Customer Reviews

120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature

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In "120 Banned Books" the authors pull together a collection of books that have been banned at some point in history for Political, Religious, Sexual, and/or Social grounds.

I found this book very interesting in two ways. First, it offers a nice synopsis of 120 books, a few of which are somewhat obscure. And as it is unlikely that many have read all of these, this book provides enough information, along with Amazon reviews, of course ;), about the subject books for the reader to make the decision about investing the time to read it.

Following each book synopsis is a short history of when, where, why, etc that book was banned. I will admit that, after a few dozen times, I got tired of which local school board voted to remove a book from a reading list or library shelf. The local school board bannings are generally motivated by someone in the community finding a book offensive or insulting or age-inappropriate. And with the political correctness/hypersensitivity of today, I am only suprised that we do not see a vastly increasing number of complaints for various left- and right- of center reasons.

But I DID find the discussions of book bans at the national level quite interesting. The read can see how some governments through history have attempted control the thoughts of the citizens by controlling the printed material (and other media as well, of course) available. This book includes examples from all over the world and is very interesting.

This is a good book to add to your library.

This book tells about the 120 books that at some time, were banned, and the reason they were.