Degree Directory presents the 25 most controversial banned books and tells you where you can read them all for free online (publishers sites, Amazon, etc.). The excerpts are rather short excerpts.
And in preparation for the week ahead, here’s the ALA Banned Books Week Site.
Git yer Banned Books Balance in One Convenient Location!
Thank you for letting me spoof the title of this blog post.
This LISNews post could use some balance. Doesn’t the existence of “banned” books online make them not banned? Why does the American Library Association keep up this word game? Some ALA leadership complain about the government scaring people falsely. Isn’t that projection of what the ALA itself is doing with BBW?
Banned Books Week is “shameless propaganda … now institutionalized with a week of its own.”
“Those who are spreading hysteria about book banning and censorship know that they are in a war, but too many of those who thoughtlessly repeat their rhetoric do not.”
See who said this (not me) and more here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/sowell
Even a former ALA Councilor said:
“It also highlights the thing we know about Banned Books Week that we don’t talk about much–the bulk of these books are challenged by parents for being age-inappropriate for children. While I think this is still a formidable thing for librarians to deal with, it’s totally different from people trying to block a book from being sold at all.”
I dare anyone to find fault with that.
-=-=-=-
http://www.SafeLibraries.org
http://safelibraries.blogspot.com/
Fisking Dan
This LISNews post could use some balance.
False equivalence is just that: false.
Doesn’t the existence of “banned” books online make them not banned? Why does the American Library Association keep up this word game?
I don’t know. It’s almost like words have different meanings based on context and use. But that can’t be right.
As for the quotes they come from an editorial written by Thomas “Harumph” Sowell who knows as much about libraries as you do, Dan. The fact that he wrote it seems insignificant since can find a boor on the Internet writing about anything. Even some boor from the Hoover Institute.
I recommend the whole piece. It’s full of willful ignorance of reality, strawmen and a whole lot more.
Dan, please. I beg you. Please let parents be parents to their own children and every other busybody can parent their own until they get so sick of them they forge a signature and join the Navy.
Yes, Virginia, There Are Banned Books
As long as school boards and library boards remove books from the shelves because an individual or group in the community disapproves of the ideas or topics discussed in the books, yes, there are banned books. (See: Nampa, Idaho.)
As James LaRue says in “The New Inquisition,” formal censorship occurs whenever a government official or government agency takes action to suppress a publication or service on the basis of their content. The fact that the book might be theoretically available in another community, or might be purchased online, does not change the censorious (and unconstitutional) nature of the official’s or agency’s action.
So yes, it is book banning, it is censorship, when a library board or a school board or a school administrator removes a book so that it is not available to a particular community (including a community of students.)
Claiming otherwise, as does SafeLibraries, is purest sophistry (yes, go look it up.)