News Flash: It’s Banned Books Week here in the United States, you know: the land of the free- at least on paper. As usual, there is plenty of media attention on the American Library Association’s annual event to highlight censorship efforts and I take bittersweet pride in reporting on...
The Wild Party is the name of a novel-length poem written by Joseph Moncure March that was immediately banned across the nation, starting in Boston upon its publication in 1928, for its decadent content. In spite of- and perhaps due to- the controversy linked to the piece it was...
Nobel and Pulitzer-winning author Toni Morrison has an impressive resume of literary hits and numerous awards, but with that comes a history of having those same novels censored. In January of 2012, the Plymouth-Canton Schools in Michigan was the latest setting in a long list of schools and libraries...
Here’s a fact for you: One in every eight births in Talladega County, Alabama is to a teen mother, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health. You might be thinking what that has to do with censorship and banned books. Well, not much- unless you happen to live...
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library knows a thing or two about the controversy surrounding censorship. Vonnegut has found his novels on the banned books list repeatedly and, last year, writer Corey Michael Dalton spent Banned Books Week imprisoned within a jail cell made out of banned books at the...
Growing up in the 1980s many of us had our interest in science inspired and popularized in the television show, MacGyver. Come on, who could forget such classic scenes like when he made a defibrillator out of some candlesticks, a microphone cord, and a rubber mat? Or how about...
Just about anything, in any format, can get censored or banned these days- books, television, movies, art, and music, to name a few. Now we can add classic nursery rhymes to the list of “offensive” material. The world, it seems, has completely lost its sense of reason and logic....
The Irish Censorship of Publications Board was established in 1929 by the newly-formed Irish Free State (boy, isn’t that a contradiction in terms) to examine and restrict ‘obscene’ publications. Liam O’Flaherty’s The House of Gold had coincidentally been released that same year and enjoyed a brief time in print...
Texas-born Tomás Rivera’s coming-of-age story of a Mexican boy’s life in a migrant family in the 1940s and 1950s, with its themes of family life and tensions, is apparently too much for the parents of a Clarke County seventh-grader and they want the book banned. They demanded that the...
Most people have either had the experience or been witness to the self-censorship that comes from the fear of causing offense to someone; some others may feel that over-protectiveness denies people the opportunity to decide for themselves where the moral line is when it comes to artful expression. Most...