Patience will reward those who visit this treasury of literary voices, a collection of uncut, unexpurgated, unedited radio interviews with hundreds of English-speaking authors -- from Ed Abbey to Sidney Zion. The interviews were conducted by Don Swaim during his long-running CBS Radio show, "Book Beat" (1983-1993). Just as in any conversation, a level of trust must be established and preliminaries and amenities gotten out of the way before a person begins to speak from the heart or the gut. With his gentle, earnest and endearingly honest probing, Swaim gets his subjects to open up: Margaret Atwood on our cannibalistic tendencies, Judy Blume on her troubles with censorship, Tess Gallagher on alcoholism in American life, Erica Jong on what happens to women who dare to write about sex. Seekers of sound bites can go to the archives of the two-minute daily feature at www.donswaim.com/bookbeatpodcast.html.
SARAH T. WILLIAMS
