Banned Book Week 2010
Banned Book Week 2010
For those of you on campus, you may have noticed some of your teachers or staff members wearing "I read banned books" buttons or you may have seen the bulletin boards in Barber Hall and the Library. To let all of you know what this is about... this week, the Library is celebrating Banned Book Week. For the 28th annual Banned Book Week, September 27 - October 1, 2010, libraries and bookstores across the U.S. are celebrating a democratic society's most basic freedom -- the freedom to read. As part of this celebration, we honor that freedom by acknowledging both the books and the authors who had the brilliance to write them. Banned Book week "celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met." (taken from the ALA)
Some interesting bits about banned books:
* each year the Office of Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports filed asking that books be removed from Library shelves.
* In 2006, the OIF received over 500 attempts to have books removed.
*Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman's famous collection of poetry, was withdrawn in Boston in 1881, after the District Attorney threatened criminal prosecution for the use of explicit language in some poems.
*D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was the object of numerous obscenity trials in both the UK and the United States up into the 1960s.
*The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear.
*Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was banned for its depiction of the behavior of Scarlett O'Hara and the freed slaves in the novel.
For more stories...
Top recently challenged or banned books of 2010
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Webster's College Dictionary
Of mice and men by John Steinbeck
The absolutely true diary of a part time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The giver by Lois Lowry
The adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
A girl's life online by Katherin Tarbox
Hunted by P.C. Cast
The freedom writers diary by Freedom Writers
The lovely bones by Alice Sebold
Go ask Alice by Anonymous
To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
And many more...
Many of these books are available in the Library and we would be delighted to get any that you may want to read in. Please, let us know. We also have the film version of many of these great stories available on DVD.
In essence, BBW in the Library is about our celebrating and enforcing your right to read, learn, think, and find out about whatever you want. In keeping with that, we want to know what you think about these freedoms. So we are having a contest to help us celebrate. Please send us your expression as a student of what it means to you to have the right to read and the freedom to learn. This can be just some thoughts, an essay, a poem, a drawing, whatever you come up with that communicates how you feel. Please submit them by Monday, October 4th and we will have a drawing for prizes from all submissions. You can hand them into the library staff or submit them to library@tvcc.cc. We will share some of our favorites with you next week.
For those of you on campus, you may have noticed some of your teachers or staff members wearing "I read banned books" buttons or you may have seen the bulletin boards in Barber Hall and the Library. To let all of you know what this is about... this week, the Library is celebrating Banned Book Week. For the 28th annual Banned Book Week, September 27 - October 1, 2010, libraries and bookstores across the U.S. are celebrating a democratic society's most basic freedom -- the freedom to read. As part of this celebration, we honor that freedom by acknowledging both the books and the authors who had the brilliance to write them. Banned Book week "celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met." (taken from the ALA)
Some interesting bits about banned books:
* each year the Office of Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports filed asking that books be removed from Library shelves.
* In 2006, the OIF received over 500 attempts to have books removed.
*Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman's famous collection of poetry, was withdrawn in Boston in 1881, after the District Attorney threatened criminal prosecution for the use of explicit language in some poems.
*D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was the object of numerous obscenity trials in both the UK and the United States up into the 1960s.
*The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear.
*Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was banned for its depiction of the behavior of Scarlett O'Hara and the freed slaves in the novel.
For more stories...
Top recently challenged or banned books of 2010The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Webster's College Dictionary
Of mice and men by John Steinbeck
The absolutely true diary of a part time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The giver by Lois Lowry
The adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
A girl's life online by Katherin Tarbox
Hunted by P.C. Cast
The freedom writers diary by Freedom Writers
The lovely bones by Alice Sebold
Go ask Alice by Anonymous
To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
And many more...
Many of these books are available in the Library and we would be delighted to get any that you may want to read in. Please, let us know. We also have the film version of many of these great stories available on DVD.
In essence, BBW in the Library is about our celebrating and enforcing your right to read, learn, think, and find out about whatever you want. In keeping with that, we want to know what you think about these freedoms. So we are having a contest to help us celebrate. Please send us your expression as a student of what it means to you to have the right to read and the freedom to learn. This can be just some thoughts, an essay, a poem, a drawing, whatever you come up with that communicates how you feel. Please submit them by Monday, October 4th and we will have a drawing for prizes from all submissions. You can hand them into the library staff or submit them to library@tvcc.cc. We will share some of our favorites with you next week.
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