Banned Books Week, September 23-30, 2006

These are a few of the challenged books I've read and enjoyed:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling


• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle


• In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak


• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes


• Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene

DON'T JOIN THE BOOK BURNERS

Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It's almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America.

—Dwight David Eisenhower

From the remarks of the President of the United States at the Dartmouth College Commencement, June 14, 1953. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

This quote by Eisenhower reminded me of the book-burning episode of The Waltons.