Brushing up on Banned Books
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-- School Library Journal, 09/01/2009
Banned Books Week, September 26–October 3, 2009, offers many opportunities to engage teens in discussions on intellectual freedom, censorship, and the rights of individuals to express themselves, even if their opinion is unorthodox or unpopular. The American Library Association's Banned Books site has resources available for use in libraries and in the wider community, including a Letter to the Editor template; a public service announcement script; and downloadable clip art, banners, and challenged book lists.
For extensive background on individual authors of banned books, check out Enslow's "Authors of Banned Books" series, which includes titles on Madeleine L’Engle and Mark Twain, best for middle school students. Students doing higher-level research will want to dig into Fernando Baez’s A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq (Atlas, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-934633-01-4) which Booklist called “the first truly comprehensive history of 'biblioclasty.'”
Hadju, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. FSG. 2008. Tr. $26. ISBN: 978-0-374-18767-5.
Gr 9 Up–Comicbook fans and defenders of civil liberties will find much in this well-researched book about how the political climate in the United States in the first half of the 20th century nearly killed the graphic novel. Generous notes and a bibliography are provided, as well as a 16-page list of artists, writers, and others who left the comics industry after the censorship and scrutiny of their contributions in the 1950s.
Johnson, Claudia. Stifled Laughter: One Woman’s Story About Fighting Censorship. Fulcrum Publishing. 1994. Tr. $19.95. ISBN: 978-1-55591-200-0.
Gr 10 Up–In 1986, a school board in Lake City, FL, banned the use of a high school textbook because it included Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, considered to be sexually inappropriate. As both a graduate student of English literature and a citizen of the city where the ban was put in place, Johnson felt compelled to fight the board's dictatorial ways by bringing the case to court. A good title for discussions of censorship, activism, and years of personal sacrifice for the sake of a cause. Pair this with Rick Wartzman’s Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (Public Affairs, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-58648-331-9).
Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Knopf. 2004. pap. $13.95. ISBN: 978-1-4000-3064-4.
Gr 10 Up–Next time your students or young patrons complain about their boring textbooks, lend them an ear and this book. Ravitch takes a well-researched look at how, in the education market, content is selected and packaged to sell, with accuracy a secondary concern. Political correctness takes its toll as does censorship, in textbooks, reading lists, and curricular guides–A Perfect Day for Ice Cream becomes A Perfect Day, to avoid the appearance of promoting junk food, an example of what the Ravitch calls "beneficent" censorship.
Tolstaia, Tatyana. The Slynx. New York Review Books. 2007. pap. $14.95. ISBN: 978-1-59017-196-7.
Gr 10 Up–The post-nuclear world is not so different from what many readers might imagine—a mutant race has emerged, mice are an important food group, and books are banned. And to make life for the proletariat even harder, a murderous creature called the slynx is preying on the city’s workers. Benedikt seems to live an almost charmed life as one of the dictator’s scribes, plagiarizing liberally to make Kablukov the creator of all things wonderful and wise. Then he develops a taste for knowledge, and realizes he must be the revolution.
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