how about the frightening works of Bill Bennett (the former education czar)…
titles like “the book of virtues”, “moral compass”, and “our sacred honor”.
a right-wing hatchet man who uses religion to justify his hate…
I didn’t read what he wrote before I said the bible. But I stand by my post.
While I very openly think that half the people on this forum are nut jobs, I also feel that there are some extremely well though people on here as well. With that said I cannot believe that people have pointed out what is wrong with the certain books on the list and not what is wrong with the list existing at all. Books do not cause harm. Idiots who cannot think for themselves and/ or latch onto certain ideals given to them by other people to supply/ enforce negative ideals cause harm. But not the books they read. Any book (even the bible, even mein kemph, even every religious book ever written) can cause growth in the mind of one who used it to guide them in the path of “what to think ABOUT” and not simply “what to think”
There were horribly stupid books in the 50s about how girls should behave that out and said that a girl who got knocked up was solely responsible and it was not the man’s problem. I find the existance of such an ideal disguisting. But this ideal was prominant in society. These books put what people thought on paper. Which gave way to a group of individuals to read it and go “What?!?!?” and help inspire change. I wish I could recall the name of the “worst” of them, which is supposedly the book that spawned the early feminazi movement. (and before I get flamed I am not actually referring to the general feminist movement. I am referring to the feminazi movement)
Bla Blah Blah Blha Blah
Point being:
Books don’t make people stupid, stupid people make books.
Books don’t make people fucked up, fucked up people make books. Books don’t make people ignorant, ignorant people make books. ECT ECT ECT
And in the end, you chose what you believe!
I’m not sure if I understand the above poster’s last few points. I guess she wrote it in a hurry (granted this is an online forum, and not formal writing), but her post reminded me that the misperceptions and interpretations of readers as well as the filtering of information have done much more harm than any stupid, ignorant, or f’ed up writer could have intended.
Excuse me, but what is the justification for this? Certain well-known conservative thinkers have assembled a list of books whose influence they consider to have done harm. Some of the books are such that almost all sane people will agree with them; on others, less conservative people will disagree.
Yet I see absolutely no evidence, either in the article, or in the public career of these judges, or in what we know of mainstream modern conservatism in general, to support the idea that they would make the big leap from calling certain books bad, to saying that the books should be banned or burned. If you have such evidence I would love to hear it; otherwise the accusation is as much a calumny as if I were to accuse you of planning violence against a man, simply because I once heard you criticize his character.[quote]Books do not cause harm. Idiots…cause harm[/quote]
I too find the idea of compiling a list of bad books, distasteful. But perhaps the formula “Books which have caused harm” was shorthand for “books which expressed ideas which we dislike and which, in action, have proved harmful”?
Many who say that books are not harmful in and of themselves and condemn this list would be among the first to cheer for a list of the most helpful books to the human race. There seems to be a double standard of which I am guilty of.
Books like the Bible can be very helpful to people but also can be used by evil persons to control and manipulate others.
Most of the books on the harmful list were written by people who thought that they were doing something beneficial for humanity.
Excuse me, but what is the justification for this? Certain well-known conservative thinkers have assembled a list of books whose influence they consider to have done harm. Some of the books are such that almost all sane people will agree with them; on others, less conservative people will disagree.
Yet I see absolutely no evidence, either in the article, or in the public career of these judges, or in what we know of mainstream modern conservatism in general, to support the idea that they would make the big leap from calling certain books bad, to saying that the books should be banned or burned. If you have such evidence I would love to hear it. . . [/quote]
Ok, here is an extremely brief list of the thousands of books that have been banned, burned or bowlderized in the US by conservatives.
[quote]1977: In the Night Kitchen
By Maurice Sendak. This picture book was removed from the Norridge, Illinois, school library because of “nudity to no purpose.” The cover art depicts a bare-bummed child. The book was expurgated elsewhere when shorts were drawn on the nude boy
1978: Silas Marner
By George Eliot. It was banned at the Union High School in Anaheim, California.
1980: Romeo and Juliet (Bowdlerized)
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition; in which some ten percent of the text was expurgated due to being, “trivial or ribald wordplay and especially difficult, static passages of poetry.” Two thirds of the removed material had sexual connotations.
