Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I'm happy to have

a writer, John Dagada, whose work I've been following for some time. He has been in America, one of the premier people who've been trying

to reawaken the form of the essay. Now he has published a bright yellow covered book. These are

the colors, yellow and black, of warning signs for nuclear waste.

The book is published by Norton.

It's called About a Mountain, and it's about a subject that the gada has previously enjoyed.

The last essay in his book, Halls of Fame, is a very amusing essay about Las Vegas. But suddenly, he was

in Las Vegas and discovered something not so amusing was going on, and it altered the way

he writes and makes his presentation because he discovered that very near to where his mother was about

to live, there was to be a mountain, Yucca Mountain, used for dumping most of America's nuclear waste,

a condition which has been true until very recently.

Here we have Las Vegas imperiled by the future, the nuclear future.

How did you discover what was going on at Yucca Mountain?

In reality, a friend of mine from school started working as a technical writer for a subcontractor at Yaka,

and he contacted me simply because he thought I would find the project amusing, although amusing in an absurd way.

And I started researching Yucca.

But as you said, during that time, my mom kind of out of the blue decided to move to Las Vegas,

...