Banned Books Week

posted by Peter Rothberg on 09/29/2009 @ 4:23pm
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow/478684/banned_books_week

I wasn't surprised to read that the American Library Association (ALA) reported at least 513 actual and attempted book bannings in the US in 2008. Here's the list of the ten most frequently challenged books of last year.

What did surprise me is this interactive map showing exactly where the bannings have taken place. Would you have guessed that many of the bluest states have been just as guilty as the cradle of the Confederacy? New England's puritanical heritage seems to be holding sway with the Eastern Seaboard awash in incidents of censorship.

Along with the locations of each incident, the map notes the offending titles and offer brief summaries of the cases against these tomes. The controversies range from predictable fears about magic-related YA fiction to traditional opposition to classics like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The transgressions range from the use of profanity and slang, to allegedly offensive depictions of racial or religious groups, to portrayals of homosexuals as anything other than mentally ill.

Worried about provacative books, Leesburg votes to separate collection by age groups

Activists ask Leesburg commissioners to move racy books for teens at library

By Christine Show
Sentinel Staff Writer
September 28 2009, 7:29 PM EDT

LEESBURG -- Responding to a call by parents, church and community leaders concerned about provacative books available to teens at the Leesburg Public Library, city commissioners tonight voted 4-1 to separate all books based on age groups.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/lake/orl-racy-book-controversy-092809,0,3897922.story

Banned Books Week: Still Needed in the U.S.

Joan E. Bertin
This piece was co-authored by Chris Finan, President of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

For a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency.

Stick a pin in each place where there's been a challenge to a school or library book, and you'll have a map of the United States that looks like a hedgehog in need of a haircut.

This year already, challenges have been reported from Montana to Indiana to Texas, in high schools and libraries, and from classics like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, to newer books like Brent Hartinger's The Geography Club and Chris Crutcher's Chinese Handcuffs.

This February in West Bend, Wisconsin, a local couple filed a petition calling for the Library Advisory Board to remove or label several Young Adult titles, including Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop and Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, because they felt that all the books in the young-adult section that dealt with homosexuality were "gay-affirming." The couple also requested that the library build a collection of books by "ex-gays" in order to achieve an ideological balance.

As this debate raged on, four members of the library board were not reappointed because of accusations that they were "promoting the indoctrination of the gay agenda." Then the Christian Civil Liberties Union Milwaukee branch filed a lawsuit against the city of West Bend, complaining that the mere presence of some of the young adult books in the library caused "mental and emotional harm" to the elderly plaintiffs. The CCLU seeks $30,000 in damages per plaintiff, the mayor's resignation, and the removal of the books for a public burning (literally!).

As the late, great, and much-censored author Kurt Vonnegut would say: And so it goes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-e-bertin/banned-books-week-still-n_b_302248.html

Don't read that! The secret lives of book banners

Julia Keller
CULTURAL CRITIC
September 27 2009

My childhood was a bloodbath.

The blood stayed safely confined within the covers of books, but still: I relished gore. I ate up stories of serial killers and ax murderers and remorseless poisoners. I couldn't get enough of gun-toting hoodlums. Supernatural creatures, such as the vampires that currently flit and hover over pop culture, did not intrigue; my passion was strictly reserved for true crime, for the real-life roguery that imperils our every step -- or so one might think, from these lurid accounts.

My obsession worried my mother, who feared she had hatched a monster. One day, while I was busy toiling in a fourth-grade classroom at Geneva Kent Elementary School in Huntington, W.Va., she went into my room and gathered up my true-crime stash. I returned home, discovered the theft and confronted her: What had she done with my precious books?

"I threw them away," she replied with an infuriating calmness.

Oh, the outrage! Seething, I resolved then and there to run away from home -- Alaska sounded nice -- and get a head start on my destiny, which involved the establishment of a detective agency. What especially rankled was that my mother's fears had been wrong-headed: I didn't identify with the killers. I identified with the cops, the sleuths who cracked the case. I wanted to solve the crime -- not perpetrate it.

That day marked my first encounter with banned books.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0927-lit-life-banned-bookssep27,0,2766625.column

Intellectual freedom videos from 2009 ALA Annual Conference now online!

OIF has four new videos up featuring programs from the 2009 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. Check them out!

http://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=552

“My, those novels certainly are… graphic!”
One of the most popular intellectual freedom programs in years, this panel discussion was sponsored by the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee, Association of American Publishers, and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Speakers: Neil Gaiman, Terry Moore, and Craig Thompson. Moderated by Charles Brownstein of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

“Privacy in an Era of Change”
An engrossing conversation about the status of privacy under the new administration. Cosponsored by the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee and the ALA Washington Office. Speakers: Mary Ellen Callahan, Chief Privacy Officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; David Sobel, Senior Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and Craig Wacker, program officer for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning initiative.

“Libraries, Librarians, and America’s War on Sex”
Sex ed advocate Marty Klein discusses the importance of having sexual information available to all library users. Sponsored by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table.

“Intellectual Freedom on the Front Lines”
Librarians and library supporters from West Bend, Wisconsin share their perspective on the protracted censorship challenges going on in their community at this issues briefing session, sponsored by the Intellectual Freedom Committee and the Freedom to Read Foundation. (See a blog post on the session from American Libraries’ Inside Scoop here.)

