Kevlar, goulashes, water, sunglasses and an infinite supply of patience. All the necessary gear for attending and surviving the 2008 National Book Festival. Rumor has it the Woodstock for Bibliophiles, Part Ocho, featured 70 authors and drew over 120,000 to the intermittently rain soaked Mall this past Saturday and put the security team for Laura and Jenna Bush into heart failure.
I, of course, passed up the Bush family fun for a half-smoked hot dog and coke on Independence before bracing myself to face the moldy smelling masses to hear Salman Rushdie in an overwhelmed Fiction and Mystery tent. (Fatwa = Kevlar). My interest lasted five minutes, which is about how long it took this master of modern literature with his expansive knowledge of five languages to digress into a political commentary. I took a pass, and did a providential about face to march into the History and Biography tent to encounter my unexpectedly favorite speaker of the day, Kimberly Dozier.
Dozier, who spent 2003 to 2006 as a war correspondent in Iraq, poignantly shared her personal experience of surviving a militant ambush in 2006 in Iraq that wiped out her entire crew and has left her at the mercy of the good graces of the Bethesda naval hospital staff for the past two years. Her book, Breathing Fire, “is not for or against the war, but about the people who put the wounded, including myself, back together.” She spoke of her colleague, Paul, that had told her “don’t risk my life unless we’re going to make air,” her long road to recovery and the passion of the airmen, doctors and nurses that invested their lives into making the injured’s better. It was beautiful, poetic, and tragic. Her empowering story was devoid of political statements and full of personal hope and enthusiasm for the relentless efforts of those injured in the war.
After that, it was a claustrophobia-inducing walk through the packed book sales tent, jostling efforts to hear the remaining speakers, and the jaw dropping lines for book signings. You would have thought they were selling the eighth installment of Harry Potter, not just offering up authors’ signatures. I was so overwhelmed that I forsook the masses for sanity and went home. Unlike the previous year’s note worthy experience, this one left me disenchanted with the surging masses. Where are the clandestined days of 30,000 attendees? Apparently stuck in 2001, when the first book festival was held. Now it seems everybody’s doing it, which, as my mother once told me, “is a sure fire reason why you shouldn’t be Sarah.” I hate to admit it, but she might be right.
Regardless, more generous logophiles claim that standing in packed tents permeated by muggy humidity was worth it to hear first hand that Kay Ryan, the community college professor turned U.S. Poet Laureate, figured out she was a writer on a cross-country biking trip somewhere in the Rockies (see “Savvy Verse & Wit” here), and that Phillipa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl, is historically endearing (read the Literate Housewife’s encounter). Bless them for it.
For other survivors of the 2008 National Book Festival, read on here:
