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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today we have a very special show with my guest, Diane Ackerman.

Her newest book is 100 Names love, a stroke, a marriage,

and the language of healing. Diane Ackerman is a naturalist and a poet and has written many

books about the senses, about love, of course, about the natural world as well.

She wrote a book about the brain.

Yes, an alchemy of mind.

A very recent book.

And to one's enormous surprise and shock, her husband, the wonderful novelist Paul West, suffered from a stroke

really just after that book was published.

He is one of the most gifted verbal writers, an anthology of language and literature.

No one with a wider vocabulary, a greater gift.

I mean, he would claim that he never had a writer's block.

And if one looked at his list of books, he wrote Westerns and science fiction

and everything else that you can imagine. And it must have been such an incredible shock

...