![]() ![]() Banning books is a shortcut that sends us to the wrong destination.Īs Ray Bradbury depicted in “Fahrenheit 451,” another book often targeted by book banners, book burning is meant to stop people from thinking, which makes them easier to govern, to control and ultimately to lead into war. If our society isn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of difficult or challenging - and even hateful or problematic - ideas, then something must be fixed in our society. Here’s the thing: If we oppose banning some books, we should oppose banning any book. But coming amid a movement to oppose critical race theory - or rather a caricature of critical race theory - it seems clear that the latest attempts to suppress this masterpiece of American literature are less about its graphic depictions of atrocity than about the book’s insistence that we confront the brutality of slavery. It depicts infanticide, rape, bestiality, torture and lynching. To be sure, “Beloved” is an upsetting novel. ![]() Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” has been banned before and is being threatened again - in one case after a mother complained that the book gave her son nightmares. Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been banned at various points because of Twain’s prolific use of a racial slur, among other things. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.īook banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. They are mind-changing, world-changing.īut those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. ![]() Heinemann’s novel.īooks can indeed be dangerous. Those seeking to ban books argue that these stories and ideas can be dangerous to young minds - like mine, I suppose, when I picked up Mr. Just in the last week, we saw reports of a Tennessee school board that voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus,” from classrooms, and a mayor in Mississippi who is withholding $110,000 in funding from his city’s library until it removes books depicting L.G.B.T.Q. In the United States, the battle over books is heating up, with some politicians and parents demanding the removal of certain books from libraries and school curriculums. He didn’t offer readers the comfort of a way out by editorializing or sentimentalizing or humanizing Vietnamese people, because in the mind of the book’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, the Vietnamese were not human. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness. The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path. While working on it, I reread “Close Quarters.” That’s when I realized I’d misconstrued Mr. Instead, years later, I wrote my own novel about the same war, “The Sympathizer.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |