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 Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is William T. Volman, and this has been a big year for William Volman.

He has published not one but four books.

Fathers and Crows, the second novel in His Seven Dreams cycle, an Afghanistan picture show, Horrors

for Gloria, and in England, 13 stories and 13 epitaphs. We're going to mostly be talking

about Fathers and Crows, published by Viking, although we'll occasionally have incursions into the others.

I wanted to begin by, I guess, taking the bull by the horns. These books seem to be a history

of brutality. And I wondered whether, are you the chronicler of brutality's history?

Well, Michael, it seems to me that it's just sort of the way things are. It's not something I go out of my way to look for.

The things going on in Los Angeles or Sarajevo are the kinds of things that have always gone on and always will go on.

I think I just don't want to be an ostrich, that's all.

By and large, history is the recitation of a lot of bad things.

Writers like Barry Lopez, for instance, in his rediscovery of North America,

acknowledging that man is bad and the people

are cruel, asks that people make a conscious effort, a social contract to move in a different

direction, knowing that this is a human possibility, the possibility of

Auschwitz, the possibility of the 100 years war, the possibility of any atrocity that you

can name, that we consciously set ourselves on an alternate track. Is that something you feel

...