The Black Eye of the Month Club

You would think book banning was a thing of the past, but unfortunately there are an alarming number of books that are "challenged" each year. The latest is Sherman Alexie's book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Apparently, Alexie had the temerity to reference sex and masturbation in a book that chronicles the life of a 14-year old native American growing up on the Spokane reservation in eastern Washington and his subsequent transfer to a public school where he is the only Indian other than the mascot. Alexie is a wonderful comic, as witnessed in his book Smoke Signals, which was made into a movie in 1998. But, it seems kids in Meridian Idaho school district will no longer have easy access to this particular book.

Students tried to appeal the decision by presenting a petition with 350 signatures but the school board voted 2-1 to hold up the decision after numerous parental complaints. The book has since been in great demand in Meridian, undercutting the school board's attempt to banish it. Downloads are pretty easy to get, which is probably a bit of a downer for Alexie, although I imagine he has done well off the book since its release in 2007. Hopefully, this incident will call attention to his other works.

It's funny to see books like Brave New World and To Kill a Mockingbird still being challenged today. You really have to wonder how myopic these school boards are, especially in a time when it is so easy to gain access to pretty much anything on the Internet. It is like they still think they can screen kids from the perils of this world when books like Alexie's semi-autobiography probably do more to help kids make sense of their lives, much like Catcher in the Rye did for troubled teens since it was first published in 1951. The title is still banned in many school libraries around the country.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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