Your librarian, the freedom fighter

September 21, 2009

By Guy Tridgell Southtown Star

Nothing about Diane Norris indicates a freedom fighter is at work. As assistant director of youth services at the Orland Park Public Library, Norris helps to oversee the section containing children's books and juvenile literature. It's a quiet comfortable environment on the building's ground level, where most of the noise comes from kids still unwise to the ways of library etiquette.

"Controversial" is not the word that comes to mind describing the place and her job.
But if you need help finding "And Tango Makes Three" or "King & King" - two books for children that have been asked to be pulled from libraries throughout the country for their gay overtones - Norris will help. Happily.

To read the full story, click here: http://www.southtownstar.com/news/tridgell/1781568,092109tridgell.article

School book ban raises censorship concerns in PR

By MANUEL ERNESTO RIVERA (AP)

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i4QmRHmriAQs3Jsy13LgLMGU-RtgD9AM19RG1

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Several university professors in Puerto Rico are protesting a decision to ban five books from the curriculum at public high schools in the U.S. territory because of coarse language.
The Spanish-language books previously were read as part of the 11th grade curriculum, but proofreaders this year alerted education officials about "coarse" slang, including references to genitalia in "Mejor te lo cuento: antologia personal," by Juan Antonio Ramos.
Also among the banned books is the novel "Aura" by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, one of Latin America's most prominent contemporary writers. The other four authors affected are from Puerto Rico.
Magali Garcia Ramis, a communications professor at the University of Puerto Rico, expressed concern Saturday about how books are being evaluated by the island's Department of Education.
"This kind of mentality rejects everything that is art and only associates sexuality with inappropriateness," Garcia Ramis said.

'Racy' Twilight books banned from schools in Australia

'Racy' Twilight books banned from schools September 12, 2009

Twilight books "too racy" for children have been removed from libraries"Goes against religious beliefs" http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26062002-421,00.html

PRIMARY school students have been banned from reading the teen cult classic Twilight books because they are too racy. Librarians have stripped the books from shelves in some junior schools because they believe the content is too sexual and goes against religious beliefs, The Daily Telegraph reports. They even have asked parents not to let kids bring their own copies of Stephenie Meyer's smash hit novels - which explore the stormy love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire - to school. Santa Sabina College at Strathfield was so concerned about the Twilight craze that teachers ran a seminar for Year 6 students to discuss sexual and supernatural themes in the books. The school's head librarian Helen Schutz said: "We don't have a policy of censorship but the issues in the Twilight series are quite different from the Harry Potter classics.

Libraries and the First Amendment exhibit

In July, the McCormick Freedom Museum in Chicago created a brand new exhibit: Libraries and the First Amendment. The exhibit explores the many ways that libraries are both bastions and battlegrounds of First Amendment freedoms. Libraries and the First Amendment has two main components. First is the virtual exhibit at www.FreedomInLibraries.org that features case studies, interactives, and comment boards. The second is a versatile poster show that transforms any public library into an exhibition space.

The exhibit is offered as a free service to any library.

Yale criticized for nixing Muslim cartoons in book

By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN, Associated Press Writer John Christoffersen, Associated Press Writer – Tue Sep 8, 10:41 am ET

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Yale University has removed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from an upcoming book about how they caused outrage across the Muslim world, drawing criticism from prominent alumni and a national group of university professors.
Yale cited fears of violence.

Yale University Press, which the university owns, removed the 12 caricatures from the book "The Cartoons That Shook the World" by Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen. The book is scheduled to be released next week.

A Danish newspaper originally published the cartoons — including one depicting Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban — in 2005. Other Western publications reprinted them.
The following year, the cartoons triggered massive protests from Morocco to Indonesia. Rioters torched Danish and other Western diplomatic missions. Some Muslim countries boycotted Danish products.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

"I think it's horrifying that the campus of Nathan Hale has become the first place where America surrenders to this kind of fear because of what extremists might possibly do," said Michael Steinberg, an attorney and Yale graduate.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090908/ap_on_re_us/us_prophet_drawings_yale

EPIC seeks to intervene in Books settlement, says privacy policies are no solution

While the CDT finds Google’s new privacy promises a good first step, the Electronic Privacy Information Center apparenty feels differently. Not content to file a brief on the matter, EPIC is actually seeking to intervene in the case (PDF), since, it says, none of the parties are representing the public’s interests, which are massively impacted by the settlement.

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5366

Congress weighs landmark change in Web ad privacy

Congress weighs landmark change in Web ad privacy

By JOELLE TESSLER (AP)

WASHINGTON — The Web sites we visit, the online links we click, the search queries we conduct, the products we put in virtual shopping carts, the personal details we reveal on social networking pages — all of this can give companies insight into what Internet ads we might be interested in seeing.

But privacy watchdogs warn that too many people have no idea that Internet marketers are tracking their online habits and then mining that data to serve up targeted pitches — a practice known as behavioral advertising.

So Congress could be stepping in. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is drafting a bill that would impose broad new rules on Web sites and advertisers. His goal: to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them on the Web and how it is being used, and to give them control over that information.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jDu3Jz5Pe_pkSNm1gHftBmK1AzdQD9AIHAP00

Privacy Missing From Google Books Settlement

If Google digitizes the world's books, how will it keep track of what you read?

That's one of the unanswered questions that librarians and privacy experts are grappling with as Google attempts to settle a long-running lawsuit by publishers and copyright holders and move ahead with its effort to digitize millions of books, known as the Google Books Library Project.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2009/08/28/28idg-privacy-missing-from-google-books-settlement-94780.html?emc=eta1