Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children? Seventy-Five Years on the Battlefield of Books for Kids

Authors

  • Betsy Bird

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5860/cal.14n3.10

Abstract

Tell it to me straight. If I mention the title A Birthday Cake for George Washington to you, does it happen to ring any bells? Odds are, it probably does. Unless you’ve been living under a very comfortable and well-
supplied rock you’re aware that this particular book by Ramin Ganeshram is the most controversial children’s book released by a major publisher in the past year.

Author Biography

Betsy Bird

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of Evanston (IL) Public Library. In addition to running the School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production, she reviews for Kirkus and is the author of the picturebook Giant Dance Party (Greenwillow, 2013) and co-author of Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature (Candlewick, 2014) with Julie Danielson and Peter Sieruta. Follow Betsy on Twitter @FuseEight.

References

Marjorie Heins, Sex, Sin and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars (New York: New Press, 1993), 3–4.

K. T. Horning, “The Naked Truth: Librarians Stood by Maurice Sendak, No Stranger to Controversy,” School Library Journal 58, no. 8 (August 2012): 32.

Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: When Book Is Ruled Out by Library,” New York Times, January 21, 1983.

“Thought Control,” The Alicia Patterson Foundation, accessed May 30, 2016. http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/thought-control.

Liz Leyden, “N.Y. Teacher Runs into a Racial Divide,” Washington Post, December 3, 1998, A3.

Jill Nelson, “Stumbling upon a Race Secret,” New York Times, November 28, 1998.

Ann Rinaldi, My Heart Is on the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl (New York: Scholastic, 1999).

“Fiction Posing as Truth: A Critical Review of Ann Rinaldi’s My Heart Is on the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl,” Rethinking Schools 13, no. 4 (Summer 1999).

Gary Soto, “Why I Stopped Writing Children’s Literature,” in Why I Don’t Write Children’s Literature (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2015), 50–60.

“Now You’re Telling Us?,” Read Roger, accessed May 30, 2016, www.hbook.com/2013/10/blogs/read-roger/now-youre-telling-us.

Downloads

Published

2016-09-14

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 3 (2016): Fall

Section

Features

License

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