That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America - by Amanda Jones

 

I first heard of Amanda Jones last fall when I attended an online workshop about banned books. Jones was one of the speakers and described being targeted by a radical a right-wing group for comments she made at a local public library board meeting. 

Jones was an award-winning school librarian who was celebrated in her home town of Watson, Lousiana where she still lived, and worked as a middle school librarian. When she learned that "book content" was on the Board agenda in in the summer of July 2022 she went to speak as a citizen against book banning and censorship. And although dozens of other citizens also spoke out against book bans and censorship, Jones was the only one who was harassed. The trolls made up, and repeated, lies about her calling her a pedophile and "groomer", and indicating that she advocated teaching anal sex to middle school children.

There were two things Jones said about book banning that I disagree with (but promise not to personally attack her for them). One is that "all book banners seem to be Republican...". While I agree that the current wave of book banners have a decidedly right-wing bent, it is absolutely true that book banners come in all all political stripes. One example of a "liberal" challenge is described in this article from the New York Times. It also appears to be the case that left-wing warriors have been successful in preemptively censoring work, as we saw with Jack Gantos' A Suicide Bomber Sits in a Library. 

Jones also, incorrectly asserts that "Librarians do not purchase pornography" Well, yes, they do. And while you probably won't find "issues of Playboy next to Time magazine" in your local public library, some libraries, do indeed carry Playboy. A quick search of the WorldCat database tells me, for instance, that I can see it at the Boston Public Library (among others).

Overall, Jones' work is heartfelt and introspective. She is honest about her questioning of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She loved them as a child, but re-reading them in the twenty-first century cast a new light on them.

My realization was a bitter pill to swallow because of how much I loved the books as a child. But the books are not what I thought they were as a child. Strip away my nostagia, and I knew the books could be harmful. Is it censorship if I take them off the shelf though?

Her decision to remove the books from her library was ultimately based on the collection development policy (which is what should always be used) which indicated that books that haven't circulated in five years be weeded from the collection. "The kids just weren't interested in them anymore, and I needed the shelf space for books that they kids would check out".

Jones also rightly points out that kids are not going to the library to look for porn, when they "have full access to the internet in the palm of their hand" and that politicians who are pandering to a hate-filled base to attack libraries and librarians are ignoring spaces where real sexual abuse is taking place, often in religious spaces.

Jones spoke with John Chrastka from EveryLibrary about her book. You can find the interview here.

Jones' homepage can be found here. 

Banned Books Week runs from September 22 to September 28, 2024.

Gay the Pray Away - by Natalie Naudus

 

Valerie and her brother are homeschooled with a curriculum sanctioned by the Institute of God's Basic Principles, a conservative Christian organization headed by Ben Goddard - a not-so-subtle camouflage of the Institute of Basic Life Principles once headed by Bill Gothard. Valerie has always been taught to obey her parents and the church's teachings. The seventeen-year-old is expected to marry and begin having children when she completes her studies in God's Training Academy. She interacts mostly with others from her church, and rarely talks to people outside of her insular world. Her haven is the public library - a place she is able to visit while supervised by her mother (who once organized a protest against it for "sexualizing children"). Valerie has learned to select books with innocuous covers so that her parents don't question her reading choices. It is through library books that she first learns about bisexual and other queer folks and begins to question her own identity. When she meets Riley, a "troubled youth" who got kicked out of her private Christian school for kissing a girl, she realizes that there is much that she still needs to learn. With the help of the public library's internet she begins to explore new territory, the freedom she experiences leads her to make some difficult decisions. 

This book reminded me of Pearl Abraham's The Romance Reader (which I read when it was first published almost 30 years ago). Abraham's work tells of a girl growing up in a strict Hasidic community who sneaks to the library to read romance novels.

National Library Week - There's More to the Story

This year we’re going to party like it’s 1981! That’s because book banning has never been so popular. After Ronald Reagan was elected president we saw the rise of the Moral Majority headed by Jerry Falwell. Book banning, in order to protect children, became a popular pastime of the religious right. As a high school student I found the book banners laughably naïve. What on earth did they think they were protecting us from? 