1980: The Merchant of Venice
By William Shakespeare. Due to objections of purported anti-Semitism, it was banned from classrooms in Midland, Michigan.
1985: A Wrinkle In Time
By Madeleine L’Engle. Challenged in Polk City, Florida because it “Promotes witchcraft, crystal balls, and demons.”
1985: A Light in the Attic
By Shel Silverstein. It was challenged at the Cunningham Elementary School. Beloit, Wisconsin, on the grounds that it “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.”
1986: As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner. It was removed from the curriculum of the Graves County High School, Graves County, Kentucky. . . on the basis of his having found seven (7) places in the book with reference to God or abortion, or curse words.
1986: Where the Sidewalk Ends
By Shel Silverstein. Public school libraries in Minot, North Dakota, pulled the book from the shelves for review.
1987: American Heritage Dictionary
Banned by the Anchorage School Board, Alaska
1987: The Miller’s Tale
By Geoffrey Chaucer. The Columbia County, Florida, School Board barred students from reading the story in a humanities textbook. Community members denounced this story as “pornography and women’s lib.” Chaucer died in 1400.
1987: Animal Farm
By George Orwell. It was one of sixty-four works banned from two high schools in Panama City, Florida, by school superintendent Leonard Hill.
1988: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
By Roald Dahl. The Boulder, Colorado Public Library removed this book from a locked reference collection. The book had originally been locked away because the librarian thought the book espouses a poor philosophy of life.
1988: Brave New World
By Aldous Huxley. In Yukon, Oklahoma, some parents demanded the book be removed because of its “language and moral content”.
1989: Where’s Wally?
The American version is titled Where’s Waldo? It was challenged in 1989 at the Public Libraries of Saginaw, Michigan, because in the scene by the seashore there is a topless woman lying on the beach. One of her breasts is in view.
1989: The Lorax
By Doctor Seuss. It was challenged in the Unified School District of Laytonville, California, because it “criminalizes the foresting industry.”
1989: The Catcher in the Rye
By J. D. Salinger, and a long time target of suppression. This time in Los Angeles County, California, for blasphemy.
1989: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
By Ralph Abernathy. This book was burned in protest in Denver, Colorado, because it alleged Martin Luther King, Jr. was an adulterer.
1989: If Beale Street Could Talk
By James Baldwin. Removed from an Oregon high school library due to offensive language and depictions of sexual activity.
1989, September: The Hobbit
By J.R.R. Tolkein. Plus record albums, audio tapes, Harlequin Romances and other books, at a public book burning hosted by Rev. D.M. Huston, Morgantown, West Virginia.
1990: Little Red Riding Hood
By the brothers Grimm. A reprint, I assume, was banned from Culver City and Empire school districts, California, because an illustration showed her basket with a bottle of wine with the fresh bread and butter. The book was banned because the wine might have been seen as condoning the use of alcohol.[/quote]
angelfire.com/scifi/dreamwea … rono2.html
What kind of nutcases could possibly be responsible for such absurd acts of censorship? Obviously people like your judges who deem Origin of the Species, On Liberty, and the Kinsey Report as among the most harmful books ever written. The Nazis burned piles of books in the streets decades ago; radical Christians and conservative nutcases are doing it today.
As for acts by the compilers of Richard’s ridiculous list, here’s “judge” Phylis Schafly (and I would wager some of the other compilers of the list have been equally active in promoting censorship):
[quote]For decades, a handful of extreme conservative activists have dominated the process that determines what textbooks will be used in Texas schools.
Led historically by local East Texas activists Mel and Norma Gabler and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, these groups aim to re-shape books that will end up in classrooms across not only Texas but the country – books they insist should teach more about Christianity and traditional gender roles, cut “unpatriotic” content about slavery and discrimination, and eliminate environmental issues that reflect poorly on the free enterprise system.
These activists have demanded alarming changes to textbooks over the years:
A topic that is both interesting and disturbing at the same time. I noted that many, but certainly not all, of the books mentioned in this thread are in my personal library. I
Any person who would stand against education (books= education) is a nutjob.
Yeah, that Emperor Qin was a real prick.
