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 (4.0 / 5.0) "A writer′s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity" - Toni Morrison, Burn this Book Published in conjunction with the PEN American center, Burn this Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship, and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves. Contributors include literary heavyweights like Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman and Nadine Gordimer, and others. <P> In "Witness: The Inward Testimony" Nadine Gordimer discusses the role of the writer as observer, and as someone who sees "what is really taking place." She looks to Proust, Oe, Flaubert, Graham Green to see how their philosophy squares with her own, ultimately concluding "Literature has been and remains a means of people rediscovering themselves." "In Freedom to Write" Orham Pamuk elegantly describes escorting Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Turkey and how that experience changed his life. In "The Value of the Word" Salman Rushdie shares a story from Bugakov′s novel The Master and the Margarita in which the Devil talks to a frustrated writer called "The Master" The writer is so upset with his own work he decides to burn it: "How could you do that?" the devil asks... "Manuscripts to not burn." Indeed, manuscripts do not burn, Rushdie argues, but writers do. As Americans we often take our freedom of speech for granted. When we talk about censorship we talk about China, the former Soviet Union. But the recent presidential election has shined a spotlight on profound acts of censorship in our own backyard. Both provocative and timely, Burn this Book include a sterling list of award winning writers; it sure to ignite spirited dialogue. 
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$9.92 |
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 (4.5 / 5.0) Over 500 reporters were embedded with military units to produce news coverage of the war in Iraq for American media outlets. As Michael Massing explains, this did nothing to prevent the coverage from being dependent on sources sympathetic to the White House. The embedded journalists saw only a small part of the war, while their colleagues back home refused to report on the ample evidence showing the pre-emptive war to be misrepresented by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, reporters at the Coalition Media Center were afraid to challenge the information (or more accurately the non-information) they received at the military's press briefings because of the threat of not being called on in the future. The result was American coverage of the war that seemed to show "a war of liberation without victims." Since the end of the war, however, it has been a different story. The media as a group has begun to ask difficult questions about the evidence on which the war was based and on how that evidence was used. Massing highlights how the "contrast between the press's feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it" points to entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism.
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$3.64 |
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(4.5 / 5.0) Throughout history writers have had their works censored on political, religious, sexual, and social grounds. Tracing the censorship histories of 120 works from around the world, 120 Banned Books provides a summary of each work, its censorship history, and suggestions for further reading. This compelling book expands on the 100 titles profiled in the best-selling 100 Banned Books (Facts On File/Checkmark Books, 1999) by adding 20 new entries on books that have sparked controversy or been banned outright. In addition, updates to existing entries cover new controversies regarding such classic books as Huckleberry Finn, The Canterbury Tales, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
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$8.75 |
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(4.0 / 5.0) Conflicting interests and conflicting attitudes toward the war characterized the uneasy relationship between Washington and Hollywood during World War II. There was deep disagreement within the film-making community as to the stance towards the war that should be taken by one of America's most lucrative industries. Hollywood Goes to War reveals the powerful role played by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office of War Informationstaffed by some of America's most famous intellectuals including Elmer Davis, Robert Sherwood, and Archibald MacLeishin shaping the films that were released during the war years. Ironically, it was the film industry's own self-censorship system, the Hays Office and the Production Code Administration, that paved the way for government censors to cut and shape movies to portray an idealized image of a harmonious American society united in the fight against a common enemy. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black reconstruct the power struggles between the legendary producers, writers, directors, stars and politicians all seeking to project their own visions onto the silver screen and thus to affect public perceptions and opinion.
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$18.00 |
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(4.0 / 5.0) <p> Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.
Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street-victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these "Rousseaus of the gutter" desecrated everything sacred in the social order of the Old Regime. Here too are the workers who printed their writings and the clandestine booksellers who distributed them. <p> While censorship, a monopolistic guild, and the police contained the visible publishing industry within the limits of official orthodoxies, a prolific literary underworld disseminated a vast illegal literature that conveyed a seditious ideology to readers everywhere in France. Covering their traces in order to survive, the creators of this eighteenth-century counterculture have virtually disappeared from history. By drawing on an ingenious selection of previously hidden sources, such as police ledgers and publishers' records, Robert Darnton reveals for the first time the fascinating story of that forgotten underworld. The activities of the underground bear on a broad range of issues in history and literature, and they directly concern the problem of uncovering the ideological origins of the French Revolution. This engaging book illuminates those issues and provides a fresh view of publishing history that will inform and delight the general reader.
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$14.84 |
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Between the two major red scares of the twentieth century, a police raid on a Communist Party bookstore in Oklahoma City marked an important lesson in the history of American freedom. Shirley A. Wiegand and Wayne A. Wiegand share the compelling story of this important case for the first time. They reveal how state power--with support from local media and businesses--was used to trample individuals' civil rights during an era in which citizens were gripped by fear of foreign subversion. <P>Richly detailed and colorfully told, Books on Trial is a sobering story of innocent people swept up in the hysteria of their times. It marks a fascinating and unnerving chapter in the history of Oklahoma and of the First Amendment.
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$15.65 |
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(4.0 / 5.0) This is the most important book ever written about Hollywood. It uncovers a secret collaboration between Hollywood and the military that has been going on for more than fifty years. Based on thousands of pages of Pentagon documents and interviews with filmmakers and military officials, OPERATION HOLLYWOOD reveals that many of your favorite movies and television shows have been shaped, sanitized, and censored by the Pentagon. David L. Robb takes you behind the scenes - and behind the closed doors of the Pentagon - as military officials and movie producers wheel and deal with the First Amendment. Robb reveals a world where filmmakers bow to pressure from admirals and generals, where movies are turned into propaganda, and where free speech is thrown out the window.
We may think that movies are free from government interference, but OPERATION HOLLYWOOD shows how the world's most powerful military has been placing propaganda into the world's most powerful medium for decades. This is investigative journalism at its best. "Robb's book should outrage most Americans and lead to hearings in Congress. Congress has never given the military the authority to use public funds and resources to engage in its own self-serving efforts to shape its public image. In the very least, it is a misuse of public funds. At worst, it is a new variation on censorship, crafted to operate in the shadow of the First Amendment. "What is clear is that the system will not end without a public outcry." by Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law, George Washington University Law School
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$4.49 |
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(4.5 / 5.0) Considering the great influence textbooks have as interpreters of history, politics and culture to future generations of citizens, it is no surprise that they generate considerable controversy. Focusing largely on textbook treatment of lingering - and sometimes explosive - tensions originating in World War II, "Censoring History" addresses issues of textbook nationalism in historical and comparative perspective. Discussions include Japan's Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre; Nazi genocide against the Jews, Gypsies, Catholics and others; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Indochina wars. The essays address controversies over textbook content around the globe: How and why do specific representations of war evolve? What are the international and national forces affecting how textbook writers, publishers and state censors depict the past? How do these forces differ from country to country? Other comparative essays analyze nationalist and war controversies in German, US and Chinese textbook debates.
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$23.31 |
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 (5.0 / 5.0) America's foremost film critics discuss sex and violence in the movies, challenging current trends toward censorship. Contains reviews of such films as Pulp Fiction, Henry and June, and Natural Born Killers, promising to raise the level of discourse on this subject.
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$84.76 |
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The first edition of Purity in Printdocumented book censorship in America from the 1870s to the 1930s, embedding it within the larger social and cultural history of the time. This second edition adds two new chapters that carry this history forward to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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$16.44 |