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10 Stupidly Banned Children’s Books

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10 Stupidly Banned Children’s Books
by Her Ladyness, December 9, 2012

Let’s get one thing immediately straight, banning books is stupid, done by cowards with small brains.  No book should be banned.

As children, most of us are exposed to books in one form or another. Some of us come from a family of bookworms, while others recoil at the sight of a meaty book. However, did you know that many of the books you either read or had read to you as children were at one point banned? Here are ten banned children’s books, forced from the shelves for at least a little while in history—some were written in days long past, and others mere decades ago.

10
Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne

Winnie-the-Pooh has been introduced and reintroduced to generation after generation as a model of a child’s best friend. If you ask most people who their favorite silly old bear is, they’ll probably tell you that it’s Pooh bear. However, not everyone has found Pooh’s “rumbly tumbly” and honey obsession so endearing. According to Banned Books Awareness, this classic has been banned in a variety of countries at one point or another, including Russia, China, Turkey, and even its home turf, England. In fact, even some places in the United States have banned this book!

So why would anyone ever want to keep children from the joy of Milne’s classic? In the case of Russia, Winnie-the-Pooh was banned in 2009 because of alleged Nazi ties. In truth, the entire ban was based on the fact that a single person, known for supporting the Nazi party, was found to own a picture of a swastika-adorned Pooh. Apparently, this one isolated case is enough for Russia to decide that Winnie the Pooh is pro-Nazi, and therefore anti-Russia. In fact, if you investigate any of the claims or reasons of schools or governments for banning this book, you’ll find them to be silly and utterly absurd. As Pooh might say: “oh bother”.
9
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Frank Baum

MGM’s classic adaptation from the 30’s is still one of the most beloved films of all time, and the book isn’t anything to snub either. Originally published in the year 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the foundations of the fairytale genre. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never read an Oz book in your life—and believe me, there are plenty to be read—somewhere, at some place or time, you’ve heard or used an Oz related reference. Who, then, would seek to ban a book that has become so important to the American experience?

America, that’s who. It might surprise you to know that this timeless classic has been contested for many years and for a variety of reasons. According to an article called “Book’s Alive” by Vincent Starret, the Detroit Library banned The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1957 for allegedly having no value for children. It was also said that the book perpetuated cowardly behavior – despite the fact that the character afflicted by cowardice was in fact never cowardly to begin with. The land of Oz has also come under fire from religious communities, who claim that it presents children with a positive image of magic and sorcery. Clearly, whatever the reason, people who would seek to ban this classic are living somewhere on the wrong side of the rainbow.
8
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L’Engle

This classic takes children into both the realm of science and the realm of magic. While A Wrinkle in Time may have been inspired by quantum physics theories, surprisingly it resonates very well with young children. This is the sort of story that teaches readers to look beyond the world they know and into the something spectacular, and it has often been praised for its imagination and vision. However, not everyone has been singing cheers for L’Engle’s work.

Interestingly enough, while L’Engle has religious imagery in her books – a little like fellow author C.S. Lewis – A Wrinkle in Time’s chief naysayers come from religious communities. According to Banned Books Awareness, many religious individuals felt that L’Engle was too passive in her inclusion of Christian imagery. A foundation in Iowa even claimed that book had satanic themes. In fact, some of the claims against this book are so absurd that a L’Engle fan might suspect that the book’s nefarious villain, The Black Thing, is behind them.
7
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White

White’s heartfelt tale of the relationship between two unexpected creatures, a spider and pig, has been drawing children in for over half a century. Published in 1952, this classic has been readily available on most library shelves for children to read. However, some people would much rather that this title never see the light of day.

In one extreme case, a school in England banned Charlotte’s Web for fear that the pig Wilbur might be offensive to Muslim students. Fortunately, the Muslim Council of Britain saw the folly of this ban: the book, and all other pig books, were quickly restored to their rightful place on the shelves.
6
Bridge to Terebithia
Katherine Patterson

This classic title is number nine on the American Library Association’s list of most commonly banned books in the 90’s. The complaints have been many, though perhaps the most commonly contested aspect is the book’s portrayal of death. While some people applaud Patterson for crafting a story full of both fantasy and realism, others find the very real depiction of the death of a child to be too much for children to handle. Aside from the alleged morbid elements of this tale, Bridge to Terebithia has also been accused of promoting a variety of religious philosophies, including Satanism, Occultism, and New Age religion.

5
Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll

Everyone has heard of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. If they have not read the book, then they have at least seen one of the many adaptations, the most famous of which is Disney’s animated classic. Words like vorpal sword, chortle, and galumph were born from Carroll’s work.

Alice in Wonderland has inspired several nonsensical complaints. While some reasons are similar to those levied against the sentient animals in Charlotte’s Web and Winnie-the-Pooh, some of the more outrageous claims made against this book include alleged references to sexual acts and the encouragement of child abuse and drug abuse. Though most of these claims have been answered with explanations and rebuttals, there are still people today who find this book inappropriate for the intended audience. However, with well over fifty films, novels, and comics that have been either inspired by or directly based off of Carroll’s classic work, it’s unlikely that Alice in Wonderland will be thrown down a rabbit hole anytime soon.
4
Green Eggs and Ham
Dr. Seuss

American author Dr. Seuss has become a household name, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a library or bookstore that does not carry at least one of his 46 children’s books. Green Eggs and Ham is a book about trying new things, and going against the status quo. Evidently, China did not wish to expand its citizens’ palates. In 1965, the People’s Republic of China banned this poetic classic, claiming that it sported Marxist and homosexual ideas. Apparently, the Chinese government feared that the ham in Green Eggs and Ham represented some sort of sexual imagery, and that Sam was a minion of temptation. The ban in China was only lifted after the good doctor’s death, and as far as anyone knows, it can now be read freely by Chinese school children who seek it out. Whether said school children read the book in a box or with a fox, is yet to be determined.
3
Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak

This classic, published in 1963, was adapted into a trippy, live-action film in 2009. Though it’s been around for over forty years, this book hasn’t always been readily available in libraries and in stores. After its release, Where the Wild Things Are was banned in libraries all across the U.S. for its dark tone and unruly lead character. Some parents were apparently uneasy about the fact that Max, the story’s protagonist, acted far too much like a regular little boy – he was loud, chaotic, prone to tantrums, and full of mischief. Nowadays, you’ll find far fewer libraries that still hold this ban, though some censors have stuck to their guns. Said censors have clearly lacked the desire to become kings or queens of their Wild Things.
2
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl

The chief complaint filed against this classic is the depiction of Mr. Wonka’s Oompa Loompas. While those of us only exposed to the 1971 adaptation (as well as subsequent revisions of the book) might find this hard to believe, book-savvy folk – as well as Burton fans – might be able to identify some problems. In the original text, Oompa Loompas are depicted as dark skinned pygmy people who work for cocoa beans as opposed to money. While Dahl claims that he never intended to work racist themes into his book, people were offended all the same. The book was banned for a short while in places in the U.S., though Charlie and the Chocolate factory didn’t spend too long stuck in the chocolate pump. I guess it holds the magic ticket.
1
Watership Down
Richard Adams

Watership Down is sort of like a rabbity version of Lord of the Rings. The plot is epic and filled with trials and tribulations, and it features a large party of rabbits of different skills and attributes. These rabbits sought a new home, and they had to fight to get there every step of the way. In fact, the conflict and brutal realism of Watership Down is one of the factors that have caused this classic to be banned time and time again. Though never banned nationally to my knowledge, select schools in the U.S. have been known to ban this book. New York is one state that is home to schools enforcing such a ban, though the phenomenon doesn’t appear to be too widespread. Whatever the case, this epic tale seems to either terrify or inspire people – so what’s the outlook for this timeless classic? If you asked Fiver, the oracular rabbit of the party, I think he’d say that Watership Down will be around for a very long time indeed.

10 Stupidly Banned Children’s Books – Listverse.

The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia circa 2032

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I am nervous about tonight, about the election results.  I guess because I am taking the results personally, I guess because they are personal.  Other elections, I was excited about the conversations that they create, but this one, I am just nervous.

I am nervous to learn if people voted with their heads and hearts or with their interpretation of WWJD.

I think I will just go to work, go to the gym, and check the results there.

Will it be popping bottles of champagne and kissing in the streets or tears in whiskey?  We will start to know in 15 or so hours…

 

The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia circa 2032

by Maria Popova

A graphic novel about heroism, corporate greed, and the convergence of Wall Street and Chinatown.

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Some two thousand years ago, Chinese general Sun Tzu penned The Art of War — an ancient military treatise that went on to become one of the most timeless and revered strategy books of all time, its insights extending beyond the military and into just about every domain of tactical intelligence. In The Art of War: A Graphic Novel (public library), writer Kelly Roman and illustrator Michael DeWeese adapt the classic to a futuristic world where wars are waged on a militarized Wall Street, China is the dominant global superpower, and Sun Tzu’s ancient teachings unfold in a dystopian interplay between corporate greed and the undying human capacity for empathy.

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Though exceedingly gory and lacking the edutainment value of graphic novels as serious nonfiction, The Art of War: A Graphic Novel peels away the many layers of what heroism means, what it can be and should be, to paint a portrait of a world that might be around the corner if we don’t align our corporate strategies with our cultural and human values.

ᔥ The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia circa 2032 | Brain Pickings.