Between the destruction of the written word by the First Emperor of China and the burning of the Alexandria Library by Caesar, they made the Spanish Inquisition look like a period of enlightened tolerance. How much ground had to be broken again for the
What might the motivation for compiling the “Top 10 harmful books of the last 200 years” be anyway? Or moreover, what might the motivation for compiling this “Top 10 harmful books of the last 200 years”. You almost have to have an agenda, and regardless of your agenda you are essentially advocating restriction of ideas.
And, I realize, promoting discussion.
Excuse me, but what is the justification for this? Certain well-known conservative thinkers have assembled a list of books whose influence they consider to have done harm. Some of the books are such that almost all sane people will agree with them; on others, less conservative people will disagree.
Yet I see absolutely no evidence, either in the article, or in the public career of these judges, or in what we know of mainstream modern conservatism in general, to support the idea that they would make the big leap from calling certain books bad, to saying that the books should be banned or burned. If you have such evidence I would love to hear it. . . [/quote]
Ok, here is an extremely brief list of the thousands of books that have been banned, burned or bowlderized in the US by conservatives.
[quote]1977: In the Night Kitchen
By Maurice Sendak. This picture book was removed from the Norridge, Illinois, school library because of “nudity to no purpose.” The cover art depicts a bare-bummed child. The book was expurgated elsewhere when shorts were drawn on the nude boy
1978: Silas Marner
By George Eliot. It was banned at the Union High School in Anaheim, California.
1980: Romeo and Juliet (Bowdlerized)
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition; in which some ten percent of the text was expurgated due to being, “trivial or ribald wordplay and especially difficult, static passages of poetry.” Two thirds of the removed material had sexual connotations.
1980: The Merchant of Venice
By William Shakespeare. Due to objections of purported anti-Semitism, it was banned from classrooms in Midland, Michigan.
1985: A Wrinkle In Time
By Madeleine L’Engle. Challenged in Polk City, Florida because it “Promotes witchcraft, crystal balls, and demons.”
1985: A Light in the Attic
By Shel Silverstein. It was challenged at the Cunningham Elementary School. Beloit, Wisconsin, on the grounds that it “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.”
1986: As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner. It was removed from the curriculum of the Graves County High School, Graves County, Kentucky. . . on the basis of his having found seven (7) places in the book with reference to God or abortion, or curse words.
1986: Where the Sidewalk Ends
By Shel Silverstein. Public school libraries in Minot, North Dakota, pulled the book from the shelves for review.
1987: American Heritage Dictionary
Banned by the Anchorage School Board, Alaska
1987: The Miller’s Tale
By Geoffrey Chaucer. The Columbia County, Florida, School Board barred students from reading the story in a humanities textbook. Community members denounced this story as “pornography and women’s lib.” Chaucer died in 1400.
1987: Animal Farm
By George Orwell. It was one of sixty-four works banned from two high schools in Panama City, Florida, by school superintendent Leonard Hill.
1988: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
By Roald Dahl. The Boulder, Colorado Public Library removed this book from a locked reference collection. The book had originally been locked away because the librarian thought the book espouses a poor philosophy of life.
1988: Brave New World
By Aldous Huxley. In Yukon, Oklahoma, some parents demanded the book be removed because of its “language and moral content”.
1989: Where’s Wally?
The American version is titled Where’s Waldo? It was challenged in 1989 at the Public Libraries of Saginaw, Michigan, because in the scene by the seashore there is a topless woman lying on the beach. One of her breasts is in view.
1989: The Lorax
By Doctor Seuss. It was challenged in the Unified School District of Laytonville, California, because it “criminalizes the foresting industry.”
1989: The Catcher in the Rye
By J. D. Salinger, and a long time target of suppression. This time in Los Angeles County, California, for blasphemy.
1989: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
By Ralph Abernathy. This book was burned in protest in Denver, Colorado, because it alleged Martin Luther King, Jr. was an adulterer.
1989: If Beale Street Could Talk
By James Baldwin. Removed from an Oregon high school library due to offensive language and depictions of sexual activity.
1989, September: The Hobbit
By J.R.R. Tolkein. Plus record albums, audio tapes, Harlequin Romances and other books, at a public book burning hosted by Rev. D.M. Huston, Morgantown, West Virginia.
