"Banned Book Week" at Library usually last week Sept

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Each year, the public libraries holds “Banned Book Week” by hanging posters and setting up a table with some banned books. On the table is “Banned Books by Robert Doyle” .

(On Amazon, they sell keychains, bracelets, mugs and sweatshirts that say “I read Banned Books”)

Inside the main book,“Banned Books” are a list of hundreds(probably closer to a thousand) of books that have been challenged. It tells where each was challenged and when.

Example:
Just As I am Anchor: Doubleday (Challenged but retain at Central High School in Louisville, Ky (1998) despite claims the book describes homosexual acts in a positive light.)

Some of the books listed:

The Scarlet Letter

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

Harry Potter

A Light In The Attic by Shel Silverstein

Gay Sex, Manual for Men Who Love Gay Men by Jack Hart(There were many on this subject.)

It’s perfectly Normal; A book about Changing Bodies, Growing-Up, Sex and Sexual Health By Robbie Harris(Children’s library)(Homosexualality and Masterbation are discussed in the book)

To me it makes it look like something is wrong with you if you don’t want a book about homosexuality in the children’s library.
What do you think?
 
Unless every library buys and stocks every book that is published, I would imagine that they all “ban” quite a lot of books continuously. Now, if I were to donate to them a copy of “Rome Sweet Home,” and they decline to shelve it, would that be banning a book? Could it then be added to the banned books table?

How do they select the books that are “banned” and thereby given free publicity?
 
gam197 said:
To me it makes it look like something is wrong with you if you don’t want a book about homosexuality in the children’s library.
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I wonder what they mean by a “children’s library”? In the town I grew up in, the children’s library was basically for ages 10 and under and used a special children’s card. At age 11 or so, kids were encouraged to apply for an adult card and to use the larger library.

The last book you listed “It’s perfectly Normal; A book about Changing Bodies, Growing-Up, Sex and Sexual Health” would seem aimed at kids going through puberty. Certainly some kids would find the discussion of masturbation or homosexuality to be of keen interest. But in the public library of my hometown, the book would have been in the adult section, not the children’s section.
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JimG:
How do they select the books that are “banned” and thereby given free publicity?
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This is from the website of the American Library Association, which sponsors Banned Book Week:
A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library
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The American Library Association (ALA) collects information from two sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use the Challenge Database Form.
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The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 546 challenges last year. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.
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ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm#wdcb
 
I think they are not refering to books that librarians just so happen not keep in any particular library, but to books that librarians had been forbidden (banned) from making available to patrons by some authority over the library, such as governments, school boards, etc.
 
Ah, so in order for a book to be “challenged” and perhaps banned, it must first make its way into the library. That means it has to make it past whoever is on the library selection committee. As I mentioned before, they can’t select everything.

So who decides that a book such as “It’s Perfectly Normal” belongs in the children’s library in the first place? If a book such as “I am Charlotte Simmons” (which has a bit of explicit sex) were placed in the children’s library, and I were to successfully challenge such placement, it would then become a “banned book,” perhaps being placed on the banned books table, and giving Tom Wolfe a boost.

PS–I liked the book.
 
JimG said:
Unless every library buys and stocks every book that is published, I would imagine that they all “ban” quite a lot of books continuously. Now, if I were to donate to them a copy of “Rome Sweet Home,” and they decline to shelve it, would that be banning a book? Could it then be added to the banned books table?

How do they select the books that are “banned” and thereby given free publicity?
Click to expand...
“Banned” Books Week is a misnomer – in the US there’s hardly anything you can’t buy if you want to. What they are talking about is “challenged” books – books someone has tried to have removed from school or public libraries.

As for school libraries, parents have a right to monitor, and protest if necessary, what the school library has on its shelves but some people go overboard. As for public libraries, they have to serve the wide public which means it will have a lot of stuff that a lot of people won’t like.

As for donating “Rome Sweet Home”, if you just drop it off or mail it in, it might go to the bottom of the pile. Instead, join your local Friends of the Library and next meeting when they’re discussing acquisitions you can suggest it.
 
All through my youth, I never really believe in banning books, but the only instances of them I really read about were those of classic works of fiction, and, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, or books with some intellectual content, like Voltaire’s Candid.

Then I read about a book called The Assasin’s Handbook, which is an actual handbook, and teaches what the title implies. Many libertarians have defended this book under the first amendement, even though it is responsible for the deaths of several people.

I’ve know come to believe that if a morally sound intellectual wanted to read anything he wanted to, and not be influenced by it, then it would be fine, but many people are gullible, and some people, especially children, cannot easily put things in context and believe that everything they read isn’t always true.

This is why I believe that specialty shops should be able to sell what they like, but public libraries ought to be careful. We ought to recall that Ben Franklin, the man who came up with the idea of a public library, had very strong Christian moral inclinations, and never would have approved of books like It’s Only Natural.
 
I’ll bet they don’t include Little Black Sambo and Huckleberry Finn.
 
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” gets banned all the time, because of its use of the “N” word.
 
The banned books list is quite misleading.

First of all, I had to fill out one of those ALA surveys as part of one of my administrative jobs. They are very voluntary, not at all a scientific survey and very open-ended. It doesn’t matter why a book is challenged, if it is removed, it is considered “banned” by the ALA.

