^B00:00:00 >> From The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:07 [ Pause ] ^M00:00:18 >> David Rubenstein: Well, my name is David Rubenstein, and I have the honor of serving as the Co-Chair of the 15th National Book Festival with Jim Billington, The Librarian of Congress. And on behalf of the National Book Festival Board, The Library of Congress, I want to welcome everybody to this extraordinary event, so thank you very much for coming. ^M00:00:35 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:41 We have everybody here by definition is special. I could go through everybody's name, but that will take too long, so please excuse me for not mentioning you but I'll just do it generically. So we are very pleased that we have a number of members of Congress here. This is The Library of Congress, after all, and the Congress and The Library of Congress have a special relationship. Many members of Congress have shown enormous interest in The Library of Congress. I want to thank those members who are here for doing that and for coming this evening. I also want to thank the supporters of the Festival for many people who have done a lot to make this possible financially and otherwise, I'll mention some in a minute, but thank you. I want to thank the Madison Council, which is an arm, in effect, the affiliate of The Library of Congress, which helps with support for The Library of Congress, I want to thank them for their support of this event. I want to thank book lovers, and that includes everybody here, people who love books. I also want to thank a special person who is here this evening, the First Lady of Ruanda, Jeannette Kagame, where is she? Jeannette, thank you. ^M00:01:47 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:55 Jeannette is somebody who cares deeply about reading and education for children and is working on putting together the first Book Festival in Ruanda, so thank you very much for coming this evening. All of us know that we could be doing something else this evening and all of us know that it's a special weekend. And it's been my view for a long time that people who go to Book Festivals are likely to live longer. [laughter] And to have a healthier life. Now that's my observation, I can't prove it, but it is my - I do have it on good authority that those who go to Book Festivals on holiday weekends have a special place in heaven reserved for them. [laughter] Now, again, I can't prove that. ^M00:02:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:44 So as you talk today or tomorrow to your friends who are off to the Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket you should let them know that there's a special place in heaven reserved for you and they're not going to have it. [laughter] It's hard to believe that this Book Festival is only 15 years old. It seems like a tradition that's gone on for 50 years or longer, but it's only 15 years, honestly. It was in 2001 that the first Book Festival was held. There were 40 authors and there were about 30,000 people attended. It was quite an event, never had been done before. This year we have 170 authors and we expect well over 100,000 people on a Labor Day weekend, which is extraordinary. So this is due to the work of a lot of people and I'll mention some of those in a moment, but the festival tomorrow we will have 12 hours of round-the-clock programming. Doors open at nine, from 10 o'clock to 10 o'clock we're programmed, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of events. And anybody that cares about reading and books and literacy will have a great time there. Now The Library of Congress, itself, for those who may not be that familiar with it, has grown a fair bit as well since it's very modest beginning. The Library of Congress was an idea that James Madison had around 1783, but Congress didn't really get around to doing anything about it until 1800 when legislation was passed to move the Capitol officially to Washington, D.C. as part of that legislation there was a provision in the legislation to have a Library of Congress and all of $5,000 was appropriated for it. But the appropriation actually occurred, it wasn't a continuing resolution. [laughter] And that $5,000 was used to buy 740 books and three maps, and that was for awhile the collection of The Library of Congress. As we all know, in 1812 some people from another part of the Atlantic came to Washington and did some things that they probably now regret. One of those things was burning The Library of Congress. At that time The Library of Congress really had no books left and then Thomas Jefferson, who was a great fan of The Library of Congress and a great bibliophile offered to sell his collection to The Library of Congress and ultimately the negotiations went forward and happened, though interestingly there were some people in Congress who debated it because they thought that Thomas Jefferson really didn't believe in God and if we bought his collection there would be anti-God books in the collection. So they went through every single title before they agreed to buy the collection. They bought it for about $23,950 and he sold about 6,487 volumes, and that was The Library of Congress collection for awhile. Then in 1851 another tragic event happened, there was a fire in The Library of Congress, 55,000 volumes were then in The Library of Congress and about two-thirds of them were destroyed and about two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson's collection was destroyed. Now we're celebrating this year the 200th Anniversary of the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's collection and while all of those books aren't here because of that fire in 1851, through the leadership of Jim Billington and others we have restored virtually all of those books, not the originals from Thomas Jefferson, but the same volumes and they are here and you can see them at any time and you'll be able to see them this evening if you're interested. So this is the 200th Anniversary of that historic collection and purchase from Thomas Jefferson. I want to thank Jim Billington later and I want to mention him in a few other remarks I want to make, but Jim Billington is really the father of the National Book Festival and I will mention him in passing in a moment. But I just want to acknowledge that, Jim, I know that this will probably be your last time as the Librarian of Congress presiding over a National Book Festival and there are other people who are going to talk about you this evening, and I just want to say personally that I have enjoyed working with you extraordinarily. It's been one of the great privileges of my life to get to know you. You've done a great job for the country. I can't imagine we would ever have a better Librarian of Congress. ^M00:06:57 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:05 But shortly somebody with far greater eloquence than I will talk