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PBS It's Lit Banned Books

We're back to talk about the great literary history of censorship and book banning. 

PBS It's Lit Banned Books

Comments

Mervyn Griffith-Jones' appeal to whether we'd want our servants reading such a text (as _Lady Chatterley's Lover_) did set the proper tone for who benefits from book bannings!

Tim Hammack

I once dealt with a technical recruiter whose "employee bio" answered the question: "What was the last good book you read?" with "Lol, who has time for reading?" At this stage of the game, a savvy dictator only bans the books he wants people to read...

Tim Hammack

Nice DS9 reference!

Maria Tostado

I learned things! And got a well-placed Garak ref in the bargain!

Eli Bildirici

This reads like the case for preservation. It is important work, but, let me tell you, often not terribly pleasant.

Eli Bildirici

The video is a very nice primer on the topic of censorship and banning, my wife is a librarian and this topic comes up a lot especially during banned book week, but there is a slight bit of taking the easy way out to always broach the topic from the angle of "oh isn't it terrible to ban Ulysses or Dorian Gray or religious texts etc.." and not from the other angle of "it's important that we document and preserve the texts we legitimately find deplorable and not destroy them outright". We'll have popular banned book reading series where they read DH Lawrence or someone like that, but nobody seems to do Stormfront article readings or read the anarchist cookbook out loud. That might read like a shitpost but I do believe the importance of not banning books does go both ways, I'm definitely not saying they should put "They will not replace us!" in the main stacks or where kids can get at it but if someone (say a humanities student or a journalist for example) needs to find out what white nationalists or the religious right were reading in the early 20th century they should have safe access to it.

Patrick Canning


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