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I always read a banned book in honor of banned book week. A helpful list!!.
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Bonnie G.
(last edited Sep 22, 2014 11:33AM)
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Sep 22, 2014 11:28AM
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Thanks! What a great way to commemorate people being really stupid.
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Do you have these sorts of issues in the UK, Alicia?
Not to the same degree that I see reported in the press from the US. I don't think any schools banned Harry Potter for talking about witchcraft! My toes are curling at the idea that To Kill A Mockingbird is contentious.I don't think 50SoG should be in school libraries, and am actually horrified any school librarian thought it should be! I'm all for age-appropriate sex education, but that ain't it.
I feel like those lists really don't like people of colour writing about their experiences.
Such an interesting list! Really noteworthy that so many of those books are actually considered classics. Here in Germany, I think, books are only banned if they have discriminatory content, for example antisemitism. The only case I can think of that is really well known is Hitler's 'Mein Kampf', which cannot be or published bought at all, you can only read it in a library.
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That is so interesting Janine. I did not realize that Mein Kampf could not be sold in Germany. I actually have pretty mixed feelings about that. This is sort of personal for me. I am Jewish. Lenin and Stalin's anti-Semitic policies decimated most of my family before Hitler took up the task. My Latvian grandmother had 13 siblings and 9 of those had been married some with kids of their own. Three,including my grandmother, lived and her parents were also murdered in pogroms. Our losses under Hitler were less substantial. All that said, part of me wants people to see what Hitler said (and what the Ku Klux Klan said, and the National Front, and ISIS, and all the other hate groups.) I read Mein Kampf, and it energized me. It helps me to remember that there are people all over the world who hate me and my family and that indifference is a sin. Like Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. That makes me work harder for justice and understanding. Decent people will see the horror and be spurred to action. People need to see and read the evil or they assume it in not that bad. Sorry, that was a long rant :) Anyway, many of these books are banned based on arguments that they are racist, but those arguments are always fallacies. One parent tried to have Diary of Anne Frank banned because it portrayed anti-Semitism. So many people are stupid and even more are intellectually lazy. A frequently challenged book here, Huckleberry Finn, is often challenged for racism and use of the N word. But Twain was one of the first people to show the world a deeply human, intelligent, and caring Black man. Once you have read Huck Finn you can't dismiss Jim as a savage. People's belief that Blacks were inherently different from Whites was being challenged. Jim's slavery was a tragedy and his escape noble. People would rather open a book, see a naughty word, and bitch than read and understand what is in front of them.
Challenging Anne Frank's diary because of antisemitism... wow, I can't really find any words for that. I really understand what you're saying about 'Mein Kampf' (and I am so sorry to hear about your family!). From a purely historical standpoint it would be really interesting to read it. I think I read somewhere that the ban to publishing it ends in 2017 (?) so historians are working on an annotated version of 'Mein Kampf' so what Hitler wrote can be understood better from a more neutral standpoint. It's basically the topic that people are most sensitive about here. Last year I watched a NS propaganda movie ('Jud Süß') in the cinema, that is only allowed to be shown after an introduction from a film historian. I think it's a good idea to get a neutral, scientific point of view to these things, but I also think it's a little ridiculous that, 70 years after the end of WWII, they are still banned - it adds a mystery to them that only makes them more interesting to people who are likely to be influenced by such things.
Banned books drive me nuts! You don't want your kid reading it? Fine. Don't tell me what to do with mine. Huck Finn is one of my favorite books.
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I really understand what you're saying about 'Mein Kampf' (and I am so sorry to hear about y..."
I absolutely agree about releasing inflammatory materials with information to put it into perspective. I read Mein Kampf in a college course on 20th Century propaganda. It was one of the last things we read and in the unit we also saw Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. It followed material from the US both on the side of isolationism and on the side of swaying public sentiment toward entry into WWI. We had also covered material from China's Great Leap Forward and Hundred Flowers campaigns and some other things. I don't think I would have benefitted from reading Mein Kampf without comparative material and a very good professor.
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Right? My son's elementary school principal told me I was destroying my son's moral code and proper intellectual development by reading Series of Unfortunate Events books with him in 1st grade. (It bears mentioning said principal was an ass through and through and is one reason my son has been in private school since 3rd grade.) Not the same as banning, but the same mind set. People should worry more about kids not reading and less about what the kids who do read choose. Also, here is a link to a recent partly successful attempt to ban Diary of Anne Frank for obscenity http://www.thenation.com/blog/anne-fr.... Spoiler alert: The obscenity was not the murder of a teenage girl because she was a Jew, it was the mention of labia. Also, unrelated but relevant -- Huck Finn is also one of my favorite books.
