...