Censored!! A Selection of Books Banned in Years Past
Certain books have "rubbed people the wrong way" for a variety of reasons. We offer here a selection of books once challenged or banned but now considered mainstream or even "classic."
Spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara never stops loving the married Ashley Wilkes even as she faces the hardships of life during the Civil War and the changes brought about by Reconstruction.
Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. It was banned in Madrid for the sentence "Works of charity negligently performed are of no worth."
A collection of four tales of outlandish, commonplace and surprising terror: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption -- Apt pupil -- The body -- The Breathing Method.
It has been challenged and removed from shelves in various school libraries.
The Bible continues to be banned in North Korea. Other countries restrict the printing and selling of Bibles.
From the publisher of this edition: "The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization, and also the most difficult to interpret. It has been the vehicle of continual conflict, with every interpretation reflecting passionately held views that have affected not merely religion, but politics, art, and even science.
"This unique edition offers an exciting new approach to the most influential of all English biblical texts--the Authorized King James Version, complete with the Apocrypha. Its wide-ranging Introduction and the substantial notes to each book of the Bible guide the reader through the labyrinth of literary, textual, and theological issues, using the most up-to-date scholarship to demonstrate how and why the Bible has affected the literature, art and general culture of the English-speaking world.
"The Bible: Authorized King James Version also includes the latest biblical research, evaluated and put into context as well as discussing centuries of critical opinion. A non-sectarian, historical approach makes it suitable for a wide range of readers. A Glossary of terms used in the Notes and six maps of the Holy Land further illuminate the meaning of this most culturally influential version of the Bible."
While the totalitarianism that provoked George Orwell into writing 'Nineteen Eighty- Four' seems to be passing into oblivion, his harrowing, cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate, and its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. This book was challenged in 1981 in the state of Florida in large part because it was viewed as "pro-Communist."
It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.