On Book Banning
Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Winnipeg Free Press Best Book of 2025
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Wells (Norman Jewison) delivers a potent behind-the-scenes look at book banning in this standout account. Wells was a member of the group that chose which titles should be pulled from the shelves of his children's school library after the librarian expressed a desire to cull old books they found "too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative." He was flummoxed by the process, which he found led to "boil away the imaginative quality of children's stories and treat them as vehicles for politically coded messages" rather than opportunities for discussion. Wells offers an accessible history of censorship, covering Augustus's book burning in ancient Rome, and advocates for using John Stuart Mill's "harm principle," which holds that "speech should be regulated only when it might reasonably be expected to cause harm to others," when considering removing titles from circulation. Along the way, he observes that, per Mills, those who claim to know what is and is not harmful "have confused their certainty with absolute certainty"—the imposition of which never ends well. Wells convincingly advocates for teachers to center ambiguity, sympathy, and curiosity when teaching about language, rather than harm, and for "the building of critical thinking abilities." It's a decisive and fascinating take on a hot-button issue.
