(08:30 pm) Banned Books Week Pt. IV

    Ban these Books

    Rainbow Party

I first talked about this book here with a quick follow-up and a link to Michelle Malkin here. Much like Where Willy Went this is a book that is completely inappropriate for the age group its intended for. Willy might sail past the heads of its young readers but nobody picking this up is going to have trouble understanding the subject. It differs from the many challenged books I mentioned in Pt. II because where small passages need to be dug out from a whole book, the problem here is right in the title and is the premise for the entire book.

Now read this out loud to yourself, in your next staff meeting, trustees meeting, and town meeting:

"A Rainbow Party is when a group of women put on various colors of lipstick and proceed to give a man, or group of men, oral sex, regularly changing partners in order to create a rainbow pattern on the penis(es) of the man or men."

Then explain to everyone that it is important to keep such books in order that teenagers have materials available to deal with such difficult issues. Think you can you do that? Me neither.

According to OCLC WorldCat "Total Libraries" owning this book is 99 but that's not exactly true. A consortium is considered a library because all the libraries share the same catalog. One system in Massachusetts has 2 libraries that own a copy, a neighboring system has 3 libraries owning a copy, 4 out of 5 copies are checked out. 1 system in Florida as 12 copies. I bet these libraries couldn't do the Read-Aloud either, hopefully they'll understand why and toss the book.

    Arming America

A very detailed account of this book's history is available here. The bottom line is the author went in with certain preconceived ideas and came out with a book that matched those ideas exactly right even if he had to make up evidence to make it work. The book received rave reviews from everyone who agreed with his ideas and he even won the Bancroft Prize for it. And then people started checking his work.

Heretical Librarian wrote a post concerning my Banned Book bleg and mentioned this book in particular:

Works like Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens not Darken, or Michael Bellesiles' Arming America are of great interest in historiographical research precisely because they are prime examples of how not to write about history.

First, are you going to stick a giant label on the cover explaining the history of the book? Second, this wasn't badly written, it was falsely written with the intention of misleading the audience and creating false arguments against a conservative gun culture. A telling bit from the detailed account I linked to earlier:

National Review’s October monthly magazine republished Melissa Seckora’s original September 11 article, "Disarming America." Ms Seckora pulls no punches in her analysis of the book. Not only does she call his book "one of the worst cases of academic irresponsibility in memory," she calls him to task for continually citing probate records from San Francisco, when, "according to everyone who should know, all the probate records that Bellesiles allegedly reviewed were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire." She even recounts an interview with Bellesiles where he contradicts himself.

If it wasn't for the award and all the high praise a lot of libraries who own the book may never have bought it to begin with. Now that the praise has turned to jeers the automatic response should be to pull it. But because that goes against everything that ALA has preached for so long it goes against the grain of a lot of librarians to do what should be obvious.

WorldCat: 1,940 libraries own this book. 1 library system in Massachusetts, 14 copies.

    Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You To Know About

Weeding saves lives. Well, maybe not literally but when I was first learning about it in college the first reason given for weeding a book was to remove items that were dated and possibly offered misleading information on a topic, especially medical related books.

To say there are a lot of crackpot books on our shelves concerning health remedies and diets and mental feel goodness is to say the sky is blue. We're not qualified to rate them. If they are popular or are well-reviewed we tend to get them. But when information about a book comes to light you have to weigh that even if you've already bought the book. This is from an interview by Bill O'Reilly of the author's lawyer (from BigChalk eLibrary):

O'Reilly: Let me ask you one thing, and this is personal to me, and I have to ask you, Mr. Bradford. He says in the book, and this really threw me, the sun does not cause cancer.

Now, my father died from melanoma. My father was a sun worshiper and did not use sun block back then. And every doctor I know, every dermatologist I know, I have to douse myself with SPF-30. And all Irish guys and Scandinavian guys and German people should, as well.

And this guy, Trudeau, says the sun doesn't cause cancer, going against every single study I'd ever seen. When I read that that's when I knew I had a book of stories, sir, because I think that's fallacious and dangerous.

That's a pretty big error don't you think?

We also know a lot more about the author then normal. From an article discussing the censorship of this book on television:

According to published reports, the 42-year-old Californian served two years in federal prison for credit-card fraud in the early 1990s. He also was sued by the Illinois attorney general over an alleged pyramid marketing scheme, according to reports.