Pearl S. Buck – Style Icon

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NAME: Pearl S. Buck
OCCUPATION: Civil Rights Activist, Women’s Rights Activist, Author
BIRTH DATE: June 28, 1892
DEATH DATE: March 06, 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH: Hillsboro, West Virginia
PLACE OF DEATH: Danby, Vermont
AKA: Sai Zhenzhu
ORIGINALLY: Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker

BEST KNOWN FOR: Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer in 1932.

Today is the birthday of novelist Pearl S. Buck, born in Hillsboro, West Virginia (1892). Her parents were Christian missionaries in China who returned to America for Pearl’s birth. But when she was three months old, they headed back to China. Buck’s father, Absalom, was a fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher — and a distant father. In many of the villages where he traveled, he was the first white person the villagers had ever seen, and they were put off by him. They were unimpressed by his fire-and-brimstone sermons, and he estimated that he converted about 10 people over the course of 10 years. Still, he kept trying. Pearl’s mother, Caroline, resented being so far from her home in West Virginia. She tried her best to keep the mud walls and floors of their hut clean, and she planted American flowers everywhere. Finally, when Pearl was four, she told her husband that they were moving to a city or she was going home. So they moved to the city of Zhenjiang, but all they could afford there were three crowded rooms in an apartment in one of the poorest sections of the city, a district full of prostitutes and drug addicts. Absalom and Caroline receive a small stipend for their work as missionaries, but Absalom squandered much of the family’s budget on his pet project: translating the New Testament into Chinese. He spent 30 years working on it. Buck wrote: “He printed edition after edition, revising each to make it more perfect, and all her life [my mother] went poorer because of the New Testament. It robbed her of the tiny margin between bitter poverty and small comfort.“

Chinese was Buck’s first language, and her nurse told her bedtime stories about dragons and tree spirits. As a young girl in the village, she wandered through the countryside. In the city, she and her brother explored the streets and markets, watching puppet shows and sampling food. She was embarrassed by her blue eyes and blond hair, but she didn’t let it hold her back. She enthusiastically joined in local celebrations, big funerals and parties.

When Buck was a teenager, her parents sent her to an English-language school for foreign girls like her. She did not fit in and was lonely, but fascinated by Shanghai. As a pupil, she was required to teach a knitting class at the Door of Hope, a shelter for girls and women who had been forced into prostitution and sex slavery. Usually, the white students from Miss Jewell’s did not speak Chinese, but since Buck did, the women there told her all their stories of rape, abuse, and violence.

After a year there, Buck went to Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She arrived as a total misfit. A woman named Emma Edmunds, a rural girl who became one of Buck’s best friends at college, said about that first day: “I saw this one girl and she looked even more countrified than me. Her dress was made of Chinese grass linen and nobody else had anything like that. It had a high neck and long sleeves, and her hair was in a braid turned under at the back.” But she cut her hair and bought some American clothes, and she managed to fit in well enough.

After college, Buck went back to China, where she met an American agricultural economist and missionary named John Lossing Buck. They were married, and in 1921 she gave birth to a daughter, Carol. But things began to fall apart. Her mother died not long after Carol was born, and her father moved in with the young couple. Her father and husband disliked each other, and increasingly, she didn’t like either of them very much. Her daughter, Carol, had a rare developmental disability. On top of everything, the political situation in China was so tense that at one point the Bucks had to hide in the basement of a peasant family’s home to escape Nationalist soldiers, and they ended up fleeing to Japan as refugees.

In 1929, Buck took nine-year-old Carol to an institution in New Jersey, where she hoped she would receive better care than Buck could provide — she called it “the hardest thing I ever did.” She didn’t have enough money to pay for the expensive tuition, so she borrowed money from a member of the Mission Board. Her marriage fell apart, and she was even more desperate for money, so she started writing. Her first novel was called East Wind, West Wind (1930), and she hoped it would cover the school fees, but it didn’t sell well. The following year she published The Good Earth (1931), chronicling the dramatic life of a Chinese peasant farmer named Wang Lung from his wedding day through his old age. The Good Earth was a huge best-seller, and Buck won the Pulitzer Prize and, a few years later, the Nobel Prize in literature.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, she said: ” My earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China. [...] Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.”

10 Misconceptions Rundown

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10) The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space.

To see something on Earth from space, it would have to be pretty big, which the great wall of China all 5,000 miles of it certainly is.

But, it’s only 30 feet across at its widest.

Here’s a photo taken from the International Space station, 200 miles above Earth. Can you spot the great wall amid the mountain tops?

Here, right? No, that’s a river, the wall is actually here. Even if you guessed the right lines buy pure luck, this photo was taken with a zoom lens, so from the window of the space station it looks more like this – which pretty clearly makes the Great Wall count as ‘not visible.’