1990: Little Red Riding Hood
By the brothers Grimm. A reprint, I assume, was banned from Culver City and Empire school districts, California, because an illustration showed her basket with a bottle of wine with the fresh bread and butter. The book was banned because the wine might have been seen as condoning the use of alcohol.[/quote]
angelfire.com/scifi/dreamwea … rono2.html
What kind of nutcases could possibly be responsible for such absurd acts of censorship? Obviously people like your judges who deem Origin of the Species, On Liberty, and the Kinsey Report as among the most harmful books ever written. The Nazis burned piles of books in the streets decades ago; radical Christians and conservative nutcases are doing it today.[/quote]
Thank you very much for all this information. Facts are so useful, and so much to be preferred to abstract speculation, that I consider myself to be under an obligation to anyone who provides them, however unpleasant to particular facts may be, or how deleterious to my own cause. However I am afraid I must protest against the conclusion which you draw from these facts. It is by no means obvious to me that the people who committed the acts of censorship or attempted censorship above were even similar to the ones who assembled the list of books they considered to be harmful. Nor is it at all obvious to me that they were all right-wingers or conservatives of any sort.
I must however begin by retracting and apologizing for a fairly serious error I committed in my previous post. I said that I saw no evidence either in the article, or in the career of the judges, or in mainstream modern conservatism in general, that the people who compiled the list would make the leap from saying that the books are bad, to wishing that the books should be burned. I stand by the core of that argument: it seems to me highly dangerous to accuse people of wishing to censor what they merely criticise. Had I limited myself to saying what was obviously true--that the article itself contained no evidence for the statement that these people would like to burn the books on their list, or even to ban them, I would not now find myself in the position of having to extricate myself from error. But, carried away by rhetoric, I went on to speak of the public career of these judges. I had no right to do so, as to tell the truth I know very little about any of them. Then I spoke about mainstream modern conservatism. Language of this sort is so vague as to be worse than useless. It leaves you free to find anyone, anywhere, who both calls himself or herself a conservative and advocates censorship and say "see, conservatism IS about censorship!"; it leaves me equally free to say of anyone who advocates censorship, "no, she is not a mainstream conservative, she is an extremist"; and debate of this kind is of very little use.
I would like now to examine censorship itself and its various categories. Without very deep thought on the matter four seperate sorts suggest themselves to me:
- Banning or abridging books for or in schools. This seems to me to be the only form of censorship which can be decently defended; that the impressionable minds of the young require some protection has been long held, by even the most uncompromising advocates of freedom.
- Banning books from public libraries.
- Banning books outright: making a certain book illegal, and the sale or possession of it a crime, as Mein Kampf is illegal in Germany today.
- Actually burning books. This odious act–to someone like me, who cannot stand even to see someone making pencil marks in a book, how abhorrent must the spectacle of a book-burning be!–must also, however, be divided into two sorts: a symbolic burning of one or a number of books as a protest, analogous to burning a flag or a photograph; and burning every copy of a book available, with the intent of actually removing the book itself from existence.
Of the nineteen seperate cases of censorship which you mention, and which, upon a cursory glance seem so awful, it turns out that fully fourteen. involved schools: books were considered inappropriate for use in schools and therefore removed from school libraries. Actually, not every single case seems to involve censorship at all. In one, you merely state that “some parents demanded the book be removed”; others say nothing more than that a book was “challenged”. Challenged by whom? with what result? How many parents made this demand, and were their demands met? I suppose the answer is probably no, for if actual censorship had taken place then surely you would have told us?
A fifteenth case says nothing more than that a book was challenged, without informing us what the substance of the challenge was; as the book, by Madelein L’Engle, is a children’s book, I am inclined to assume that this case also involved a school or school board.
There remain two cases in which books were removed from libraries and two cases in which books were burned. I am inclined to suspect that the book burnings were of the symbolic kind, rather than attempts to totally remove certain books from existence, but that is cold comfort when we contemplate that in this day and age at least two public book burnings have actually been held.