Even the FTC banned him from running anymore of his infomercials selling medicinal products and Australia banned him from doing business there period.

The only reason he's allowed to do the infomercial for this book? Get this from the previous link:

Trudeau has been able to remain on the air because he's pitching a book, not specific medicinal products. Prohibiting an author from talking and marketing his work brings up all sorts of First Amendment and censorship issues that the FTC left alone.

Fine. But that's no reason we have to buy the book. Whose rights are more important his or our patrons? Your free speech absolutism or their safety?

To add insult to injury the book isn't even a book. Its an infomercial itself. Commenter, mdoneil, on LISNews described it as "not much more than an advertisement for a fee based website." This was confirmed by another librarian in a PUBLIB email. So not only are we making false medical information available we are acting as a middle man to further expand Trudeau's wallet.

This book is a con.

WorldCat: 2 separate editions 479 and 467. 1 large system in New York had over a hundred copies. And that's a lot of marks.

    If you haven't bought these books, good for you. If you have because you weren't aware of their background and you've just read this you should remove them. If someone asks for them you should explain that one is not appropriate for your collection and two are flat out false, intentionally so. If you don't have a policy that justifies that statement you should write one.

    If we're really professional librarians... If we're really serious about what we do... If we're not just a warehouse... If we are trying to have a positive impact on the patrons we serve... Then no library should own these books.

Thursday September 22, 2005

  (08:30 pm) Banned Books Week Pt. III

    Honorable Mentions

    Should you own these? Probably not. If you do I'm sure you'll live but there should be a little voice in the back of your head reminding you of the money wasted.

    Lose 50 Pounds in 50 Days

emailer: I don't know who the author is but it just came through to be processed. I can't imagine why it isn't only one page long with the following advice: Cut off your head.
Even if you starve yourself I don't think you can lose 50 lbs. in 50 days.

    'Nuff said...

    Fortunate Son

A pre-Election hit piece that started off the rumors about W. cocaine use. The writer was an "ex-con who once tried to hire a hit man to knock off a former boss" and the original publisher actually pulled the book prior to publishing. I'm sure some of you will be yelling about Unfit For Command but the same respect liberals were demanding for Kerry's service has to be applied to the man who wrote the book and the men who supported it. It also didn't come out of left field. The author had debated Kerry in the past and been consistent in his disdain of Kerry's rewriting of history.

    Full Screen Movies

We buy abridged audio books because we can buy 3-4 for the price of 1 unabridged and the commuters who use them don't seem to mind. But come on people! Show some backbone! Widescreen is the same price as Full and it shows the whole movie!

    Sex

During one of Madonna's reinventions she created a spiral bound, overpriced, 'book' with metal covers (!) showing us nude photos of her with accompanying poetry (you can see examples here (though I can't guarantee how long the ebay listing will last, my Chinese is rusty). $50 is a high price for something she seems provide pretty easily and with Google you can find some of it for free.

    The Anarchist Cookbook

If you really need to blow something up then you should probably scratch the money together and buy the book.

    Where Willy Went

Willy is a sperm who is bad at math but a real fast swimmer. I'm going to spoil the ending here and tell you he wins a race with 300 million other sperm and becomes a human girl who is, yup, bad at math but a real fast runner. Got that? To say this picture book is completely inappropriate for its age group doesn't even begin to describe it. Possibly a great gag gift at wedding and baby showers but that's about it.

Tomorrow Night: Ban These Books!

Wednesday September 21, 2005

  (08:30 pm) Lost

    Premieres in 30 minutes! Woohoo! (yes that's why part III is being posted tomorrow night)

  (08:24 pm) About

    I had planned on putting a me, myself, and I section in the About page for almost a year now. Me has been there for a while, the myself isn't what I originally had in mind and the pic in I is 10 years old not to mention the rest of it is kinda yuck. That said it is up for now. Maybe I'll get around to cleaning it up in another year or two.

Tuesday September 20, 2005

  (09:31 pm) Twit II

    I called this morning ALA has the voting record up! I will wade through it and have something up next week. Thankfully they actually left it in an Excel format so it should be easier this time.

