Virtual Bookshelf: September 2021- Banned Book Week

Presents summary and censorship accounts of books that have been banned throughout history for political, religious, sexual, and social reasons.

Banned books: Challenging Our Freedom To Read provides a framework for understanding censorship and the protections guaranteed to us through the first amendment. Interpretations of the uniquely American notion of freedom of expression - and our freedom to read what we choose - are supplemented by straightforward, easily accessible information that will inspire further exploration.

In a raid on the Progressive Bookstore of Oklahoma City in 1940, local officials seized thousands of books and pamphlets and arrested twenty customers and proprietors, several of them members of the Communist Party. All were detained incommunicado and many were held for months on unreasonably high bail. Four were tried and convicted for violating Oklahoma's 'criminal syndicalism' law and sentenced to ten years in prison. The defendants' convictions and sentences caused a nationwide furor and were ultimately overturned on appeal after protests from labor unions, churches, publishers, academics, librarians, the American Civil Liberties Union, members of the literary world, and prominent individuals ranging from Woody Guthrie to Eleanor Roosevelt.

This book is a collection of articles in which authors debate the state of freedom of speech and the use of censorship in the United States and around the world.

For years now, Nat Hentoff has been the best-known lay guardian of the magnificent spirit and letter of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. His principled advocacy of free expression for all seems to be needed more than ever today, at a time of appalling assaults on expression not only by traditional opponents on the political right - those offended by what they consider obscene or radical or otherwise taboo - but also from the left - radical feminists calling for the suppression of pornography, members of minorities banning language they consider psychologically damaging, and various other proponents of so-called political correctness. These more recently minted censors are now to be found within such former bastions of free speech as the universities and even the American Civil Liberties Union. This urgently important book is not a mere collection of legal cases; neither is it a history of free expression or a polemic from either left or right.

When James Joyce's Ulysses began to appear in installments in 1918, it provoked widespread outrage and disgust. As a result, U.S. Postal authorities denied several installments of Ulysses access to the mails, initiating a series of suppressions that would result in a thirteen-year ban on Joyce's novel. Obscenity trials spanned the next decade. Using personal interviews and primary sources never before discussed in depth, James Joyce and Censorship closely examines the legal trials of Ulysses from 1920 to 1934.

Journalists are being imprisoned and killed in record numbers. Online surveillance is annihilating privacy, and the Internet can be brought under government control at any time. Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, warns that we can no longer assume our global information ecosystem is stable, protected, and robust. Journalists -- and the crucial news they report -- are increasingly vulnerable to attack by authoritarian governments, militants, criminals, and terrorists, who all seek to use technology, political pressure, and violence to set the global information agenda.

In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of "indecency" laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato's argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the "harm to minors" argument rests on shaky foundations." "There is an urgent need for informed, dispassionate debate about the perceived conflict between the free-expression rights of young people and the widespread urge to shield them from expression that is considered harmful. Not in Front of the Children will spur this long-needed conversation.

The campaign in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s to rid comic books of their violent content, and often-times to obliterate the medium itself, had far-reaching and deeply felt reverberations. Spearheaded by moralists, educators, politicians, and psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, anti-comics crusades led to book burnings, town meetings, periodical discourses, and the draconian Comics Code, recognized as the most oppressive act of self-censorship in this country's history. At issue was the possible link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, although then-current concerns about communist infiltration, lowered educational levels, and moral decay also crept into the arguments.

Censorship has been an ongoing phenomenon even in "the land of the free." This examination of banned books across U.S. history examines the motivations and effects of censorship, shows us how our view of right and wrong has evolved over the years, and helps readers to understand the tremendous importance of books and films in our society. Provides readers with a broad understanding of the different levels of censorship. Puts challenges to books into historical context of societal standards and current events. Takes both historical and literary perspectives, recognizing the lasting cultural influences of texts and their literary significance. Presents biographical background of major authors who have been challenged. Identifies the source and explains the result of challenges to the most important or influential banned books. Compares challenges to controversial books against similar challenges to controversial films, television shows, and video games.

In this lucid, disturbing, and provocative book, Joan Delfattore offers a behind-the-scenes view of the ways in which special-interest groups influence the content of textbooks used in public and private schools throughout the country. Efforts to censor elementary and high school textbooks have proliferated in the past decade. Most challenges have come from ultraconservative activists who oppose evolution, racial and ethnic equality, nontraditional gender roles, pacifism, and a host of other issues that contradict their religious, political, or social views. Other protests originate with ultraliberal activists whose goal is to eliminate all negative or traditional descriptions of racial, ethnic, religious, or gender groups, without regard for accuracy or historical context.

Set in a World War II American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian, who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. Yossarian is also trying to decode the meaning of Catch-22, a mysterious regulation that proves that insane people are really the sanest, while the supposedly sensible people are the true madmen.

Two misfits. One extraordinary love. Eleanor -- Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough -- Eleanor. Park -- He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises -- Park. Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds -- smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

Living in a "perfect" world without social ills, a boy approaches the time when he will receive a life assignment from the Elders, but his selection leads him to a mysterious man known as the Giver, who reveals the dark secrets behind the utopian facade.

Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America's dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has inspired artists as diverse as John Ford, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. Tracing the journey of the Joad family from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the migrant camps of California, Steinbeck creates an American epic, spacious, impassioned, and pulsating with the rhythms of living speech. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and has since sold millions of copies worldwide.

Sixteen-year-old Miles' first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama includes good friends and great pranks, but is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal car crash.

The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end. Connor is too difficult for his parents to control. Risa, a ward of the state, is not enough to be kept alive. And Lev is a tithe, a child conceived and raised to be unwound. Together, they may have a chance to escape and to survive.