"Your one-stop source for improper ideology and freedom seeds."
Reviews of subversive literature
Here’s an excellent summary of the growing power of organized book-banning groups. The internet helps us, but it helps them too! I usually limit these book-banning digests to news to from North America, but this article on international book-banning is too interesting not to share. The Perks of Being a Wallflower has been challenged again, […]
A small victory in Florida. Another victory in Montana. Yet another victory in Wisconsin. But the book-banners never stop trying. Parents in Richland, Washington, review books on high school reading lists by counting swear words, ignoring literary merit. Click on Book Index, scroll down, and click on their review of A Prayer for Owen Meany […]
The lead story: But really, why not bowdlerize Twain? Christians read a truncated version of the bible. Southerners have their own version of Civil War history. Schoolkids in Texas learn about an America that never was. What else is new? So . . . on to more banned book news! I asked once before whether […]
Dateline Seattle: we’re not banning books, just “suspending” them! Interesting USA Today article: it’s no longer just isolated parents working alone, now book banners and book banner wannabes are starting to organize and band together. The Smithsonian, taking its cue from Obama and the Democrats in congress, caves to threats of Republican miffitude. Even writing […]
The difficulty of getting at the truth of a story was increased today by Wonkette, an influential political blog, then multiplied by Fox News, a conservative propaganda outlet. Starting with the onion’s outer layer, here’s the headline and blurb from Wonkette: An American state has decided to promote illiteracy? What, are they shutting down schools? […]
A conservative book-banner’s question: why can’t our school libraries be filled with lofty thoughts written by dead white men again? And here’s the expected pinko response. Books the right would cheerfully ban. An old (1994) essay by conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, saying there’s no such thing as book-banning in the USA. I’m calling bullshit. If […]
Maps? I love ’em! Well, maybe except for this one: View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2010 in a larger map The Pentagon has figured out a way to take a book out of circulation without actually banning it. Here’s a good anti-censorship manifesto from the writer who was recently “disinvited” from a youth book fair. […]
In honor of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week 2010, which starts today, here is a special roundup of banned book news, and a comment on Wilbur Smith’s The Dark of the Sun. Wondering which ten books drew the most fire over the past year? Here’s your answer. Corrected entry (see comment below post): […]