Animal Farm: Banned by the Soviets, Promoted by the CIA
Though the book cannot and should not be divorced from the Russian Revolution, Orwell sees beyond the specifics of that revolution, and even beyond revolution itself, to tell what… More
Why We Need Diverse LGBTQI Books
LGBTQI literature, while no longer taboo, still rests on uneasy ground in our school libraries. The tragedy, of course, is that young people are the ones who need these… More
Reservation Sunsets and ‘Salem’s Lot
Maybe the banning advocate truly is the 13 year old, terrified that his secret life is out, that some novelist had looked into his private world and reported from… More
On Beauty: Banning Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The narrative that Pecola absorbs from the world around her is simple. It tells her that to be beautiful is to be white. It shapes her identity at the… More
Tyranny of Parents: Banning Shel Silverstein
Warning: What you are about to read contains profanity, vile, morbid, and anti-parent material, suggestive illustrations, subliminal messages that glorify Satan, suicide, cannibalism, disrespect for truth and legitimate authority,… More
Song of Songs
Why is Song of Songs singled out as the problem child? Song of Songs, the Bible's great love poem, is the zenith of the Bible's contemporary social incomprehensibility because… More
The Naked Lunch: Disguised Espionage
In a sense, the book was predestined to cause a censorial response, programmed, as it was, to infiltrate and disrupt. It seems likely that Burroughs, along with his editors… More
Burning is Banning: On the Qur’an
At this very moment, somebody somewhere in the United States is trying, in some way or other—be it by burning, be it by banning—to censor the Qur’an. At this… More
On Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
It’s a luxury in our country that banning books is by and large an academic argument...[W]hen we have a discussion of “banned” books in this country, what we are… More
Immunization Through Fear: Banning R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps
I assert that the original Goosebumps series and all the subsequent spin-offs are so popular (over 300 million sold, making Stine the second most best-selling children’s author of all-time)… More
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