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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and I'm very happy to have Mary Gateskill as my guest.

And now there's a book called Somebody with a Little Hammer. It's a collection of

essays, and I think it's wonderful. First of all, let's tell all the guests where somebody

with a little hammer comes from. It's from probably a lot of them, a pretty well-known story by Chekhov called Gooseberries,

where a character is somewhat ineffectually raving at his friend about how he, as an older

person, he's middle-aged, can do nothing to stop all the social injustice

around him. And he's trying to tell his younger friends that he should do something. But one

of the things he talks about is that people don't see, if you're well off, if you're doing

well economically and or emotionally and personally, you just don't see people who are not.

They just, if you're feeling good, you tend to think everybody's feeling good.

Even I think that's true today, when you can see very blatantly on the news they're not.

And that's what you're saying, that somebody should be outside the door of every happy man with a little hammer, just tap, tap, tapping, reminding him that there are people who suffer and that one of these days he will too.

Yes, we all will.

And it's one of those famous passages that breaks your heart the first time you read it, then the second time you withdraw from it,

...