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 reason.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Kirkpatrick Sale, and I'm very happy to have him on the show. He's the author of The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus and the Colombian legacy.

It's from in paperback, Plume Books.

Many of you know that I almost never do nonfiction on this show,

but I'm very taken with this book.

Sale is the author of Human Scale and one of the founders of the New York Green Party,

and he's the co-director of the E.F. Schumacher Society.

And one, you know, knows that one in the midst of a celebration of Columbus sort of outscaled like that of the bicentennial,

that this is a kind of reanalysis of the Colombian myth, and it's a very different kind

of writing for you. You know, you did a history of the SDS, and most of your work has

been contemporary. What was it like to start to do historical research?

Hard. I've done historical research before, and it was increasingly a part of the work that I've been doing.

But in this case, I had to do the 15th century in a way that was all-encompassing so that I was able to take Columbus out of the 15th century in a way that it was all encompassing so that I was able to take Columbus out of the

15th century as a representative of the 15th century. But that's hard work learning about something

that went on 500 years ago. So that's why it took me seven years of work to produce this book.

Did you, given your leanings, did you have any axe originally to grind, or did it get

discovered and sharpened in the course of the work?

Well, I would like to pretend to be objective, but the truth is that there was an axe

...