"Booksellers and librarians are superheroes, saving lives every single day. Here are their amazing, inspiring true stories as told to the greatest storyteller of our time, James Patterson. To be a bookseller or librarian... You have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary. A person who creates 'book joy' by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, 'You've got to read this. You're going...

"Mr. Lemoncello has invited teams from all across America to compete in the first ever LIBRARY OLYMPICS ... but someone is trying to censor what the kids are reading"-- \c Provided by publisher.

When a parent group bans a series of scary books from the local public library, Arthur and his friends devise a plan to get their favorite books returned.

At the height of Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for "re-education." The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin--as well as, before long, the...

Serialized first in the Little Review in 1918 and published first in Paris in 1922, although its censorship for obscenity in America and England were not lifted until the mid-1930sIn terms of its story it defies abridgement or explanation except that it all takes place on one day, 16 June 1904, or Bloomsday, which was the anniversary of Joyces first walk with his beloved Nora Barnacle. It (very) loosely follows the episodes of Ulysses from the Odyssey...

For 2,500 years literature has been condemned in the name of authority, truth, morality and society. But in making explicit what a society expects from literature, anti-literary discourse paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The threat to literature's continued existence, William Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.--

"Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation's number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California--the Joads' newfound home--the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship. When W.B. "Bill" Camp, a giant cotton and potato grower, presided over its burning in...

A thrilling tale of secretaries turned spies, of love and duty, and of sacrifice--inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Doctor Zhivago.

Challenges or questions regarding the content in children's books are very common, but rarely do they result in book banning. No public or school library is immune to those who want to deny children's access to certain books and materials. Scales has compiled a tool to help librarians, teachers, and young readers become aware of the social issues that are most often at the center of the majority of book challenges for children.

Draws on unique access to classified CIA files to document the role of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" in promoting American Cold War agendas in the 1950s, revealing how the CIA helped publish the Soviet-banned book in Russian to an enthusiastic black-market audience.