The Top Ten list for 2010 is out. And there are some familiar names on it-  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Nickel and Dimed  by Barbara Ehrenreich. But these aren’t a critics Top Ten Recommendations. They are among the list of books most challenged by people who object to the presence of these books in school and public libraries.

Yes, it is time to think about the “Book Wars” again.

Each year, the American Library Association and other groups mark Banned Books Week during the last week in September. In 2011,  it begins today, September 24, and continues through October 1. (This video was made two years ago, but the issues remain the same.)

In a time when some American parents don’t want their children to hear the President of the United States give a speech on education values, or a planned Koran-burning wins with wide popular approval, the importance of this reminder of the right to free expression and the value of THINKING is more urgent than ever.

Where are they pulling books out of libraries? See a map of local “challenges” to books from 2007-2009.

Here are some important links to three groups involved in combating censorship: the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and Teaching Tolerance:

American Library Association Banned Books Week site

The National Coalition Against Censorship

Teaching Tolerance (A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center)

www.twitter.com/kennethcdavis

With those words, James Joyce (February 2, 1882-January 13, 1941) opened Ulysses, chosen in 1999 as the greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. The novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on their wanderings through Dublin on a single day –June 16 1904.

That makes today “Bloomsday” and complete readings of the book take place all over the world. The date was significant to Joyce because it was the day on which James Joyce first had an outing with his future wife,  Nora Barnacle, model for the character Molly Bloom.

First serialized in a literary magazine between 1918 and 1920, the novel was published in its entirety in February 1922 in Paris. Considered obscene, the book was kept out of the United States, leading to a court battle in which Ulysses was cleared for U.S. publication in a landmark obscenity ruling in 1933.

When I was about 14, I was given a copy of The Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories about the city –and people– he loved and hated. I must admit I struggled with it at first. But that collection, and Joyce’s autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are two books I count among the most influential in my life.

Think you know your Joyce? Try this quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, my first collaboration with my daughter, Jenny Davis.

Don’t Know Much About James Joyce

“When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.”  It may be hard to believe that the man who wrote that sentence (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916) also wrote Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), two of the most infamously “difficult” works in the English language.  James Joyce (d. 1941) was born in Dublin in 1882, where his middle-class, Catholic community would inspire fiction like Dubliners (1912), the short story collection that he called “a chapter of the moral history of my country.” From the concise realism of Dubliners, Joyce’s fiction moved towards experimental uses of language and stream-of-consciousness narration.  Joyce’s dense wordplay reaches a peak in Finnegans Wake, a work intended to be read aloud.  If you’re up for “a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying” James Joyce quiz, read on!

1.    What Christian term did James Joyce borrow to describe a “sudden spiritual moment” when “the soul of the commonest object” leaps out?
2.    What is the name of Joyce’s main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and the posthumously published fragment, Stephen Hero?
3.    What genre of writing made up Joyce’s first published work, Chamber Music (1907)?
4.    What famed psychiatrist wrote Joyce, “Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters”?
5.    In the Irish ballad that inspired the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, what brings Finnegan, the dead Irishman of the title, back to life?

In 2004, NPR did this story about the 100th anniversary of “Bloomsday.”

Here is a link to the James Joyce Centre in Dublin

Answers
1.    Epiphany
2.    Stephen Dedalus, inspired by the labyrinth builder of Greek myth.
3.    Poetry.  In fact, Joyce’s collection of poems drew the attention of Imagists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
4.    Carl Jung. Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was treated by Jung.
5.    The smell of whiskey.

“BEAM ME IN, SCOTTY!”

Apologies to Captain Kirk and Star Trek.  I know it’s really, “Beam me UP, Scotty.”

For more than 20 years, I have been traveling the country to visit libraries, bookstores, museums, schools and librarian conferences to share my love  for history, geography and all the subjects I have covered in the Don’t Know Much About series of books for children and adults. It’s always great fun for me to talk about America’s past, telling real stories of real people,  exploring the “hidden history” I’ve uncovered, connecting history to the headlines –and sharing my love for writing and books.  Our teachers and librarians are dedicated professionals. And the readers I have met over those years have proven that Americans don’t hate history. They just hate the dull version they got in school. And this writer has learned a lot from them along the way.

Now, with the power of computers, I want to visit your library virtually. Will you invite me?

Before I tell you my plan, I want you know that libraries have a great personal value to me. When I was a boy growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, a trip to the library every few days was part of my life. I remember the day I got my “adult” library card which allowed me to climb the ornate marble stairs up to the second floor main stacks. For me, the library was a central part of my education — and my love of writing. Since then, I have always believed that libraries are an essential part of our democracy. It would be nice if every government office functioned as well as the library does!

