A girl reading at the 2005 National Book Festival on the National Mall. - Michaela McNichol
This year's Sept. 24 festival on the National Mall was a First Amendment model for freedom of expression. Festivalgoers carrying bookbags walked side by side with war protesters carrying signs; some went to both events. Nonfiction writers discussed their ideas in measured tones, while poets and novelists delivered their messages in metaphor. Children's authors and illustrators told their stories in simple words and pictures. From the audiences, opportunistic ideologues occasionally seized pavilion microphones and C-SPAN2 airtime to sound their themes repeatedly. d Celebrity designers, decorators, chefs and a doctor, most with their own television shows, did what they do best: entertain.
Librarian James Billington, his wife, Marjorie, and first lady Laura Bush make their entry into the Great Hall for a gala reception for authors and sponsors, members of the Cabinet and Congress, the James Madison Council and other guests. - Harrington Photography
The festival opened with ceremony in the Great Hall on the evening of Sept. 23. Attending the formal reception, program and dinner were festival authors and sponsors, Laura Bush, members of the Cabinet and Congress, the James Madison Council and other guests. Less formal was a reception among the U.S. Botanic Garden's exotic flowering plants for state librarians and other reading advocates who were converging on Washington from all 50 states and U.S. territories for their Saturday presentations in the Pavilion of the States.
During the Great Hall reception, guests circulated among archways softened by draperies. Satin gowns gleamed and jewels glinted in special lighting that set marble columns aglow. Military aides stood stiffly in formal dress. A military string combo played on the mezzanine.
After escorting Mrs. Bush and guests to the Coolidge Auditorium, Librarian James H. Billington opened the program that preceded dinner in the Great Hall. "The National Book Festival brings the creative spark of writers, illustrators and poets together with readers of all ages," he said in his welcoming remarks.
He thanked Library employees for their yearlong effort to produce the festival, 700 volunteers for their spirited assistance, donors, particularly Target, that make the festival possible each year, and Mrs. Bush for her continuing support of the festival.
Introducing the first lady as "the reader in chief of the United States," Billington noted that the event originated five years ago as a "big idea" she brought with her from Texas, which had its own book festival.
In her turn, the first lady expressed her appreciation to Billington and the Library staff for all of their hard work in organizing the festival and then spoke briefly about the importance of books. "Books tell stories about who we are as a nation," she said.
Told in family Bibles, children's books, novels, histories and biographies, "stories converge in hope and love," she said. "They make us laugh out loud or move us to tears with emotion."
She introduced authors Linda Sue Park, David McCullough, Sue Monk Kidd and Tom Wolfe. Of McCullough, she noted that he started writing about history after seeing a collection of photographs at the Library. "Of the many gifts the Library of Congress has given our country, inspiring the passion of David McCullough may be one of the greatest," she said.
She spoke of the "strange, beautiful, haunting, uplifting tales" told by the other three. "To hear from one would be a treat, but to hear all four is a feast," she said.
The first author to speak was Park. "I am thrilled and honored to be here," said the daughter of Korean immigrants. Her third children's book, "A Single Shard," won the 2002 Newbery Medal.
She recalled her son's reaction upon learning of the award: "Gosh, Mom, think of all those kids all over the country who will be forced to read your books."
Once, someone in a book-talk audience asked her why she wrote books for children. She said she responded, "Only the author of books for adults would ask that question. If they don't read me now, they're not going to read you later.
"Writing for children is investing in the future," she said.
The next morning, at a pre-festival White House breakfast that Mrs. Bush hosted for festival authors and their families, journalist-author Robert MacNeil said, "This National Book Festival is simply a wonderful idea. "There are many festivals, but none has the zip of the national festival."
In this age of instant communications, books still are important, he asserted. "Books are still the source of new ideas that are introduced into the culture and then percolate.
"Good ideas don't just pop into the mind," MacNeil added. The germ of an idea can pop up, he said, but it may take a decade or two for the writer to develop his ideas, as in the case of Robert Caro producing his books about Lyndon Johnson and David McCullough writing his book about John Adams.
Television is a medium primarily for spitting out fragments of ideas, he said. "Pause for a thought on television and you won't be a guest on television very often," he said to the audience's laughter and applause.
Journalist and author David Brooks discusses his new book, "On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense," a witty look at the American experience. - Gail Fineberg
Both the first lady and the Librarian noted that the National Book Festival was supporting the efforts of a nonprofit organization, First Book, to collect 5 million books donated by publishers to give to victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. By the end of the day, families and children had donated several thousand dollars to the cause.
"The Library of Congress is also offering preservation support to libraries for the repair of water-damaged books," Billington announced.
Later that morning, on the parched, brown plain of the National Mall, crowds of readers stirred up dust clouds as they hustled from white pavilion to pavilion to listen to their favorite authors. Twenty-five thousand lime green C-SPAN2 book bags and 20,000 scarlet Target cushions added splashes of color to an otherwise drab palate muted by overhanging gray clouds that provided relief from the heat and humidity of the night before.
