Alan Greenspan @The National Book Fest

Today, we are introducing our new companion blog, By the Book DC, If you are a reader or a book lover, you should like our new site. We hope you check it out and become a regular reader.

Last Saturday, the Library of Congress held its annual National Book Festival. More than 100 authors participated. Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman for the Federal Reserve for 13 years, spoke about his years one of the nation's most influential economist and The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting. was one those authors. He answered a series of questions posed by David Rubenstein, co-founder and Chief Executive of the Carlyle Group.

Economist Alan Greenspan answers 

questions form David Rubenstein

Question: Who is here to find out what the economy is going to do?

Greenspan: Raises his hand high, to much laughter from the crowd.

Question: What do you expect from the economy?

Greenspan: It is edging higher and that is likely to continue for a while. But we are in an area where we have never been before.

Question: Where do you invest?

Greenspan: I try to find out what Carlyle is doing (again, much laughter from the crowd).

Question: Did you really give up the clarinet to become an economist:

Greenspan: I was a very good amateur. I used to sit next to Stan Getz (a jazz great) and I realized that I can never play what this kid is playing. I am in the wrong profession.

Question: Who was the smartest president who ever worked with?
Greenspan: There were two - Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Now there were a few things wrong with Richard Nixon. I don't have time to enumerate them. I heard in person what you heard on the (Nixon secret) tapes. My general idea was he hated everybody.

To continue reading this post, which was published in our new companion blog By the Book DC, click here,

National Book Festival Only Weeks Away

Even though there are still several weeks until the unofficial August end of summer, it's not too early for book lovers to begin making plans for the Library of Congress' 2014 National  Book Festival set for Aug. 30.

There will be several changes to this year's event. First, it won't be held outside on the National Mall. Instead, it will held inside the massive Walter E. Washington Convention Center. 

The move was made to protect the newly planted grass on the National Mall.According to the Washington Post, the Library of Congress staff tried to address the Park Services concerns, but no compromise was able to be reached.

Instead of a 2-day festival, this year's event will be held on one day only. However, since it is inside, the day-long celebration of books, authors, and reading can run later than it did on the unlit Mall. Presentations will be offered for 12 hours, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

This year, local independent book store Politics and Prose will serve as the official festival bookseller. This is the 1st time in the festival's 14-year history that an independent bookseller has won the contract for the event.

Last year, the festival attracted more than 200,000 visitors. Like previous years, this year's event will feature many of the country's best-known authors, poets, and illustrators such as E.L Doctorow, Rep. John Lewis, Richard Rodriquez, and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. For a complete list of speakers and times, click here

National Book Festival Heading Off the Mall

The rumors were finally confirmed Wednesday: After 12 years on the Mall, the National Book Festival is moving to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Word that the National Park Service was concerned about pedestrian damage to the grass first broke in September, just as the 2013 festival was about to begin.

The Library of Congress staff tried to figure out some way to address the Park Service’s concerns, but ultimately, no feasible compromise was reached. More than 200,000 people attended last year’s two-day literary event.

To continue reading this post originally appearing in The Washington Post, click here.

A Vet Dishes on the National Book Fest

Brad Meltzer

With almost a dozen New York Times best selling books, many of them set in Washington, Brad Meltzer is no stranger to the National Book Festival, sponsored annually by the Library of Congress, and the DC area.

That was why, when he appeared at the Book Fest last Saturday, he felt like it was a homecoming of sorts.  It was also why he wanted to let his fans, hundreds of whom crowded into the Fiction and Mystery tent, in on the real reason why so many authors always attend the 2-day celebration on the National Mall of all things books.

And the secret?  Authors are offered a special breakfast at the White House. Meltzer recounted his first 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue dining experience. "I was sitting with (British fantasy writer) Neil Gaiman and Salmon Rushdie. And Neil and I are such geeks we were talking about Superman".

Meltzer said he did participate in one White House tradition. "The napkins disappear like crazy and I still have mine," he said.

Later, Meltzer was invited to a special lunch in the residential part of the White House. He found himself seated next to Barbara Bush. On the table in front of him was a beautiful, hand-written seat assignment card embossed with White House designs. Mrs. Bush leaned toward him and told Meltzer that first-timers often made off with the cards. "Oh, those novices," Meltzer said he told Mrs. Bush. "Hey," he called out while pointing, "Look, there's Ruth Bader Ginsburg". As Mrs. Bush turned, Meltzer pocketed his name card. "Still have that, too," he said.

