Hearby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tim to Bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

I am thrilled, honored, excited today because it's a very special day.

For the very first time, I am doing a writer of nonfiction

whose writing is so beautiful and so conceptually strange

that I felt entranced by him, and then I saw his work.

He's an artist.

He's a potter.

He has an exhibit in the Gagocyan Gallery that people in Los Angeles can go and see.

And what he's done in the first book is to trace the background, the history

of an inheritance, a set of Netsuki, Netskis, that survived the Holocaust and were in the possession of an Uncle Iggy in Japan whose partner survived Uncle Iggy and helped follow the steps of these beautiful, strange, detailed, lovely objects across a century.

But now, in the new book, The White Road, by my guest, Edmund Duwant, which is called

Journey Into an Obsession.

This is a book about whiteness.

...