Books

Politics in Austin is nothing new. But this year, a political movement is rumbling through the Texas Book Festival.

Some big names will be on hand at this weekend's event, such as Doro Bush, there to promote a memoir of her father, 41st President George H.W. Bush. Junior Illinois Senator Barack Obama is back, too. He's hoping to reignite the American dream, and perhaps a 2008 run for the White House.

Kinky Friedman will also be squeezing in some last-minute gubernatorial campaigning.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Sidney Blumenthal, former adviser to President Clinton, will visit Austin to talk about How Bush Rules, while Andy Borowitz plans to unfold The Republican Playbook and James Moore and Wayne Slater, senior political writer for The Dallas Morning News, will show how President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, pulls the strings.

There are books on the vice presidency, Washington lobbying and, of course, 9/11.

Much of the festival remains about nonpolitical topics, with authors who deal with subjects from Big Bend National Park to Marie Antoinette. But Clay Smith says the festival has nearly reinvented itself in the two years since he became literary director of the event.

"Last year we didn't really do any political programming at all," he says by phone.

The barrage of current-events programming is a microcosm of a larger trend in American reading during the past six years. Americans have become obsessed with politicians and politics – not to mention the current-affairs-type books such as Lawrence Wright's best-seller, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

"We have seen double-digit increases in this category for the past eight years – 20, 25 percent, 30 percent," says Bob Wietrak, vice president for merchandising with Barnes & Noble. "It slowed down in 2005, but it zoomed right back up in 2006 when the war became a hot topic."

From the revelations of Bob Woodward in State of Denial, which has sold 1 million copies in just three weeks, to the investigative reporting of people such as Mr. Wright, who will also be on hand in Austin, Americans have turned away from fiction and toward nonfiction to understand the world.

"It really started in the year 2000," Mr. Wietrak says. "That's when both the conservatives and the liberals really started to focus on and were very energized by books. The country has been split 50-50 for a long time, and the books are kind of like rallying points for the believer."

Publishing insiders cite factors ranging from the shock of 9/11 to shifts in how traditional journalists do their jobs as causes for the bonanza of political titles.

Colin Robinson, executive editor at Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner, believes the boom points to a weakness in the traditional print and broadcast media.

"There used to be more real investigative journalism in television and newspapers than there is now," he says. "A lot of newspapers are cutting the numbers of the reporters they've got. So I think there is a real sense in that you can only find the info in books.

"You can also see the way it works," he adds. "A lot of these books are being written by journalists who are often holding the information back because they can use it to sell their books."

Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon.com and author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, says this dilemma looms in the mind of every reporter with a book deal. "All the time you are thinking of that one-page press release and what new it will have to say."

To be fair, in many cases papers simply don't have enough space for the kind of in-depth reporting a writer can do in a book. And most journalists with a scoop lack the option of waiting for a book deal before they publish.

But three of the most spectacular successes of this year – Mr. Woodward's State of Denial; New York Times reporter James Risen's State of War, which contained a scoop on the National Security Agency's wiretapping; and independent writer Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, all contained crucial pieces of context in how the war on terror was being prosecuted.

In addition to the journalistic exposés, another category of political sellers feeds the needs of political activists, who are hungry for books that will confirm what they already believe – sometimes to the detriment of the entire field of political science as a whole, publishers say.

"I do think there is a category of these books which has gotten terribly shrill," says Drake McFeely, president of W.W. Norton.

Mr. Robinson agrees. "There has certainly been a lot of books out on the one side bashing Bush, on the other side attacking liberals, and it's hard to think there is really very much original to say in those frameworks any longer."

The key to making such voices work within the literary context of the book festival, Mr. Smith says, is to make the discussion more than a shouting match. At the festival, partisan authors are kept on separate panels, and Mr. Smith says he tried to include comedic writers, such as Mr. Borowitz.

Sometimes, several publishers say, it seems as if the most-partisan books, such as Ann Coulter's, grab most of the media attention. But there are signs that people hunger for more.

For instance, when the war in Lebanon started over the summer, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart brought on the author of The Shia Revival to talk about the changes in the Middle East. Immediately it began selling.

"It wasn't a best-seller," says Mr. McFeely. "But the good news was that in moments of trouble Americans rise up and read more broadly."

This kind of literary circling of the wagons isn't a new phenomenon.

Harold Augenbraum is executive director of the National Book Foundation, the nonprofit organization that gives out the National Book Awards. This year's finalist list contains no fewer than five books related to 9/11 – including Mr. Wright's The Looming Tower, and all of them tell the story of 9/11 from an American point of view.

"You really have to look at other traumatic events in American history," he says. "I'm sure around the time of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas there was a rush of books to make sense of this, that's the only analogous situation."

The difference now however is that the situation, via the war on Iraq, is ongoing. And this means there will be more, plenty more of this publishing to come.

"We have a lot of books still to come this year," Mr. Wietrak says, "and if trends stay the same 2007 and 2008 will be bigger than ever."

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

The festival takes place Saturday and Sunday at the state Capitol in Austin. There is no charge. For details, visit www.texasbookfestival.org.

If politics isn't your bag, there are plenty of other authors at the Texas Book Festival (although the previously announced appearance by Sesame Street puppeteer Kevin Clash was canceled). A sampling of the more than 200 scheduled to appear:

Sarah Bird, The Flamenco Academy

Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

Sonia Nazario, Enrique's Journey/La Travesia de Enrique

Laura Numeroff, When Sheep Sleep

Amy Sedaris, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

Tavis Smiley, What I Know for Sure: My Story of Growing Up in America

Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir

J.F.