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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can can reason who can read

hello and welcome to bookworm this is michael silverblatt and today my guest is russell

banks the author most recently of cloud splitter this has been an amazing time for russell banks

um his the sweet her after was um filmed this year as was a previous novel, Affliction.

The Rule of the Bone was widely embraced last year by school students around the country.

He's the author as well of success stories and continental drift.

And now this novel, which I believe is his, you know, longest and in fact only really long novel,

is Cloud Splitter from Harper Flamingo. And it is a life of John Brown as told by his son, Owen Brown.

And I wanted to begin by asking you about the historical Owen Brown.

Well, the historical Owen Brown was in some ways, maybe in every way.

He's the perfect narrator.

He's the witness to all the events that mattered to me in writing a novel based on the life of John Brown.

And he escaped and never told about it.

He escaped from Harper's Ferry and disappeared after Harper's Ferry into the abolitionist underground,

which was probably like the weather underground of the 1960s and 70s,

and reappeared on a mountaintop in Altadena, California,

and lived the rest of his life as a hermit shepherd and died

without having given interviews or written memoirs and left no real account of his experiences,

...