Meltzer in a one-man media empire. In addition to his political thrillers, he has written two best-selling books for young people, one entitled Heroes for My Son and the other Heroes for My Daughter. He has worked on Green Arrow, Justice League of America, and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer comics. He also hosts the History Channel series Brad Meltzer's Decoded.

The prolific content producer was also one of the 1st authors to fully utilize the internet for promotion. Since much he has placed on line goes into far more depth about his writing than he had time to offer in the 45 minutes allotted to him at the Festival, we will use some of his own website postings to tell more about Meltzer and his books.

• Letters and Answers
• The Inner Circle
• New and Next
• FAQs

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips

While I like Meltzer's thrillers and am looking forward to his 10 greatest mysteries Decoded book coming next month, as a former teacher, I am most appreciative of his Heroes for My Son. In my last year of teaching, I used the book in my classes for seriously at risk students, some of whom were repeating 10th grade for a 3rd time. Most of these students were engaged and inspired by the stories in the book. I'm sure your children or grandchildren would be, too.

A Hilarious Take on Titles Rejected for Tall Tales Told

When Chris Buckley speaks, everyone laughs

Author Christopher Buckley has a big problem. Recognized as one of America's most humorous satirists, he says it is getting harder and harder to make stuff up that is funnier than what is really happening in America today.

For example, take one of Buckley's latest book tours. Here is how he described one incident from that tour to a tent full of fans this past weekend at the National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress.

"Well, you know those book blurbs. Sometimes, I just make them up. I had written that I had worked for every president since William Howard Taft (1909 to 1913). So I had an AM drive-time interview. Now, AM drive-time is not really the occasion for Socratic dialogue. You have kind of a sliding scale of interviewers.  At the top you have Terry Gross of NPR and then, down at the Jurassic level, you have AM talk show jocks. I got to the studio and I saw the DJ speed reading my book jacket for an in-depth interview."

Before they went on the air, the radio jock asked him: "So, you used to work for William Howard Taft?"

"I thought, oh what the hell, so I said, yeah."

"Can we talk about that?," the DJ asked.

"And we did," Buckley said, as the crowd laughed uproariously. "Needless to say, I wasn't asked back on the show, but it was worth it."

Buckley said that with so many books coming out each year (400,000 he said, with half of them written by Joyce Carol Oates, who was speaking after him) it was becoming more and more difficult to come up with a good book title. He said he was having such a problem with his new book, which he promised, although he wouldn't talk about it, "was very reasonably priced and attractively packaged".

Titles are supposed to mean something, Buckley contended. "Like when I saw 50 Shades of Gray, I thought it was about decorating. Boy was I in for a surprise," he said. Then there are the foreign sales to be considered. When John Steinbeck's classic Grapes of Wrath was released in Japan, the English title translation said Angry Raisins. "I wonder how Moby Dick made out?" Buckley rhetorically asked.

For the next 30 minutes or so, Buckley took the crowd through the process of trying to come up with a name for his new work of previously published essays that his publishers would accept.

His 1st suggestion was Want to Buy a Dictator? That title came from an article that he wrote for Forbes magazine. Here's how Buckley tells the tale.

"When the Soviet Union was breaking up and Russia was in financial trouble, I thought about (their former leader V. I) Lenin, who was displayed in his tomb. You know, kind of the Sleeping Beauty from Hell. So I decided to write a false story about them (the Russians) trying to auction off Lenin's corpse for hard currency. First, of course, I had to come up with a reasonable price for a dead Commie dictator. $15 million seemed about right"

"When we published the story, the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree so we went home so we wouldn't have to lie. That night I was watching Peter Jennings (on the nightly news) and he was talking about (the Lenin story)"

"The next morning, I got a call from ( uber-rich magazine owner) Steve Forbes. Now this was the guy who signed my check. It was pretty early for Steve to call. In fact, Steve Forbes had never called me. He said the Russians are going ballistic. They were calling me a brazen liar and an international provocateur ... and I thought ... cool."

