h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Any reasons for some of these books being banned? Was it short term? Ones I have read, and thus maybe able to comment on include:
A Clockwork Orange, A Brave New World, James and The Giant Peach, Little Red Riding Hood, Lord of The Flies, Slaughter House Five, Huckleberry Finn (or Tom Sawyer, I can't remember which one), The Merchant of Venice, The Witches, Twelfth Night.
I can understand some books (Lady Chatterly being a good example) causing controversy, but Roald Dahl!

The books listed were banned or challenged for a variety of reasons, and by different groups. Some communities wanted them banned from a specific public library, or school, or the reading list of an English class. They wanted to 'protect' the members of the community from the offending material, language or ideas. Sometimes a state bans a textbook from the whole public school system.

Challenges happens regularly. Sometimes the challenges are defeated, sometimes they are not, and the books are suppressed in the community. Indefinitely. [Sometimes communities actually take the offending books out and burn them.]

The American Library Association has an Intellectual Freedom Newsletter that lists current challenges to books in the US. Here is their summary of why books were challenged between 1990 and 1998:

5,246 challenges were reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom

1,299 were challenges to “sexually explicit” material
1,134 to material considered to use “offensive language,”
1,062 to material considered “unsuited to age group,”
744 to material with an “occult theme or promoting the occult or Satanism,”
474 to material with a homosexual theme or “promoting homosexuality.”

"Other specific challenges were to material that dealt with religious viewpoint (373), nudity (276), racism (219), and sex education (190), or were thought to be anti-family (186)."

"Almost seventy percent of the challenges were to material in schools or school libraries. Another twenty-six percent were to material in public libraries. Sixty percent of the challenges were brought by parents, sixteen percent by patrons, and almost ten percent by administrators."

The examples of banned books on the list shows how dangerous allowing censorship can be. What one person finds 'objectionable' is sometimes totally innocent to another. I can try to research the objections to some of the specific titles if you like.

The question is 'WHO DECIDES WHAT I CAN READ?' When a book is banned that decision is being made for you.

How could anybody want to ban Brave New World? Yes, I can understand how its vision could be offensive, but surely that should be used as a lesson not to let that kind of situation develop. If people are trying to stop books with important mssages like that, then why isn't The Handmaid's Tale on your list?

Unfortunately, the list is only a SELECTION of banned or challenged titles.

And The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood HAS also been banned. One incident that was recorded on another list:
It was removed from the Chicopee, Mass. High School English class reading list (1993) because it contains profanity and sex.

Here is why Brave New World was challenged in one place:
Challenged as required reading in the Corona-Norco, Calif. Unified School District (1993) because it is "centered around negative activity." The book was retained and teachers selected alternatives if students object to Huxley's novel.

"centered around negative activity" Isn't that the point of Brave New World?
Incidently, I was reading a review for a book first published in the seventies which claimed to be written by Adolf Hitler. I can't remember the name right now, but it was an attempt by some guy to right as if he had been Hitler. His point was to attempt to explain Hitlers way of thinking, so as to point out why he was wrong. Apparently, according to the review, it is a very clever deconstruction of Nazi ideology. The weird bit was that some neo-Nazi's in America actually put it on their recommended reading list, failing to see that it was anti-Nazi.
This could be construed as the reason why most people should not be allowed to choose for themselves (not being clever enough to spot what a book is about, either way) but that is just as bad as any other reason.
Have I made myself clear, or am I prattling incoherently?

I'm going to give up trying to understand why people do things like that. It's so dumb! I bet somebody's even tried to ban the Guide... It just makes no sense whatsoever. Books are just books, when it comes down to it, made up of lots and lots of letters. Of course, these have meaning, and you can learn a lot from a book, but you have to remember that it is only a book. Even if it does spawn something like h2g2

The above two comments pretty much cover pointing out the idiocy in banning books. Very seldom [if ever] do the reasons to ban a book ever have anything to do with relating the content within them to the reasons for banning them. The imagined problems created by reading them are far less dangerous than the real dangers created by banning them.

Many times sex, profanity, 'dangerous' ideas are banned in an effort to keep them from 'perverting young minds'.
I decided long ago that my kids could read what ever they wanted. If they were old enough to understand something, they were old enough to read about it. And if they didnt understand it...reading about it wouldnt hurt anyway cause they wouldnt know what they had read.

Of course I also knew what they were reading. If they had been selecting nothing but pornography, I would attempt to include other choices so that they would not grow up with the view that it was the primary adult activity. In other words I would try to balance their view, and make sure that they had access to healthy books about sex and relationship. And there is a point within a teenager's life where reality DOES pretty much revolve around sex. Just as nutrition mainly involves fast food and french fries. If other alternatives are presented, eventually they grow past this phase.

Nothing need be banned. Either in mental or physical food.

