Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds Book

Throughout history, tyrants, totalitarian states, church institutions, and democratic governments alike have banned books that challenged their assumptions or questioned their activities. Political censorship was even applied to ancient Greek dramas during the Nazi occupation in 1942. Political suppression also occurs in the name of "security" and the safeguarding of official secrets, and is often used as a weapon in larger cultural or political battles.

Such censorship has affected every form of writing; Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds illustrates its extent and frequency.

Works covered Include:
-- Animal Farm, George Orwell
-- Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic
-- Burger's Daughter, Nadine Gordimer
-- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
-- Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
-- The Case for India, Will Durant
-- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
-- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
-- El Senor President, Miguel Angel Asturias
-- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
-- The Fugitive, Pramoedya Anata Toer
-- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
-- Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
-- The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
-- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
-- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
-- The Odyssey, Homer
-- Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
-- The Struggle Is My Life, Nelson Mandela.

VOYA

This is one volume in a set of four that also covers literature suppressed on sexual, social, and religious grounds. In the preface, Karolides admits that these distinctions can be artificial: "not all attacks are identified forthrightly; it is apparently more difficult to protest the politics of a text than it is to protest its offensive language." Thus, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, for example, was challenged on "social" grounds and appears in that volume, despite what was probably a hidden political agenda. Still, there are plenty of books left that have been challenged on purely political grounds, from Animal Farm-"Orwell was a communist"; to Born on the Fourth of July (McGraw-Hill, 1976)-"unAmerican"; and from Gulliver's Travels-"full of unprovable lies"; to Mein Kampf-"propaganda of a common gangster." Each entry contains a detailed summary of the book (two to three pages, in most cases), a section on the book's censorship history (varying from a few lines to several pages), and a list of further readings (books, journal articles, and court cases). Many of the books discussed in this volume were banned in schools, either because they appeared to be favorable to socialism, communism, or the Soviet Union, or they were perceived as being unfavorable to the United States. Thomas Bailey's American Pageant (D.C. Heath, 1956), a U.S. history textbook notable for its lively, readable style and humorous insights into people and events of our national past, was challenged because it contained "a lot more funny pictures of Republicans and nicer pictures of Democrats" and because President Franklin Roosevelt was described as a "gifted leader." This book is recommended as a reference book for high school and public libraries. The summaries and bibliography would be useful to students researching any of the works listed. The censorship histories are an excellent resource for librarians facing challenges, and are more detailed than those offered in ALA's Banned Books Resource Guide (ALA, 1998). Index. Biblio. Biographical Profiles.