Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

Go 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 this is Bookworm.

This is a very special league, because at last, John Sales has come out with his monumental novel, A Moment in the Sun.

It's published by McSweeney's Press, who's done a beautiful book with a wonderfully embossed cover.

It's an old style that includes John Dos Passos, and it travels from the American 1890s into the 20th century,

beginning with the mining of the Yukon,

ending with the electrocution of an elephant,

and everything in between.

Yellow journalism, Coxie's Army, the attempt of southern white men to reinvent a Declaration of Independence,

a white Declaration of Independence and get their city back in Delaware.

It's a rich and complex and thrilling novel. Why this period, John? I think the thing

that drew me into it first was I was doing research for my last novel Los Gussanos, which has to do with

the long, long dance between the United States and Cuba.

And I went back in the research, even though the book doesn't go back that far to the Spanish-American

War, to see how the first formal, you know, kind of ground rules were written.

And I kept running into this phrase, Philippine insurrection or

...