#81294
09/21/2002 11:03 AM
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The annual "celebration," sponsored by the American Library Association, begins today. My favorite banned book has gotta be the AHD. What's yours? http://www.ala.org/news/v8n12/freedomread.html
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#81295
09/21/2002 11:17 AM
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The list I looked at didn't include AHD--and that would have been my favorite banned book, too. I took a look at the 1990-2000 list--lots of children's books and some Stephen King among others.
I suppose my favorite on that list is Huckleberry Finn. Blissful memory of having read it one spring, mint julep in my hand throughout many pages, by an iris bed in a garden where Poe once lived.
But How to Eat Fried Worms?? On the list? Why?
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#81296
09/21/2002 11:48 AM
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#81297
09/21/2002 11:55 AM
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list I looked at didn't include AHD
It's on the T shirt. Where do we complain about favorite books left off the list?
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#81299
09/21/2002 12:49 PM
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#81300
09/21/2002 1:09 PM
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How about banning the Bible - think of all the filthy stuff in it:murders, rapes, incest
not fit for any child to read.
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#81301
09/21/2002 7:18 PM
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enthusiast
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When I hear about books being banned I wonder: Do these people ever go to the movies? If they did, I reckon they'd happily crawl back to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield. These kids are a whole lot more wholesome than those preverts up on the screen.
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#81302
09/21/2002 7:42 PM
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Where's Waldo??
Voted most likely to teach kids how to stare blankly.
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#81303
09/21/2002 8:37 PM
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In reply to:
These kids are a whole lot more wholesome than those preverts up on the screen.
OK. Prevert. Is a prevert a young'un? Like an early metamorphical state of a pervert-to-be?
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#81304
09/22/2002 2:25 PM
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John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, hands down. To ban a work that so touchingly drives home the lesson of human compassion for "using offensive language and being unsuited to age group" has always set my spine a-bristlin'. Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird are right up there with it. Irony?...showing up on some banned books lists of late has been none other than Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451...about burning books!  
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#81305
09/22/2002 7:13 PM
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old hand
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The Globe and Mail (Canada's National Newspaper!  ) put out a poster, many years ago, which I still have, that depicts "A collection of bestsellers that have been banned or burned throughout history." The pictures are all of the charred remains of burned books (quite poignant), except the last, which shows a book still on fire. Here they are, in order with their dates: 387 BC - Homer - The Odyssey 250 BC - Confucius - Analects 553 - Various Authors - The Bible 1497 - Dante, Alighieri - La Divina Commedia 1517 - Luther, Martin - Works 1632 - Galilei, Galileo - Dialogo dei due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo 1597 - Shakespeare, William - The Tragedie of King Richard the Second 1641 - Descartes, Rene - Meditationes de Prima Philosophia 1726 - Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels 1733 - Voltaire, Francois - Lettres Philosophique sur les Anglais 1852 - Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter 1885 - Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1895 - Wilde, Oscar - Salome 1922 - Joyce, James - Ulysses 1925 - Darwin, Charles Robert - On the Origin of Species 1934 - Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer 1955 - Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye 1969 - Roth, Philip - Portnoy's Complaint 1988 - Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses I'm embarrassed to admit I've only read about five of them....So many books, so little time! (I don't concentrate on banned/burned literature, though...!) I still have the poster up, to remind me of what I'm missing. It was an ad for the "National Books Bestseller List" on Saturdays. Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
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#81306
09/23/2002 2:22 AM
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old hand
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Now don't get the impression that I'm jumping off a proper and politically correct bandwagon just because it is headed over a cliff. I'm not. I can knee-jerk with the best of them. But when it comes to books I am bound to a higher loyalty; The unencumbered right to pursue the truth. And I think that the fluff-headed folks at the ALA wouldn't know the truth if hit in the head with a volume of truth by John Stuart Mill. ***Why does Banned Book Week list no banned books, only "challenged" books? Why the heck can't books be challenged? *** Are these the same "Butchers of English" who gave us " Visually Challenged" for the blind, and "Vocally Challenged" for the mute? ***Are these paternalistic namby-pambies trying to take away the inalienable right of we the people to burn books of own choosing? What's wrong with a good old-fashioned book burning? Who do you like best - books or people? ***Public Library boards select daily for books to put in the children's sections of our libraries. We pay their salaries. Why should we not have any input into what they buy? I challenge anyone of you ALA-leaning Awaders to post some of the salacious, offending, sentences that were "challenged" by others, on this high-minded, open-minded, liberal-minded forum; the self-same sentences that have been put in the kiddie section of some of our public libraries. ***Name a book that a state, county, or city has banned by law in the last 50 years. ***Why was the innocuous Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury challenged? Maybe for the "ironic effect". Maybe it was challenged in anonymity by those who know what is best for the pedestrian masses. If so, the ironic effect was wasted on me. - As for me, I'm saving my righteous indignation for touchie-feelie causes that have a toe-hold in reality.
