September 20 to 27 is Banned Books Week, and the ACLU is calling attention to the wealth of creative expression that is stifled when books can be forbidden from library shelves. For example, which of these books was among the 10 Most Challenged Books of 2002: -- The "Harry Potter" series by J.K. Rowling? -- "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou? Or, -- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain? Give up? Take the ACLU's online quiz to find out: http://www.aclu.org/FreeSpeech/FreeSpeech.cfm?ID=13757&c=83&MX=959&H=0 The ACLU is also using this Banned Books Week to raise awareness of the other ways freedom is being compromised in America's libraries. The ACLU has been in court fighting the government's attempts to force public libraries to use Internet blocking software. And we are working overturn Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which gives the FBI license to snoop in a person's library records. The ACLU encourages Americans to mark Banned Books Week by telling their elected officials to preserve our right to privacy and keep censorship out of our libraries. For more information, see the ACLU's feature page on Banned Books Week at http://www.aclu.org/FreeSpeech/FreeSpeech.cfm?ID=13668&c=83&MX=959&H=050 responses total.
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I'd guess all three. Now I'll go take the quiz.
It was a trick question - they all were. There is more about Banned Book Week at the website of the American Library Association - http://www.ala.org.
I'm reading Ulysses.
AHAHA< FAG! whore.
Freak.
Maybe they've changed the web site since Rane entered #0, but it
isn't "the 10 Most Challenged Books of 2002," it's "20 of the Most
Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000." Also, it isn't a "quiz" at
all. You're instructed to "Check the box next to every book you've
read to find out if you're a rebellious reader." The 20 books are:
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Native Son by Richard Wright
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Except for one major classic and a couple of minor ones, the quality of
the books on the list isn't very high, nor is any of them
especially "rebellious." It's the sort of list a cynical politician
would put together to appeal to what he insultingly imagines to
be "average" people. It says more about the cretins that banned them
instead of Thoreau ("Break the law!") and Whitman ("Resist much, obey
little!") than it does about the books themselves. You actually
*could* ban most of them and the culture wouldn't even blink. The ACLU
is like my cable company: I keep saying, as soon as an alternative
comes along...
I presume "Where's Waldo?" was included as a joke..
Nope. It's because in the beach scene there is a lady going topless. Her nipples are about the size of an ant's footprint. But, as we all know, size isn't everything.
<gasp> Nipples? Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children? Where's my Congressman?
There are some scenes in Where's Waldo of people apparently stoned on Marijuana, too.
How's that?
No they went to the crease and sniffed the binder glue.
I take it they were banned near the time of their
initial publication, instead of all being challenged today.
I have some Idea why some of the books are controversial, but some make no sense to me at all. Mean, Flowers for Algernon? What in there is controversial? Oh! now I remember.
I suspect that the people who try to ban these books don't read very widely, and certainly don't read the classics. If they did they'd be trying to ban a lot of other stuff, such as Plato. I mean, all that stuff about the pleasures of homosexual love. Can't have the kids being exposed to that!
I think very few even read the books - someone else did and reported something (in their opinion) nasty. So the banning bandwagon runs on largely on hearsay. This gets reported now and then, especially when some bigwig is the spokesperson - when asked, they admit they haven't read the books but lots of people had told them....etc.
My dad is a school librarian, and he's had people ask him to remove the Harry Potter books before. He always offers to let them borrow a copy and read it for themselves, but everyone has turned him down. Generally they're going on what they've heard second- or third-hand, or on their church's party line. One guy brought in a copy of an Onion article about the dangers of Harry Potter that had been emailed to him; he didn't realize it was satire, apparently.
(Was that explained to the visitor, and did he understand, and admit he was embarrassed?)
Why were James and Giant Peach and Are you there God, It's me Margaret on the list? I haven't read James... but it seemed harmless enough. And I read the Judy Blume book when I was 10. Nothing controversial, unless the whole concept of a pubescent girl dealing with her first period was too controversial for the banners.
