Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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 my guest

is Jonathan Leatham, the author most recently of Dissident Gardens. Situate the book for me, Jonathan. What's its time period?

Well, it sprawls. I think that's the right word. It glances as far back as the 30s and

gets to the present, or I guess technically, to 2012. But it kind of centers. I mean, the majority of the material

and the psychic center of the book is late 50s, early 60s, a kind of a hinge moment for the

two main characters, a mother and daughter as the daughter leaves home. And I think that

the heart of their experiences and their world is the world of the

50s and 60s. And dissident gardens, where is that? Well, there's a place in Queens called

Sunnyside Gardens. It's a real place. And it's a kind of a utopian suburb in New York within the space of New York City.

The blocks were built on a concept that Lewis Mumford was involved in initiating the architecture,

borrowed actually from a German suburban experiment,

but the blocks are modest brick houses

around a shared communal interior gardens that's meant to belong to everyone who lives in it.

And this is a place that attracted, in real life, in an exaggerated degree in my story,

attracted socialists, communists, dreamers, often Jewish, lower middle class or middle

...