I am humbled and honored by all of the positive reactions across the country and around the world for my Banned Books Awareness and Reading for Knowledge series about censorship. The comments and the discussions are fun and informative and nothing short of amazing. I’ve even ruffled a few...
Freedom of expression and thought is a fundamental human right, and is so important that it is the first amendment to the United States Constitution, yet there are those who would deny that right because some ideas that are expressed by others are contrary to their personal opinions. The...
Gary Paulsen has written over 200 books in his career. Most of those novels are junior-high-level stories that center on the wilderness and the importance of nature, and use common “coming of age” themes where a character in isolation must use the art of survival as a rite of...
Well wouldn’t you know it? Yet another of America’s legendary Founding Fathers has had their written work banned by the same citizenry that purports to idolize them. Benjamin Franklin’s life story was published in France under the title “Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin”(The Private Life of...
We all grew up with the lyrical children’s books by Theodor Seuss Geisel, otherwise known as the immortal Dr. Seuss. His imaginative characters and trisyllabic meter rhymes gave us bestselling books like Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue...
This morning, while doing a casual web search for banned books graphics, I came across my own logo for BBARK by surprise. I saw that it was posted by a library, so I interestingly followed the link and discovered that it was for a public library in Ontario, Canada...
He was the third President of the United States, the most intellectual figure in shaping America’s early history, and a voice of reason in his own time as well as today. The thought is enough to imagine him rolling in his grave, but, like fellow Founding Father, Thomas Paine,...
Thomas Paine was many things: author, radical, inventor, intellectual, and revolutionary; but he was also considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, was considered so influential to the American revolutionary cause that it was reportedly said at the time that “without...
On Thursday, August 11, 2011, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once again made headlines, but it wasn’t for literary accomplishment or news of a long-lost Sherlock Holmes crime buster. He, instead, found himself on newswires around the world for having one of his books banned. This isn’t the first time...
The Giving Tree is one of the most affectionate, oft-quoted, and beloved children’s stories of all time; A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends are many a child’s first introduction to poetry. These books have endured because Silverstein paints a whimsical world of fantasy that...