    In related news I did submit an application to be on the ballot for Council but won't know if I'm on it until the end of October. I believe there are ways to guarantee that I'm on the ballot and will look into that soon, just in case.

Night

  (09:16 pm) Banned Books Week Pt. II

     Don't Ban These Books

     I got a lot of good replies on my Banned Book Bleg, some obvious frustrations concerning certain book types, and a few less serious suggestions.

     One kind of book that seems to eat away at librarians are the political talking head books that have become so pervasive. More then one person said they'd like to see them go and that applied to both the Ann Coulters and the Al Frankens of the genre. At times I'm tempted to agree but we all know that's not going to happen. We live in a time where news has become entertainment. There are certain drawbacks and benefits to that. The drawbacks being the plethora of junk being printed, the benefits being a large selection of good reading plus a new kind of audience visiting the library. We shouldn't scoff at that anymore then we scoffed at Harlequin or comic book readers. We should simply try harder to be more aware of the good stuff. And if you still think there are way too many talking head books, go grab a ruler and measure your cookbook section.

     And no, to all the smart alecks out there, the Bible isn't getting banned. Jonah Goldberg of NRO has a good statement on that, actually its on a coffee cup, go figure: "Everywhere, unthinking mobs of 'independent thinkers' wield tired clichés like cudgels...". The rest of the quote is at the link. And speaking of clichés, banning cannot and does not make the unpopular popular. It makes the all-too-popular less available, like its supposed to. So no banning of unpopular Homer or Aristotle to try and increase their fanbase, it would simply guarantee their path to oblivion.

     Overshooting and Earned Reading

     I received a link to this site. It contains a lot of information on the various titles involved with a recent challenge.

     Its hard to argue over books like Fade by Robert Cormier. Cormier writes for YA and the excerpts given by WPAAG are pretty damning. Its an example of the worst kind of YA fiction that focuses on the worst behaviors in society. So of course its exactly what we should give a teenager to read. Society has turned an entire section of the population into a fictional everyman strictly to entertain ourselves. And in order to keep everyman interesting to us we are constantly throwing challenge after challenge at him, admiring his triumphs and sharing in his misery, a living soap opera. My peers say we should supply these books because these are the issues teens deal with. I say they're dealing with it because we're pushing it. Nobody's actually trying to fix the problems of teen pregnancy, drug use, and sexual abuse they just want to hand out manuals to teens telling them how to cope when it happens.

     On the flip side Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison aren't writing books that teens pick up for beach reading. These are adult books for adult audiences. Is a 16 year old an adult? Could be. Some are, some aren't. Let me repeat something from a discussion I had late last year on Conservativelib:

"The reason we tend to be liberal about what is or always has been available on a library shelf to anyone, regardless of age, is the fact that in order to access it you had to be intelligent enough to actually read it. A thick novel with detailed sex scenes and such is harmless in the hands of a 6 year old. Its harmless in the hands of a 14 year old because the simple fact he would have to invest in serious reading time is a major turnoff. If he is patient enough to sit down and read such a book then chances are he is intelligent enough to, if not always comprehend, at least not act out a skit of Beavis and Butthead while he's reading it. He can get beyond the 'fun' parts and appreciate the book as a whole."

     This is the earned reading principle and it has to be applied to both YA collections in public libraries and school libraries. Like it or not a graphic sex scene is not enough of a reason to pull a book. You can argue that it shouldn't be assigned by a teacher but trying to get it pulled is drawing attention to something most kids wouldn't notice to begin with. The kids that do notice the harder books, those that attempt to read them, pay attention to them. They're the smart ones and they need to be encouraged and challenged not put in straightjackets.

     Back to the easy reader misery books. There are more then a few out there and I'm not going to just argue they all need to be thrown out across the board. There would be plenty more just like them Xeroxed out by somebody trying to make a name for themselves. The idea that you can be a big success by 'pushing the limits' isn't unique to YA Fiction or ever just books. It would be better to fight the thinking behind this kind of crap then making stars out of those who write it. A positive message needs to be created for YA reading. I don't know where its going to come from but you might want to start by finding what books you agree with, and try and find some published this decade.