I kicked off National Library Week a few days early this year by watching Judy Blume Forever, a new documentary available on Amazon Prime, over the weekend. I highly recommend this film for all. Fans will be thrilled with the way eighty-five year-old Blume is honored by young and old, authors, readers, and librarians alike. Those who are not already fans will surely want to find out more by reading some of her books. My almost-sixty-year-old husband has called her a “national treasure” now that he has not only seen the new film, but also listened to her most classic work Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret on audio, and watched her in some Zoom discussions during the pandemic. 

The American Library Association (ALA) declared April 24 as National Right to Read Day, so as a follow-up to the movie the ALA and Prime video sponsored a Zoom event featuring a panel discussion with Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok (directors and producers of Judy Blume Forever); Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada (ALA President); Suzanne Nossel (CEO at PEN America) and Pat R. Scales (author and retired librarian). The panel was moderated by Chris Finan (Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship). Pardo and Wolchok discussed the villainizing of Blume and her books during the 1980s, explaining that they expected it to be a small part of the film, but that they had no idea what was still to come. In one segment of the film we see a clip of Blume on the television show Crossfire with Pat Buchanan. Buchanan, who has clearly not read her books, attacks Blume, repeating the same sentence from her book Deenie. Finan mentioned the segment during the panel discussion, letting audience members who might have been too young to remember Buchanan, that he was a “blockhead from the eighties”. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Judy Blume shows off some books in her bookstore Books & Books in Key West, FL

One of the panelists mentioned fear as a parental motivation for the sudden rise in book challenges. As I said, even in the eighties the whole thing seemed rather simple-minded, but today when we know that children can find whatever they want on the internet, and as children deal with real issues such as gun violence, abject hunger, and church-sanctioned pedophilia, I can only see this new wave of book banning as a deflection. Parents cannot control what is available online, but they can try to control what books are in their public schools and libraries, no matter how futile it may be.

The theme of this year's Library Week is "There's More to the Story". And, in fact, I have a lot more to say. Listen to me on The Dissident's podcast talking about libraries, library work, and book banning for National Library Week. 

Off the Edge - by Kelly Weill

The rather long subtitle of this work is "Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything". Weill immerses herself into the culture of the Flat Earthers to discover how and why they came to believe. The short answer: it's all YouTube's fault. There is of course a lot more to it, but most contemporary Flat Earthers got started by going down a YouTube rabbit hole, and once they went down they found more and more videos by other people proclaiming to have done "experiments" that prove that the world is flat. 

I must admit that until I read this book I assumed Flat Earthers were putting us on, but not so. They are indeed quite serious, and are ready to fight (some to the point of fisticuffs) with those who disagree. Evidence to the contrary is unlikely to sway those who subscribe to the Flat Earth theory. Nor does the threat of loss of companionship. Many have lost family and friends over the issue. Some have severed almost all ties with loved ones and only have the online community of other Flat Earthers for companionship. Conspiracy theorists of all stripes have, sadly, always allowed this to happen. As Weill describes the disappointment of the Millerites in the 1840s when the apocalypse failed to materialize as predicted by their leaders

...many members only became more fervent in their belief, proclaiming that the real end was still coming soon...believers let their crops rot and their friendships fail...These groups often find trivial factors to blame for their disappointments...

Libraries are at the front lines of combating misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories. Weill finds a topographic map in a library that refutes some psuedo-science described in a 1930 Leaves of Healing newsletter which purports that "Flat Earth belief as a matter of salvation or hellfire".

Libraries can also provide information that only intensifies the arguments of a true believer.  In 1919 Flat Earth Society founder Samuel Shenton theorized that if an aircraft hovered over the earth that it could simply wait until its destination caught up with it (since the earth spinning on its axis after all). He was vindicated when he found plans for a similar airship (created by another flat-earth believer) in a library. And, rather ironically, it was research in his local public library that led Charles K. Johnson to Shenton, and the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS) in the early 1940s. Johnson was able to contact another flat earth believer Wilbur Glen Voliva who "confirmed" everything Johnson believed.

As we debate how far social media should go in monitoring speech in order to combat misinformation, and as book banners across the country attempt to remove materials from schools and libraries in unprecedented numbers, the need for librarians (never mentioned in this book), who can help people navigate their research, is made abundantly clear.

