Sarah Palin wanted to fire her town librarian when she was mayor, because the librarian wouldn't help her ban books. Bringing up this fact has the Palindrone blogosphere furious: it's a smear campaign to mention the mayor's effort to fire her librarian. But Palindrones should be pleased and proud: Palin stands in the Ashcroft-Gonzalez tradition, after all: everyone should have the right to own many guns, and gun ownership should be completely unregulated. But we need to know who is reading what and we need to have the full force of law to investigate readers and even imprison them for reading.
I think this proves conclusively that if the pen is not mightier than the sword, the word processor is at least more threatening to the Republic than the gun.
And the failure to read is a big threat to the Republic as well. I'm not talking just about an informed citizenry, but what happens to us when the citizens are illiterate. 85 percent of juvenile offenders are functionally illiterate. And in many states, such as California, the department of corrections projects the number of prison beds it will need ten years down the road based on how many kids entering fourth grade CANNOT READ at grade level. Read or go to jail, if you are an inner-city youth. Read and go to jail if you live under the Patriot Act. I have no answers, only a deep sense of outrage. If you know what to do, go do it. As Mario Savio said, there are times when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, that you must put your body on the gears. Are we at that point?
Sara Paretsky
Showing posts with label American Library Association. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Library Association. Show all posts
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Friday, October 05, 2007
Read Banned Books. . .
By Sean Chercover
Ah, the familiar signs of autumn’s gentle approach . . . children playing in the schoolyard . . . the slight chill in the night air . . . the woodsy smell of burning books . . .
Leaves. I mean burning leaves, of course. After all, what kind of idiot would burn books? Probably the same kind of idiot who would try to ban books. The kind of idiot who would demand that libraries and schools and bookstores limit your reading options to only those books that do not threaten said idiot’s worldview.
Yes, it’s Banned Books Week once again, and I’m gonna jump up and down and wave my hands about it, like I do every year. The mouth-breathers haven’t stopped trying to control what we can read, so we can’t stop either. Eternal vigilance, and all that jazz…
The thing is, thousands of groups of our fellow citizens want to “protect” the rest of us from ideas that they have deemed Evil. As you might expect, these Evil Ideas are found in Very Dangerous Books. And our self-appointed moral guardians run around demanding that these Dangerous Books be banned from public libraries and school libraries. And the really frightening thing is, their efforts sometimes meet with success.
From 2000-2005, there were over 3,000 organized attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Harry Potter novels topped the list of evil books. Also in the top ten were Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou.
Here are a few more titles, from the top-100 challenged books (1990-2000):
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Native Son
Of Mice And Men
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Catcher In The Rye
In The Night Kitchen (really)
The Color Purple
Brave New World
The Outsiders
James And The Giant Peach
Ordinary People
Lord of The Flies
Song Of Solomon
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, The Office for Intellectual Freedom, and a handful of other fine organizations (and endorsed by the Library of Congress), Banned Books Week attempts to draw our attention to an ongoing threat to our intellectual freedom.
So please follow the links in this post, and read Banned Books Week section of the ALA website.
And unless you have something better planned this week, (like, say, burning a witch, or using the constitution for toilet paper) please consider stopping by your local library and checking out a couple of the books on the list.
Free People Read Freely.
Ah, the familiar signs of autumn’s gentle approach . . . children playing in the schoolyard . . . the slight chill in the night air . . . the woodsy smell of burning books . . .
Leaves. I mean burning leaves, of course. After all, what kind of idiot would burn books? Probably the same kind of idiot who would try to ban books. The kind of idiot who would demand that libraries and schools and bookstores limit your reading options to only those books that do not threaten said idiot’s worldview.
Yes, it’s Banned Books Week once again, and I’m gonna jump up and down and wave my hands about it, like I do every year. The mouth-breathers haven’t stopped trying to control what we can read, so we can’t stop either. Eternal vigilance, and all that jazz…
The thing is, thousands of groups of our fellow citizens want to “protect” the rest of us from ideas that they have deemed Evil. As you might expect, these Evil Ideas are found in Very Dangerous Books. And our self-appointed moral guardians run around demanding that these Dangerous Books be banned from public libraries and school libraries. And the really frightening thing is, their efforts sometimes meet with success.
From 2000-2005, there were over 3,000 organized attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Harry Potter novels topped the list of evil books. Also in the top ten were Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou.
Here are a few more titles, from the top-100 challenged books (1990-2000):
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Native Son
Of Mice And Men
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Catcher In The Rye
In The Night Kitchen (really)
The Color Purple
Brave New World
The Outsiders
James And The Giant Peach
Ordinary People
Lord of The Flies
Song Of Solomon
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, The Office for Intellectual Freedom, and a handful of other fine organizations (and endorsed by the Library of Congress), Banned Books Week attempts to draw our attention to an ongoing threat to our intellectual freedom.
So please follow the links in this post, and read Banned Books Week section of the ALA website.
And unless you have something better planned this week, (like, say, burning a witch, or using the constitution for toilet paper) please consider stopping by your local library and checking out a couple of the books on the list.
Free People Read Freely.
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