"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
Reviews of subversive literature
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! News In the last YCRT! I mentioned a Canadian comedian who is being investigated by a Quebec human rights commission over a joke. Well, get a load of this: a German comedian is being prosecuted for mocking Turkish President Erdogan. And no, not in […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. In 1966, the school board in Hanover County, Virginia, voted unanimously to remove all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird from school libraries. Harper Lee herself responded with an offer to cover the costs of enrolling members of the school board […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! News Roundup: A parent in Seminole County, Florida, lodges a complaint after her 9-year-old brings home a copy of This One Summer, a young adult graphic novel aimed at readers aged 12 to 18. The book is pulled from elementary school […]
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Hitler’s Mein Kampf has an interesting history in Germany: a best-seller before WWII, it’s been banned in that country since 1945. Until last week, that is, when the copyright expired and it entered the public domain: Germans can now read it again. By […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. When this high school principal says “Parents should have the right to determine what their students are exposed to in the classrooms,” what she really means is that parents of a few students get to set school policy on what […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Textbooks confiscated from Tucson Unified School District classrooms, January 2012 Banned Books Week Commentary From Friends & Foes Can you parse this Banned Book Week letter to the editor? I can’t make heads or tails of it! An attempt to ban a […]
Have a great Banned Books Week, everyone! I don’t know about you, but I’ll be ordering a copy of The Boy Came Back — it sounds like a fun read.