Change the Subject - the movie

Change the Subject trailer

I received an email last week letting me know that Indiana University Bloomington was sponsoring a free screening of this film. I had not heard of the documentary before, but I did know the story of the Dartmouth College students who took on the Library of Congress (LoC) in order to have the pejorative catalog subject heading "Illegal Aliens" changed to Undocumented Immigrants. I was surprised to learn that the change has not yet happened (see this page from the Library of Congress Subject Headings). I followed the story at the time and remembered that Republicans in Congress (for the first time ever) decided to get involved with decisions on LoC subject headings. It is not unusual for Library of Congress Subject Headings to change as language and mores change, but in this case some lawmakers decided that this was too much and amounted to "political correctness run amok". Calls were made for more transparency in the process for changing LoC Subject headings (again, this had never been the case before). 

What both parties here understand is this: words matter. Language matters. 

The film follows the students from the CoFired (Coalition for Immigration Reform and Equality at Dartmouth) Student Group as they go from discovering that the subject heading exists to talking to the College librarians about it (and librarians' own awakening about the term) to the students' realization that the heading did not originate with Dartmouth's Baker-Berry Library but rather that the headings came from the authority of the Library of Congress and so they took their case to the United States Capitol.  

The term inspirational was used to describe the students. 

Inspirational? 

Yes. 

These students in fact inspired me to contact the editors of the popular Opposing Viewpoints database (Cengage) in 2017 when I discovered that the term "illegal aliens" was used as a heading in the database. I pointed out that the Library of Congress was considering changing their subject heading and that surely the editors of the database were aware of this. Furthermore, I suggested that the heading was judgmental, which seemed to be contrary to the purpose of the Opposing Viewpoints database - to inspire discussion. Unlike the Library of Congress Cengage did indeed "change the subject" after I sent them my message. The term "Undocumented Immigrants" is now used in the database.

Screenshot from Opposing Viewpoints database

I will continue to follow this story. Perhaps we will see a change in 2021.

Dude, Where's My Country - by Michael Moore

I picked this book up at a used book sale a few years ago and it was sitting on my to-be-read shelf (along with so many others) until the pandemic and consequent stay-at-home orders had me finally taking a look at some of these neglected works.

Moore's now 17-year-old book written in the aftermath of 9/11 when Bush (43) was president harkens back to a kinder, gentler sort of evil - a time when we could not have imagined living in a this dystopian landscape headed by a complete incompetent. Moore pulls no punches as he points to specific examples of President Bush's poor leadership, both unintentional and willful, following the terrorist attacks in 2001. 

He begins by describing the problems he had in distributing his previous book Stupid White Men in the wake of the crisis

The first 50,000 copies...came off the printing press the day before 9/11, but when tragedy struck the next morning, the trucks that would carry them to the nation's bookstores never left the loading dock. The publisher then held the books hostage for five long months-not simply out of good taste and respect (which I might have been able to understand), but out of a desire to censor me and the things I wanted to say. They insisted I rewrite up to 50 percent of the book and that I remove sections that they found offensive to our leader, Mr. Bush.

Facing the potential of having the books "pulped" if he did not acquiesce, it was a librarian, Ann Sparanese, who came to the rescue. Without benefit of Facebook (which did not exist at the time) Sparanese learned of the impending censorship and mobilized all the other librarians on her e-mail list to contact Regan books. 

Fearing there would soon be a crazed mob of wild librarians storming down Fifth Avenue and surrounding the HarperCollins building...the News Corp surrendered. They dumped my book in some bookstores with no advertising, no reviews, and the offer of a three-city tour...In other words, the book was sent to the gallows for a quick painless death...within hours after the book's release, it went to number one on Amazon-and within five days it had gone to its ninth printing.

There is, not surprisingly, a lot about the USA PATRIOT Act here, and how it allows the government to access otherwise confidential information, especially where library records are concerned. Likewise Moore makes clear throughout that American citizens like and use their libraries and want the government to support them.

When I start reading a book I am always glad to find the first mention of libraries, and in this case I believed it to be in the Introduction (so early in the work the pages are numbered in lower case roman numerals). However, when I opened the book again to write this post I found that the real first time is actually even earlier than that, on the page before the title page (a place one does not usually find any writing). It contains this bit of satire

 

The Librarian - by Larry Beinhart

Beware the librarian who knows too much! In this political thriller university librarian, David Goldberg, finds himself targeted by Homeland Security for information he allegedly learned by helping an eccentric billionaire archive his papers. He is framed for bestiality (of all things) and goes into hiding in order to save his own life.

