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.

On KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I'm at the University of Iowa,

and I have the opportunity to talk to and interview John McPhee.

John McPhee has given perhaps only 40 readings in his many years of writing and relatively

few interviews, so I consider it to be both a great honor and an unmissable opportunity

to talk to him about his upcoming book, which is called Silk Parachute.

It's published by Faris Strauss and Giroux, and it is a book of essays.

John McPhee, I would like to believe that many of you know, is, to my mind, America's most beautiful living

writer of nonfiction.

He's written about basketball as a mindful enterprise.

He's written about the pioneer spirit that brought people to Alaska.

He's written many books of essays at sea, for instance, Atlantic City now, and its dissolution from Atlantic City as represented on the Monopoly Board.

The essays are thrillingly shaped.

I think that their syntax, even their individual words, reflects their subjects,

reflects their subjects on the deepest level so that when you're reading, something

that you didn't know you'd care about, is something that

you experience in the course of the reading, that this is truly the use of language experientially.

Now, I know that you have a many-parted writing and rewriting program on your computer

...