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#81307
09/23/2002 4:43 AM
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Milo's rantHuh? BTW, most of the books banned or challenged were mostly in high school and secondary school libraries, not in the "children's section" of libraries as you put it. Nobody's talking about the 10 and under crowd here. Banning books is as much, if not more so, a product of the puritanical (a.k.a. moralistic) religious right as it is by the self-deceptively fascistic PC left, and I don't think anybody here is condoning this practice by either extreme. To pigeonhole book-banning as some liberal agenda is just ludicrous propaganda. The censorship of literature, and censorship in general, is something I take with only a grain of amusement. ". Maybe it was challenged in anonymity by those who know what is best for the pedestrian masses. If so, the ironic effect was wasted on me. - Sieg Heil, Milum...Sieg Heil...ha...ha  Sheesh!
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#81308
09/23/2002 6:01 AM
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"Obscene" Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Challenged, but the 1,100 copies of the dictionary were returned to the Sparks, Nev. elementary school classrooms (1993). A sixth-grade teacher objected to the book because it includes obscene words. "Violent" Of Mice and Men. John Steinbeck; Bantam, Penguin, Viking. Challenged as an appropriate English curriculum assignment at the Mingus, Ariz. Union High School (1993) because of "profane language, moral statement, treatment of the retarded, and the violent ending." Pulled from a classroom by Putnam County, Tenn. School Superintendent (1994) "due to the language in it, we just can't have this kind of book being taught." Challenged at the Loganville, Ga. High School (1994) because of its "vulgar language throughout." ------------------------------------- The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear. The teacher's school board had pulled the books from class reading lists, citing "adult language" and references to sex and violence. Many students and parents protested the school's board's policy, which also included the outright banning of three other books. Shakespeare is no stranger to censorship: the Associated Press reported in March 1996 that Merrimack, NH schools had pulled Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from the curriculum after the school board passed a "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" act. (Twelfth Night includes a number of romantic entanglements including a young woman who disguises herself as a boy.) Readers from Merrimack informed me in 1999 that school board members who had passed the act had been voted out, after the uproar resulting from the act's passage, and that the play is now used again in Merrimack classrooms. Govind has a page with more information about the censorship of Shakespeare through history. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html
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#81309
09/23/2002 12:58 PM
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by challenged books, i think they mean books that are fighting legal challenges-- that have been banned by some school or locality.
as for burning books, by all means, burn any one of your book you want, but please don't think you* are better able to decide what i should or shouldn't be reading, and don't start burning my books.
*you being anyone who want to impose their values on me, not you personally!
I was raised in very conserative religious household. (age 13 or so, i read Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and thought it racy!-- the same Pearl Buck that was conserative enough for reader's digest.
but my parents never banned any book. they discouraged junk, ie, Valley of the Dolls, and encouraged literature ie, Portrait of Doren Grey, and were frightened by my intest in subjects like The Microbe Hunters (which they thought to be morbid), but they did not stop me from reading what ever i chose.
Some would have use wrap our children in cotton wool, and not have them exposed to people with other values, experience and religions.
Humans can be evil, or good, stupid or wise, hurtful or helpful, couragous or cowardly... and any one person can be all of these at different times in their lives. if we only allow children to know read about good, wise, helpful, couragous people, and fail to show them that even these characters have flaws we do them a huge disservice.
banning books that express ideas you don't like doesn't make the ideas go away. it just make them taboo to discuss.