Now, on to  my plan.

As we are marking the 150th anniversary of the  Civil War, which began on April 12, 1861, I will make a limited number of FREE library Skype visits to discuss Civil War history, the life of Abraham  Lincoln, and other aspects of this momentous tragedy in our past and  how it continues to haunt us. These visits are planned to last 30-40 minutes. They will include a brief introduction by me of my work and career and a discussion of some of the  major aspects of the Civil War, and time for audience questions –always my favorite part of the visit. While the Civil War is certainly the key subject, the discussion need not be limited to that piece of American History. As a newly revised and updated edition of my New York Times Bestseller Don’t Know Much About History is being published this month in an Anniversary Edition hardcover by HarperCollins, the floor will be wide open for all questions about American History, the headlines, or books and writing in general.

If you would like to organize a library event on your end and  “Beam me IN, Scotty,” via Skype, a video link to your library computers, please use the Contact page on my website.  We will get back to you in an effort to set up a convenient time and date.

I look forward to beaming into your library!

Best wishes,

Kenneth C. Davis



Born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama –Nelle Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

If you only publish one book, may as well make it a good one. For Harper Lee it was To Kill A Mockingbird (1960),  the story of Scout Finch, a girl growing up in a small Southern town.  Scout and her brother Jem wake up to the intolerance and racial hatred around them when their father, Atticus, takes on the legal case of a black man accused of raping a white woman. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and in the last few years, it has been far and away the most popular selection for “One Book, One Community” reading programs—for example, every Vermont resident was encouraged to read the novel in 2011. However, it is also among the most “challenged” books, according to the American Library Association. Do you know why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird?  Take this quick quiz on the beloved coming-of-age novel (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes.)

1.    In what fictional town is To Kill A Mockingbird set?

2.    In which real Alabama town were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931?

3.    Which character in To Kill a Mockingbird did Lee base on her childhood friend Truman Capote?

4.    What is the name of Scout’s reclusive neighbor, whom she begins to understand better at the end of the novel?

5.    Who won an Oscar for his role as Atticus Finch in the 1962 film version of the novel?

Answers

1.    Maycomb, Alabama.

2.    Scottsboro.  The case of the “Scottsboro Boys” provided real-life inspiration for Lee’s novel.

3.    Dill Harris, Scout Finch’s friend and neighbor.  Lee was the prototype for one of Capote’s characters: Idabel Tompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).

4.    Boo Radley.

5.    Gregory Peck.  Another of Peck’s great roles from literature was in the 1956 film Moby Dick; he played Captain Ahab.

And by the way, it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because all they do is “make music for us to enjoy.”

We want it (the library) to be a place for relaxation and fun for the kids.

Bringing to light one more depressing example in a long, sad line of stories about censorship may simply make your eyes glaze over. But this Connecticut library story comes right on the heels of the Smithsonian’s decision to pull a video, “A Fire in My Belly,” from a recent show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. because it included 11 seconds of footage of ants crawling on a crucifix.

Add these two incidents to the renewed threats to withdraw federal funding from public broadcasting by an emboldened Republican majority in the House, the attempted cancellation of an August Wilson play for its use of the word “nigger,” and the related controversy over an expurgated version –subject of a previous blog– of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Censorship is riding high. It is once again as American as apple pie, assassinations and anti-immigrant vitriol.

Perhaps this trend should come as no surprise. The last election seemed to suggest a swing to the right. Economic hard times also tend to produce a backlash against what is “unpopular” or “different.” Public funding of “controversial art” has always been a bete noire for many Republicans, evangelical Christians and some Catholics. But in a time when the political discourse includes a church group that protests at soldiers’ funerals and placing cross-hairs on political ads, the calls for censorship aren’t limited to the right side of the political spectrum.

All of these developments demand a restatement and explanation of the First Amendment. So here it is, courtesy of the American Library Association:

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION, OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF; OR ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES.

Of course, there is a long litany of weighty quotes from writers and jurists about the importance of free expression in an open, democratic society. One would hope that it need not be provided to Congress or the Town Council of Enfield, Ct.

But it is this simple — a group of radicals, who wanted to overthrow the society and government that ruled them, once wrote and said some very dangerous things. Today, we keep them in the National Archives. The Founders and Framers understood with complete clarity that it is the least popular ideas and expression that need the most protection.