Hurrah! Hurrah! Sense bursts forth like rays of sunlight over the horizon.

was it the part about sex, or french fries???



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(straight-faced) French fries, definitely. I think that must be what the Freeks meant when they spoke about Ambrosia, the food of the gods. Well, that or Chinese food.

An excellent Entry containing some truly alarming facts, bluDragon. But however idiotic some of the American authorities may have been or may continue to be, surely the ultimate in book-banning was perpetrated by Iran over Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". Banning a book from the shops is quite bad enough. Trying to ban the author from continuing to live is something else again...
The authorities in Britain have been far from blameless, too. There was one ludicrous case about 10 years ago when the Thatcher government absurdly attenpted to ban "Spycatcher" by Peter Wright, a retired secret serviceman, from publication in Britain on the grounds of national security. The fact that any hostile agencies could by that point have obtained all the information contained in "Spycatcher" simply by buying a copy in Australia, where Wright's book was freely available, didn't seem to have occurred to the British, er, intelligence services. Needless to add, all that the ban on UK publication achieved was massive free publicity for the book and soaring sales of imported copies.
Finally, I think I remember the case of the fake "Hitler" book mentioned in a previous posting. If memory serves, it was called "The Hitler Diaries" - and the fact that it was a fake was only discovered after one UK newspaper had paid a large sum for the serialisation rights. Tee hee...

Thank you for the comments!

You are so very right about the Rushdie situation. Certainly the ultimate in bookbanning. And an indication that there are worse things than burning the books. [of course just ask a witch about THAT] But in today's world it is even more alarming that something like the Rushdie thing can happen!! At least they have pretty much given up burning witches. But, it certainly changed Mr Rushdie's life.

Phil mentioned Spycatcher also, in the Censorship thread in this forum. It is certainly an irony for book banners that crusades AGAINST a book frequently result in even more popularity for it.

Unfortunately there is a parallel situation that when complaints are successfully raised against one book, it seems to spawn a flurry of complaints against other books. Seems to give people the idea that they CAN challenge ANYTHING they personally dont like. No matter how narrow or shortsighted the complaint. And once the 'witch hunt' atmosphere is created and allowed to continue unchecked you get a lotta stuff being burned, suppressed, etc.

Your comments add yet another dimension to the whole issue of censorship.

Thoughtfully,
blu
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I am 14 and my mother has always allowed me to read anything I want. Occasionally she has recommended against reading a book because she thinks the content too harsh, or too disgusting, or that I am not ready. Usually I read on anyway, and usually she is right. However, she has never forbidden me to read a book, and she has never taken away a book she would rather I not read (examples: Interview With a Vampire, Lolita, The Satanic Verses.) I have visited several sites that listed books that have been banned in the US and the reasons they were banned and could not believe how many were banned for idiotic reasons like bad language. Kids use or hear bad language every day; it will not warp their minds to read them. Also, I resent anyone thinking they know better than I what I should read, what I can handle reading, and what would be beneficial (and not) for me to read (particularly people who have not even read the books they are forbidding! as happens in many cases). For instance, many people would assume I preferred books like Sweet Valley High (no offense to fans of these books) to books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Richard Bach, yet I read and enjoy them both (I've sampled SVH and do not care for it.) Having read Solzhenitsyn, I know that some people would consider the content entirely unsuitable for a girl my age (leaving naughty words completely aside; I'm talking about the real content here). I have read books that "promote homosexuality", describe murders, describe rapes, "focuses on the negative", and I have probably read books that are anti-family. As a result of such wide reading, I am the articulate, opinionated girl I am today. My horizons are much broadened by reading, and I would jump on the flames if I came upon a book burning (or at the very least make a valiant effort to put them out.) I am also horribly long-winded, so I'll close now.
silversolstice

I am also lucky in the fact that my parents allow me to read whatever I want - although now I'm 17 they can't really stop me that well, can they? But when I was younger I could read more or less anything I wanted, and often read the same books my older sister did (until she started on Mills & Boon, that is). I understand why some parents might want to control what their children read but if they want to encourage their children to read, the kids should be allowed to read what they want.

You both had wise parents--for two reasons. One, they didnt try to control your thinking by controlling your reading. And two, they also involved themselves so they knew what you were reading. And I suspect, they also involved themselves in other parts of your lives.

Helping a child to learn to think for themselves is a very scary thing for some parents. It is much easier to just say 'Dont!'. But eventually you have to let the child cross the street by themself, let them decide if they are going to the same church you do, etc., etc. And the parent wont be there when the child decides what they think about smoking, drinking, drugs, sex. So they are much better off helping their children deal with these issues than ignoring them.

Sticking your head in the sand, and demanding that your children do the same, will hurt more than harm them in the long run. Better to help them figure out solutions to controversial problems, than pretending the problems don't exist.

Hurray! for you and your parents!


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