Department of Book Reports: Banned Books Week

Image via ABFFE

For the past thirty years, the last week of September has been Banned Books Week, a celebration of the Freedom to Read and the First Amendment, and this year is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Experession, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the PEN American Center, among others. Libraries and bookstores across our great land will have displays of the many books that have, at one time or another, been suppressed in some fashion.

What are some of these tomes? Some examples:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee has been challenged many times, including in 1980 by the Vernon Verona Sherill New York School District as a "filthy, trashy novel". I've read it a few times, and I guess I missed that part.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple has also been challenged and banned. The Souderton PA School District banned it as "smut" in 1992 as inappropriate 10th grade reading.

Ulysses by James Joyce was banned from the United States, England and Ireland for obscenity during the 1920's and not because it was deemed "too long".

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was banned as obsecne in France from 1956-1959, England in 1959, and Argentina that same year. Florida's Marion County had its DA office look into the book for ideas of incest and pedophilia.

Even winning Nobel Prize in literature does not keep a writer from censorial minds. Toni Morrison's Beloved has also been challenged many times. In 2007 two parents objected to the use of the book in an AP high school English class because it addressed issues of bestiality, racism and sex. The Principal of the school ordered it replaced by Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which, of course, has nothing to do with sex. Other Nobel Prize winners whose books have been banned include John Steinbeck (both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men); Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls...did the Earth move for you, too?); William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying); and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby).

This past Monday the School Board of Monarch, Kansas voted to end the ban in the school library of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Kind of. The kids cant really check it out, but it is available in certain portion there for their parents to check it out for them. The Vonnegut Library has made an offer to help kids decide for themselves.

These obscene books are available from Jackson Street Books and other fine independent bookstores.

What are your favorite banned books?

Department of Book Reports: Novels of Political Paranoia: Seven Days in May

In an on-going series about the Paranoid Style in American politics in the American novel, this report will look at one of the classics in cold-war literature, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II's Seven Days in May (Harper and Row, 1962, a year before the Kennedy assassination, and out-of-print).

Set sometime in the early 1970's, the book has a fairly straight forward plot. The President of the United States, Jordan Lyman, with the consent of the US Senate, has conducted a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The Treaty is regarded as near-treason in Pentagon, where Colonel Martin "Jiggs" Casey works as an adjutant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one General James Mattoon Scott. Over the course of about 24 hours, Jiggs, through such innocuous clues as a betting pool on the Preakness, an encounter with an old military friend who unwittingly discloses the existence of a secret army base outside El Paso, and discovering that his boss has been lying to him on other matters, begins to suspect that there is a military plot to take over the government of the United States. Col. Casey takes the information to President, and though his story is dismissed by other advisers to the President, an investigation ensues and over the next few days, the plot is discovered to be real and plans are made to thwart it.

One of the first of a series of political thrillers to be published, the book operates in a cold-war era. The Russians are not to be trusted. Communism is the greatest external and internal threat to the United States. And the question asked consistently is who will protect our national security when it seems that the Executive wont. At least not to the satisfaction of the Military. It was also a period of what appeared to be a highly political military. The character of General Scott appears to have been modeled on such Generals as Edwin Walker, Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur. Walker,the apparent object of an assassination attempt before JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald, and LeMay, the 1968 running mate of George Wallace, were especially reactionary in their political views, though MacArthur didn't lag far behind.

Seven Days in May was released in a film version in 1964, directed by John Frankenheimer, fresh off of filming The Manchurian Candidate, with a screenplay by Rod Serling, a vehement liberal and starring Kirk Douglas as Jiggs Casey, Burt Lancaster as General Scott and Frederic March as the President. Here is a case where I think the the film may be better. (It's available off and on at the Youtubes). The opening sequence where protesters and counter-protesters to the treaty file past one another until skirmishes between them erupts into a near riot, gives great imagery to the milieu of the times. Serling's screenplay tightens up much of the books plot (Casey is a married in the book, and the family scenes tend to bog down the narrative; in the movie he is unmarried), but still uses the strong and dramatic dialogue that Knebel and Bailey wrote.

The book is, unfortunately, out-of-print. However we do have one copy available and there are, last I looked, about 195 listings for it at abebooks.com. As a political thriller, the book is a fine read; as a movie, it gives cinematic vision to a well-imagined plot. And the central issue remains with us. Should our fears for our national security ever over-ride our Constitution? What happens when megalomania of our would-be defenders becomes the source of undermining our political way of life?
With each order placed through jacksonst-books.com, we'll include a freebie: a publisher's Advance Reading Copy. Mention you saw us here in the "Questions for the Bookseller"



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Department of Book Reports: Banned Books Week

We are nearing the end of this years Banned Books Week, sponsored by, amongst others, the American Library Association and the American Booksellers Association, all as part of the effort to bring attention to those who would ban books.

Of course there has always been those that would ban books. The Catholic Church had its Index. The Nazis staged public book burnings. Ulysses was banned for US import until 1934. Both Lady Chatterly's Lover and Naked Lunch were banned in Boston. Mayor Palin, almost immediately after assuming office, wanted to know how to go about banning books in her hometown burg. It makes one wonder why.

Books can be dangerous. Many contain ideas. Sometimes unpopular ideas. Ideas that may make one think. Ideas that engage and transform us. Ideas that set off our imaginations. Ideas that can change the way we see the world. Ideas that may make decide to help change the world for the better. Clearly books can be subversive. And we can't have that! An informed and imaginative people could do incredible things.

The blogosphere has done a good job this week of alerting us to this week. The General linked activities revolving around Banned Books week in Second Life here. Crooks and Liars has covered it well, too. I'm sure I'm missing others. What is your favorite Banned Book? Do you have any stories about censorship and the banning of books in your locality?

In the meantime, enjoy this favorite tune of démocommié™™™™™©®ç au courant.


This book report was brought to you by the soon to be resurrected Jackson Street Books
top photo: thnx boingboing.