about Jim Billington in the ways that I think are worth listening to, shortly. So I want to thank the sponsors who made this possible this evening. Let me mention them -- Wells Fargo, which has been very, very supportive of The Library of Congress National Book Festival, AARP, The Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Washington Post, The Madison Council and NEA. And as a result of their gifts in kind and cash and other things we are able to have the National Book Festival for free. And I'm committed to making certain that as long as I'm involved it will always be for free and I think it's a great thing for the American people that we make it for free, and so everybody who wants to come tomorrow doesn't have to worry about cost and it's an extraordinary event, unlike anything really that I've seen anywhere else in the world in terms of a Book Festival. So I would like to just say that Jim ... ^M00:08:04 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:10 ... how did we actually come to this Book Festival, how did it actually come about. Well, many different ways that you can look at it, but victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan, it is often said, and this is a victory. But really there are only two people that deserve the credit for getting this off the ground. At the time of the Inaugural festivities of George W. Bush, Laura Bush mentioned to the Librarian in the Congress, Jim Billington, that there had been a Texas Book Festival that she had helped to start and she wanted to know was there a National Book Festival? And Jim Billington said, well, there isn't yet, but there will be. And Jim Billington then began to work very closely with Laura Bush and, well, why don't we let her tell you more about it. >> Laura Bush: Good evening and welcome to the 15th National Book Festival's Gala, on the eve of our very first National Book Festival. On Friday, September 7th, 2001wegathered right here in the Coolidge Auditorium of The Library of Congress to begin what we hoped would become a new tradition in our nation's Capitol. President Bush, many members of his Cabinet, and a marvelous group of authors and book lovers, just like you, were here to help launch what has since become one of the most successful Book Festivals in the world. I am proud to have worked alongside the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington, and his excellent staff to bring to Washington a National Book Festival. As a lifelong lover of books and a librarian I believe that children everywhere should learn to read and I know that literacy is an essential foundation for democracy. And like Thomas Jefferson, who 200 years ago sent his lifetime collection of books to be housed in the building where you now sit, I too cannot live without books. So it's a special joy to welcome you here tonight to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the National Book Festival. Thank you, Dr. Billington, for your service as our nation's Librarian. Thank you to The Library of Congress, the largest, most vibrant Library in the world. Thank you to all the friends of The Library of Congress. Happy 200th Birthday to our national treasure, the Thomas Jefferson Collection. And Happy Birthday to yet another American treasure, the National Book Festival. ^M00:10:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:11:00 >> David Rubenstein: All right, you're going to now hear from some very distinguished authors and then I think you'll be quite pleased to hear from their extraordinary comments. Ladies and gentlemen, Kwame Alexander. ^M00:11:22 [ Applause ] ^M00:11:35 [ Pause ] ^M00:11:40 >> Kwame Alexander: Good evening. I am just honored and very grateful to be here. Thank you to Maria Rena [Assumed Spelling], to Dr. Billington, to the National Book Festival staff for this wonderful event, for 15 years of this literary tradition. I grew up as a writer here in this area. I became a poet in earnest across the bridge in Arlington, Virginia. There was a woman, of course, it always starts with a woman, that I had a crush on and I needed to be able to convey that to her. And the only way I knew - I wasn't very cool, I didn't get cool until recently. [laughter] And so the only way I was able to convey that I was interested in her was through a poem, but not just any poem. I wrote her a poem a day for a year. [laughter] I am not a painter, browns and blues we get along but we are not close, I am no Van Gogh, but give me plain paper, a dull pencil, some Scotch and I will hijack your curves. ^M00:13:08 [ Applause ] ^M00:13:13 Take your soul hostage, paint a portrait so colorful and delicate you just may have to cut off my ear. [laughter] And she married me. ^M00:13:28 [ Applause ] ^M00:13:35 I'm a poet. My life's work is taking the human soul entire, and like Langston Hughes said, squeezing it like a lime or a lemon, drop by drop into atomic words. I am a poet, I write to explore and explode. I write to dream a world that does better, that knows better. My heart is here with you tonight at seven p.m., but my head is still some time else at seven a.m. You see, 24 hours ago my family and I arrived from Singapore. And to just further illustrate what that means, at two a.m. this morning I hear music and dancing coming from my seven year old's room because she thinks it's two o'clock p.m. We spent three weeks in Singapore eating black pepper crab, drinking lime juice, and marveling at the greenest, cleanest city we'd ever seen, but it wasn't just fun, well at least not for me. It was work, I was there to write, or rather to share my writing with 4,000 students at the Singapore American School. Each day for three weeks I did my normal thing. I talked about growing up in a house with 10,000 books. I talked about wanting to be cool in high school and figuring out that the answer to that was playing tennis. [laughter] I talked about writing my first poem for my mother on Mother's Day when I was 12, the first line went something like this - Dear Mommy, I hate Mother's Day. [laughter] I talked about writing a love poem for a girl I had a crush on in college and then taking an advanced poetry class with Nicki Giovanni [Assumed Spelling] and getting a C minus on that poem. [laughter] I talked about the 20 plus rejections I received from the Crossover and then, of course, I shared a poem from the Crossover. Josh Bell is my name, but filthy McNasty is my claim to fame. Folks call me that because my game is a claim, so downright dirty it'll put you to shame. My hair is long, my height is tall, see, I'm the next Kevin Durant, LeBron and Chris. You guys are a little slow tonight. [laughter] I'm the one jetlagged. My game is tight. My dad likes to gloat. I ball with Magic and the goat. But tricks are for kids, I reply, don't need your games, my games still fly. Mom says your dad is old school, like an old Chevette. You're fresh and new, like a red Corvette. Your