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, this is Michael Silverblatt, and I'm here today on Bookworm with Tim Cahill, a guest

again, with his book, Road Fever, a high-speed travelogue recently published by Random House.

So, around a year and a half ago, Tim, you were on the road for 23 days straight

doing what? I was driving from the very tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, to the frozen northern

edge of Alaska at the Beaufort Sea, Pruto Bay, took the Pan American

Highway, the longest highway in the world, and in some cases the roughest highway in the world.

And for reasons that have yet to be fully explained, we did it, my partner Gary Sorby,

and I did it faster than anyone else had ever done it.

And are, in fact, in the Guinness Book of World's Records for this rather dubious feat.

You, in the course of writing about this, it seems to me that traveling that fast, you'd be writing about what you didn't see.

Yeah, and that's one of the misconceptions of what this book is about.

In setting up any kind of an event like this, what goes into it is often a lot more interesting

than the actual event itself.

So there was a year and a half of setting it up.

For instance, you know, there's a boom in travel writing

now and you see all the new travel books out and there's a publishers have travel series.

And you open up the book and, you know, here's somebody is traveled to Yemen and here's somebody

in Bali writing something. And the question, since this is my job to go out there and do it,

...