Love story: Book festivals bring readers, writers together -- Sept. 15, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

We think of reading as a solitary pastime, but it’s often social and cultural as well.

Who wants to talk about a great book? Just about everybody, as the explosion of book clubs in recent years attests.

Bring writers into the conversation, and you have a book fair. Add more readers and writers, and it’s a book festival.

About 75 book fairs and festivals are now held in 43 states. More than 120 authors and illustrators and upwards of 100,000 people are expected to throng the 15^th annual National Book Festival on Sept. 24 in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s capital.

Stephen King, whose books have sold an amazing 350 million copies worldwide, is the festival’s marquee draw. If you didn’t snag a free ticket for his sold-out appearance, you can still visit with big names.

No tickets are required for the other speakers, who, unlike King, will sign their books. Among them: filmmaker Ken Burns, journalist Bob Woodward and authors from at least seven foreign countries.

The celebration surrounding the opening of the Museum of African American History and Culture the same day likely will extend to the festival, where the roster includes basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, television producer Shonda Rhimes and novelist Colson Whitehead.

In addition, many readers may see Carla Hayden, the new Librarian of Congress for the first time. Hayden, the first African American and the first woman in the position, was sworn in Wednesday.

Free and with programs for all ages, the national festival is the legacy of first lady Laura Bush, a former librarian with the lifelong mission of inspiring people to read.  

In November, the Texas Book Festival, which Bush started when she was first lady of Texas, will mark its 20^th anniversary. She and the Library of Congress launched the national festival in 2001, just three days before the horrors of 9/11.

Bush didn’t invent book fairs, of course, but she did popularize them for modern readers.

Book fairs got their first 20^th century boost in 1919, when a Chicago department store held Book Week. One hundred thousand customers poured into the store to shake hands with 14 authors and buy books from 60 publishers, Bernadine Clark wrote in “Fanfare for Words,” a 1991 history of book fairs published by the Library of Congress.

The Miami Book Fair started in 1984 and the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in 1989. The Tennessee festival takes place Oct. 14 through 16.

In Virginia, the Fall for the Book festival, sponsored by George Mason University, runs Sept. 25 to 30, and the Virginia Festival of the Book is next set for March in Charlottesville. The 2017 Alabama Book Festival will be held in April in Montgomery.

Festivals are quick-hit gatherings for readers and writers, but the nation’s first, permanent celebration of American writers past and present is in the works. The American Writers Museum is under construction on the second floor of an office tower in downtown Chicago and plans to open in March.

The idea for the museum came from Ireland, where the Dublin Writers Museum honors great Irish writers. In this country, the writers museum will fill a void, says Jim Leach, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“We collect in central points the artifacts of civilization and honor politicians and soldiers, athletes, artists, inventors and entrepreneurs, but we neglect our writers,” Leach said in a statement on the museum’s website.

It probably won’t surprise anyone that Laura Bush is among those supporting the writers museum.

Like the Texas and national book festivals and literary events around the country, the new museum will “celebrate writers of every era, every genre and every race,” she says in a video, and “inspire everyone to fall in love with reading and writing.”

I hope she’s right.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A boomlet of Bush popularity -- April 25, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Americans are notoriously fickle. Three separate times while he was president, George W. Bush’s approval rating plummeted to 25 percent. This, of course, was the same president whose approval rating soared to 90 percent after the 9/11 attacks.

As Bush’s helicopter lifted off the U.S. Capitol grounds for his return to Texas after Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration in January 2009, the jubilant crowd sang-sneered:  “Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, goodbye!” At that point, only about one in three Americans approved of his performance as president.

Bush claims he never worries about polls or the judgment of history. When journalist Bob Woodward asked him in 2003 how history would judge the Iraq war, Bush declined to take the bait. “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead,” he said.

As they often do with polarizing politicians, people have mellowed toward Bush. Nearly half of adults now approve of the way he handled his job as president. While about three in four Democrats still disapprove, that’s down from the nine in 10 Democrats who disapproved in 2008 of the way he did his job.

Bush’s approval rating overall equals Obama’s, the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll reported Tuesday.  Such are the power of silence and absence.

   

In our ego-driven world, the idea of someone stepping off the national stage more or less voluntarily has definite appeal. Even his critics admired the way Bush picked up his paint brushes and went about his new life in Dallas, refusing to be drawn into the political fray.

He didn’t respond when Barack Obama and other Democrats blamed him for the mess he left. He skipped the 2008 Republican National Convention to stay in Washington after Hurricane Gustav, showing he did learn something from the disastrously slow response to Katrina. He declined an invitation to join Obama at Ground Zero after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. Bush also stayed away from the Republican National Convention last year.

The 43^rd president, in interviews surrounding the dedication Thursday of his presidential library, began to give his side of his eight White House years. For example, he vigorously defended the Medicare prescription drug benefit he expanded, despite Republican criticism that it was too big and costly.

“We were modernizing an antiquated system” already in place, he told the Dallas Morning News.

He regrets being unable to get an immigration bill through Congress, and he called for a “benevolent spirit” in the debate.

His brand of “compassionate conservatism” may yet get a second look from his party. After losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the Republican National Committee finally conceded that the perception that the GOP doesn’t care hurts Republican candidates. Imagine that. 

It’s worth remembering how Bush cast his compassionate conservatism. “Big government is not the answer. But the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference,” he said in 2000. “We will give low-income Americans tax credits to buy the private health insurance they need and deserve,” he said.

Democrats typically denounced Bush’s compassion as phony, and conservatives saw his conservatism as squishy. Interestingly, tax credits are what the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – will give low-income people in January to buy health insurance through exchanges.

   

House Republicans have voted repeatedly to repeal Obamacare. This week House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., tried a different approach. The felicitously titled “Helping Sick Americans Now Act” would redirect $300 million from the health law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund to a temporary health insurance fund for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

   

The idea was to show that while they hate Obamacare, Republicans do care about the sick. Not so fast.

Democrats opposed the measure for draining the public health fund, and the White House threatened a veto. But it was the ire of GOP conservatives that forced Cantor to pull the bill before a floor vote. Tea party Republicans and other conservatives refused to vote for anything short of repealing Obamacare.

Cantor says he isn’t giving up. Can he win the compassion argument among Republicans that Bush could not? Stay tuned.

   

 © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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