But that wasn't the end of the story. In reality, the Kremlin became deluged with offers for the dead Lenin. One Dallas, Texas multi-millionaire offered $37 million. "I have talked to our designers and I have been told that Mr. Lenin would make a fine addition to our lobby," he was supposed to have announced.

"So you can see it is pointless to use satire. You're in a losing competition with tomorrow's front page," Buckley said, telling the crowd that the publishers would print the story but not use the related title for the entire book".

At this point Buckley digressed to reaffirm his contention that real-life is far more funny than any satire he could create. "I was in Dallas, Texas (must be something about Texas and Dallas) where I was speaking to a group of women and this lady introduced me as a satyrist. And she didn't just say it once, she kept on saying it. And I couldn't help thinking that this crowd of nice, blue-haired old ladies were thinking - why had the (speakers) committee chosen to have a sex pervert address them at 11 a..m?"

Then Buckley returned to his titling tale. His next suggestion was Bassholes. This came from an article he did about the growth of interest in fly fishing. "I told them there was a hunger in the land for a book called Bassholes. I have done the market research.." Unfortunately, the publishers didn't share that hunger and rejected that title also.

Undaunted, Buckley turned to an experience he had as a young 29-year-old English major chosen as a speech writer for then vice-president George H. W. Bush. He wanted to title the book Look Out, President Park.

It seems that when Buckley was hired, he was taken for training in what to do if he were on the scene of an attempted assassination. "Of course, John Wilkes Booth had killed Abraham Lincoln to avenge the entire South and John Hinkley had attempted to kill President Reagan to avenge Jodie Foster, which kind of speaks to the trajectory of idealism in American assassinations".

Anyway, Buckley was taken to a room where he was subjected to a series of what he called America's least funny assassination videos. However, one video was much different. It was an actual filming of an attempt on the life of then-South Korean President Park Chung-hee. Here is how Buckley describes the filmed scene.

"President Park was giving a talk and this guy walked up toward him, pulls out a .357 magnum. He takes his time and then you hear blam, blam, blam. And you see President Park sink down behind the podium as if this happened all the time. You could see him thinking - I hate this part. I'm dying up here".

Suddenly the guards sprung into action. "They began spraying the front row with machine gun fire. One of the guards rushed to take cover behind Mrs. Park. He was using the 1st Lady as a shield".

At the end of the session, an extremely serious official told Buckley he had 2 choices - you either duck or take the round.

Buckley said he had a quick response.  "What was that second part, again?," he said he asked. "I was reasonably sure if it came to that, I would take the duck, but I did want to hear the second choice again".

But Look Out, President Park was also rejected. So, even though he never had to face gun fire, Buckley's next suggestion - Thu - came from one of his most deadly days as a vice-presidential speech writer. In his writing for Vice President Bush, he had included a quote by the ancient Greek general and historian Thucydides. The speech was going splendidly until Bush got to the quote. "Thu ... Thu.. Thu," he said, stumbling over the name. Bush, certainly, as a Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, no dummy, tried again. But all that came out was "Thu ... Thu ..." Finally, on a 3rd try he got it right. After the speech, a glowering Admiral came up to Buckley and intoned, "The next time use Plato."

Despite Buckley's supporting story, the publishers said there was no way Thu worked as a title. Buckley then broke into the background for yet another suggestion, this time I Wish I Had Said That. However, before he could complete the story, his allotted time expired.

And so, while greatly entertained, the crowd never did find out exactly what the official title of Buckley's forthcoming work would be. But I'm 97.6% sure that most of them - me included - were going to buy the book, no matter what the title actually is. If we can only stop laughing long enough to get to the bookstore.

Book Fans and Their Fest

There are probably as many reasons to attend the National Book Festival as there are attendees. However, the avid reading enthusiasts who yearly congregate on the National Mall for one of America's largest book celebrations can loosely be arranged in 1 of 3 categories - some come for a particular type of book, others come for a particular author or authors, and still others come to grab the free reading goodies offered, which includes large, brightly-colored book bags (this year orange) to carry those items home.

Margaret Atwood prepares to take the stage

Take Anne Rhome. The 67-year-old Virginia resident could be found Saturday on the 2nd row of chairs in the Fiction and Mystery tent, where she planned to spend the entire 7 hours of the festival, which is sponsored by the Library of Congress.