The scene was, in the words of Washington Post host Marie Arana, editor-in-chief of Book World, "quintessential Washington" — a stew of festivalgoers and antiwar protestors of all ages.
As the Smithsonian Metro escalator emptied hordes of people in shorts and blue jeans onto the Mall, festival volunteers in bright green shirts handed out programs and directed people to turn left for the book festival. March organizers in blue shirts handed out antiwar signs to trainloads of suburbanites and busloads of out-of-towners and told them to turn right for a route to the White House demonstration.
Although the antiwar protest may have discouraged some from coming to the festival this year, huge, enthusiastic crowds (some 100,000 by Library estimates) squeezed into pavilions to hear the stars — best-selling novelists, popular children's authors and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists, historians and biographers. Most without seats stood politely several rows deep around the edges or sat where they could on the ground. However, in an occasional spasm of chair rage, some pushed and shoved to grab a seat. One man, who had lost track of his chair momentarily, demanded that a woman relinquish her front-row seat.
Oldsters with thinning hair seized front-row seats to better hear their favorite writers. "Can't someone stop that music? We're trying to hear," demanded one, indicating a black-box amplifying an author's speech.
Outside the pavilion, a man whose grizzled beard suggested that he might have heard Joan Baez sing at an antiwar event some four decades earlier, tramped back and forth with a sign that assailed Bush and the war in Iraq in impolite language.
David McCullough describes the hardships of Revolutionary War soldiers to a huge, rapt audience. "We're softies by contrast," he said. - Harrington Photography
Young families, some pushing loaded strollers and others towing their kids, headed toward both events. Many carried both homemade antiwar signs and kids' books for authors to sign.
Signifying security-conscious Washington, helicopters looped over the Mall all day, wopp-wopp-wopp, sometimes shutting down speakers momentarily.
Booing audience members in the History and Biography pavilion closed off speech by one man who seized a microphone three times to ask Thomas Friedman, Steven Roberts and David Brooks if it were not true that Israel was responsible for the war in Iraq.
One woman asked a single question of three or four speakers: Had the media failed to report adequately on the role of oil in the Iraq war? A third man asked nearly all the speakers about the role that religion played in their own lives or the subjects of their books.
"To what extent do you see your life's work as a calling from God," he asked Judge Robert L. Carter, for 24 years an NAACP attorney who won 21 of the 22 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court.
Left, First Book President Kyle Zimmer, left, greets Center for the Book Director John Cole in the Pavilion of the States. Both organizations are partnering to bring "Book Relief" to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina; right, Tom Wolfe pauses from signing his latest book "I Am Charlotte Simmons," a fictionalized account of life on today's college campuses. - Pat Fischer and Harrington Photography
"Ohhh, I'm not religious enough to answer that," Carter said, shaking his head. "I may have had a calling, but I don't think it came from God," he added with a wry smile.
Asked how religion influenced the Founding Fathers, Pulitzer-winning historian Joseph Ellis responded that Washington was a "lukewarm Episcopalian," Jefferson a deist, Adams a Congregationalist-turned-Unitarian, and none of them, including Franklin, could agree on matters of religion. The one thing they did agree on, strongly, was that separation of church and state was essential. "They believed no state should have power over religion," Ellis emphasized.
Elsewhere on the Mall, adoring fans mobbed their favorite authors for autographs. They stood patiently in a blocks-long line while McCullough, winner of Half-Price Books' Reading Advocacy Award, signed 700 books.
Early astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an advocate of future space travel and author of a recent children's book, "Reaching for the Moon," did not take time to sign an autograph book presented by a small boy on the festival grounds, but other star attractions, including McCullough, Wolfe and Neil Gaiman, were autographing books, posters and casts everywhere they went. Gaiman signed books until 6:15 p.m., long after the festival closed at 5 o'clock.
At home at the nation's celebration of books was Hollis Gabriel, who until Aug. 28 taught third grade at the Academy of Sacred Heart in New Orleans. That day, one day ahead of Hurricane Katrina, she and her husband, Henry, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, and son Connor, a seventh-grader, left their Orleans Parish home and 5,000 beloved books. They know at least 3 feet of "horrid water" filled their home, and what the water did not destroy, mold has consumed in the 90-degree days that followed.
- Michaela McNichol, John Harrington Photography, and Katherine Blood
She left with one suitcase and a box into which she had tossed the things most precious, family photographs, love letters from her husband, poetry. "I love my clothes, but I thought, ‘I won't need those in my next life,'" she said. "Even if we go back, it's a next life."
She paused. "I don't have my things, but it's freeing. Here I am, in this wonderful city with all it has to offer."
She looked around the Pavilion of the States as kids clustered around the Louisiana state table for stamps on their literacy maps. "This is fabulous," she said. "So many people celebrating books.
"I feel ready to move on. I feel like a door has opened for me here."
