Library of Congress's National Book Festival

It's been two weeks since my sister Cynthia and I made our annual trek to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. I've been remiss in not writing about it sooner but you'll forgive me for having a minor stress meltdown as I waited to hear if my home had withstood the devastating Hurricane Irma. It did, though now we wait to see which paths the next two storms will take.

I'm guessing it had to do with the unseasonably cold, wet weather of Labor Day weekend, but the Walter Washington Convention Center was overflowing with book lovers. I've never seen it, even during Book Expo America, so jammed with people. Lines for every speaker ran round corners and through empty rooms, minimum waits ran forty five minutes. People were patient, they talked books with their neighbors or read what they had already purchased while standing in line. Never fear the demise of literacy.

My sister ran right to David McCullough but I had my sights set on Siddhartha Mukherjee. Having devoured "The Emperor of All Maladies," I was anxious to hear what the renowned cancer researcher had to say about genetic testing as it relates to disease. Though "The Gene, An Intimate History," looks daunting, Dr. Mukherjee spoke to his interviewer and the audience in clear, layman's terms. With the calm and kindness of doctors like Abraham Verghese or Atul Gawande, he explained that his book had begun as a very personal family story, a search for the genetic propensity to clinical depression. Instead, it became a broader history of the double edged sword that gene research has become, from the evil of forced sterilization (the story of Carrie Buck, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Buck), to the targeted therapies now being formulated to treat individual cancers.



Another non-fiction writer whose presentation took me completely by surprise was New York Times opinion writer and three time Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas Friedman. This was not a man to be tethered to a podium! He strode with purpose back and forth across the stage, engaging the audience with humor and aplomb. He shared the back story to the title of his latest book, "Thank You For Being Late," a plea to slow down and listen to our fellow humans even as we increasingly dance to the frenetic music of technology.

Friedman spoke of the new and unusual relationships he's formed since he made the conscious effort to take an extra five minutes to engage with people he would ordinarily be "too busy" to bother with. He spoke of the year 2007 as if it were a "supernova," filled with a remarkable accretion of technological advances that have pushed us beyond our wildest imaginings. And though he exhorts us to take time to smell the roses, Mr. Friedman also instilled fear in me when he opined that a young person entering college today will find that, by the student's senior year, much of what he or she learned to that point will already be outmoded. How does one even live with that kind of pressure?

And, speaking of pressure, I have a review due tomorrow for Library Journal on a book that I just finished yesterday, Elif Shafak's "Three Daughters of Eve." After I work on that I'll continue with this saga of my day in D.C. with the three authors I was able to hear in the afternoon.