Banned Books published by Google 392
Lens Hood Man writes "Marking the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week, Google is inviting users to celebrate their freedom to read by making Banned Books available to all. From the Google Blog: "...you can use Google Book Search to explore some of the best novels of the 20th century which have been challenged or banned." Those books challenged this year include 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Lolita'."
Radical, Militant Librarians! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/basics/basicrelatedlin
The books are stil banned from public distribution (Score:1, Interesting)
Because of copyright extensions, the latest in 1998, A book written in 1926 will now not not be available for public distribution until 2022.
The "Public library" is a compensation for the lack of public information created by unreasonable copyright extensions. With a "Public Library", the government ( being the entity that granted near infinite publishing monopolies ), pays the created monopolies for the "right" to allow limited public access to the works of which the authors are often dead or no longer receive compensation.
Not all banned/challenged books are meaningful (Score:4, Interesting)
#7 : Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
#19: Sex by Madonna
#88: Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Project Gutenberg Has Most of Them (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of these I have seen on Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org].
Sometimes when I'm dying in my cubicle at work, I open up a random page of James Joyce's Ulysses [gutenberg.org] and drift away
Excellent timing. (Score:4, Interesting)
And yes, every book that Google has up there has been banned or challenged in public libraries across the country. There are still places where 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'Tom Sawyer' are considered improper reading for children - and for adults.
Good work, Google. Keep on it.
Re:these are banned? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do you think there are people who would like to see them banned?
I've got a friend who was raised a JW who was turned from the path of rightousness by the simple act of reading Have Spacesuit Will Travel. His parents weren't happy (and have been shunning him for decades). He wasn't even allowed to visit a library, but obtained the book by the simple invention of placing a library in a bus; the Bookmobile.
The book came to him while his parents weren't looking.
KFG
Banned... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:these are banned? (Score:2, Interesting)
Banned Books and Rock Stars (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been seeing a lot of comments about "Hey, I read most of those books in High School! How can they be banned?" First of all, this is a list taken out of context... many of those books were taken out of libraries due to topics that are not controversial now, but were controversial a few decades ago. Depictions of euthanasia ("Of Mice and Men"), drug addiction ("To Kill a Mockingbird", "Brave New World"), sex (Lots of books on the list), even favorable depictions of non-Caucasian races ("Adventures of Huckleberry Finn") all would be cause to get a book banned. In hindsight, it seems silly, but every generation has its taboos. Just TRY to get a book approved about terrorism or school shootings in today's English curriculum. AIDS is okay to talk about now, but it wasn't 20 years ago.
It's a lot like Rock stars. They do a lot of publicity stunts and live a lifestyle that seems garish and offensive to the social conservatives of their time, but looking back in hindsight, most of the hype is just plain silly. Biting off the head of a bat? Ozzie, your domestic home life is much scarier than that; so is the fact that we find it entertaining to televise it.
Second, I have a sneaking suspicion that many of these books are chosen by high school English teachers in a misguided attempt to jazz up their curriculum. "Ooo, this was a banned book. That'll reach out to my jaded kids who barely can read a page a day, let alone a whole book." I don't think they realize how big the Cliff Notes market is, or how easy it is to rip off essays about banned books from the Wikipedia.
Re:Intellectual dishonesty (Score:3, Interesting)
In general I agree, though there are recent complaints about Huckleberry Finn (because it includes the "n-word").
But there's another kind of "banning" that doesn't get included: bookstores refusing to carry nonfiction books they don't like. (I know this isn't "censorship" because it doesn't involve government action, but it is a form of "banning.") Recently the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, famous for supporting banned books and authors, told a customer "We don't carry books by fascists" [iwf.org] when some asked for a book by Oriana Fallaci, who (ironically) actually fought against real fascists in World War II. There are other cases of books by conservative authors that have been intentionally misfiled by clerks in an attempt to hide them, or of bookstores that refuse to special order a book they don't like. I know this happened to The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS by Michael Fumento when it was published in 1990, but I've never seen it listed as a "banned book."
Search Issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I got was a list of about 75 books with "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the title, including many screenplays, references, notes, etc. I think there are a lot of duplicates, too, with minor differences in the book's meta data. It was extremely difficult to distinguish which one is the "real" book.
After trying five or six links that looked like it might be the right one, I gave up.
Not a Black and White issue. (Score:4, Interesting)
I read this book in high school, and I came away from it with a new appreciation for the horrors of racism and injustice. How the hell is it degrading? By showing just how fucked-up the law was in regards to nonwhites?
Some black parents in my school district recently tried to have Mockingbird removed from the curiculum (but not from the library) and my first reaction was similar to yours. The media reports made it sound like their whole objection was that the book uses The 'N' Word and discussing it in class was offensive to them. When I went to the meeting however, I quickly discovered the issue was more complex. The main problem is that mostly white teachers choose this 46-year-old book by a white author to teach students about racism. 46 years ago, a novel by a white author was about the only way such a message could reach a wide audience, but in 2006 there have got to be better ways. Any black author knows far more about racism than Harper Lee (despite Mr. Lee's best intentions), and it's time for the curiculum to reflect that.
Harper Lee isn't a MR. (Score:2, Interesting)
Bah! (Score:4, Interesting)
One that's not even in Project Gutenburg.
One that google won't even show you if you use moderate safesearch.
One that has been banned in more countries than any other.
120 days of Sodom, by Marquis de Sade
Warning: NSFW
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_120_Days_of_Sodo
Quite possibly the most fucked up thing ever written.
Or turned into a movie for that matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal%C3%B2_o_le_120_g
People ban stuff for the silliest reasons. Half of those books were banned merely because of racism or one or two possibly offensive subjects.
This is a true banned book. If you are not offended by it, you are quite possibly a horrible human being.
Even saying that, I think you should read it. It puts perspective on things.