game is so sweet its crepe suzette. Each time you play its all - much better. [laughter] During the q-and-a, after one of the presentations, a boy raised his hand and asked why do you write children's literature? Because the older we get the more unwelcoming we are to change or maybe we're just too busy for it. Sometimes when the world is not so beautiful, when the women have lost their Sunday song, and when the men are being blown away like sand in a windstorm, I write. I write so that children can imagine and reimagine a world that is a little bit more tolerant and more human. I write to my seven-year-old daughter so that she will have a mirror that shows how beautiful and brilliant she is. I write so our children will have a window to show them what is possible. I am a poet. I say yes to an authentic and meaningful life, so that I can have something authentic and meaningful to write about. That is why I write for children. And after I finish this answer I sort of tear up a little bit. I'm not sure why, but the students start staring at me sort of awkwardly and they're in silence, and they don't know whether to comfort me or just sort of wait it out. That evening when I get back to the hotel, a teacher sends me an e-mail with a note from one of the eighth graders who was in the presentation. It read, Kwame's poetry presentation made me reexamine myself, my doubts and what limits I place on myself. A common thing I like to do is run away from problems, tests, procrastinate, parents angry at you, just lock the door and turn up the speakers, bad grades, screw school, but when Kwame said something along the lines of don't let the no's define you it sort of slapped me in the face in a good way. And then the eighth grader ended with this line, these four words, I have to change. That is why I write for children. I'm a poet and poets are dreamers, and I simply want to dream a world that is worthy of them. Thank you. ^M00:18:58 [ Applause ] ^M00:19:12 >> David Rubenstein: Ladies and gentlemen, Andrea Wulf. ^M00:19:19 [ Applause ] ^M00:19:27 >> Andrea Wulf: That is so unfair to come after you. [laughter] Well, it is a great honor to speak about Alexander von Humboldt here in the Jefferson Building of The Library of Congress because there are some wonderful connections between Humboldt, Jefferson and this Library in Washington, D.C. But let me start with a quote about Alexander von Humboldt. This is what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about him in 1869. Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Cesar, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind. Yet over the past few years whenever I told someone that I'm writing a book about Alexander von Humboldt, the most common reaction I got was a blank face. Very few people in the English-speaking world have heard about him, yet his name is everywhere. The Humboldt current, that's the ocean current which hugs the West Coast of South America, the Humboldt penguin, there are mountain ranges across the world which carry his name. In North America alone there are four counties and 13 towns called Humboldt. There are mountains here. There are lakes. There's a river. Even the State of Nevada was almost called Humboldt when a name was discussed in the 1860s. So who was this man? Humboldt was born in 1769 in Prussia and he became the most celebrated scientist of his age. His contemporaries thought that he was the most famous man after Napoleon and they called him the Shakespeare of Sciences. He was also brazenly adventurous. He went on a five-year exploration of Latin America, and it was a voyage that shaped his life, his thinking, and that made him legendary across the world. He ventured deep into the mysterious rainforest of Venezuela. He cross the Andes from Bogota to Lima, climbing the highest volcanoes in the world. And it was during this voyage that he came up with a concept of nature that still very much shapes our thinking today, the idea that nature is a web of life. He described earth as a living organism where everything is connected. He is also the forgotten father of environmentalism. He warned of the devastating environmental affects of monoculture irrigation and deforestation. Amazingly, he predicted in 1800 harmful human induced climate change. He brought together art, the arts and the sciences. He said we had to feel nature to understand nature. I could basically go on forever because he was an extraordinary polymerase [Assumed Spelling], he was a genius polymerase who crossed, who roamed across the disciplines. And he influenced scientists, writers, poets and artists. Thomas Jefferson called him one of the greatest ornaments of the age. Napoleon was jealous of him. Charles Darwin said he would have never boarded the Beagle without Humboldt and, therefore, not conceived of the original species. Henry David Thoreau's Walden would have been a very different book without Humboldt. John Muir's [Assumed Spelling] ideas on forest preservation were heavily influenced by Humboldt. And even Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's famous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea owned all of Humboldt's books. But let me tell you a little bit about Humboldt, Jefferson and Washington, D.C. So after his exploration in Latin America Humboldt returned to Europe, but he did a little detour and he stopped at Philadelphia and then in Washington because he wanted to meet the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, whom he greatly admired. He arrived in D.C. in early June 1804, and he was a very busy man. Everybody wanted to meet the heroic explorer. James Madison hosted a party for him. Jefferson hosted a party at the White House for him. And he, of course, went to The Library of Congress. He went here on the 4th of June, 1804. He also went to Mount Vernon, spent the afternoon there, and then had dinner in Alexandria. And there's a wonderful description of that evening by the artist, Charles Willson Peale. Basically what happened was they had dinner in Alexandria, it was late, they had come here, there were two carriages. The two drivers of the carriages were absolute drunk by the time the dinner was done and decided to race back to D.C. So every time one of the carriage drivers tried to overtake the other one, the other one would kind of block them, and there were quite a few hairy moments when the carriages almost overturned. And I'm pretty sure that Humboldt absolutely loved this mad race, but I have to say I'm rather glad that he didn't die on a road from Alexandria to Washington, D.C. I would not be standing here today. So this was the social side of this visit, but there was also a political side. And the timing of Humboldt's visit to D.C. could have not been better because Jefferson had just acquired the Louisiana Territory in the previous year. And Jefferson bombarded Humboldt with questions about the new neighbor, Mexico, because Humboldt had just been there. And Humboldt delivered plentiful, including 18 tightly written pages which summarized information about agriculture, mining and commerce in Mexico. And these are still today in The Library of Congress. This was exactly the kind of intelligence that Jefferson wanted. And over the next few years Humboldt and Jefferson corresponded and many of their letters are here at the Library. And Humboldt also sent Jefferson his books whenever he published them. So when Jefferson sold his collection of more than 6,000 books, exactly 200 years ago, to The Library of Congress there were quite a few Humboldt books in that collection. So my book, The Invention of Nature, is my attempt to find Humboldt and to restore him to his rightful place in the pantheon of nature and science. And the great thing about writing a book about an explorer is that you actually get to travel to pretty amazing places yourself, obviously all in the course of research. [laughter] So, for me, this has been an incredible journey through landscapes and letters. I went to the Andes, for example, and went up the Antesun [Assumed Spelling] which is a volcano, and at 13,000 feet I found the hut in which Humboldt had spent the night in 1802. I climbed the Chimber Rock [Assumed Spelling], so another volcano in Ecuador, which had been incredibly elemental for Humboldt's vision of nature. I paddled along the Orinoco and listened to the strange bellowing cries of howler monkeys in the rainforest in Venezuela. I walked around Walden Pond in freshly fallen snow, and I went to the Yosemite where John Muir had implemented Humboldt's ideas of forest preservation. Appropriately when researching an explorer, I also experienced a hurricane, though admittedly not in Latin America, but in New York when I got stuck there for five days during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. So now I'm here, finally launching my book after many years of research, in the city where Humboldt and Jefferson first met. And I hope I've made you a little bit curious about this man because he was really extraordinary and I think he deserves to be known much better. He was, after all, as one contemporary said, the greatest man since the deluge. Thank you. ^M00:28:03 [ Applause ] ^M00:28:16 >> David Rubenstein: Ladies and gentlemen, Rick Atkinson. ^M00:28:19 [ Applause ] ^M00:28:25 >> Rick Atkinson: Well, that's so unfair to follow both of you. Well, good evening, welcome. I've lived in Washington for almost 40 years and this is a town that despite its dysfunction and its deep weirdness appreciates books, those who write them, those who edit and publish them, those who sell them. I write about war, both the inhuman side and the human side, which is one of the themes of this year's Book Festival. If you're from out of town and you're looking for a touristy thing to do this weekend after the Festival I suggest you cross the Potomac River and visit Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. Section 60 is where many of our battle dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are buried, almost a thousand of them. I once called it the saddest acre in America, but it's actually almost 14 acres, sadly. First Lady Laura Bush gave us the National Book Festival, others gave us Section 60. As an Army brat I grew up on Army posts and most of them have a national cemetery full of war dead. For a kid there was something mesmerizing about these places, including the regularity of the gravestones, each 28 inches high, bone white, perfectly aligned, each grave containing a world gone. W.H. Alden [Assumed Spelling] said we were put on this earth to make things. I think he would take a broad view of what we should be making, a poem, a novel, a cookbook, a gadget, but the point is to be a maker. Like some of you I suspect it took me awhile to figure out what it was that I was supposed to make. I did the usual stumbling, fumbling adolescent thing, post-adolescent. I thought I wanted to be an Army officer like my father. I had an appointment to West Point, David Petraeus' class in fact, but decided at the very last minute not to go because I wanted to study literature and maybe even try my hand at writing. I also wanted to go to a place where there were girls, and at that time West Point admitted exactly zero. I stumbled into the newspaper business, eventually stumbled into The Washington Post because as an Army brat I knew the difference between an F-16 fighter and an M-16 rifle I was given military topics to write about. I found that my calling was to make something of all those graves, those worlds destroyed, those young men dying young. So what I do is write about war, and that sadly never goes out of fashion, it's always a growth industry. I now consider myself a recovering journalist, instead of writing the first rough draft of history, trying to use a longer lens writing narrative military history, every scribbler since Eucides [Assumed Spelling] knows that writing about war means writing about love, valor, venality, the foolishness of fools, the knavery of knaves, the whole panoply of human behavior and misbehavior. In early 2003 between books I did some backsliding into journalism and went off to war, from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, then commanded by my non West Point classmate, Dave Petraeus. One day just after the invasion began Petraeus and I were standing outside in a screaming sandstorm in a remote hellhole of Southern Iraq, our faces no more than eight inches apart. Things were not going very well in the war, not very well at all. And he said tell me how this ends, tell me how this ends? I recently finished writing 750,000 words about the American role in the liberation of Europe in World War II. We just commemorated on Wednesday the 70th Anniversary of the formal end of the War. Oddly enough during the home stretch that question perplexed me, tell me how this ends? Authors know that finding an ending can be as difficult as finding a beginning sometimes. We all know how World War II ends, right? Ticker tape, America ascendant, boom and post-war babies, some of whom are sitting in this room tonight. But then I came across a document compiled by the US Army in 1946 that suggested how to put a period on those 750,000 words. The document recounted in exquisite detail how in a large warehouse at 601 Hardesty Avenue in Kansas City the US Army Effects Bureau had begun as a modest quartermaster operation with a half dozen employees in February 1942. That expanded to more than 1,000 workers, and by August 1945 they were handling 60,000 shipments a month, each laden with the effects of American dead from six continents. Hour after hour, day after day shipping containers were unloaded on to a receiving dock and then hoisted by elevator to the Depot's 10th floor. Here the containers traveled by assembly line, conveyor belt, down to the 7th floor, as