I do hope you told them about the freely downloadable e-book, too.
Good for you for pushing back on this. Little Brother isn’t my favorite, but I nonetheless donated a hardcover copy to the high school library where my Mom was the librarian when it came out. (I like to think of it sitting quietly on the shelves there, corrupting innocent juvenile minds… 
)
I think they’re fine, but here’s a bunch of schools and libraries that would love for you to buy 'em copies:
Thank you, Ben!
Of course!
One thing’s for sure. I doubt the principal could have made more students suddenly interested in reading it if he’d walked up and down the hallways of his school in clown makeup and a “READ LITTLE BROTHER” sandwich board, ringing a handbell.
Let’s hear it for the Streisand Effect.
Clearly this principal is not qualified to be in charge of educating students.
Congratulations! You know you’re doing something right when people get this fired up. First digital book burning indeed!
Congratulations Cory. Not many authors are able to get into the elite group that has had their book banned in schools. Your book will have to join the ‘infamous’ group of books that include: the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the Kite Runner, Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Catcher in the Rye, the Color Purple, Of Mice and Men, and Captain Underpants!
If I were you, I’d take it as an honor. You wrote something that had an impact, which made it important for someone to try to stop.
Whitley Central Intermediate in Williamsburg KY taken care of. Only 3 more Hardcovers in stock on Amazon.
Thank you very, very much!
Maybe the principal will allow the book to be read in disemvoweled format.
The best thing about the book is that it’s challenging. I remember thinking about how I would feel about my oldest reading it as a tween or teen and initially being a little scared of the idea. There are a lot of themes that the book deals with that don’t scream “kid-friendly.” But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t kid-appropriate. When I was about 12 or 13, I read Starship Troopers for the first time and that made me start thinking about voting as a responsibility, not just a privilege. I became a better person than I might have otherwise been because of the books I read that forced me to think about their themes. Whether we agree with them or not, facing them helps us form our own ideas and that’s a gift I won’t take away from my kids.
Thank you, Cory (and all of the teachers, Tor, and the poster makers) for giving these kids a chance to not only read a well-written, enjoyable story (yeah, it’s not the greatest novel ever written, but it’s a damned fine read), but also to have an opportunity to face relevant topics for the world we’re living in and discuss them with their elders and peers.
I think that the role of an educator is to encourage critical thinking and debate, and that this is a totally inappropriate way to address “controversial” material in schools.
It’s weird. When I hear about books being censored, it always makes me scratch my head that it almost always happens in schools that are more privileged than the one I went to. OK, so I’m looking at their website and they look like a pretty typical high school, but bear with me a moment.
My old high school is in a town that has less than 800 people. My graduating class had less than 40 people in it. (I love the stats on Wikipedia; according to their stats, they’re 1.15% Hispanic; that’s 0.9 people. I know they have at least one, LOL) But back then (late 80s to early 90s) I could go into the small library and find every single book that was most frequently banned. I could find Stephen King (don’t judge, please), along with a small selection of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and so on. In my senior year, we read Catcher In The Rye. And that teacher didn’t shy away from anything.
To put this even more in perspective, I used to spend my summers mostly at my grandma’s house, where I would literally have to go to an outhouse to go to the toilet. One of the things I’d keep myself occupied with on a rainy day, when Grandma wasn’t giving me something to do, was play solitaire. When one particular uncle visited, the cards had to be put away, because they’re a tool of the Devil. And according to Mom, that’s how it had been when she was a kid; you just didn’t have playing cards.
And another thing about this little town is that they’re pretty poor, and very white. Rumor has it, though, that they fought to keep public housing out because it’d mean they’d have to let Those People move in! So reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, along with watching reruns of Star Trek (no joke), was a real eye-opener. Wait, so Jim is one of the few decent human beings in the story, about the only one with any honor, and the white people looking down on him act like animals? Yes. Wait, so Sulu doesn’t talk like he just got off the boat? There’s Asian people who aren’t first-generation? Yes. (Californians, don’t laugh, please.)
So on the former, I get a little bent out of shape when Huckleberry Finn gets banned, and I get told to shut up my privileged mouth and listen. No…you listen. That book made me (imho) a better person. If I hadn’t read it, I’d probably have just believed all those friends and family who said that black people were inferior. I probably never would have started reading other writings from that time, or comparing and contrasting ideas from that time and now. Having a famous author, in a book published 130 years ago, talking about issues that some people still don’t seem to get, man, that’s a punch to the gut. It’s a punch to the gut, too, to be told, “This needs to be banned, it hurts my people.” To me, they might as well be saying, “I haven’t read this, but this word is offensive.”
But, hell, I know people who would read Little Brother and agree with the school administration. They tend to be of the “whatever it takes to fight the terrorists” persuasion, and tend to have military backgrounds.
If you wanted to design a way to get students to question authority, the Principal just discovered it.
Just sending along our moral support of your gift. We have to get the DUH out of Florida.
This one and its sequel are seriously good books. I read them and then I bought them. Strong work!
Reading this makes me so glad I teach in Australia where we don’t have too many attempts to censor YA literature. I adore ‘Little Brother’ and of course ‘Homeland’, introducing them to a number of students, as well as craphound.com. I can’t wait to use this story as another example of blinkered thinking. Coincidentally, I’ve just been studying ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with one class. Looking forward to you making another down under visit. Melbourne Writers’ Festival please!
You are in very good company. Congratulations!
Why do we get the names of the librarian and English teacher, but not the principal? It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!
Dr Michael J Roberts, email mroberts@escambia.k12.fl.us .
When I was a second grader in a rural VA county seat thirty years ago (moved from OR - parents got jobs at the county hospital - only spent 2 years), the older high-school brother of one of my friends got caned because he got caught with a copy of Catcher in the Rye – which was banned in the district.
What makes this even more disgusting is that the school learned about this from the kid’s preacher - this was my friend’s bro’s best guess because the priest was the only person he discussed the book and he said the guy freaked out when he refused to surrender the book.
