Banned Book Club

This book came out in 2007 and was Jodi Picoults first book to debut at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The book is an unpacking of a school shooting, following the events that lead up to it and the impact after. It's really really really heavy, so heavy that although I have the book on my to read shelf I haven't touched it yet.

Have you read this book at all? Do you have any thoughts about it?

This book was banned over 7 times last year alone by different school districts across the US. But ironically.. it's because it discusses sexuality and teen dating violence.

This book was adapted into a film of the same new, and I had never actually seen nor read it until I volunteered to be on a committee to review the book after it was challenged within my local school district.

It's been a year since I read it. The book stuck with me in more ways than one, probably the biggest being the way it so succinctly captured the way trauma manifests as a child. The 20th anniversary edition contains an extra letter that wraps things up to a much more... "happy" ending.

Have you read this or seen the film at all? What are your own thoughts?

Per Wikipedia:

Reasons for censorship include content considered to be anti-family, sexually explicit, and content involving homosexuality, offensive language, drugs and alcohol, nudity, descriptions of masturbation, and suicide.

I will be pulling from the ALA as well as other sources, as well as listing reasons why it was challenged or banned if I can. I've read quite a few, and I have some thoughts.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/429137

Shadow libraries, sometimes called pirate libraries, consist of texts aggregated outside the legal framework of copyright.

Today's pirate libraries have their roots in the work of Russian academics to digitize texts in the 1990s. Scholars in that part of the world had long had a thriving practice of passing literature and scientific information underground, in opposition to government censorship—part of the samizdat culture, in which banned documents were copied and passed hand to hand through illicit channels. Those first digital collections were passed freely around, but when their creators started running into problems with copyright, their collections “retreated from the public view," writes Balázs Bodó, a piracy researcher based at the University of Amsterdam. "The text collections were far too valuable to simply delete," he writes, and instead migrated to "closed, membership-only FTP servers."

More recently, though, those collections have moved online, where they are available to anyone who knows where to look.

The purpose of this site, then, is to have all these libraries at our fingertips when in need of a certain text or book.

As Aaron Swartz put it:

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Read the full text of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3460381

A decision to fire an elementary school teacher from Georgia has been upheld, after she read a children’s book on gender identity to her fifth-grade class earlier this year.

The Cobb County School Board of Education voted 4-3 along party lines to uphold Katie Rinderle’s termination, overruling a tribunal that had said she should not be fired. “The district is pleased that this difficult issue has concluded; we are very serious about keeping our classrooms focused on teaching, learning, and opportunities for success for students,” the board of education said in a statement Friday.

Rinderle worked at Due West Elementary School, in Marietta, Ga., and read the storybook “My Shadow Is Purple” by Australian author Scott Stuart to her class in March.

The picture-book is about a child who reflects on his mother’s shadow being “as pink as a blossoming cherry” and his father’s shadow that’s “blue as a berry,” and says their shadow is purple. Some parents complained, although Rinderle said others had also expressed their support for the lesson.

Rinderle, a teacher with 10 years’ experience, was removed from her classroom and the Cobb County School District accused her of violating the district’s policies on teaching controversial issues, and urged her to resign or face termination of employment. She was issued an official notice of termination on June 6.

Rinderle sought to overturn her firing, and a tribunal of retired educators, appointed by the Cobb County Board of Education, determined following a hearing that although she had violated district policies, she should not be fired.

However, on Thursday the Cobb County School Board of Education voted along partisan lines to reject the tribunal’s decision, with three Democrats opposing the decision to fire her and four Republican lawmakers upholding it.

School district lawyer Sherry Culves, speaking earlier this month at the hearing, argued that “the Cobb County School District is very serious about the classroom being a neutral place for students to learn. A one-sided viewpoint on political, religious or social beliefs does not belong in our classrooms.”

Yay!

☹️ Man this is sad as hell

What the fuck?

Source: TOM GAULD: YOU'RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK | My cartoon for this week’s Guardian Books.

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I read it as a kid and didn't realize it was a target for censorship and removal until I was older. It was extremely impactful to me because it was the first time I ever read about the holocaust from an exclusively Jewish perspective.

It disturbed me as a kid. A lot.

I had known as a kid about the basic horrors of the holocaust and that people died especially growing up having Jewish family. But what I did not really did grasp until reading Maus is that the people who committed the holocaust weren't these comically evil villains. Nazis weren't these inhuman monsters that everyone just instantly despised, no. They were human beings. Neighbors, doctors, lawyers, friends, family members, most of them were every day people. Realizing that disturbed me more than anything else, that these people years prior could have had a casual conversation on the street or been neighbors with the people they were now murdering.

Realizing that was integral in understanding the holocaust for me, alongside just realizing that parts of it just can't be understood. No matter how much it disturbed me as a child, it taught me more than anything else up until that point.

There's quite a lot of books most kids probably wouldn't be reading, but so many are just because they are being banned. Apparently it's been such an issue locally that my local moms for liberty groups want the school board to advise administrators to start confiscating books, which local parents ripped them a new one for even suggesting that

I absolutely freaking love this.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/news@lemmy.world/t/271719

People donated more than $15,000 to the library system, which will be matched by the city, providing $30,000 for LGBTQ programming

Seattle Public Library offers to those between the ages of 13-26

Brooklyn Public Library offers to those between the ages of 13-21