Another book perhaps to be banned
By Marjorie Kehe | 01.10.09
Once again, a book intended for young readers is in the news. “Night Talk” by Elizabeth Cox is the story of a friendship between a black and a white girl during the civil rights movement.
These two girls live under the same roof, have absentee fathers, and are best friends who share their deepest thoughts and feelings by night. By day, however, the white girl, Evie, at first fails to see that she and her friend do not live in the same world at all.
The value of this book, it would seem, is in the eye of the beholder.
“Night Talk” has been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Google Books calls it “a beautiful, moving story” that has “served as an inspiration for honest discussions of race around the country.”
But in Snellville, Ga., parent Laura Booth says the book contains graphic sex scenes and “reads like pornography.” Booth wants it removed from the school’s bookshelves.
The titles change but the questions remain the same: What is appropriate for young readers? Should what offends one (or some) parent(s) be removed throughout a school?
And on an even deeper level, what serves teenagers best? Does reading about a sexual encounter in a work of literary merit teach them something useful – or expose them to notions that they are not yet ready to process?
Certainly it depends on the book as much as it depends on the teen him or herself – but that’s exactly what makes these questions so difficult to answer.
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1. Chet Dettlinger | 01.11.09
Books are generally made up of words and pictures. If people would quit worrying about other people hearing and seeing things that they obviously have heard and seen themselves, they might have an opportunity to learn that words and pitures are only “bad” when some silly censor teaches that they are. Insofar as words are concerned, they are just symbols of sounds. I’m thinking of the late George Carlin’s “Part Time Dirty Words.” Of course it’s full of “bad” words but alas they are intercnageable with “good” words.
If these same mind controllers didn’t try to lead people to “good words” like god and angels and heaven and **** and alah and saints which are make believe deivel, they might figure out that someone else might learn from “bad words” what they obviously alredy know themselves; that there are real things that everyone is bound to experience some time in life.
For centuries people have been killing each other over which of their phoney gods is the “real (correct myth). Meanwhile words won’t hurt anyone until they are incased in dogmas. One set of words that have stayed in my mind since I was six years old are those from the belt buckles of Nazi soldiers in WWII:”Gott Mit Uns.” (God with us). Was he (it or whatever?)
Let your children learn reality from books and quit leading them to drivel like the bible. That is if you don’t want them to learn about incest and murder and other “good” words that are enshrined in the “good book.” If they read the bible more power to them. IF they read “Night Talk,” more power to them too. At least they might have a choice to decide for themselves.
Down with book burners!