Dicken's, in David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, takes on unwed motherhood, poor houses, child abuse and other issues. the details how we as a society deal with these issues have changed, but these issues are current. and unwed motherhood occures when woman have sex... and there is another taboo topic. Not discussing sex doen't mean kids don't engage it, it just means it can't be talked about-- and not talking about it, means no easy way to get information on birth control, (or even information on building self esteem, and chosing not to have sex, not because of an externally imposed religious taboo, but because a teen is making an informed choice!)
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#81310
09/23/2002 1:44 PM
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How about banning the Bible - think of all the filthy stuff in itStrangely enough it is on Auntie's second list, Bill, for precisely the reasons you suggest.  But isn't the Bible itself a selective compilation, partially defined by what was not deemed appropriate content?
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#81311
09/23/2002 1:52 PM
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1988 - Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses
Although still depicted as "burning" this book can be purchased anywhere in the West, can't it? Could make a very interesting read in light of the last year-and-a-bit's events.
Why doesn't Lady Chatterley's Lover get a mention? Probably if you talked about banned books in the UK it would be the first association. Or just possibly Spycatcher, though that has no sex in it.
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#81312
09/23/2002 2:11 PM
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Helen, I think you're right on the definition of "challenged."
Fishlet, Lady Chatterly's Lover *was banned in the US, when it first came out (late 20s?). My grandmother had a copy "smuggled" to her by a Brit friend who came to visit a few years later (either the ban was lifted first in the UK or else she had a bootleg copy...). The ALA list doesn't go back more than a couple of decades, far as I can tell.
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#81313
09/23/2002 2:23 PM
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Forgive me for being repettious, but I still get a chuckle out of cartoon in New Yorker
long ago, showing excited author yelling to his friends: "I'm a success, my book has
been banned in Boston!"
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#81314
09/23/2002 2:57 PM
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Quite a detailed history of the book here, Auntlie - looks like your gran had a bootleg copy. It also looks like the US was first to allow legal publication of the book (albeit more than 30 years after it was written): http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/lcl.html
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#81315
09/23/2002 3:09 PM
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Lady Chatterly and Jude the Obscure were published at about the same time. I don't know that Jude was banned, but there was quite an outcry against it as being an immoral book--and Hardy, consequently, stopped writing novels and turned strictly to poetry.
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#81316
09/23/2002 4:34 PM
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I don't know that Jude was banned, but there was quite an outcry against it as being an immoral book--and Hardy, consequently, stopped writing novels and turned strictly to poetry.WW, that story makes a salient point. Any truth to it? by challenged books, i think they mean books that are fighting legal challenges-- that have been banned by some school or locality.Uh, lets see, that would mean that all 100 books are currently being contested in our court system, with some haven been in contention for ten years or more. Gee, you would think that by now some bannings would be have been found illegal and some bannings would have been ruled proper and let stand. But if not, our snail-paced legal system is an embarrassment to we all, and we should not mention it in front of our good friends who live overseas. ___  PS: Maybe we could ask the Chinese and the Iraqis and 70% of the other nations of the world how they manage their Banned Book Lists. ___
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#81317
09/23/2002 5:08 PM
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Yeah, milum, there's a lot of truth in what I wrote. I don't have the exact dates, but 1896 is pretty darn close to when it all happened for Hardy--for him to announce that he would write no more novels. And he didn't.
Here's something off the Web:
"In 1896, following more than 20 years as one of the most popular and most
criticized novelists in England, Thomas Hardy announced that he would not write
another novel as long as he lived. He kept his word. He refused to give in to critics
who had attacked his works as being overly pessimistic and peopled with immoral
characters.
Looking back at Hardy’s novels today, it is hard to imagine that they sparked such
violent responses from Victorian critics. Yet the attacks on Hardy’s last two major
novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, were particularly fierce.
Many libraries banned Jude from their shelves, and one bishop announced that
the book was so indecent that he had thrown it into a fire. Hardy responded that
the bishop had probably burned the book because he couldn’t burn its author.
