Amph America's most banned books. 1 - Huh?

2. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California, USA.

Based on Steinbeck's own experiences as a bindlestiff in the 1920s (before the arrival of the Okies he would vividly describe in The Grapes of Wrath), the title is taken from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse", which read: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awry.)

The novella has been banned from various US public and school libraries or curricula for allegedly "promoting euthanasia", "condoning racial slurs", being "anti-business", containing profanity, and generally containing "vulgar" and "offensive language"

 

Daaaaaah tell me about the morons who ban Steinbeck, George.

 

Because God forbid anyone should ever have to think about the moral issues surrounding euthanasia, racism and capitalism. I particularly love the idea that this book "promotes" euthanasia and "condones" racism. It's that old thing again of thinking that if something is in a book, it's because the author approves of it - this book, as all great books are, is about bringing up these issues and forcing the reader to think about them and figure out what they believe about them.

 

I heard it's a disappointment, but I hope it's not THAT obvious.

Especially with the whole "witchcraft" thing, when her books are actually quite Christian, with many Christian. Not as "in your face" as Lewis, but less subtle than Tolkien.

 

She actually has two direct quotes from the Bible in there...

 

I hope not.

 

And here it is.......

The exceptionally disappointing end to this phenomenal saga is a series of books I have never heard of, and have had great trouble finding out ANYTHING about, so perhaps you guys can do better.

The most banned book in America is........


The "Impressions" series (edited by Jack Booth and others)


Rogue managed to find me some info, but it's not copyable so Here is the link

But it seems from skimming that it's the usual story. Nutty people in the name of religion decided to cause a fuss.

 

Never heard of it... they really did a good job at banning it!

Can't even seem to find anything on Wikipedia or Amazon on it, can anyone else?

 

... A textbook?

My god, it's banned based on the excerpts it contains. That's... lame.

 

You're kidding me...

 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar not looking so stupid now is it?

 

What's the rationale behind the ranking? Just how many times something has been banned?

 

This list is taken from "Banned in the U.S.A." by Herbert N. Foerstel

More info here

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html

 

Thanks for taking on the hosting of a list and actually completing it, that seldom happens.

 

Wanted to finish it before the 3-yr mark

 

Yeah, congrats. A shame the list kind of fizzled at the end there. But it's been fun and I'll never forget the way you totally rang everybody's bells (including mine) with that inspired April Fool's Day joke.

 

It is a bit of an odd choice for #1, but I can see perhaps why it would be ranked so highly. Consider:

1. Books challenged in court.
2. Court finds favour with the publishers and throws out the case.
3. ... but libraries pull the book anyway, and the publisher decides not to continue with the series.



At least in the cases of books such as Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye the books gained attention and continued to do well despite the attempted bannings (one could even argue that they reveled in the attention). Here though a successful series was removed, ceased publication and was successfully censored to the point we're now all here scratching our heads completely ignorant of it's existence.

Pretty creepy. Sinister even.

 

To be fair, I'm fairly certain we're completely ignorant of its existence because it's a schoolbook. Do you remember the name of your middle school English text?

 

Weren't they usually titled English for 8th Graders?

 

Perhaps, though I was thinking more in terms of how it's taken some extreme Google searching just to find even the remotest detail concerning the books. They've virtually vanished from existence it seems.

 

I think this is one of the most frightening things about e-books. In the future, it's going to be incredibly easy to ban a book and basically erase its existence entirely. The great thing about banned books in the past was that there was essentially nothing that could actually be done about all the copies of the book in circulation. But pretty soon when books get banned, they'll just get totally deleted from existence.

 

Eh, they'll just live on through piracy. If anything, the digital age has made it almost impossible to truly eradicate information. Before, you were limited to print run of however many, and you could at least try to track most of those down, and it would be extremely difficult to actually copy a book or print a copy yourself. Now, anybody and his brother can download a PDF and put twenty copies on twenty flash drives for a relative pittance. Information has become infinitely multiplicable by even the common user. If you could eradicate digital information, piracy wouldn't be a problem.

 

oh, i thought it was a book named "huh?". that would've been awesome.

 

But don't you feel that all that information is moving out into the cloud? When Amazon realized it had sold all those copies of Orwell a few years back that were actually not legal, they just reached into the cloud and deleted them. The people who "owned" those books on their Kindles didn't actually "own" them at all; they owned access to that information on a cloud somewhere and when Amazon decided that it didn't want those people to have them anymore, they made it happen in a split second. Yes, I get what you're saying about PDFs and such, but I think more and more things are on the cloud and people don't even have the digital copies they think they have. And with the ability that companies now have to reach into our systems and do things without us even knowing it, I think it's becoming less and less likely that these things are as secure as they used to be. This is pretty extreme paranoia at the moment, I guess. But it feels like in a couple of decades, things could be disappearing pretty easily, with nary a physical copy to be passed around by rebels, if you know what I mean.