I read Huck Finn as a required text at school (didn't like it, did *get* it).As Bonnie said, the recent challenges to Anne Frank that I have seen were about her discovery of her emerging sexuality, not the fact that she was Jewish, or being persecuted for that!
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As Bonnie said, the recent challenges to Anne Frank that I have seen were about her discovery of her emerging sexualit..."
In 1983 four members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the rejection of this title because it is a “real downer.” Not exactly the same as the anti-Semitic themes, but problematic. I had heard that it was banned for anti-Semitism but the story was apparently apocryphal. There have been attempts to ban Merchant of Venice and Protocols of the Elders of Zion for anti-Semitism which is wrong, but at least those are actually anti-Semetic.
In 8th grade, my history teacher made us read part of Mein Kampf. All I remember was that the book was enormous. Someone must have complained, because I don't remember us reading much or doing much with it.
I loved so many of the books on the banned book list that now I want to go read the others.
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I have been drawn to books for the same reason! The one that I recall is Kaffir boy, which was excellent.
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I saw John Green's comment elsewhere. It says all better than I possibly could. People are idiots.
I come from the UK, where not that many books have actually been banned ( Lady Chatterley ,Lolita, and I think, James Joyce's Usysses? ) are all I can think of, though I seem to remember something being banned for leaking spy secrets in the 80's.I feel very cross for all you perfectly intelligent American readers who have loonies and prudes presuming to ban books on your behalf!
Barbara wrote: "I feel very cross for all you perfectly intelligent American readers who have loonies and prudes presuming to ban books on your behalf! ..."
It does beg the question as to why loonies and prudes have so much power in the US. I know so many intelligent, sensible, worldly Americans, why can't they just tell the nutters to be quiet and sit down?
I discussed this with my year 7 English class today (12 year olds) and they were outraged that someone would dare to ban a book! They said it made them more likely to read it if they weren't supposed to. That's one form of teen rebellion I'm on board with!
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I want to respond to Barbara and Alicia's thoughts in a cogent way, but I am not sure how to explain the tyranny of the loons. These nuts get a lot of coverage, but they are not the majority here, and they lose many more fights than they win. That said, sometimes they do win. In my state, until 2013 alcohol sales were legally banned on Sunday because all of us should be soberly churching on Sunday. Of course bars could always serve, so I guess God is cool with getting drunk and skipping church if you do it in a public place. Also in my state, they have just expanded the right to carry weapons to stores, churches, bars, schools and airports (though Federal law supersedes this so the airport is still gun-free.) Here is a brief explanatory article for those interested http://america.aljazeera.com/articles....
We sane Americans feel pretty cross about the wing nuts ourselves, but one of the best things about America is that everyone seems to feel they have a right to make things happen. There is no sense of just going with the flow or bowing to those in power. Sadly, that is also worst part about America. People here have the right to impose their crappy belief systems and anti-intellectual/information philosophies on everyone around them. And powered as they are by their sense of right, and entitlement, and Fox News, and the blood of Jesus, they simply outlast the sane people. We sane people support their right to live as, and raise their children to be, cretins as long as they leave everyone else alone. But in their single-minded zealotry the crazies yell and scream and buttonhole legislators, while we, the sane, go out for dinner with friend, or catch up on Mad Men, or work out, or read a book.
One last thing: In places like Atlanta where there is lots of space and many of us live in single family houses and drive alone in our cars to the garages of our office buildings the loon issue is worse. When I lived in New York people did not have the luxury of ignoring how things impacted others because every day your face was rubbed in the lives of others. In Atlanta we can and do live in bubbles surrounded by people who are just like us. So everyone we know agrees with us which makes us sure we are right. Most people never see the way things impact others in the community, because we don't know those people. So all this space, and the insularity of our lives, and our specific choices of where to get information makes us crazier and less compassionate and generally less likely to try to see others' points of view.
I just read that over and I don't think I have explained a blessed thing, but I am posting anyway.
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Also want to add that I am all for banning Ulysses on whatever principle was chosen. That book was torture!
Re Barbara's mention of the book banned in the 80s in the UK - it was called Spycatcher and was a memoir of someone in the intelligence services. It has a whole series of court cases about it (one of the more interesting classes I went to last year) but eventually they decided that it was easy enough to import it from where it was published abroad so stopped the ban! At least that's what I can remember... My brain works a bit wonky about remembering things sometimes!
Bonnie wrote: "I just read that over and I don't think I have explained a blessed thing, but I am posting anyway. ..."Interesting to get your perspective on it!