From his appearance and personality, Thomas Hardy would seem an unlikely man
to provoke such controversy. He was small, quiet, and shy. He was a country
person rather than a city person, and the characters of his novels have a realistic,
earthy quality about them."
I do believe that Lady Chatterly and Jude were published the same year. Edit: I stand corrected by AnnaS. below--I was completely wrong about Chatterly's date of publication here.
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#81318
09/23/2002 5:49 PM
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re: Gee, you would think that by now some bannings would be have been found illegal and some bannings would have been ruled proper and let stand.
most of book banning are local issues.. and fought in local court, and since the US supreme court said that obsenity is based on community values, and values do change in different locations, there is no one hard and fast rule about what is obsene, and futher, many of the banned books are banned from local libraries, and schools, they are not banned in toto.
But if not, our snail-paced legal system is an embarrassment to we all, and we should not mention it in front of our good friends who live overseas.
PS: Maybe we could ask the Chinese and the Iraqis and 70% of the other nations of the world how they manage their Banned Book Lists.
while i think is important to educate and share values, fact is not all countries value free speach. (and by extentions, freedom in published material) but it is my right, hard fought and won. and it upsets me, when my first ammendment rights are trampled.
if i should leave the US and move even to as liberal and open a country as the UK, i would not have the same rights to free speach that i do here. What is done in China or Iran is not to be desired or emulated, but to be mourned.
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#81319
09/23/2002 6:15 PM
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I do believe that Lady Chatterly and Jude were published the same year.Tut-tut, Dub-dub. LCL (as I mentioned above) was published in the late 1920s -- 1928, I just discovered, after LingIU. Your Jude predates that by more than three decades. Not that this takes away from anyone's point, but one does like to keep the facts straight.
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#81320
09/23/2002 6:28 PM
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Thanks for the correction, AnnaS.
Honest-to-goodness, when I read Jude this summer, I could have sworn that in the jacket cover notes of the edition I read that there was a big comparison between Jude and Lady Chatterly--and that I'd read that they'd been published the same year--and that that had surprised me. But on I went in my ignorance, just surprised by the info.
I have no idea how I misread what I read, but I did.
Thanks again,
WW
P.S. But I am certain Hardy never wrote a novel after Jude because of the harsh criticism it received for both its sexuality (which seems very surprising because what sexuality that is there is very much controled) and its story of a couple who were married to other people but who lived with each other.
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#81321
09/23/2002 7:06 PM
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#81322
09/23/2002 7:29 PM
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Pooh-Bah
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Well I see The Giver by Lois Lowry made the list. I'm not sure why, and yet I am not surprised, since it was an interesting and intelligent book about a kid who challenges and ultimately changes a whole societal system.
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#81323
09/24/2002 8:56 AM
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It's generally thought that the US has the most liberal societal attitudes to matters over which some would seek to ban books, for the obvious reason that the US has constitutional guarantees such as the 1st amendment. But societal suppression can in practice be just as effective in terms of practical censorship. The UK has in practice a greater tolerance of eccentricity, unorthodoxy, not fitting in, etc. Seizing and destroying books, or other legally derived measures are not the only method of inhibiting free speech.
Interesting too that literary expression is so cherished in the US but the electronic media (ie TV, where the vast majority of society gets its entertainment - how many people read books?) are in practice heavily censored. UK or indeed Oz TV (and likely Zild TV too) are liberal and robust by comparison.
jj
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#81324
09/25/2002 10:48 AM
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The UK has in practice a greater tolerance of eccentricity, unorthodoxy, not fitting in, etc. Seizing and destroying books, or other legally derived measures are not the only method of inhibiting free speechYep, JJ, I was just about to come out with something along these lines. Freedom of speech/expression is about more (and less) than having a Constitution that openly stands for it. After all, no books would ever be banned in a country with true, complete freedom of speech. In practice freedom of expression is compromised by the need to retain other "freedoms" such as freedom from obscenity and freedom from blasphemy. This article is interesting, on how many Western countries ended up effectively banning The Satanic Verses for a time, and thus supporting the Ayatollah: http://www.atheists.org/Islam/lessons.html
There was a curious and somewhat chilling silence from the White House and other governmental quarters about the Rushdie affair. Of course, with so many governmentalists busy defending censorship of books, magazines, videos, and other material (to "fight drugs" or "combat pornography," the two often linked in the public imagination), it was difficult to defend Satanic Verses on the basis of so libertarian a notion as freedom of expression.