This book reads like a handbook for buying an election. Big spenders, behind the scene's deals, and top secret documents combined with Beinhart's thinly veiled characters, and real-life events, made me feel almost as paranoid as the poor librarians who were being stalked (and murdered) in this work.

This book boasts at least four different kinds of libraries: the university library where Goldberg works; the Library of Congress; a community college library; and the private library of billionaire Bill Stowe described as

...wonderful, the literary portion of the dream that was the house. While we [the university library] were closing earlier and earlier and cutting Sundays and holidays and our walls were blank and barren and the steel shelves were unadorned and it all flickered under that shuttering light that flourescents put out, this had mahogany shelves and tungsten lighting and fine comfortable furniture. 

So clear here that rich people deserve good libraries, and the rest of us do not. This point is also made evident earlier in the story when Goldberg must fire one of his librarians. He tells her

The chancellor of the university has a privately funded study that he received from the Heritage Institute, on libraries...and it says that there are far too many physical volumes. That all this can be replaced, except for some rare volumes of historic value, perhaps, by a great cyber library, one library for all accessed from our home and office PCs. That would cut down on the need for almost all librarians, except for cyber ones and it would make all this space available...for classrooms or dorm rooms, which actually earn money.

Those who make these comments really make clear that they either don't understand, or don't care, that libraries are places where those who don't have homes, or offices, can get access to information.

In addition to Goldberg, there are several other librarians in this work. Bookish Elaina Whisthoven (the one who is fired) is described in a rather stereotypical way

Elaina Whisthoven loved books and presumed they would love her back and she wanted to serve humanity, so she became a librarian. She wore large glasses and had large curls that were always clean and always brushed and never styled. She lived like a nun  on her meager starting salary in a room she rented from a retired professor and his elderly wife...

Whereas, head librarian, Inga Lokisborg

with an accent as thick as hand-cut bread [is] a crone, judgmental, and by librarian standards, fierce. The lines on her face are like the fissures in layered shale, her eyes, overall, are the color of slate, but there are chips in them the color of bluestone...

She also has a surprising sexual secret.

Finally we learn briefly about hapless librarian Larry Berk "a wonderful man whom God has mistaken for Job."

There is a lot of commentary in this work about different kinds of information, and knowledge, and how it is used (or not) in order to create reality. This page-turning dark comedy will make anyone who reads it think twice about what they believe they know.

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America - by Thomas Frank

Those who read my Was post know that this book has been on my "to-read" list. So, writing that post prompted me, finally, to read it. I didn't even have to request an interlibrary loan. It was on the shelf at the good ol' Clement C. Maxwell Library all along. This book about how some rural or working class conservatives vote against their own economic self interests in order to vote for a conservative social agenda (pro-life, anti gay marriage) was a real eye-opener for me. I was interested to learn that many of those who vote that way are quite aware of what they are doing, but are willing to sacrifice themselves to the cause. I expected to see a lot in this work about book banning, but there was only a few places where it was mentioned. The first place I found a reference to censorship was in regard to evolution "which we will strike from the books." (If you haven't seen the movie Kansas vs. Darwin it is definitely worth watching - a documentary about a modern-day "monkey trial"). We also learn about a conservative candidate who loses conservative votes for "supporting the availability of AIDS literature in the public library...ten years previously." It was apparently not always thus. Frank recounts a school board meeting in the early eighties in which "an angry parent...wished to remove a number of books from [the] high school library." In those pre-Contract with America days "the presiding administrators had trouble restraining their laughter" as the woman "ran through her list of accusations-prefab stuff that she had probably heard from the John Birch Society."

I laughed reading about Pope Michael I, the sedevacantist, who through reading material in his "personal library of religious books" determined that Pope John Paul II was, in fact, not the pope due to "manifold heresies of the church since the sixties" and through a vote of 5 people, including himself and his parents, was appointed the new pope. I think that the good thing about public libraries is that they really do try to collect a vast array of materials, with differing points of view.

The final word in libraries comes on the second to last page of the book when Frank tells us that the public library of Kansas City, Kansas, described in the 1939 WPA guide, with its "elaborate Italian Renaissance architecture" is gone. Leveled by "progress" along with some other historic features. It is disappointing to lose some of this history, but I guess I don't expect to see many of the things described in depression-era guides. I am also sure that the library that was razed would probably be too small for Kansas City now.