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.

A work that aspires, however, humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

The great novelist Joseph Conrad wrote those words in a literary manifesto called “A Preface to the Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’ ”

Oops, I mean “Slave of the Narcissus.” Or should it be “The Children of the Sea,” the title used by Conrad’s first American publisher in 1897? Or perhaps I should call it the nearly unspeakable “N-word of the Narcissus,” the title chosen by WordBridge, publisher of a 2009 bowdlerized version of Conrad’s novel?

This question arises over the decision to publish a “sanitized” version of the great American classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in an edition which purges the use of the word “nigger” (as well as “injun”). The edition, forthcoming from NewSouth Books, replaces more than 200 uses of the word “nigger” with “slave”  in Mark Twain’s original text and substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”.

This, I believe, is the real N-word: Nonsense.

NewSouth Books asserts that these epithets are “hurtful” and prevent some teachers from assigning the book.

It’s true –some readers, along with educators and parents, have been offended by the use of a word that makes people uncomfortable — with good reason.

News flash: Art is supposed to make us uncomfortable.

The controversy behind the decision to –in my opinion– deface  a signature piece of American culture has been well-covered in the media and addressed by many, including New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani as well as the Times editorial page.

As someone who cares deeply about American History and Literature, I would like to add my voice to all those who find this expurgated version of Huck Finn an act of cultural destruction in the guise of political correctness. While it falls far short of the Taliban blowing up ancient Buddhas, it is a lot worse than draping the bare breasts of two female “Liberty” statues at the Justice Dept. during John Ashcroft’s days as Attorney General.

We are not talking about painting lawn jockeys white, but altering the intent and meaning of one of America’s cultural touchstones. And in so doing, missing Mark Twain’s central point. It’s a bit like complaining that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is cruel to Irish babies.

This should be what I and others like to call a “teachable moment.”

Teachers should assign Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, read it together with their students, and talk about what the book means. And most important, what Mark Twain meant. Acknowledge that this word is hateful and hurtful. But get students to Think For Themselves. That, after all, is a teacher’s most important job.

And maybe, while they are at it, teachers might get them to read Randall Kennedy’s excellent book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. (Pantheon, 2002). In it, Kennedy writes of Huck Finn:

Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it. By putting nigger in white characters’ mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites. . . . Huckleberry Finn is the best fictive example  of Twain’s triumph over his upbringing. In it, he creates a loving relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, all the while sardonically impugning the pretensions of white racial superiority.

Joseph Conrad, whose work was also sanitized for an American audience, also wrote in that memorable essay (a must read for writers, by the way):

And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. . .  If I succeed, you shall find there according to your desserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm-all you demand-and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

Providing that glimpse of truth is what Huck, Jim and Mark Twain were able to do. The justification is found not only in every line, but in every word. Even the “hurtful” ones.

The very illustrious Bookclubgirl recently asked me to produce a year’s worth of recommended Reading for Book Clubs. She posted my guest post on her blog today and you can find it here. I don’t belong to any book club, but I am going to try and reread all of my own suggestions as well!

Have a great 2010!

http://www.bookclubgirl.com/book_club_girl/2010/01/kenneth-c-davis-offers-up-a-year-of-book-club-recommendations.html

All Free Library of Philadelphia Branch, Regional and Central Libraries Closed Effective Close of Business October 2, 2009

I read about the possible closing of the Philadelphia Free Library –in the city where Benjamin Franklin helped invent the public library in 1731—with shock, sadness, and dismay. And more than a little anger.

Angry that a nation so dependent upon free expression, learning, technology, information and access pays lip service to these ideals but always looks for ways to deny them to the people who need them most. This is a woefully repetitious story. The library is at the soul of a democracy. Yet we constantly look to snuff out that soul.

The truth of the library’s essential value in our civilization was driven home for me last week when I visited two of New York’s great cultural treasures — both of them libraries. In two grand buildings, only a few blocks apart, I saw a rare Gutenberg Bible, illuminated manuscripts more than 800 years old and the art and poetry of William Blake. In two brief visits, I was treated to some of the greatest treasures of the western world.

Very wealthy men created these libraries. But one was meant for private use. Financier J.P. Morgan built a library (and art collection) in his private study. Fur trader-turned-real estate mogul John Jacob Astor built what became the New York Public Library. (Nowadays, of course, the NYPL is still free; going to the Morgan Library and Museum will cost you 12 bucks; 8 for students.)

The illuminated manuscripts were displayed—coincidentally—in the Morgan Library, part of the treasure trove of European artwork that the “banker’s banker” turned into his private museum of riches. It was not unusual for men of his wealth to cart Europe’s cultural treasures back home to America — very expensive souvenirs.

These manuscripts were created by monks and other clerics, to be seen by a handful of people. Written in Latin, they could be read by even fewer. Whole Bibles, psalms, sacred music, papal decrees – it was information, tightly controlled and available only to the select. The laws, sacred words and rules of a culture were in the hands of a very controlling “elite.”

The Gutenberg Bible, one of a few dozen in the world, stood under glass at the entry to the Public Library’s Main Reading Room. The Gutenberg was open, and its black ink was vibrantly readable after more than 500 years. Admittedly, this book was in Latin too. But Gutenberg’s technological “great leap for mankind” would later turn out Bibles in German and other vernacular languages, opening the way for the Reformation, Enlightenment and a great revolution in literacy and learning.

As a writer, as a lover of books and reading, as a lover of learning, I know that the public library and school libraries in Mt. Vernon, New York where I grew up, shaped me. A trip to the public library was like a visit to a sacred shrine. We cannot afford to take that away.

So why, in a country that professes to value the importance of free education, free information, and free expression do we always look to destroy the best places to nurture those fundamental American necessities? Yes, Necessities. Public libraries, like schools or the fire department, are not luxuries. Politicians, who may have never darkened a library door, do not understand that basic fact of life. The public library is more than just our soul. It is our lifeblood too. And you can see that when you stop in any library where droves of people –more during the Great Recession — are not just checking out bestsellers, but clamoring for information, education, answers and direction.

What commodities, what resources, are more valuable? We can keep information available to all. Or we can let the true “elites” keep it for themselves — locked up in their private studies.

Here is a link to the New York Public Library:
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/
Here is a link to the Morgan Library and Museum
http://www.themorgan.org/