main
side
curve
  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

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

Discussion in 'Archive: The Amphitheatre' started by halibut, Apr 13, 2009.

  1. Zaz

    Zaz Jedi Knight star 9

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 1998
    Well, that's why they ban "Huckleberry Finn"...:p
     
  2. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    That's true. I remember the preface in Jump Ship to Freedom now, though I had forgotten it. But, yeah, likely that is the reason.
     
  3. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    32. The Witches of Worm - Zilpha Snyder

    The Witches of Worm is a 1972 young adult novel by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, and received the Newbery Honor citation in 1973. In it a lonely pre-teen girl, the protagonist Jessica, finds a blind, almost hairless cat that she names Worm. A reclusive elderly neighbor helps her to raise it. Worm seems to have a terrible hold on Jessica, and it is suggested the cat possesses her to do mean and destructive things to her friends and her somewhat childish and emotionally-distant divorced mother. Jessica comes to believe Worm is being possessed by a group of witches that includes her elderly neighbor. Jessica?s destructive actions escalate until her mother attempts to send her counseling. Enraged by this idea, Jessica runs away.

    It is left to the reader to decide if in fact anything actually supernatural is going on.

    This book has a history of being banned from school libraries because of its focus on the subject of witchcraft, the description of visions/nightmares Jessica experiences, and its protagonist's disturbing inner monologues with Worm/herself.
     
  4. CloneUncleOwen

    CloneUncleOwen Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2009
    I'd never even heard of this work, before. Now I'm completely
    intrigued, and look forward to reading it.

     
  5. Zaz

    Zaz Jedi Knight star 9

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 1998
    What is it about witchcraft that sets everybody off?
     
  6. CloneUncleOwen

    CloneUncleOwen Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 30, 2009
    [image=http://i33.tinypic.com/9qfzp4.jpg]

    "It's those nasty, big, pointed hats."
     
  7. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    31. the Learning Tree - Gordon Parks

    Not easy to find out much about the book, although there was a film made of it. But this Amazon review sheds some light onto it

    "In the book "The Learning Tree" Mr. Parks points out some very powerful issues that we still are at contraversy about today. He writes about interracial dating as well marriage. Also teen pregnancy as well as teen sex. That right there alone disturbs in my opinion a lot of people when they even hear about it. But I think that's good that he's expressing issues people can relate to. Then and now, because in some cases the color of your is looked upon before anything else. Gordon Parks is a very well known author in my family. I have a great respect for his writing, mainly because he sees eye to eye with the truth of the matter at hand in his writ"

    race and sex. Two essential ingredients of a banned book
     
  8. Zaz

    Zaz Jedi Knight star 9

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 1998
    You're forgetting religion.

    And witchcraft. :rolleyes:
     
  9. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    30. James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl

    [image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/JamesAndTheGiantPeach.jpg]

    James and the Giant Peach is a popular children's novel written in 1961 by British author Roald Dahl. The original first edition published by Alfred Knopf featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. However, there have been various reillustrated versions of it over the years, done by Michael Simeon for the first British edition, Emma Chichester Clark, Lane Smith and Quentin Blake. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996. The plot centers on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with a group of anthropomorphic insects he meets within the giant peach. Originally titled James and the Giant Cherry, Dahl changed it to James and the Giant Peach because a peach is "prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry", and a peach is a drupe.

    Because of the story's occasionally macabre and potentially frightening content, it has become a regular target of the censors and is no. 56 on the American Library Association's top 100 list of most frequently challenged books




    Come on, this is just ridiculous!!!!
     
  10. Spider-Fan

    Spider-Fan Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 15, 2008
    Having the name James and growing up a rather heavy kid, this book quickly became the bane of my existence and it took years for people to stop associating it with me. Ban it all you want people, I am not above being petty. :p
     
  11. DarthBoba

    DarthBoba Manager Emeritus star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    ...What scary images?
     
  12. Zaz

    Zaz Jedi Knight star 9

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 1998
    Peaches must be subversive, or something. :p
     
  13. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    29. The Color Purple - Alice Walker


    The Color Purple is an acclaimed 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.

    Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female black life during the 1930s in the Southern United States, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence



    A couple of things about this one

    1) "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is a complete load of crap. If they change, then they change. That's what change is.

    2) I believe that the movie version is the only Spielberg film (since before Jaws) which doesn't have a score by John Williams
     
  14. Cobranaconda

    Cobranaconda Jedi Grand Master star 7

    Registered:
    Mar 3, 2004
    Most pointless, boring, annoying book I've ever read. I'm happy to say I didn't read it by choice, it was part of the "English Literature" curriculum, though the writing in this book is more Creole than English...
     
  15. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death (1969) is an anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim.

    Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, fatalistic, ill-trained American soldier, is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a prison in Dresden. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse, known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". The POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.

    Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a nonlinear narrative. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They believe in predestination. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the correctness of their theories.

    As Billy travels?or believes he travels?forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, real and fantastic. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s, and in the moment of his murder by Lazzaro.

    Billy's death is the consequence of a string of events. Before the Germans capture Billy, he meets Roland Weary, a jingoist character who constantly chastises him for his lack of enthusiasm toward war. At their capture, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him hinged, wooden clogs to wear; Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs. On his deathbed, Weary manages to convince Paul Lazzaro that Billy is to blame; Paul vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life". Time-traveler Billy already knows where, when, and how he will be killed: he is shot with a laser gun after his speech on flying saucers and the true nature of time before a large audience in Chicago, in balkanized United States on February 13, 1976 (in future to the date of writing).


    Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of many attempts at censorship, due to its irreverent tone and purportedly obscene content. In the novels, American soldiers use profanity; his language is irreverent (The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty); and the book depicts sex. It was one of the first literary acknowledgments that homosexual men, referred to in the novel as "fairies", were among the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

    In the USA it is frequently banned from literature classes, removed from school libraries, and struck from literary curricula; however, it is still taught in some schools. The U.S. Supreme Court considered the First Amendment implications of the removal of the book, among others, from public school libraries due to its content in the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico,
     
  16. darth_frared

    darth_frared Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jun 24, 2005
    one of my favourite books! it's the only war book i have read that didn't romanticise war and instead decided to take the piss in the profoundest way possible. it's wonderful.
     
  17. YodaKenobi

    YodaKenobi Former TFN Books Staff star 6 VIP

    Registered:
    May 27, 2003
    I can't put into words how much I love this book. One of the absolute best of all-time.
     
  18. PadmeA_Panties

    PadmeA_Panties Jedi Youngling star 4

    Registered:
    Oct 25, 2003
    Great book.

    I'm sure the reason its included in the list is 1) the picture, and 2) the talk of sex/some vulgarity. But it is definitely Vonnegut's best, (then Cat's Cradle, imo, then Player Piano, etc, etc, etc.)
     
  19. Zaz

    Zaz Jedi Knight star 9

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 1998
    I don't know why it would be banned.
     
  20. JohnWesleyDowney

    JohnWesleyDowney Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jan 27, 2004
    I LOVE that book too.

    For Kurt Vonnegut, the bombing of Dresden included in Slaugherhouse Five was one of the key events of his life. One can only imagine how the irony of being bombed by your own forces might mess with your mind.

    From wikipedia:


    In Popular Culture

    Kurt Vonnegut

    Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was based on his own experiences as a prisoner of war at Dresden during the bombing. Vonnegut recalled "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him and other POWs to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."

    In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, he wrote:

    "The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in."[149]

    This experience was also used in several of his other books and is included in his posthumously published stories: Armageddon in Retrospect.


    For anyone interested in what happened at Dresden, here's the wiki article. It's pretty breathtaking.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

     
  21. darth_frared

    darth_frared Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jun 24, 2005
    it is one of the few accounts of war that i know that doesn't glorify anything in the least. i remember quietly thanking god for giving me vonnegut so i wouldn't have to think of americans as this race of people who don't understand the devastation war wreaks.
     
  22. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    27. A Separate Peace - John Knowles

    The back story begins with Gene Forrester returning to his old prep school, Devon (a thinly-veiled portrayal of Knowles' own alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy), fifteen years after he graduated. He returns to visit two places he regards as "fearful sites": a flight of marble stairs, and a tree by a river. First he examines the stairs and notices that they are made of very hard marble. He then trudges through the mud to the tree. The tree brings back memories of Gene's time as a student at Devon. From this point on in the book, Gene will describe the time span from the summer of 1942 to the winter of 1943. In 1942, he was 16 years old, living at Devon, and best friends with Phineas (nickname Finny), another boy. At the time, World War II is taking place, and has a prominent effect on the story. Gene and Phineas, despite having polar personalities, become fast friends at Devon: Gene's quiet, introverted intellectual personality complements Finny's more extroverted, carefree, athletic demeanor. During the time at Devon Gene goes through a period of intense friendship with Finny. One of Fin's ideas during Gene's "Sarcastic Summer" of 1942 is to create a "Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session", with Gene and himself as charter members. Finny creates a rite of initiation by having members jump into the Devon River from a large, high tree. He also creates a game called "blitzball" (from the German blitzkrieg).

    Their period of intense friendship was then followed by a period of intense animosity during which Gene strives to out-do Finny academically. This animosity culminates (and is ended) when one day as Phineas and Gene are about to jump off the tree, Finny falls out of the tree and shatters his leg because Gene shook the branch they were both standing on (whether intentionally or unintentionally is unclear). Because of his "accident", Phineas learns from the doctor that he will not be able to compete in sports which are most dear to him. The rest of the story revolves around Gene's attempts to come to grips with who he is, why he did what he did, and with human nature. Gene reveals that he caused Finny's fall. At first Finny does not believe him and afterward feels extremely hurt. In the end, Gene is confronted about the 'accident' by Brinker Hadley who accuses Gene of trying to kill Finny. This confrontation ends with Finny falling down a flight of stairs (the ones Gene would visit 15 years later), and again breaking the leg he had shattered before. Phineas dies during the operation to set the bone, the doctors assuming that Finny died when bone marrow entered the blood stream, because his heart suddenly stopped during the surgery. Gene doesn't cry over Finny, but learns much from how he lived his life, stating that when Finny died, he took his (Gene's) anger with him. In Finny's death, Gene could finally come to terms with himself.



     
  23. Strilo

    Strilo Manager Emeritus star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 6, 2001
    Why would this book be banned? We read it in 8th grade.
     
  24. halibut

    halibut Ex-Mod star 8 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 27, 2000
    I'm guessing cos of the suicide society? Perhaps parents weren't happy that it was required reading in some school? I really have no idea lol!
     
  25. Zaz

    Zaz Jedi Knight star 9

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 1998
    I read this book in high school, too. I thought it was a load of codswallop, but harmless.