Eight books you are forbidden from reading
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For as long as people have been writing, there have been other people that want to prevent that writing from reaching the public. Around 600BC King Jehoiakim of Judah burnt a scroll containing a prophecy he did not like. Plato supposedly loathed work by Democritus, another philosopher, and sought to have it destroyed. (Ironically in his dialogues he warns of “the danger of becoming misologists”—ie, people who hate reasoning or ideas.)
Censorship is still firmly in fashion. In America, the land of the free, youngsters cannot read freely: according to PEN America, a non-profit organisation, more than 4,000 books were banned from schools in the 2023-24 academic year. Governments around the world are keeping an ever-closer close eye on the written word. Since 2013, 6.2bn people across 78 countries have “experienced a deterioration of their freedom of expression”, according to the Global Expression Report, which tracks free speech. Read our list of the eight books that have been pulled from shelves from Italy to Uzbekistan.
Rachel Lloyd, Deputy culture editor
Editor’s picks
In some places, at least. A brief world tour of book bans in the 21st century
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The quarrel over free speech will never be resolved, says Eric Berkowitz
Remembering “The Man Who Hated Women”—and the women who resisted
When one person’s art is another person’s insult
Canada Gives - Regional Development Manager, Western Canada
2 天前Part of our family legacy is that the first book known to be burned in what is now the United States was "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption," by William Pynchon. It was published in 1650 and banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The book was considered heretical by the Puritan authorities because it challenged their beliefs on atonement and salvation. Copies of the book were publicly burned in Boston, making it one of the earliest instances of book censorship in American history. Nearly 400 years later and we're still doing this?
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2 天前Supposedly in our family folklore and family tree we had someone arrested for bringing books into the state of Kentucky. #FreeSpeech & #CheapTalk are not synonymous concepts. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/public_law_and_legal_theory/802/ https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/doi/10.1093/jla/laz004/5552027?login=false
Credit Risk Director
2 天前I tried to buy all Dr Seuss books that were banned by the hysterical left.