Pavilions and Authors at the 2005 National Book Festival
Children
Sponsored by AT&T
Buzz Aldrin & Wendell Minor
David Baldacci
Doreen Cronin & Harry Bliss
Hilary Knight
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Laura Numeroff
Mary Pope Osborne & Will Osborne
Linda Sue Park
Gloria Jean Pinkney
Jerry Pinkney
Sandra Pinkney
NBA & WNBA
Thomas Friedman - Journalist Thomas Friedman
declares that "The World is Flat" in his new book about the new global economy.
"The world shrank and flattened as digital technology toppled old top-down
controls over communications, politics, business, even centralized governments."
Linda Sue Park -
Linda Sue Park, the 2002 Newberry Medal winner for "A Single Shard," said,"
Writing for children in investing in the future." Park read from her most recent
work, "Bee-bim Bop!" This catchy rhyming verse for young children is
about a favorite Korean dish.
Joseph Ellis -
Historian Joseph Ellis discusses his new book, "His Excellency: George Washington."
According to Ellis, "George Washington is the most famous person in American
history about whom most Americans...know almost nothing. And most of what they
know is wrong."
Robert L. Carter -
In his new book, "A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in the Cause of Equal
Rights," Judge Robert L. Carter tells stories of growing up in a segregated America
and his determination to change that as an NACCP civil rights lawyer.
Teens & Children
Sponsored by Target
Meg Cabot
Sharon Creech
John Feinstein
Jack Gantos
Patricia Reilly Giff
Pat Mora
Walter Dean Myers
Dave Pelzer
René Saldaña
R.L. Stine
Letters About Literature
Fiction & Fantasy
Sponsored by The James
Madison Council
E.L. Doctorow
Richard Paul Evans
Jonathan Safran Foer
Diana Gabaldon
Neil Gaiman
John Irving
Gish Jen
Sue Monk Kidd
George R.R. Martin
Bobbie Ann Mason
Tom Wolfe
Buzz Aldrin - Astronaut and American icon
Buzz Aldrin encourages young people to reach their goals in his children's
book, "Reaching for the Moon." One of only 12 people who have walked
on the moon, Aldrin achieved his goal of becoming a fighter pilot and qualifying
for teh space program.
Myrka Dellanos -
Myrka Dellanos, a popular bilingual broadcast journalist in Spanish television,
discusses the secrets of her success in the Home & Family pavilion. Her
new book is "Triunfa y se Feliz: cosas que aprendi gracias a Dios, a mi
madre y la vida" or "Succeed and Be Happy: Things I Learned Thank God, My Mother
and Life."
E.L. Doctorow -
Novelist E.L. Doctorow is pleased "to see people who read" in attendance at
the National Book Festival. His latest work, "The March," is set
in the South during Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia and
the Carolinas during the Civil War. "It's this floating world on which
I chose to build a novel."
Rupert Holmes -
Rupert Holmes discusses how he fused his interest in music and mystery in his
Tony Award-winning musical, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and his most recent
book, "Swing," a musical murder mystery. Still, he is perhaps most well-known
for his popular tune, "The Piña Colada Song."
Mysteries & Thrillers
Sponsored by The Amend Group
David Baldacci
Nevada Barr
Sandra Brown
Jeffery Deaver
Martha Grimes
Rupert Holmes
Laura Lippman
Marcia Muller
John Sandford
Karin Slaughter
History & Biography
Sponsored by AARP
David Brooks
Andrew Carroll
Robert L. Carter
Joseph Ellis
Thomas Friedman
Kay Bailey Hutchison
Robert MacNeil
David McCullough
Andrea Mitchell
Steven V. Robert
John Irving - John Irving discusses his
latest novel, "Until I Find You," in the Fiction & Fantasy pavilion. Of his
writing style, Irving says, "Any novel of mine is more imagination than autobiographical.
...I'm in it for the detail; I love detail." He starts his books by writing
the last sentence so he knows how it will end before he begins.
Donald Hall
-
Donald Hall, former poet laureate of New Hampshire and the author of more than
15 books of prize-winning poetry, read Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking" in the Poetry pavilion.
Sue Monk Kidd -
Sue Monk Kidd discusses her latest novel, "The Mermaid Chair," a
story of a woman's self-awakening. Her first novel, "The Secret Life of Bees,"
caused "quite a buzz," according to Mrs. Bush, who introduced Kidd at the National
Book Festival gala.
Andrea Mitchell -
Veteran broadcast journalist Adrea Mitchell discusses her new book, "Talking
Back," a memoir about her experiences as one of the first women to cover five
presidents, Congress and foreign policy. "There is no room for broads in broadcasting,"
was the message she was given in the early years of her career.
Home & Family
Sponsored by Target
Giada De Laurentiis
Myrka Dellanos
Fernando & Marlene Divina
Leeza Gibbons
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Bob Kinkead
Chris Madden
Laurie Smith
Julie Sussman & Stephanie
Glakas-Tenet
David Tutera
Judith Warner
Poetry
Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts
Kim Addonizio
Marisa de los Santos
Alice Fulton
Dana Gioia
Donald Hall
Andrew Hudgins
Dolores Kendrick
David Kirby
Samuel Menashe
Mary Jo Salter
A.E. Stallings
Christian Wiman
Al Young
