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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

Go to turn.

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, and one of the people I truly appreciate having on the show on a regular basis is here with me today, Dave Eggers,

whose new book, The Parade, has been published by Knappf. And this book really surprised me

because it's so different from the last book.

We had a great time last time learning that Yemen is the home of coffee,

and now we're abroad again in an unnamed country where two men have been sent to pave a road that connects the north and south of a country

not named that has endured a civil war.

The people who live in the South have suffered from not only rape and death and

terrible events during the war, it's been years since they've had access to sufficient medical help,

and so these people from an industrialized country, two of them, have come to pave the road.

One of them has been involved with some 63 such projects. The other is doing it for the first time.

They're meeting each other for the first time, saying choose a number between one and ten, and one chooses nine, and one chooses four,

and there will be, for the longest time, almost to the end, no names named in this book,

not the names of country, not the names of character.

Why?

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