Of course he didn't admit he was wrong or misinformed. That would be about as likely in that situation as someone doing so in a discussion on Grex.
Re #18: Yes, I think so. Well, I don't know if he admitted he was embarassed, but as far as I know he stopped pestering my dad about removing the book.
ask him to ban the bible because of all the dirty sex and violence in it.
Whenever I find material at the library to be offensive, I prefer to insist that it be bowdlerized.
Whenever I encounter people demanding that books be banned from libraries because of objectionable content, I prefer to insist that such individuals and any existing progeny they may have be sterilized in order to prevent the spread of their disease of ignorance.
Since they're almost always objecting to the content based on their assumption of its likely effect on their offspring, I would expect such a policy to be, errr.. fruitless.
(groan)
Is it OK to object to books being allowed in libraries if it's based on size? See, there're certain editions of certain books which're made humoungous and I voted against them being in my Local Library, did I do wrong.
Re Where's Waldo: It's been many years since I looked at the book, but I remember one page that was "The Sixties", or something like that. It had a area with hippies, and they seemed to be smoking weed and acting strangely. But, I could be remembering it all wrong. If anyone has a copy of the book, please correct me.
Re #27: most libraries have a section of "oversize books". They aren't in any subject order, of course, but can be located via a catalog. Did you object to your library holding oversize books per se, or just an oversize edition of a book that was already in the library? I would not think the latter involves book-banning - especially if the book would still be available via ILL.
I say we get all the ignant peoples together, force them to read the books, and discuss. I don't find anything objectionable in the list. Then again, my parents went out of their way to ensure that we read books on the banned lists.
29: nononno. The books I'm talking about are several storeys tall.
Many books have lots of stories, and some are tall. But how tall are the books?
They're nearly as tall as the building.
Do you know how many books perished in The World Trade Center?
They say it was burning paper that created the heat that weakened the towers enough to collapse. So those books are TERRORISTS.
Hmm. The "they" I read, said it was a combination of the fuel and poor insulation (possibly the asbestos or whatever was used had flaked off or been shaken off by the force of the collisions).
A close friend is a manager at George Washington University's Eccles library, and they had a display on banned books. What was interesting is that the books had been banned in public elementary and secondary schools. This brought about the question as to whether these books had been banned in any colleges/universities. Anybody know?
That was part of it, but the jet fuel fire burned itself out relatively quickly. What continued to burn after that was paper and other office debris.
They didn't use the right kind of insulation on the steel framework. asbestos would have worked, but was banned as a cancer causing agent. They went with a type of concrete. Being hard, it was blasted off by the impact and explosions. Teh blast also moved all the furniture to one corner where it burned unhindered.
re #30: It's called high school. It doesn't really work.
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They also didn't adequately protect the stairwells with fireproof material, such as drywall. (interesting side note about the paper - don't think of it as burning sheets, think of it as an almost explosive dust... which is what it would have turned into during the initial blast.)
No, they used drywall. The problem is drywall is easy for pieces of jet planes to smash through. Not only did that make it ineffective as a fire break, the drywall debris blocked the stairway. If the stairwells had been surrounded with concrete more people would have gotten out. The fact that, during the first WTC bombing, people trapped in elevators were able to cut through walls and get out with nothing but car keys should tell you something about the quality of construction we're dealing with.
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Drywall is "quality" construction. It's purpose is to support some attachment, paint, and to not burn very well. If you started installing concrete walls you will not have 100 story buildings. According to a documentary I saw about the Twin-Towers, they did design it to survive an airliner of that time flying into it.
Yes, the intercontinental version of the Boeing 707. I think they only took into account the initial impact, though, not a fire. From what I've heard the WTC towers were considered firetraps from the day they were built. The only reason they got constructed at all is the New York Port Authority had the right to ignore building codes.
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Notice, though, that both disasters revealed that the buildings were impossible to evacuate in a timely way. That's pretty much the definition of a firetrap.
I dunno - I've heard that things could have been a lot worse. Most of the people got out, after all.
You have several choices: