My local libraries used to have day/week events specifically to read banned books. I wonder if that's still a thing? If not, publishers/libraries should bring it back as it's a win/win for them.
I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical. I do think there's some level of censorship happening here and I get inklings of book burning when I consider how difficult it is to get these books.
Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors, so the prices for collectibles are high. That's not unusual.
What are you proposing be done? Force the Seuss Foundation to publish books it doesn't want to publish?
What now? That's not what's going on here at all.
| Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors
After all of this, it is considerably easier to procure the writings of Adolf Hitler than of Dr. Seuss. That is very strange and wrong.
The Mein Kampf comparisons also tend to leave out two key factors: most of Dr. Seuss’ books are intended for children and they’re presented without critical analysis. I don’t think you’d find much objection to the same kind of scholarly work discussing Seuss’ works in the historical context – Dr. Seuss Goes to War being a good example of what that might look like.
It's actually the libraries pulling them from the shelves that seems so bizarre to me. I could understand them moving them from the children's section to somewhere else, but to remove them from circulation entirely, and then presumably put a bunch of other books out on the table for banned books week is just strange.
Public libraries have historically been a big institutional force for the rights of free speech and free thought, fighting in court to be able to loan out (and keep secret the names of borrowers) very controversial books. I honestly cannot understand sacrificing those principles and all of that history over Dr. Seuss.
Librarians are generally quite opposed to banning books and I haven't seen any sign that this is different: some large systems (e.g. NYPL) have said they're keeping them in the general collection and others (e.g. Chicago) have said that they're temporarily removing them from circulation while deciding what to do long-term. I would bet that the major of local decisions will end up being along the lines of either not shelving them in the children's section or having some kind of contextual note for people who request it.
It's easy for Chicago to say that they're figuring out what to do long term, but somehow these books were all fine (and in the children's section!) for something like 70 years, and now they're suddenly radioactive.
What this suggests to me is that there has been a shift in values among librarians, and when the publisher made the decision to take them out of print, this forced a reevaluation, and then we discovered that avoiding any whiff of racism is a more important value than free speech. I think that's really sad and depressing.
In terms of giving these to children - I'd argue that this is the parent's decision to make and that there are far worse things we are seem to be ok exposing children to, like advertising or social media.
while technically true this is also essentially wrong, if someone stops selling something for moral reasons then they are strongly implying you are immoral for acquiring the thing they have stopped selling; and it is a necessary component of the immoral that one should not have the immoral, transmit the immoral, commit the immoral or otherwise partake of the immoral.
Unless they donated the book rights to the public domain, they literally are telling you exactly that.
Why is that? Surely if both are well written/marketed enough they could both be bestsellers?
That said, your link's observation that it's a curated list actually means that it is more of an accolade than merely sales. It means that somebody at the Times wanted the book on the list, which says more to its readers.
It's not much, but when you're trying to stand out in a crowded market, each little bit helps. Popularity has a positive feedback effect, and it's really slow going if you can't take advantage of it. At least for a cycle or two.
Given the NY Times growing irrelivance in the market, the high-profile cases of having their list gamed more than once, their ongoing war against their own users with the 3rd party tracking and bullshit they pull over cancellations, I somehow doubt their list is having much of an impact on anyone.
I don't know how much that helped, but the underlying logic makes sense. He had a medium-sized niche audience, but their word of mouth wasn't going to sell a lot of extra copies. This put the book out on a world stage. And it just so happened that this particular book (a nerdy exploration of the politics of pre-Caesar Roman Republic) might appeal to the New York Times readership.
That's what the list could be for at its best: a mechanism for breaking out of your niche. I have no idea how many extra books it sold, but it was a meaningful mechanism for trying.
The wright brothers, carl benz, charles babbage, invented flight, automobiles, and computers respectively.
All very white dudes.
"Asian" is too broad a term to be much use outside of geography.
"Latin" is a little more coherent, based on both geography and language. It's still pretty broad though; there are common threads but I don't know anyone who identifies simply as Latin.
"White" as a cultural identity is a relatively new invention. Personally I don't see much in the way of a shared culture here. It's problematic for many because in the USA it's been very prominently used by persons and groups who've been opposed to increasing civil rights for non-whites. It's distasteful to others because it represents a flattening of culture -- in my experience, white Americans will generally more readily identify with a particular subset of European heritage and/or with their own state or region. But this may be changing.
There's no bald people culture.
Or innie bellybutton culture.
If we enslaved people based on their baldness for a few centuries and then kept discriminating against them for another century, I am sure they would have their own culture born from that shared experience.
Southern Black people were the only ones in America that did.
Then if you expand that definition globally...the number of total black people experiencing slavery from white people during that time, was actually the very small.
It's like saying all White People share a culture because the Irish had a hard time during British or American repression.
Your using one definition to support your argument but then saying that definition also doesn't apply to other groups.
FJ Haydn spent the bulk of his working career in Hungary, toward the end of his career he went to France and England and received large adoring audiences, not as some kind of exoticism, but because he was/is a giant of European/white culture.
Why would anyone say “white isn't a culture” except to express animosity towards white people?
Arch, Debian, Suse, etc. are cultures, but gnu/Linux isn't?
I truly believe the word "white" does not, in practice, describe a specific culture, or even a specific set of closely related cultures, and I have no animosity toward white people. I don't think that opinion comes anywhere near the "almost exclusively held by racists" category.
Write characters that are not exactly like you: you cannot possibly do this right and have no business attempting it. Write characters that are just like you: where's my representation?
It just needs a speech synthesizer uttering the words "The only winning move is not to play" at the end. Thus, effectively silenced by your own conclusion, other people can take your place. If you point this out, well, hasn't your kind said enough already?
I have an unsubstantiated theory that this moral compassing at the institutional level (like the article mentions) has gathered more steam after the internet went into our phones and thus became highly accessible to the general public.