Jon Meacham was relaying an amusing anecdote to the overflow
crowd that had come to hear him speak at the Miami Book Fair last weekend. He
concluded it with, “Or as we would say in the South, bless her heart.” The
story had been a warm-up to something larger: his discussion on his new book about
George Herbert Walker Bush. That’s what the audience had come for.
And something larger still.
A few holdouts who have to be from out of town still do a
bit of a head snap when they hear “Miami” and “book” in the same breath, bless
their hearts. But readers know otherwise. Mitchell Kaplan and Eduardo Padrón,
the two visionaries behind the fair—Mitchell the impresario of Books &Books, Eduardo Padrón the president of Miami Dade College—have been
orchestrating this better-than-Woodstock-for-readers event for 32 years now.
Each year, it grows larger.
Bring 600 authors together for two days, and in any given
hour there are as many as 18 concurrent sessions taking place. O, the word
choose. And oh, the many books.
“Have Half”
And so if you are a reader, you come for the books and the
talks. But you come, too, for the moments of transformation, the ones you put
your own stamp on—the moments when a stillness comes over you as the words of
the author, and sometimes those of the audience, go beyond intellect to a
deeper, larger place.
You could feel it as Jon Meacham spoke—of a former president
who, as a youngster, was nicknamed “Have Half” because of his empathy. Of a
father whose heart broke when his young daughter died. Of an imperfect leader
who always knew that the office was larger than the person holding it.
As Jon spoke, you could all but feel the audience, many of
whom would never describe themselves as Republicans, succumb to the larger
story that Jon was telling. The one that went beyond passing judgment and that
instead spoke to tolerance, and civic duty, and compassion.
Sharecroppers and
sinners
It was much the same with Congressman John Lewis. He spoke
with the kinetic power of a preacher and the quietude of one who has witnessed both
compassion and its flip side. He described the five-dollar suit he bought when
he joined the Civil Rights movement (and still has). Sharecropper: that is what his father was. The word startled with
its many implications, and his story took us deeper.
When Gerald Posner relayed the many sins of the Vatican
bank, there was neither malice nor triumph in his voice. Instead, there was
hope that on some level, there could be redemption.
Darkness visible
Stacy Schiff spoke in her elegant way of how absolute the
darkness was in Salem in 1692, solid and terrifying and fraught with dire
consequence. That same darkness, Antony Beevor would tell us, descended upon
the soldiers who fought in the frozen forest during the Battle of the Bulge in
1944.
And it is darkness that clings to many soldiers of any war,
in the form of PTSD. In one of the most emotion-charged events of the fair, the
actors Paul Giamatti and David Strathairn performed readings from Sophocles,
the ancient Greek tragedian—searing, agonizing, gut-wrenching readings—the kind
that can reach into that deeper place where suffering lies and become a way to
climb out of the darkness.
The Rabbi’s thanks
Rabbi Harold Kushner also invoked the ancient Greeks in his
talk. Among the audience members who went to the microphone after his presentation was
a woman who didn’t have a question, only a message.
She told the Rabbi how, years earlier when her young child
had died, his books had been her single salvation. She never thought she would
get a chance to thank him. But now here, in this room, she could.
Only a few stalwarts managed to hold back tears. The rest of
us didn’t really care that we couldn’t.
“Proofreading Woman”
Not every moment at the book fair, of course, is so tearful.
There was the smile of sheer joy that first-time author Rebecca Rego Barry had
when for the first time she set eyes, and hands, on her book—it had come
directly from the printer to the fair at the last possible moment.
And then there is the catharsis known as the Rock Bottom Remainders,
the band of writers—as in musical band—where Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom
and other authors let loose with exuberant, raucous abandon.
Where else can you hear the song “Proofreading Woman”? And
with the immortal lyric, “She never says ‘between you and I’.”
Okay, so you had to be there. But that is, in fact, the
point. We lovers of books come to the Miami Book Fair to be among fellow
pilgrims, to seek and bear witness to the larger stories, to recognize
ourselves in each other, and to dwell, however fleetingly, in that deeper
place.
Bless our hearts.
