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 read.

Hi, good afternoon, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Thomas Caneli, the author most recently of Woman of the Inner Sea, published

by Doubleday under the Nan A. Talese in print.

He's the author, of course, as well, as of Schindler's List, the family madness, the playmaker

to Asmara, Flying Hero Class. And I started to read his books with a sort of Joan of Arc

novel called Blood Red Sister Rose and went backward to read the chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and then

when several movies The Devil's Playground and of course the chant of Jimmy Blacksmith

and I believe one other, Barbarossa maybe?

Oh no, that was one of Fred Skepsies films.

Fred made those two early films and then Barbarossa was his first American film.

So I've been reading Thomas Caneli for quite some time. This book began with an incident that someone had told you. Could you tell about that, please? Well, if I tell it too intimately,

I've got the problem that I rather give away the book. But what happened was in 1980,

a very young-looking American woman who didn't look old enough to be bereaved told me rather than have

other people tell me that she had lost both her children. And she told me that having had an

extremely privileged upbringing in the eastern US.

Upon losing the children, she had tried to transmute herself in some way

to become a different kind of American woman.

She had become a more anonymous woman.

She'd gone and worked in places where you wouldn't have normally expected to find her.

...