inspectors pawed through each container to extract pornography, ammunition, perhaps amorous letters from a girlfriend you didn't want a grieving widow to see. Workers used grinding stones and dentist drills to remove bloodstains and corrosion from helmets and web gear. A detailed inventory was then pinned to each repacked container before it was stacked in a storage bin. And all the while in a huge adjacent room banks of typists were banging out letters, up to 70,000 letters a month by December of 1945, and the gist of those letters was this - Dear Sir, Dear Madam, we have your dead son's stuff, you want it back, where should we send it? Over the years the Effects Bureau, inspectors found amazing things - tapestries, enemy swords, a German machinegun, walrus tusks, a shrunken head, a tobacco sack full of diamonds. Among thousands of diaries also collected in Kansas City was a black notebook that belonged to Lieutenant Herschel G. Horton, 29 years old from Aurora, Illinois. Shot in the leg and hip during a firefight with a Japanese on New Guinea, he had dragged himself into a grass shanty. And in the several days that it took for him to die he wrote a final letter home to his family. And it began -- My Dear Sweet Father, Mother and Sister, I lay here in this terrible place wondering not why God has forsaken me, but why he is making me suffer. That's how it ends, that's how it always ends. And I'll end this evening, since we are in The Library of Congress by quoting our recent Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, who ends her poem, Pilgrimage, which is about a visit to Vicksburg, with these lines - In my dream the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm. My job is to make the reader feel that heavy arm. Thanks very much for the privilege of being with you this evening. Thank you. ^M00:36:56 [ Applause ] ^M00:37:07 >> David Rubenstein: Ladies and gentlemen, Louise Erdrich. ^M00:37:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:37:18 >> Louise Erdrich: I feel like I've been everywhere already, from a world being dreamed by someone with a child who wants to make it worthy for, to a universe where Humboldt's, in Saul Bellow's words, Humboldt's dream of nature is realized, and to your world. I want to thank you, all of you for bringing me there. The first thing I'm going to do after this is read your latest books. Thank you. ^M00:38:01 [ Applause ] ^M00:38:08 [ Foreign Language ] ^M00:38:18 I wanted to say something in Ojibway because we're in the Jefferson Building. I thought it would be exciting. The reason I know a little Ojibway is because my mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa and my father met her when he went there to teach, and the story is he looked across a road and he saw her walking across and he couldn't stop looking. And his brother was with him, and he said I'm going to marry her. And they did. And so I'm here tonight. Thank you. [laughter] That's what you do as a writer, you get lost in your own stories, I guess. When I was informed of this Award I was astounded and I looked back, as anyone would, through literary history, heroes, people and I noticed as a woman and as a mother that, and as a native woman, my father is German, my mother is native, that there were very few women, fewer mothers and very, very few native women. So I also want to thank reliable birth control, family planning. And I think that there's no question that there is a coincidence between the remarkable and amazing novels and nonfiction, everything that's being written in the past 40 years and the very simple fact of birth control. So I want to say that because as a mother [applause] - I know I wouldn't have had the presence of mind without knowing something about my future. I would also like to dedicate these short remarks to my friend, Loretta Monette's [Assumed Spelling] literature class at the Turtle Mountain High School in Belcourt, North Dakota on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. And I'm just going to say this because I'm hoping this is streamed and I know they want to watch it, so I'm addressing all of us although I'm going to say young people. We're all young, so young people, you can reach into another person's most hidden self, the existence you can't know otherwise, by reading books. By reading you will reach into yourself and find out who you are. Dear young people, reading is about connecting hearts. So, as I said, I grew up in a small town, and I was the oldest of seven - in North Dakota - I was the oldest of seven children. And our parents were and are - my father is 90, my mother is 80 - they were our schoolteachers because as a teacher you never lose your teaching instinct. Everything when I grew up was labeled with, every object had a German or Spanish or French label on it so that we would learn these languages. And on the rare occasions that we were permitted to watch television we had to cover our eyes during commercials. My father especially was very worried that - he loved capitalism in many ways, but he really didn't like this, how we would be persuaded to buy useless objects if we watched these commercials. And to this day he is still that way. He has never bought a pair of socks, and that's going way too far, he mends his own socks and he's 90. [laughter] Those were the days, though, that a parent would say put down that book and do something useful. I got that a lot. And now we get this misty feeling when we see a child somewhere reading a book, right? We don't want to disturb that intimacy. And as the daughter of schoolteachers I'm very aware that really the future of what we hold so dear, of literature and books, really is in the hands of schoolteachers. Teaching a young person to love reading is really a mind-bending task, and they do it and they do it every day and they do it with love. And I see every day, along with my daughter Palace who is here with me, that children do, do love books. It's like a natural sort of once they really are committed to reading they fall in love. We own a bookstore, it's called Birch Bark Books. It's a little place in Minneapolis, and we're going to stock your books, we're going to sell our books. We love bringing books to people, and we still see children walking into the bookstore with big handfuls of change. I mean, you know, maybe they held somebody up, but they've got this money that they've collected from babysitting or under the couch cushions, and they're still buying a book that they've had to scrape some money together to buy and they want it to be theirs. But when I grew up we were living in a small town, schoolteachers didn't have much money, and we had three books. We had Marjorie Morningstar by the first author who was awarded this price, Herman Wouk. Marjorie Morningstar was on the highest shelf so I couldn't read it until I learned how to climb up the side of some very rickety shelves. I read it when