"I come here to hear the authors talk about both their new books and their older books," Rhome says. "I've only missed 1 (of the 12) festivals. I stay mostly in the fiction tent because that is what I read."

So how come she wasn't in the 1st row? You could blame her late arrival for not getting the closest seats. On this particular Saturday, the book festival started at 10 a.m.with an appearance by Dom DeLillo, one of America's most acclaimed writers. In 2006, a New York Times survey of writers and literary experts chose his novel Underworld as the 2nd best novel of the past 25 years. When Rhome arrived shortly after 9 a.m., she was told the front row had been filled by 8:45.

Rhome says she never tires of the DC festival, which allows her to continue her life-long passion with books and reading. "When I was young, I loved being in the library and being surrounded by books," she said.

Then there are readers like Carolyn Hoy, a high school teacher who had traveled with 2 friends from Lancaster, Pa. for Saturday's programs. There were 2 reasons she was there - one was named Margaret Atwood; the other was Daniel Pink. In fact, we encountered Hoy as she was taking pictures of Pink, who was minutes away from delivering an engaging talk on his newest book entitled To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others.

"Don't you just love him," Hoy said as she snapped away. As a teacher, she readily agrees with Pink's contention that everyone is a salesmen and therefore should know the best ways to persuade and convince.
"I use all of his books in class," says Hoy, who teaches seminar classes to mixed groups of gifted students in grades 9 through 12. She said Pink's works are ideal for learning concepts of creativity and motivation.

As Pink prowled the stage animatedly distributing the wisdom he had gathered from social scientists around America, you could spot Hoy furiously scribbling down ideas to take back to her classroom.

Daniel Pink persuades fans like Hoy

In the final category you would be hard pressed to find a better example than my wife (and doting grandmother of our 2 grandkids, 5-and-half-year-old Audrey and 4-year-old Owen). Now while Judy did plan to see some authors (her 2 choices for this Saturday were Linda Ronstadt with her new memoir Simple Dreams and Christina Garcia, a Cuban-American writer whose latest book is a darkly comic novel featuring a fictionalized Fidel Castro entitled King of Cuba) that wasn't her main reason for her attendance.

Just a portion of my wife's free reading haul.

For much of the day, you could find Judy prowling the tents, filling her bright orange book bag with age-appropriate, reading-related materials for Audrey (who is already reading on her own) and Owen (who still prefers to be read to).

"I love the festival because they have a lot of fun, free, educational things that you can take home for your children or your grandchildren," Judy said. "And a lot of the items you couldn't even buy in stores if you wanted to".

My wife says she can't wait to bring Audrey and Owen (who currently live in suburban Atlanta) to the festival. I support that idea. Maybe then they can carry their own bags. But until that day comes, that is a task for Grandpop. Thank goodness I love books and my grandkids and I look good in orange.

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
To book lovers, the National Book Festival is like a rock festival. But like the New Orleans Fest or Bonaroo, the multiple-stages setup prompts some tough decisions. Here are some I faced this past weekend ... Linda Ronstadt or Dom DeLillio? .... James McBride or Daniel Pink? ...Terry McMillan or Benjamin Percy? Alfredo Corchado or Joyce Carol Oates? Taylor Branch (whom I have seen before) or lunch? What a wonderful problem to have.

The National Book Festival In Pictures

The Library of Congress held its 12th annual National Book Festival on the National Mall this past weekend. The 2-day event brought more than 100 authors to thousands of avid book readers of all ages. This post will show you some of what it was like to be there.

The Schedule 

A Sampling of Authors

Linda Ronstadt

Margaret Atwood

Brad Meltzer

Taylor Branch

Daniel Pink

Justin Cronin

Benjamin Percy

Christoper Buckley

Alfredo Corchado

Kenneth Mack

What Older Readers Did

And What Younger Readers Did

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
This is the 1st in a 5-part series on the National Book Fest.  Still to come:

• An inside look at why people attend the festival
• Titling a novel satirist Christopher Buckley
• The day as seen by Book Fest veteran and NY Times best selling author Brad Meltzer
• Festival newbie from Mexican-American journalist Alfredo Cortazar.