Censorship and Banned Books: Home

Given that the protection and maintenance of intellectual freedom is a paramount duty of librarians and libraries, the Intellectual Freedom Manual is a necessity in any library. Major sections on “Protecting the Freedom to Read,” “Code of Ethics of the American Library Association,” “Intellectual Freedom and the Law,” and “Preserving, Protecting, and Working for Intellectual Freedom” give detailed yet concise information on these “aspects of an essential mission.” The manual is well organized, clear, and thorough, though hardly exhaustive.--Ann Welton

Wielding an influence far out of proportion to their numbers, according to the author, well-funded ultraconservative activists have used federal lawsuits and intimidation in an attempt to censor textbooks and to color elementary and secondary school education with their views on everything from minorities to nontraditional sex roles, gun control, evolution, holistic health, anti-pollution laws and religious tolerance. DelFattore argues that these fundamentalists target not only multiculturalism, globalism and environmentalism but also the right of students to think for themselves. Focusing on recent federal cases, her important study examines the chilling effect lawsuits exert on textbook content by prompting publishers to quietly practice self-censorship. A professor of English at the University of Delaware, DelFattore also criticizes "politically correct extremists" who, in her view, censor part of the truth in their efforts to eliminate sexism and racism from texts. Her lucid critique should serve as a rallying point for parents, teachers and administrators who oppose textbook censorship. Readers' Subscription Book Club selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Academic libraries and intellectual freedom in the twenty-first century -- Collection development -- Internet access -- Library exhibit spaces, programs, and rooms : the academic library as agora -- Privacy and confidentiality.

This text gives extensive insight into titles that historically have faced a high rate of censorship, both in the United States and abroad. The text is arranged in four sections, with titles divided by the main grounds (political, religious, sexual, and social) for censorship. Introductory notes for each section define what the book's authors mean by that type of suppression and summarize its history. Each title is identified by author, date and place of original publication, publisher, and literary form, and each entry includes a comprehensive summary of the text. These summaries are followed by a full censorship history and suggested "Further Readings" sections directing readers to accessible sources of additional information. By limiting the texts under consideration to 100, the authors are able to provide highly detailed accounts of each title's censorship history in what is surely the most exhaustive single-volume reference available. A valuable tool for those seeking information on particular banned books or on censorship in general; recommended for public and academic libraries.

Book banning has legal limits -- Book censorship is a universal practice -- Banned Books Week is hypocritical -- Banned Books Week supports first amendment rights -- Book banning violates children and young adult freedoms -- Book banning protects family values -- Book banning handicaps the educational process -- Individuals should make their own decisions about censored books -- Book banning endangers majority values -- Book banning protects minority values -- Banned books teach tolerance -- Book banning reflects American social temperament -- Iranian book ban reveals repressive political regime -- Teachers should prepare for book challenges -- Book destruction controls ideology -- Book destruction destroys cultural identity.

A coming of age novel about Charlie, a freshman in high school who is a wallflower, shy and introspective, and very intelligent. He deals with the usual teen problems, but also with the suicide of his best friend.

Everyone in town thinks Meg is volatile and dull-witted and that her younger brother Charles Wallace is dumb. People are also saying that their father has run off and left their brilliant scientist mother. Spurred on by these rumors, Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their new friend Calvin, embark on a perilous quest through space to find their father. In doing so they must travel behind the shadow of an evil power that is darkening the cosmos, one planet at a time. The travelers must rely on their individual and collective strengths, delving deep into their characters to find answers.

When seventeen-year-old Bella leaves Phoenix to live with her father in Forks, Washington, she meets an exquisitely handsome boy at school for whom she feels an overwhelming attraction and who she comes to realize is not wholly human.

This is the first of a series.

The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl. Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hyper-civilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

At New York City's Central Park Zoo, two male penguins fall in love and start a family by taking turns sitting on an abandoned egg until it hatches.

Come in . . . for where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins. You'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. The Unicorn and the Bloath live there, and so does Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who will not take the garbage out. It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off, and crocodiles go to the dentist.

Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare’s fellow actors in 1623, the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably the most important literary work in the English language.

After years of working as a fireman--one who burns books and enjoys his work--Guy Montag meets a young girl who makes him question his profession and the values of the society in which he lives.

Jerry Renault is forced into a psychological showdown with Trinity School's gang leader, Archie Costello, for refusing to be bullied into selling chocolates for the annual fund raising.

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Ulysses has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each chapter has its own remarkably innovative literary style, and the book is one of the great, extended tours de force of stream-of-consciousness narration. It is an essential stop in any tour of English literature.

D.H. Lawrence finished "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in 1928, but it was not published in an uncensored version until 1960. Many contemporary critics of D.H. Lawrence viewed the Victorian love story as vulgar, and even pornographic. It was banned immediately upon publication in both the UK and the US. The obscenity trials which followed established legal precedents for literature which still endure. At the heart, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is a story about the invisible bonds between lovers, companions, and husbands and wives. Against this backdrop, Lawrence also explores the relationship between physical desire and spiritual fulfillment, often using sensual and explicitly sexual language. This special edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" has been restored for a modern audience, including all previously censored material.

The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic that has been translated into more than 40 languages.
"A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1961 by Harper & Row"--T.p. verso.

Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches.

Story of Holden Caulfield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices -- but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells the story of a teenaged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with an escaping slave, Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious.

Though some of the situations in Huckleberry Finn are funny in themselves (the cockeyed Shakespeare production in Chapter 21 leaps instantly to mind), this book's humor is found mostly in Huck's unique worldview and his way of expressing himself. Describing his brief sojourn with the Widow Douglas after she adopts him, Huck says: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Underlying Twain's good humor is a dark subcurrent of Antebellum cruelty and injustice that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a frequently funny book with a serious message.