If it were my purpose to defend my country from the accusation of being a place hospitable to censorship, I could point out that two cases of books being removed from public libraries is not a great deal, over a thirty year period, in a country of hundreds of millions of people and, I assume, millions of libraries and schools. The rest is mostly a lot of noise in which opinionated people sought to influence what was read in our public schools: if we can agree that tampering with the curriculum is not censorship (for otherwise I am guilty of censorship every time I choose to read one book with my students and not to read any one of the millions of others possible) then we do not have very much fire beneath this smoke. You say that these are only a few of thousands of examples. I have no reason to doubt you. But am I justified in assuming that the list you have provided is a proportionately accurate picture of the total, and that, if we could examine each one of the thousands of cases, we would find genuine censorship comprising a very small percentage of the whole?
But it is not my purpose here to defend my country from the charge which you successfully have successfully established against her: that she contains depressingly many people whose response to an idea or an image which they do not like is, not to respond to it with their own ideas, but to attempt to have the idea suppressed. And emphatically, I am not trying to defend censorship in any way, an act which I find an outrage. I am trying to protest against false accusations and that unfortunate method of attack, guilt by association.
I do not know why you say that all of the cases in your list were ones of books being banned, burned, or bowdlerized by conservatives. One of the cases involved Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, which was accused of being an Anti-semitic play. In fact it contains a Jewish character who conforms to an anti-semitic stereotype. From this I can guess that the people who wished that the play not be taught in school, are people very sensitive to or outraged by what they percieve as anti-semitism, even when it appears in our greatest poet. Now, to be against anti-semitism is not an exclusively conservative trait.
Of the two cases of book burnings which you mention, the victim in one was a biography of Martin Luther King Junior, whose burners were angry because it accused that great leader of the civil rights movement of being unfaithful to his wife. From this I conclude that the people who burned the book were ardent admirers of Martin Luther King: not an exclusively conservative group.
Nothing in your list made me so sad as to hear that a copy of Little Red Riding Hood was banned from a couple of school districts in California because the girl's basket contained a bottle of wine beside the bread. Another example of our national neurosis and lunacy where alcohol is concerned. Yet temperance was historically a progressive, rather than a conservative, movement; its early advocates were found largely among the advocates of Womens' Suffrage; and in the debates about the legal drinking age, which I am just old enough to remember, the principal advocates for raising the age to 21 were Mother's against Drunk Driving: not, so far as I recall, an exclusively right-wing group.
One of the stranges cases you mention was a children's book which contained the suggestion that children break dishes, in order not to have to wash them. (an excellent idea in my opinion, I who hate washing the dishes!) This was "challenged", whatever that means, by someone in Wisconsin who felt that breaking dishes is not a good idea. From this I can conclude that the challenger was either an idiot, or singularly lacking in a sense of humour, or, most probably, both. Now you may not believe me here, but my experience suggests that not all conservatives are idiots and humourless, and that not all humourless and idiotic people are conservative. Even if you go so far as to disagree there, it would be rather difficult to make this a case of conservatism.
If you wish I would be happy to furnish you with a number of cases familiar to me in which the proponents of censorship or other forms of infringement on free speech have come from the left, rather than from the right, and in which the overall effect has been rather more serious than silly.
We then get lots of garden variety cases of books being removed because of nudity, profanity, and sexually suggestive material. And this is the heart of my complaint: these things have no similarity to the list of most harmful books. The one is a hodge-podge of attempts by prudish and puritanical people trying to keep everything which children or even, in a very few of the cases you mention, high school students, protected from anything they consider immoral or unclean. The other is a statement by a group of conservative intellectuals, about a number of books of unquestioned intellectual influence, that that influence was mostly negative.
I disagree with censorship as strongly as you possibly could. But I cannot accept the idea that all of the people above, especially the ones who limited their arguments to what should or should not be taught in schools, were "nut-jobs". I happen to find the assembling a list of "harmful" books a not particularly worthy way to spend ones time. It is redolent of all those cases, from the Qin emperor down, where the list of bad books ended up a list of books to be burned. But I cannot accept that the people who formed it were necessarily nut-jobs, that they are advocating restriction of ideas, or that they are of the same ilk as the book-burners. On the contrary, it seems to me almost a homage to these books. It says: "we take books seriously, we take ideas seriously, we believe books and the ideas in them can make peoples lives better and they can make peoples' lives worse. And here are a few books which we consider so powerful that they have made people's lives worse. " And one does not have to be a nutjob to say this. One does not even need to be a right-winger to say this of, say, The Kinsey Report. There is a very non-puritanical case to me made that the influence of that book has been negative. It might be argued that sex, to be sexy, to be exciting, requires mystery, requires an air of the forbidden and the unknown, requires some indirectness, some veils. The Kinsey Report, some might argue, by putting everything on the table in cold, clinical, unromantic prose, made sex less sexy, less romantic, less interesting. I am not saying that this is my opinion; I am saying that the opinion could be held by a very non-puritanical person, that someone who believed this would certainly be justified in believing the Kinsey Report to have had a negative influence, and that that person would be neither a right-winger nor a nut-jub.