And these days in the UK and the US there is also government censorship as part of the "War Against Terrorism".
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#81325
09/25/2002 11:12 AM
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(and likely Zild TV too) are liberal and robust by comparison.
Boring with no clothes on is still boring, jj ...
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#81326
09/25/2002 11:35 AM
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Boring with no clothes on is still boring, jj ...Back to The Sun, The Star and The Sport eh, Cap?
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#81327
09/25/2002 1:49 PM
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Freedom of speech/expression is about more (and less) than having a Constitution that openly stands for it.
If it's written down you can find the loopholes. Having it written down is useless if you don't have the social fabric to back it up.
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#81328
09/25/2002 5:22 PM
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Having it written down is useless if you don't have the social fabric to back it up.Agreed. My wife told me that freedom of speech, etc., was guaranteed by the Chinese constitution, but it was useless, because the thugs in charge just ignored it. Check out Article 35 at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.htmlk
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#81329
09/25/2002 6:18 PM
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yes, i was the proud sponser of an x rated web page (now defunct) When congress attempted some years back to limit x rated material on the internet, my son set up a web page that provided the archives to the eroticanewsgroup.
Much, but not all, of the archived material would have been considered x-rated, and some was porn, and some bordered on being obscene. But we both felt stongly that the law was unconstititional, and would not be held up, and broke the law as act of intentional civil disobedience.
Still, i am glad that his web page was not the test case!
(the test case was a NY one)
the page is no longer up... it was getting 20,000 visitors a week, and got to expensive to upkeep.
But Faldage is right, it takes effort and courage to keep up the fight for free speach-- especially when the speach is not something you like.
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#81330
09/26/2002 9:55 AM
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Faldage is right, it takes effort and courage to keep up the fight for free speach-- especially when the speach is not something you like
Hear, hear.
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#81331
09/26/2002 10:08 AM
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The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded more than 7,000 book challenges since 1990, including 448 challenges last year. Each challenge is an --> effort<-- to remove books from school curricula or library shelves. ~ American Library Association press release. But Faldage is right, it takes effort and courage to keep up the fight for free speech-- especially when the speech is not something you like. ~ of troyCopy of e-mail sent to ALA by milum (that's me) in the spirit of of troy. Good-day ALA,
Me chums and me are having an electronic discussion on AWAD concerning Banned Book Week. Would one of you fine folk at ALA explain to the gang the various ways that books are challenged in attempts to effect their removal from our libraries?
Thank you,
Milo Washington.
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#81332
09/26/2002 10:18 AM
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156 |
I mentioned this to my husband this week, but he's (serendipitously) doing the Banned Book reading for the both of us. He's been reading the Harry Potter books since last week. Great timing! Actually, I (re-)read Margaret Laurence's "A Jest of God" this week, by accident, since I wasn't sure if I'd read it. Since she's one of the Big Canadian Authors, this book is on curricula in schools, and I'm sure it's had its share of challenges. Having rather "adult" themes and all. I know that "The Stone Angel" has had its share of troubles, and that is one great book.
In my all-girls' Catholic high school (not that long ago - I graduated in 1994), they were just phasing out the bowdlerized Shakespeares they'd used since time immemorial there. I remember having to share textbooks so we could read the parts that was included in the new books, but not the old ones.
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#81333
09/26/2002 10:20 AM
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
Without wanting to start an anti-US slanging match, I do find it interesting that one of the few countries whose underpinning document explicitly states that speech is free is so fond of finding and enforcing exceptions to that rule ...  Ma femme used to run the administrative side of the NZ censorship department. I don't think they'd ruled that a book (as opposed to a skin mag) was obscene or unsuitable for general consumption, never mind having banned onefor it, for sixty years!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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