     Now this doesn't mean parents can't challenge books. My advice to parents is to try and find the Lexile rating of a book you find offensive. Compare the grade level to what you feel the content is and use that for your arguments for why it needs to be removed. A low reading level combined with a high level of adult content is a legitimate reason to pull a book. I'm sure there are cases to be made out there but you do still have to find a balance.

     A message to Librarians: If anything here does need to be banned its your whining every time a YA book gets challenged. If you were doing your jobs instead of always hopping on the nearest soapbox this wouldn't be an issue. A little balance won't kill you either.

     Coming Thursday: The Honorable Mentions

Sunday September 18, 2005

  (08:40 pm) Banned Books Week

     Banned Books Week started yesterday. I know you're all excited. This is what I had to say last year. Early on I used the phrase "Free Uncle Remus!". This is the intro and a few related posts here, here, here, and here.

     Not much has changed in Saudia Arabia. Castro's Cuba still rots but God bless those Estonians. And let's not forget places like Zimbabwe run by tyrant Robert Mugabe. With 70% poverty, life expectancy of 36-7 years of age, and almost 25% of the population with AIDs or HIV, books, banned or otherwise, aren't much of an issue (though someone's going to have to explain to me the literacy rate of 90%, either someone's lying, someone's priorities are off, or literacy ain't what it used to be).

     Its places like these that make our attempts at a national discussion over so-called 'banned books' seem less then urgent. There should, however, always be an ongoing discussion about banning books amongst our profession. A great quote popped up over at LISnews, thanks to Tomeboy: "In public we preach full access; in private we censor. We get away with this because we call our censorship "selection"". It's from a Will Manley column and its worth re-reading on this of all weeks. The problem with our fanatical obsession with reading reviews is lack of correctives later on. It's rare that a book should be banned but there are books that shouldn't be bought and in some cases there are even books that, once bought, need to be removed and discarded. This is more then simple weeding. To ban a book is to remove it in the face of popularity and demand. When a patron requests the book we have to say we won't buy it. Then we have to be able to explain why.

     How professional can we be if, once a book is bought, we are forced to defend it for as long as it remains on a bestseller list? No doctor sticks to the same prescription in the face of ill-effects to the patient and even a common laborer knows enough to not dig a hole he can't get out of. Yet we stand steadfast behind the absurd and the ridiculous out of some liberal fear that if one book is on the block every other book on our shelves must be as well. But isn't it our responsibility as professionals (ancient profession that we are) to create the guidelines that would prevent such a slippery slope from happening?

     Why should a book be banned? Well, we haven't established that have we? But in looking at some titles that I knew should be banned I at least found some starting points: Age, Accuracy, and Intent.

     Age is obviously going to be something that applies to minors (though not necessarily, feel free to ban books meant for senior citizens that are published in pt. 8 font). If material is written on a certain level and intended for a certain audience but the subject matter is clearly beyond anything that group should be dealing with then that material needs to be removed. This is the primary reason why there should be filters on children's computers. We are 'banning' porn from the Children's area in the library. The public understands this one, my profession doesn't. Go figure. But there are books too and we will get to those.

     Accuracy is very difficult to define. I think its fair to say that there are plenty of books on our shelves that are inaccurate in some way. The idea has to be that the work as a whole is inaccurate. And even then that's not always enough. Do Holocaust deniers get banned or is the fact they are Holocaust deniers enough of safety valve? Something so absurd it becomes valuable in its own way? Most of the medical community has scoffed at Dr. Atkins for decades, is that enough to claim a book is inaccurate? I think Accuracy can stand on its own as a reason but more often then not it will have to be combined with the third category of Intent.

     Intent. Much like accuracy there's more then one hatchet job on our shelves, people with an ax to grind whether personal or political. Considering what gets published I'd hate to see the volume of manuscripts that get rejected. But intent should not be applied to how the writer sees the subject but how the writer sees their audience. Does the writer expect the reader to do something? Not just to follow a certain train of thought but to act on it. Again, Intent can stand on its own but if you have both Accuracy and Intent you have a much stronger case for banning a book.

     I have 3 books that should be banned in all libraries and a possible fourth. They each fall into at least one of the three categories above. I'll list them with my reasons at the end of the week. Tomorrow or Tuesday I'm going to discuss some books that shouldn't be banned.

Night