From left, Mark Crabtree and his daughters Laura and Morgan view entries in the Found Objects Art Contest during the 2008 River City Reading Festival. After a year hiatus, the event returns Saturday to the Lawrence Public Library, 707 Vt.

The second River City Reading Festival brought together a variety of authors, poets and readers Saturday at the Lawrence Public Library in a celebration of reading and the sharing of ideas.

The festival, which offered various activities from children’s crafts to a mystery panel and book signings, brought in a steady stream of visitors, said event organizer Julie Tollefson.

To culminate the event, author and social critic Thomas Frank shared his political ideas about the conservative right that are in his new book, “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,” at the Dole Institute of Politics.

The irony of his critiquing conservatives in the building named after former Republican senator Bob Dole wasn’t lost on him. Frank said Dole is one of the few Republicans he does like.

It’s the conservative right he has a not-so-small problem with, and he took shots at it in his previous book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”. That’s because, as he states in “The Wrecking Crew,” the conservative right has systematically turned government into a business that benefits not the American people but the corporate world.

Frank, a Kansas native and Wall Street Journal columnist who lives in Washington, D.C., introduced his lecture by talking about the 19th-century conservative revolution, in which the rising coalition sought to bring justice to a corrupt government but eventually fell into a pattern of misrule. Concentrated wealth and democracy can’t co-exist, they learned, and Americans have to relearn the “bitter” lesson today, Frank said.

He said when writing his current book, he “set out to survey the extent of the wreckage to see what conservatism has brought in its years in power.”

What he found is a privatized government ruling.

He gave four examples of “botched” initiatives in which privatized government was given a “starring role,” he said. Those are the reconstruction of Iraq and now Wall Street, Hurricane Katrina recovery and Homeland Security.

“Today the departments of defense and homeland security routinely accept contracts so stupidly written that they seem to have been designed more as a way to sluice taxpayer billions into the contractor’s pockets than as a device for actually getting something done,” he said.

Because the companies are private, they are largely shielded from oversight and accountablity, he said.

His lecture left many audience members in conversations with each other.

Ried Nelson has a Saturday morning coffee meeting with friends, and they decided to attend the lecture instead.

Some of the ideas left his group feeling a “little frustrated,” Nelson said. “Some of the messages he gave us, there aren’t really answers.”

One in particular was the notion Frank stated that in researching for his book he’s noticed conservatives in power intentionally engage in deficit spending to rob liberals of funding their causes.

“That’s a hypothesis,” Nelson said. “I feel it may be true and that’s depressing. It feels like there’s not much we can do.”

Overall, Nelson said Frank’s visit as part of the reading festival provided “different ideas and theories for things we are all thinking so we can all throw those into our grab bag.”