Her life depends on the written word.

So, when 13-year-old Liza DiNizio first heard that two men had burned a pile of books outside their used-book store in Kansas City, Mo., she was outraged.

Books? They were burning books?

She had just used her wagon to rescue a whole set of encyclopedias from a curb in her Chicago neighborhood – “A to Zwingli, perfect condition, leather bound from the year 1921” – and here were these two men, 500 miles away and supposedly all grown up, igniting books like they were charcoals at a cookout.

Their Memorial Day weekend stunt got a lot of news coverage across the country, and Liza’s criticism morphed into camaraderie after she learned why Tom Wayne and Will Leathem had doused the books with lighter fluid and set them on fire.

They had all these extra books to give away – thousands, in fact – and nobody wanted them. Even the Missouri state prisons wouldn’t take them.

At the same time, America’s literacy rates are plummeting. A National Endowment for the Arts survey showed less than half of American adults now read any literature at all, and that upset Wayne and Leathem so much that they posted the study’s findings on their bookstore’s Web site.

Their book-burning was a protest, Wayne said.

“It was a piece of performance art to underscore what is really going on,” he said in a telephone interview from their shop, Prospero’s Books. “We were holding up the art-life mirror to our culture.”

The reflection changed Liza’s mind, and she wanted to let them know why.

She pulled out lined notebook paper and filled two pages with tight little letters full of personality – some tilt left, some tip to the right, some stand straight as oaks. All together, they gave a glimpse into the world of a girl whose lifeline is tethered to books.

“To make it short and sweet,” her letter began, “I love books.”

So do Wayne and Leathem. That was their point.

“I haven’t thought about this in years,” Wayne said. “I first started loving books in the second grade, when we had this piece of construction paper and earned stars to stick on it with every book we read. I did as many as I could. By the time I was in junior high, Dad would want me to do (stuff) in the yard and I’d go hide in the attic and read books.”

Liza knows exactly what he means.

“For me, books are literally my brothers and sisters,” she wrote. “I only let my most trusted friends borrow them, and I just have a (as corny as this sounds) special place in my heart for them.”

Their book-burning, though, made sense.

“Americans take so many things for granted, and books are just one of them,” she wrote. “I think it’s a wonderful, creative endeavor to shock people back into thinking about the problems of illiteracy in America.”

For Liza, the written word is more than personal.

“I communicate with words. Well, obviously, but in a different sense. I have a disability that doesn’t allow me to talk. Mind you, I can hear 100 percent, but it’s extremely difficult for me to move my tongue. Maybe that’s why reading and words are so important to me. I communicate by writing things down. For me, seeing a beat-up, mangled book lying in the street is tragic … Books are possibly the most important thing on Earth to me.”

She enclosed $5 and asked that they pick out a book or two for her. “I would prefer vintage, but please send a book special to you.”

Wayne said they have received thousands of e-mails, calls and letters, but Liza’s made him cry. He’s got a surprise coming her way, which I won’t spoil here.

“You wonder,” he said. “Her letter is so well-written. What happened that she can’t talk?”

Liza had a difficult birth, and she suffered brain stem damage that paralyzed her throat and her tongue. When she was 3 years old, her mother, Mary Kleihege noticed one day that she was reading a page from her Barbie coloring book.

“I had no idea she could read,” Mary said. “It opened an entire world to her.”

These days, Liza communicates by writing notes and typing on her BlackBerry. Wayne is grateful that she took the time to write to him.

Most people who weighed in made a lot of noise.

“We’ve had a lot of people so angry with us that we would burn a book, any book. They didn’t get it. But that little girl in Chicago? She got it right away.” And she reminds all of us there’s real power in the written word.