I repeat that conservative and nut-job are not synonyms, that disliking a book and wanting to burn it are not the same thing, and that guilt by associate, or, worse yet, creating associations where none exists, such as by mentioning the Nazis in one sentence and Christians and conservatives in the next, is not fair. I apologize for the long and rambling nature of this letter and hope it will be admitted in the spirit in which it was written, a passion for freedom and fairness and a hope that we may continue a mutually enlightening and instructive conversation.
Carbury wrote:
I, for one, see little need for an apology. Your piece is well constructed and quite cogent. Your analysis is balanced and objective. For the most part I agree with the positions you enumerate.
However, (here comes the but) I disagree with some minor things, such as on the issue of
Wow.
I need to hang out on this forum more often. Some absolutely outstanding posts in this thread! Many of the best are by posters from whom I am already accustomed to seeing excellent discussion (this includes, btw, not only people like OOC, with whom I often agree, but also folks like MT and Richardm, who’s comments I respect and enjoy reading, even when I disagree with them), so in this case I’ll reserve specific comment for a poster who I hadn’t read before…
Carbury: What a post! :bravo: We need to see more of you in the IP forum my friend 
to the posters who feel Harry Potter is in some way harmful - you’ve arrived at a low place.
The Harry Potter series gets kids to read. Therefore it is good. Full stop. Period. From there they move on to Darren Shan or Goosebumps, whatever - anything that gets children to read is good.
Feel free to dislike the books, (I assume you haven’t read them) but I don’t see how you can call them ‘harmful’.
Alleycat - I won’t be buying any more of your pizzas. They’re great, but there are some things I can’t stomach.
[quote=“Shuaiguoren”]“This is obviously wrong.”
No it’s obviously an exaggeration.
Show me how Harry Potter, a popular children’s book enjoyed by adults, is HARMFUL, or shut up.[/quote]
Ok, first I said that about your statement that “ANYTHING that gets kids to read is good”. I was NOT about HArry Potter. I NEVER said anywhing bad about HP, I’ve read them all and actually enjoy them. But thanks for jumping the gun.
Do you really think ANYTHING that gets a kid to read is good? Even if the kid has an unhealthy fascination with porn, racism, violence, intolarance, narcotics, etc? Kids are getting into this stuff at a really young age now, do you think that encouraging them to read about it is good? There is nothing wrong with education about certain topics, but I’m talking about some kid who has no intrest in reading anything but “Mien Kamft” (sp?) and other countless manifestos. Would you bring piles of other racist crap home and encourage him to read it while thinking, “this is great stuff, it’s getting him to read!” Education is great yes, feeding a fire is not.
nope.
Once again, I didn’t say anything against HP. Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Hell, all Alleycat did was copy another poster’s thread, and add one word to the end of it: Agreed. For this reason you will never eat there again, even though you said you like to. 
Origin of the Species.
I’m not again evolution or figuring out what’s behind our biology. But Darwin understood little about the why. Malthus was a bad person to follow to figure out the why.
Have doubts? Just follow the science wars among biologists. There are many who contest the why about Darwin. Steven Jay Gould. Why would he write an article about Kropotkin, the anarchist philosopher, the former botanist who, from his studies, grew to believe life was cooperative. Could Gould, even if he didn’t find it, have been looking for other explanations for life
Until it’s settled, we’ve got to live with bad sciences like evolutionary biology and psychology.
Not that it’s a bad book (I’ve never read, but it’s supposed to be a classic), but there’s a good argument that Frankenstein was one of the most harmful, anti-science, anti-knowledge books of the past 200 years.