Censorship Books - Page 5

Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism

John Byrne Cooke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

must read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Reporting the War is a must read for anyone who wants a better understanding of the natural tension that exists betwee the press and the government. Coork focuses primarily on wartime and elequently contrasts the difference between "live coverage" and journalism. I finished the book with a renewed sense of gratitude to those journalists who report the truth in the face of significant governmental interference and great personal risk. Cooke refreshed my awareness that freedom of the press may indeed by the most important safequard of the First Amendment and our American way of life!
Kathie Ross

Editorial Review:

John Byrne Cooke's fascinating look at wartime reporting from the American Revolution to Iraq is now available in paperback. The press has consistently influenced public perception of wars, and has often affected their course. Cooke--son of news icon Alistair Cooke--reveals how the government has tried to suppress opposing opinion, and  how the press has struggled to preserve the principles of the Founding Fathers. At a time when reporters are routinely being censored, arrested, kidnapped and even killed, this is a must-read exploration of freedom of the press in wartime.

Sex, Literature and Censorship

Jonathan Dollimore

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Editorial Review:

Those who love and live by art, tell us that it is the most exalted expression of civilized life. In this provocative new book Jonathan Dollimore argues that, far from confirming humane values, literature more often than not violates them.

He begins with a polemical and witty attack on the spurious radicalism of some fashionable academic theories about desire and sexual dissidence. Dollimore then examines the ways in which the media, literary critics and the state, as well as these literary theorists, all deny or repress the disturbing and dangerous knowledge conveyed by literature.

His own account of the volatile connections between aesthetics, desire, politics and censorship unfolds through topics such as homosexuality, bisexuality, sexual disgust, and the disturbing relations between art and inhumanity, and through brilliant insights into a wide range of authors including Euripides, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Yeats.

Most persistently, this book is about how the experience of desire in life and art compromises our most cherished ethical beliefs. If this helps make art irresistible and of indispensable value, it follows too that there are reasonable grounds for wanting to censor it.

This compelling and accessibly written book will be essential reading for students and scholars of literary, gender and cultural studies, and will have a major impact on debates about art, sexuality, censorship and the role of the intellectual.

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

J. M. Coetzee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.

From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.

"The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."--Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."--Kirkus Reviews

"These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."--Publishers Weekly

"Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and René; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."--Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review

"An extraordinary collection of essays."--Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review

"[A] disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry

Jon Lewis

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1972, The Godfather and Deep Throat were the two most popular films in the country. One, a major Hollywood studio production, the other an independently made "skin flick." At that moment, Jon Lewis asserts, the fate of the American film industry hung in the balance.

Spanning the 20th century, Hollywood v. Hard Core weaves a gripping tale of censorship and regulation. Since the industry's infancy, film producers and distributors have publicly regarded ratings codes as a necessary evil. Hollywood regulates itself, we have been told, to prevent the government from doing it for them. But Lewis argues that the studios self-regulate because they are convinced it is good for business, and that censorship codes and regulations are a crucial part of what binds the various competing agencies in the film business together.

Yet between 1968 and 1973 Hollywood films were faltering at the box office, and the major studios were in deep trouble. Hollywood's principal competition came from a body of independently produced and distributed films—from foreign art house film Last Tango in Paris to hard-core pornography like Behind the Green Door—that were at once disreputable and, for a moment at least, irresistible, even chic. In response, Hollywood imposed the industry-wide MPAA film rating system (the origins of the G, PG, and R designations we have today) that pushed sexually explicit films outside the mainstream, and a series of Supreme Court decisions all but outlawed the theatrical exhibition of hard core pornographic films. Together, these events allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what films got made and where they were shown, thus saving it from financial ruin.

100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature

Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, Dawn B. Sova

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great Concept - Horribly Executed 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This a great concept of a book, but the scholarship, prose, and editing are all shoddy. Some facts are flat-out wrong, dates often have transposed numbers, entries are repetitive.

Some of the entries are misrepresentative of censorship trends. For example, there is an entry on Voltaire's "Candide." However, the only time "Candide" was ever censored (as far as my research can tell) is once in the 1930s when one shipment of French copies was stopped in American customs because of the pictures. So it's the *artwork* which was being censored, not the novel. Additionally, much of Voltaire's work WAS actively censored, both during and after his lifetime, but Karolides and crew fail to mention that.

My college Censorship Honors Seminar course used this book as a textbook and we spent most of our time wondering if the editor was asleep while proofing the text. It was horrid.

Editorial Review:

Throughout history, writers have had their works of literature and social, political, and religious thought censored in the United States and around the world. 100 Banned Books profiles 25 well-known, often classic works in each of these categories that have especially significant censorship histories. Each clearly written entry in this eye-opening book gives readers a summary of the work, its censorship history, and suggestions for further reading.

Among the works covered are: Political Grounds: Animal Farm, Dr. Zhivago, The Grapes of Wrath, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and more Religious Grounds: The Bible, The Koran, The Talmud, Oliver Twist, and more Sexual Grounds: Lolita, Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, and more Social Grounds: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Canterbury Tales, Black Like Me, and more.

Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries Revised and Expanded Edition

Herbert N. Foerstel

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A thorough study of the current state of book-banning 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Now in a newly revised, substantively expanded, and thoroughly updated edition, Banned In The U.S.A.: A Reference Guide To Book Censorship In Schools And Public Libraries by Herbert N. Foerstel (formerly Head of Branch Libraries at the University of Maryland, College Park, and currently one of the Board of Directors for the National Security Archives), offers a thorough study of the current state of book-banning in schools and public libraries, as well as being a superbly organized, "easy to look up" reference resource concerning major incidents of book banning (including legal cases arising from book banning), and authoritative information concerning the most frequently challenged books -- in 1996 through 2000 the Harry Potter series tops the list of banned books! Simply put, Banned In The U.S.A. is a straightforward and fact-filled resource which should be found on the shelf of every academic and public library in the country.

Editorial Review:

Since the first edition was published to acclaim and awards in 1994, librarians have relied on the work of noted intellectual freedom authority Herbert N. Foerstel. This expanded edition presents a thorough analysis of the current state of book banning in schools and public libraries, offering ready reference material on major incidents, legal cases, and annotated entries on the most frequently challenged books.

Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control

Raiford Guins

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> Freedom & Security -> Censorship
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Media Studies

Editorial Review:

Not long ago it would have been an absurd idea to purchase a television, CD or MP3 or DVD player, computer software, or game console with the intention of limiting its capabilities. However, as Raiford Guins demonstrates in Edited Clean Version, today’s media technology is marketed and sold for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver.

TVs equipped with V-chips, Internet filters, editing DVD players, clean-version CDs and MP3s, and game consoles with parental control features can block out, monitor, disable, and filter information. As Guins argues in this provocative book, consumers now find themselves in new relationships with their everyday media in which they inscribe their viewing, listening, and playing experiences with self-prescribed and technologically enabled values and morals. Censorial practices are not so much enacted on media by regulatory bodies today as they are in our media technology.

According to Guins, these new “control technologies” are designed to embody an ethos of neoliberal governance—through the very media that have been previously presumed to warrant management, legislation, and policing. Repositioned within a discourse of empowerment, security, and choice, the action of regulation, he reveals, has been relocated into the hands of users.

Book Banning (At Issue Series)

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The Oak and the Calf

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

I LIKE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, BUT I LOVE THIS BOOK THE BEST 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Don't get me wrong, Gulag Archipelago is one of my favorite all-time works. It's place in world history is secure. But the Oak and the Calf is a personal history of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (arguably the greatest living writer in the world).

At a time when the punishment for owning a copy of Gulag was DEATH, Solzhenitsyn was not afraid to stand up to the Soviet system ALONE AND UNARMED (He has a lot in common with Mahatma Ghandi).

When you are armed with truth and you stand firm, it is Evil itself that must eventually back down.

How did Solzhenitsyn gain so much courage? How did he handle the Soviet system without becoming a corpse? How was he able to write his first several books while still a prisoner in the prison camps? What kept him going when things looked the most bleak?

We can learn much about commitment, will-power, and dedication to principles of truth by seeing how Solzhenitsyn did it. By reading this book, Solzhenitsyn can be your mentor and teach you through his example.

--George Stancliffe

Editorial Review:

In this autobiographical work, Solzhenitsyn tells of his ten-year war to outwit Russia's rulers and get his works published in his own country. 14 cassettes.

The Decency Wars: The Campaign to Cleanse American Culture

Frederick S Lane

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Editorial Review:

Janet Jackson’s infamous "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Superbowl precipitated a nationwide controversy. To judge by the hysterical reaction, one would think that nothing so shocking had ever been seen on television. Yet, remarkably, during the conservative 1950s, similar breast-baring accidents on television (by Faye Emerson and Jayne Mansfield) raised barely a stir. Is America on the verge of another puritanical era? Is this new Puritanism the result of something more than just concerns for public decency?

First Amendment and emerging technology specialist Frederick S. Lane examines America’s changing attitudes toward decency and the politics of decency in this timely book. He takes a strong and unequivocal position that it is inappropriate and dangerous for the government to try to regulate morality. He accuses religious conservatives of starting "decency wars" for motives no more noble than profit and political gain. As Lane astutely points out, such controversies generate a flood of books, speeches, and syndicated radio and television programs. More importantly, they fill the coffers of conservative politicians and "non-profits."

Lane first sets the stage for the current controversy by reviewing the history of the decency debate from the invention of the camera as the catalyst for public decency concerns, through the mixing of morality and politics by the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, to the recent activist stance by the Federal Communications Commission against perceived indecency.

He spells out strategies for combating the rising influence of the Religious Right’s puritanical ploys by emphasizing that decency standards are a private and personal responsibility, not a matter of law enforcement. He asserts that we must continuously educate the public regarding the ruinous effects of government censorship, watered-down textbooks, and homophobia. Moreover, he stresses the supreme importance of supporting existing and new organizations to counteract the propaganda from groups like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family.

Including interviews with politicians, religious leaders, entertainers, and other individuals across the spectrum of American culture, this compelling book is essential reading for understanding one of the most fiercely debated social issues of our nation.