In the turbulent 1960s, childhood is a place where a boy sells lies for a dollar, names the sad houses in his neighborhood, and digs for fossils in the softening street. Toy dinosaurs wage wars on front lawns. A butterfly net sewn from a mother's dress strains to catch what the air will give. A father reads poetry instead of fairy tales and teaches his son that falling is part of flight. Part fever dream, part elegy, The Book of Why summons a country on the verge-block parties and Super 8 cameras, sparklers held aloft while adults look away from what is changing. These pages trace how wonder hardens into knowledge, how small losses leave permanent marks, and how the boys we were learned, quietly, what could not be carried forward. J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has written, edited, and produced the one-minute spot "Facts About Fiction," and the award-winning program Arts & Letters Radio, a show celebrating modern humanities with a concentration on Southern cultural and intellectual work that can be streamed at artsandlettersradio.org. He has published fiction in Toad Suck Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Literally Stories, Inklette Magazine, Cleaver, Twelve Winters Journal, East of the Web, Litbop Art and Literature in the Groove, Rural Fiction Magazine, Café Lit, Potato Soup Journal's 'Best of 2022' anthology, and Southwest Review. He spends his time with his amazing wife in Little Rock, Southwest Virginia and Pittsburgh.