I was about eight. Amazing. And we had the Bible. And we had Animal Farm by George Orwell, and I read that when I was nine. And I thought the best pig story ever. [laughter] And when I was 13 I read it again, and I thought it changed everything for me because I couldn't believe that something could be written on two levels. My escape or my treasure, the place that I was educated was a library, it was a town library endowed by some very good people in the town. I read most of the books in there or tried to read most of the books in there before I left Wahpeton. And, oh, my mother, I hope this isn't streamed now because I'm going to say this - my mother took out a book called Portnoy's Complaint because I told her it was great. [laughter] And she brought it home and she read it. This is a small town and you had to sign your name on library cards, right? And she erased her name and put it back in the middle of the night. [laughter] So this prize is especially meaningful to me. It's meaningful that as a culture we consider books so important that we have established and maintained a National Library. To me, this says more about us as a nation than our military power, than our global influence, than our wealth. This is our wealth, and what this wealth involved is our freedom to think what we think, say what we say, and publish what we write for other people. And then for these works to be treated as treasure this is what is noble about our country. My first job in Wahpeton was hoeing sugar beets. Now I've said that writing was similar, that I spend my days chopping words out that suck the life from sentences. In a way writing is a very miniscule, tedious, almost insect-like operation, you know? I still feel very much like the 13-year-old girl that I was when I had my first job, and I still feel so excited and so happy that I don't have to have that job, I don't have to hoe sugar beets. It's changed everything, too, because once you know what it's like to work on that level it changes how you see the entire structure of the world and where this country came from, the foundation upon which its beauty and wealth and honor and gorgeous buildings exists. It exists on the sweat and the hard work, the pain of people who were in slavery, the dispossession of native people, backs of women, all of that is all part of what we write about. And all that is part of the extraordinary complexity that we find ourselves in. I was so nervous about coming here because I realize again whenever I'm going somewhere that I have always forgotten to invent a literary persona. Now it's completely too late. [laughter] I'm writing a book now that started with an Indian boarding school experience. My grandfather, Patrick Garneau [Assumed Spelling], who testified in Congress on behalf of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, was educated not quite to the eighth grade level in Indian boarding schools. And I researched his life, I was able to get all his school files through The Library of Congress Midwestern Archives in Kansas City to deal straight on with a wonderful librarian and to have his very files and his letters in his own handwriting sent to me. And he has been a hero, a family hero of ours, very learned, very interesting, wonderful traditional dancer, just a terrific man. I didn't know that he'd run away from school. Now I didn't know that he tried so hard to get back into the boarding school that he was sent away from, and that the superintendent had written him back a letter - Dear Pat, we can't let you in, it wouldn't be right. After the intoxicating substance that you manufactured behind the barn. [laughter] With the other sixth graders, we just don't know if we can let you back in. These are - the libraries are full of things we don't know, and it's a discovery and it's a marvelous thing that you do as librarians and that we all can participate in by supporting you. In that book, as many native people do, in fact more native people per percentage of population enlist in the Armed Services than any other population group. In that book a young man in 2003 has joined the National Guard, in which my father served for 36 years - he's joined the National Guard, extremely excited. For as many people are and were in the real parts of this country, full of fervor, full of excitement to change the world, to make the world better, but it's 2003 and to his disappointment he finds that this action, this war that is going on in Iraq will be over in 100 days. If I aspire to anything it is to understand, acts of love, self-sacrifice, trust, bravery, shame of cowardice, the learning opportunities of failure, joy, absurdity, everything about ourselves in our singular human existence. So this is who I am and this is all I am, a writer trying over and over with insane persistence to understand. Thank you. ^M00:53:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:53:20 >> David Rubenstein: How many people here are attending their first Book Festival, National Book Festival, could you raise your hands? Wow. How many have attended the last five? The last 10? All 15? Wow. Okay. Jim, we know you attended all 15. [laughter] There are a number of authors who were at the first Book Festival and I just want to acknowledge a number of them here. Scott Berg, are you here, Scott? ^M00:53:48 [ Applause ] ^M00:53:53 Scott, stand up. Scott is the Author of great books on Woodrow Wilson, Lindbergh, among other things, Katherine Hepburn, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Thank you for coming again, Scott. Tom Mallon [Assumed Spelling], a great historical novelist, where is Tom, is he here somewhere? There he is in the back. Thank you. ^M00:54:09 [ Applause ] ^M00:54:13 He was at the first Book Festival as well. Walter Moseley [Assumed Spelling], a mystery and crime fiction writer, a great one. Where is he? There he is. Thank you. ^M00:54:19 [ Applause ] ^M00:54:23 And is Tom Brokaw here? Tom is going to be here tomorrow. Is Tom here now? All right, he's going to be here tomorrow and we're going to have a great session with him. And there's one other person I want to acknowledge, who was at the first Book Festival. He's a person who I think has done more to get Americans excited about history and their history than any other living writer. It's a man who has written 10 books, two of them have won Pulitzer Prizes. His books have sold more than 10 million copies, translated into 17 different languages. He is the recipient of more than 50 honorary degrees. He has won the Medal of Freedom, and he is the proud father of five children and 19 grandchildren, and is a man that I think has done more to help The Library of Congress practically than any other living author by speaking about The Library of Congress so eloquently and so frequently, and he did much of his research on his books at The Library of Congress. It's my honor to introduce David McCullough. ^M00:55:29 [ Applause ] ^M00:55:50 >> David McCullough: Thank you. Thank you very, very much. I was speaking at a college in California not long ago, and in the question-and-answer period I was asked aside from Harry Truman and John Adams how many other Presidents have you interviewed? [laughter] Well, appearances notwithstanding, I never knew either Mr. Truman or Mr. Adams. But I've been asked if I could be somewhere to witness some event that took place in the lives of either of those men? Because of my devotion to this great institution here, I would have loved to ask John Adams how he felt signing the first Library of Congress into law as President of the United States in 1800 on April 24th, a day that I think all of us ought to know, that date. It was probably one of the very few things that he and his Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, agreed on. And, of course, they both expressed their love of books in a vivid fashion more than once. Adams grew up in a house where there were no books, maybe a Bible. His mother was illiterate. And, as he said, he went to Harvard, discovered books, and I've read forever. When he was in his 80s he embarked on a 16-volume history of France in French, which he taught himself. We have come a long way and for a very good reason, by so many people who went before us who did so much that we should never, ever take for granted. And the establishment of an institution, such as this, here on the acropolis of our country where it belongs was one of the greatest of all American achievements and still is. Think of it, the greatest Library in the world, and it began here and we are the beneficiaries, all of us. I speak tonight at this celebrant occasion, this wonderful Book Festival, as one whose life was changed by this Library, whose whole direction as in my ambitions of what I would make of my life changed. Fifty years ago this year I signed my first book contract and I couldn't believe that a publisher was willing to sign a book contract with me because I'd come upon quite by accident, a discovery here, right upstairs, about the disastrous plight in Johnstown, Pennsylvania of 1889. I'd grown up in Pittsburgh, which is not very far away, and heard about this calamity all my life, but I really didn't know what happened. And I saw a collection of photographs lying on a big table upstairs and stopped to look at them and could not believe the scale of devastation revealed in those photographs. So I took a book out of the Library to read about it, and it wasn't very good. So I took another book out of the Library, and if anything it was less satisfactory, it was a potboiler written at the time. Well, in college as an English major I had come under the influence of the wonderful Thornton Wilder, who was a fellow in Davenport College at Yale, and I was a student resident in Davenport College. And you could go in and sit down beside him at lunch in the dining hall if he happened to be there and talk with Thornton Wilder. And somebody once asked him how did you get the ideas for your plays and your novels? And he said, well, I would imagine a story I would like to read or a play, a story I'd love to see performed on the stage, and I'd check around and find out that nobody had written it. I would write it myself so I could see it performed on stage, but read it in a book. [laughter] And I said to myself why don't you try and write the book about the Johnstown flood that you wished you could read. I'd never done any research of a serious nature in my life. I've had relatively little history. I never - I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was here working for the US Information Agency, which I had done because when Kennedy gave his call for all of us to serve our country, to do something for your country, I thought I'm going to do that. So I quit my job in New York at Time and Life. I was still in my 20s, came to Washington. Knew nobody in the Kennedy crowd. Knew nobody here in the Government. Wound up, stroke of luck, working for the US Information Agency, which was what brought me up to The Library of Congress to check something out for a project I was involved with. That was more than 50 years ago. I've just published my tenth book, most of which is based and the whole idea of the book is based on what kind of human beings were the Wright Brothers. And I was able to find that right here, upstairs - excuse me, across the way in the new Library in the Wright Brothers Collection, which is one of the greatest collections of letters in all of the great collections of The Library of Congress. Over a thousand private letters, private correspondence just between the father, the two brothers, and the daughter. More than a thousand letters written mainly by Wilbur Wright concerning their professional efforts to discover the secret to flight. You can go inside their lives, inside their worries, inside their determination to not be stopped by failure, inside the fact that they had the capacity to learn from failure, and they were knocked down and seemingly defeated many, many times in many ways, but they would not give up and they always came back, what did we learn from that defeat, that failure? And to have the privilege of reading those letters and discovering that these two men who broke one of the most highly technical difficult problems of all time and then changed the world, changed history with what they accomplished, who had no money, who had no education beyond high school, but who grew up in a houseful of books, who grew up under the inspiration and direction of a father who had them read everything, but mainly the great works of literature - Virgil, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, poetry, drama, theater, Shakespeare, natural history, everything. And to read above the level always from the childhood on. Who had what would amount to a brilliant and very full good liberal arts education in a tiny little wood frame house on a side street in Dayton, Ohio. And yet they mastered this most difficult of all technical problems, not because they'd been trained in technology or science, but because they had that reach of mind and that sense of having purpose in life, high purpose, and by being curious about everything. Orville Wright was once asked if he didn't agree with those who said that he and his brother were the perfect example of how far an American could go with having had no advantages growing up? He said, oh, that's not true, we had the greatest advantage any children, any child could have, we grew up in a house that stimulated and encouraged intellectual curiosity. I've had the privilege of using the treasures, of having my mind opened, my curiosity enhanced by this Library for every subject I have undertaken, every one. I owe my life's work to this Library, and my gratitude and my appreciation can never be sufficiently fulfilled in what I hope I can do for this Library