We had one book removed from our library on challenge. It is a small school and we get a lot of donations, by the boxful. We don’t have a librarian but the volunteers are pretty good at screening out “adult” material. We have to be especially careful since it is basically self-serve so any kid from grade K-8 can check out any book. Well one book accidentally got in and a parent caught it. We had to remove it because she was right, it would have been inappropriate material for an elementary school kid to read. There is a public library across the street so any kid who really wants to read it or whose parents want him/her to read it can easily access it without it being available for younger children. According to the ALA, we “banned” the book. :mad:

I was involved in one other challenge at a different school. A book was challenged by a parent because it had a lot of sexual talk and the kid was in third grade. Again, it was a mistake. The kid was a very strong reader and the librarian had mistakenly ordered several books for “above grade level” readers without realizing that the content was way above third-grade appropriateness. Book was removed but I am sure it is still in the Jr. High school library. “Banned” according to the ALA.
 
As a lifelong bookworm and a writer, I think that the approach to book “banning” cannot be definded in black and white. A year ago I got a list from my library of the 100 Most Challenged Books of 1990 to 2000 and I am slowly making my way through them. This has greatly shaped my view of banning/challenging, as I think it would for most people when you see some of the books that are on that list.

One of the books I read when I first saw the list was Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”. I still cannot fathom why this book was third on the list. Yes, there is talk of racism and the description of a child’s rape, but it is not done in a gratitious manner. It’s someone telling their life story. Are we not allowed to tell our life stories if they contain bad things now?

Currently I’m reading another banned book by a black author, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. Halfway through it, this is another one I don’t understand. Yes, there is some talk of incest and talk of racism, but again…is art to turn a blind eye to things that are very real and part of the human condition? It’s sad if you look on the list how many books are written about “black life”. It almost makes me wonder if the reason these books get challenged is because we want to pretend that black people didn’t exsist before the 60’s civil rights movement. That way we bear no guilt for the way they were treated before that time.

Personally, and this has alot to do with being a writer and artist myself, I do not believe in censorship. Obviously, we need to keep inappropriate material out of CHILDREN’s hands, but I’d say about sixty or so of the hundred books are from the adult section. When people complain about a book in the adult section, I would tell them they don’t have to check it out if they don’t agree with it. As George Carlin said, to a paraphrase, in a bit about someone who got offended by what they heard on the radio…there’s two knobs, one to turn off the sound and the other to change the channel. Use them.

And as for keeping things out of kids hands, that should fall into the lap of the parents. In a school library I can understand parents complaining about books there because they support the school through tuition or taxes. However, asking the local library to remove Harry Potter or the Goosebumps series out of the kid’s section because they offend YOUR religious values is not something I agree with doing. If YOU don’t want YOUR kids reading it, make sure they don’t! Don’t tell ME what I can or can’t let MY kids read.

Then again, I read “The Da Vinci Code” as soon as our library got it in due to the controversey. And I think Dan Brown should be glad that so many people raised a stink about the book, because truthfully it’s not a masterpiece of writing. If it hadn’t been for the controversy it definetly would not be the type of book the library has multiple copies of on the shelf. I know some of you may fault me for this, but none of my money endorsed the book and I strongly believe you can’t make judgements based on what other people tell you on matters of censorship.

Sometimes I worry very much about the future of free speech in this country. Over the weekend we had two instances of this vital, most important right being hampered. The first was the college student that was arrested and then tazered for asking John Kerry the wrong questions, and the second was the last two sentences of Sally Field’s Emmy acceptance speech being blocked. Now, I think Sally should’ve found a better word them “GD”, a term that I will chew anyone out over if I hear them use it in my ear shot, but her point was very valid. GD should’ve been bleeped, but what about “wars in the first place?” Especially when you consider they let Michael Moore say the war was “fictious” in his Oscar speech a few years ago. What’s wrong with saluting military moms and speaking a wish for peace? It’s very scary.

So I think it’s a very good thing for people to encouraged to read the “banned” books and make their own minds up about them. And that would be my advice. God’s law is perfect, but man’s laws often reach the ridiculous.
 
except through first amendment guidelines, the government should never be in the position to determine the content of speech the public can access. the inevitable misuse of that power if unrestrained far outweighs any benefits.

constitutionally permitted time, place, and manner restrictions on speech permit barring offensive materials from children’s libraries.

banning huck finn because of the “n” word or harry potter because of magic seems very myopic to me. if one wants to protect a child from real life, the kid should be banned from reading about the holocaust, or about the Darfur crisis, or almost all of history for that matter.
 
I rarely go the library for 2 reasons:
  1. There have been 2 or 3 instances when I definitely returned a book, but months later, when I was checked out another one, they charged me a fine for an unreturned book.
  2. I prefer to purchase books, because I am a slow reader, and also because I want to be able to refer to the book later, re-read it, or loan it.
Well, a couple of years ago I made one of my rare trips to the library, and it happened to be Banned Books Week. They had a display, but surprisingly (tongue in cheek), there was no Bible on display. I was tempted to go home and get one, and put it up on the display myself.

I decided against it, because they probably would have banned it from the banned books display.
 
Banned Books Week is such a misnomer. There’s not a book in existence that you can’t find if you are willing to look hard enough for it.

Libraries have finite budgets and have to make a choice as to what books to buy. I still remember hearing the lecture about the difference between censorship and selection in library classes. I think I can sum it up in this sentence: I am a professional and I decide what to buy.
 
What I can’t understand is why public libraries have ‘Young Adult’ sections - then define YA as being ages **ELEVEN **and up…

The graphic novels and magazines available for these eleven-year-old “ADULTS” are basically deplorable. Taxes support many public libraries - don’t be afraid to let them know that some material is not suitable for children - & that eleven-year olds *are *children, not adults.
 
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