As for the man-made part of this misconception our glorious man-made cities blasting light into the void certainly are visible.

9) Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.

Socially obnoxious? Yes. Gives you arthritis later in life as karmic punishment? No.

8) People Only Use 10% of their Brain

If you haven’t seen a medical drama in the past oh, 30 years, you might not be aware that doctors now have machines that can see inside peoples’ brains and, contrary to popular, belief 90% of the neurons don’t sit all day around doing nothing.

While scientists don’t yet know exactly what each part does, they do know that all the bits matter.

So if you think someone could scoop out 90% of your brain and you’d still be just fine, then perhaps you really do only use 10% of it.

7) Eskimos have Hundreds of words for snow

This one is technically correct, but misleading.

Some languages, such as German, like to make compound words by running several smaller ones together which is why German words are sometimes absurdly long.

Inuit languages use compound words as well so rather than say ‘yellow snow’ as you would in English an Inuit speaker combines the two words into one, but it’s not really a new word, just a quirk of grammar.

So technically Eskimos do have 100s of ways to describe snow… but then so does every language.

6) You Need 8 Glasses of Water a Day

While doubtless some people would benefit from drinking more water and drinking less crap there is no scientific evidence that 8 glasses of water a day is the required amount and some evidence that it might be too much.

And while we’re talking about water…

5) Tap Water is Bad but Bottled Water is Good

If you live in a paradise free from Government regulations like, say, Somalia, then you might have good reason to prefer bottled water over tap. But modern, functioning countries have something called health regulations which cover both kinds of water.

Also, water is extremely dense making transporting it from those pristine mountain tops and glaciers enormously expensive which is why bottled water companies don’t bother.

‘Bottled’ water is often just local tap water with a fancy label and an enormous markup.

4) Gum takes seven years to pass through your digestive system.

This is pretty easy to disprove yourself but it’s understandable why most people don’t try the experiment.

3) Blood in Your Veins is Blue

The idea here is that the blood in veins is blue and it only turns red when exposed to the oxygen in the air.

Thinking this isn’t unreasonable, after all your veins look blue and medical diagrams show arteries as red and veins as blue, but it’s the same mistake as thinking that mountain dew is green because it’s in a green bottle.

Pour it out and you discover that Mountain Dew is really piss yellow, which is probably the reason it’s in a green bottle to begin with.

The next time you get blood withdrawn from a veins take a look. What color it is? Red. How much oxygen is inside a good syringe? None.

Unless you’re a Horseshoe crab or Plavalaguna you’re blood isn’t blue.

2) Fan Death

This misconception is a specialty of South Korea. Here the belief is that if you spend too much time with a rotating fan in a confined space, it will use up all your oxygen and you’ll asphyxiate to death.

Exactly how the fan made of lifeless, anaerobic plastic, competes for your oxygen is unclear, but hilariously South Korean fan manufacturers – who surely must know better – include timers on fans to prevent them from running too long.

1) People Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While Sleeping

Supposedly while you’re in bed, helplessly unconscious with your gob wide open, each year eight spiders find their way into your mouth and you reflexively swallow them.

This is plainly ridiculous: spiders love warm, moist places so eight is far too low an estimate.

via http://blog.cgpgrey.com/10-misconceptions-rundown/

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Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic

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Less than 10% of plastic trash is recycled — compared to almost 90% of metals — because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds. Frustrated by this waste, Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can, and does, recycle any kind of plastic.

via Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic | Video on TED.com.

Throwing water bottles into the recycling bin doesn’t begin to address the massive quantity of postconsumer plastic that ends up in landfills and the ocean. Because it’s so difficult to separate the various kinds of plastics – up to 20 kinds per product – that make up our computers, cell phones, cars and home appliances, only a small fraction of plastics from complex waste streams are recycled, while the rest is tossed. In 1992, Mike Biddle, a plastics engineer, set out to find a solution. He set up a lab in his garage in Pittsburg, California, and began experimenting with complex-plastics recycling, borrowing ideas from such industries as mining and grain processing.

Since then, Biddle has developed a patented 30-step plastics recycling system that includes magnetically extracting metals, shredding the plastics, sorting them by polymer type and producing graded pellets to be reused in industry – a process that takes less than a tenth of the energy required to make virgin plastic from crude oil. Today, the company he cofounded, MBA Polymers, has plants in China and Austria, and plans to build more in Europe, where electronics-waste regulation (which doesn’t yet have an equivalent in the US) already ensures a stream of materials to exploit – a process Biddle calls “above-ground mining.”

He says: “I consider myself an environmentalist. I hate to see plastics wasted. I hate to see any natural resource – even human time – wasted.”

“Biddle’s company ventures into lands where few recyclers — who stick to the safer world of steel and aluminum — dare to tread.” myhero.com

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