Literature’s front line

Kevin O’Brien and his mother showed up Saturday morning at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books hoping to score tickets for a 3:30 p.m. session with the decidedly nonliterary title, “On the Front Lines: Covering War,” a panel discussion by combat correspondents on how they do what they do.

The O’Briens, as it turns out, were a week late -- all the advance tickets were gone less than 90 minutes after they were made available April 17.

In what can be read as a sign of the times, some of the hottest tickets at this year’s book fest -- where panels ranged from high literature to how children’s picture books are made -- were for events related to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. To be sure, talks by top-selling authors such as Sue Grafton packed UCLA’s Ackerman Hall, with a capacity of 2,200, as well as other venues on the campus. And celebrity culture burned brightly. The line to get copies of a “Power Pilates” exercise book signed by actress Stefanie Powers stretched about 50 feet at the Borders/Brentano’s booth, while three other writers seated next to Powers mostly chatted idly among themselves.

But of the 16 events that closed out before the festival began, three focused on the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. And the session at Haines Hall preceding the war-reporting talk -- “Outsourcing Democracy: Can It Work?” -- also filled the room’s 370 seats.

“It’s relevant, it’s happening right now,” said Kevin, 15, of Los Alamitos, as he read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” during the hour wait in a standby line hoping seats might come open for the war-reporting panel. “The fact that it is a discussion is interesting to me. Newspaper stories are one person writing. Television is either all opinion or all fact. The way this is being presented is interesting -- it’s a discussion among reporters who were there.”

O’Brien and his mother, Sandra O’Brien, got seats, but the fact they and scores of others waited up to an hour was itself a gauge of the depth of interest. One woman in the standby line, Connie Leyba of South Pasadena, had a copy of spy-suspense writer Alan Furst’s “Dark Voyage” in her shoulder bag, but gambled on the standby line rather than cross the festival site for his autograph. She got in too.

“This is the war that has ended, but that hasn’t ended,” said bookseller Rueben Martinez, who was manning a nearby booth for his Santa Ana-based Libreria Martinez. “Maybe people want to just investigate more what is happening.”

The book festival is a massive thing, sometimes confusingly so. At any given hour half a dozen talks are underway in college lecture halls; scores of authors sit at bookstore booths signing copies of their books and chatting with fans; kids get their faces painted, watch entertainers or practice crafts under shady trees; and people eat. It can be hard to juggle a personal “want” list, hard to figure out what to buy at this supermarket of ideas.

Still, war drew people like a magnet.

Author William T. Vollman, whose new 832-page novel “Europe Central” explores the World War II clash between Germany and the Soviet Union, believes the interest in war -- currently being fought and those of the past -- is part of human nature.

“People want to rethink the landscape of their times,” Vollman said between autographs. “We’re going to be at war for years and years to come.... Maybe people are waking up a little bit to realize international politics” affects individual lives in the U.S. “Why shouldn’t it be part of their consciousness?”

The war-reporting session was moderated by Los Angeles Times foreign editor Marjorie Miller, who began covering wars in Central America in the 1980s; panelists were Times writer Terry McDermott, who covers efforts to combat terrorism; Mark Bowden, author of “Blackhawk Down,” about American military deaths in Mogadishu; and Chris Hedges, former New York Times correspondent who spent 20 years covering wars.

Many of the questions from the audience centered on the belief that the American media were not telling the whole truth about the war in Iraq, either from collusion with the government or at the government’s order -- a belief the panelists sought to shake.

“You couldn’t get six journalists to conspire about lunch,” McDermott joked.

The panel differed on the use of embedded reporters, Bowden defending the practice as a chance to give the public more details of what is happening. Hedges criticized the cozy relationship it can build between journalists and soldiers who are protecting them, and for the restrictions the reporters work under while the military controls where they go.

At the same time, Hedges said, mainstream media outlets shy from the most graphic images of war for reasons that are “not necessarily political -- it’s done for what’s palatable.”

In the audience, Kevin soaked it all in. Afterward, he said the talk matched his hopes, offering him insight to a process that affects how he perceives the world.

“I never looked at it that way, that the embedded reporters” worked under restrictions, he said. He was particularly enthused by the conflicting views between Bowden and Hedges on embedding, and that he came away from the discussion better equipped, he believes, to digest news from the front.

“I’ll look more critically,” Kevin said as the crowd ebbed late in the afternoon, a cool ocean breeze sweeping the campus. “I’m going to reconsider what I hear from the battlefield.”