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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

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 Joshua Cohn. He is both a novelist and a literary critic. He does both sublimely well.

But this time in his newest book, the Netanyahu's, he's written a comedy, not just a comedy, but a campus comedy. It's said that when Harold Bloom,

the great literary critic, was teaching at Cornell, he was one of maybe the only Jew on the campus.

This is what the Ivy League was once like, and he was called upon to be the person who would guide Netanyahu, the father,

when he came in search of a job in the history department.

So let's begin in terms of your book, Who Are the Netanyahu's?

Yeah, who are the Netanyahu's?

They really are not the Netanyahu's that we're familiar with, I think, or that we want to be familiar with or trying to be familiar with on the news. There's Benzio Netanyahu, who is Benjamin Netanyahu's father and the father of three boys, actually, Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu and Ido Netanyahu. Yoni Netanyahu, of of course, that went on to be the hero of Antebbe,

when an Air France flight was hijacked and Israeli commandos, you know, saved the hostages from

Edia means Uganda. Yoni Netanyahu was the one casualty. Bebe, we all know, who just stepped down

or was ousted as the Prime Minister of Israel. And Yido, Netanyahu was a, you know, a former radiologist and a current playwright, God Save

Us All.

The father was a historian, a kind of a crank, a madman, a person who was right.

He was right.

He was right.

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