as time goes on and have in years past. And one of the greatest privileges, the greatest friendships that I have made in my life is with Jim Billington. ^M01:05:24 [ Applause ] ^M01:05:31 I want to tell you that that man, that scholar, that thinker, that Oxford Graduate, that Professor of History at Harvard and Princeton, that man has changed this Library in ways that no one could have imagined when he first became the Librarian of Congress now 28 years ago. On the day that he was sworn in as the new Librarian of Congress he said some things that I've recently read that I think were the prediction that was fulfilled. He said during his press conference he maintained that celebrating the life of the mind is something that a free people needs to do, the life of the mind. He also said in taking his oath of office, as it were, that the Library should move out more broadly and more deeply. Jim Billington has made this Library an international institution. He has made it a resource for the world to tap into. And he's delved deeper into innumerable subjects. He's also an idea factory. I've never known anybody like you, Jim. He's got ideas coming out every day. It's so hard to keep up just following the ideas. And he has enthusiasm for learning, enthusiasm for curiosity. And he has this wonderful optimism about what can be accomplished. Serving one's country, we think of the Military of course and we think of some of our more admirable representatives in our Government, but we also ought to think of those people who are doing the kind of work that the people who work here do in this great institution and about their respect for leadership. I had a wonderful conversation just today with a very important former member of the staff with whom I have worked over 25 years or more, now retired. We were talking about Mr. Billington, Dr. Billington. He said it takes a big individual with big ideas to lead a big and an important institution as he has and as such institutions ought to be led. The gift of leadership is part of James Billington's many abilities to which he has devoted so much of his life and to the benefit, to the great advance of this institution, and consequently to our country. He speaks eight languages, eight languages. I can barely get by in one. He has innumerable honorary degrees. He is an important historian. He taught himself Russian on his own by going to the public library and using a dictionary when he was still in high school because he wanted to read about Russian history and Russian life. He is phenomenal. I think, it's my opinion he could be classified as perfect if he only had a sense of humor. [laughter] So, Jim, I express the gratitude that so many of us feel in our hearts, as well as our minds, for how you have served our country and enlarged the reach and the scope and the appeal of this great American institution, The Library of Congress. ^M01:09:59 [ Applause ] ^M01:10:38 >> James Billington: Thank you, all, very much. Thank you, all, for being here. And the applause you so generously gave after that beautiful tribute by David McCullough, and for the wonderful readings of these Authors tonight, so moving and so powerful, and you're all being here. That I can only thank you and say that the applause is for you. The applause is also for the Congress, which has been the greatest institutional patron on a bipartisan basis through thick and thin and really in the history of the world the biggest patron. But also the extraordinary patronage of those who supported this Book Festival, of the many Authors, we have the biggest group every coming this year, of the many readers, of the multigenerational power of reading. And also of our Host tonight who spoke so eloquently about this history and who has made The Library of Congress Book Festival something that will endure by his generous backing over a multiyear period as the really principal donor and an extraordinary benefactor and, himself, a live participant and great enthusiasm for reading, literacy and so forth. It's a privilege to be in the presence of these two people - David McCullough, who started it out, was our first Book Festival, came and talked to me three days before 9-11 occurred and said this is a great idea, I want to help. Well, help it, he did. And its future is as bright as its past. And the big thing is not so much what any one individual has done, but we have an extraordinary staff. So thanks to them. Thanks to the Congress who has made this possible. Thanks to the donors who have taken a special interest. And thanks to these two people who are kind of the bookends - David McCullough, which more than anybody else, started this all up, started us on this adventure, and David Rubenstein, who has made it permanent. And all of you who have participated. So the applause is all for you, endless thanks, and God bless you all. And have a wonderful time at what will be our largest group of Authors and all the other people in this great world of translating the human story through the beauty of language and the compactness and the admiration of a book. I remember George Canon [Assumed Spelling] once said late in life, close to his 100th birthday, he looked out the window of my office here and said I wonder if everyone will ever always be able to enjoy being alone with a good book on a rainy day. It's the beginning of conversation, of dialogue. This is a place where it happens, it begins, for many of the families and fathers it began reading by natural light before they went to work in the society, and then began talking about the different experiences they had, the different books that they'd read. Reading was so fundamental, it always is. Thank you, all, for supporting and thank you, all, for being here. And thank you, most particularly, to our Host and our Speaker, the person who really began it all, sustained it all, and the person who has made sure that this thing will last by his own wonderful enthusiasm for books, reading, literacy, the whole bang. Thank you, all, so much for being here. ^M01:15:06 [ Applause ] ^M01:15:19 >> David Rubenstein: Thank you, Jim. This is a composite of the posters for the 15 Book Festivals and on behalf of the National Book Festival, The Library of Congress we want to present this to Jim. Jim? ^M01:15:29 [ Applause ] ^M01:16:12 >> David Rubenstein: So I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who has come this evening. We are going to have dinner upstairs. The main Reading Room is open, and tomorrow we have a Book Festival. And as we all know Thomas Jefferson, one of the great patrons of The Library of Congress said that part of life is about pursuing happiness, and tomorrow all of us get a chance to pursue happiness. So pursue some happiness this evening, tomorrow. Jim Billington, thank you for everything you've done. And, David, thank you for a great speech. >> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:16:54