‘I Think We Should Throw Those Books In A Fire’: Movement On Right To Target Books

 (By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 10 November 2021)

 Perhaps the most infamous quote of the 2021 Virginia governor’s race — and indeed of any 2021 race — belongs to Democrat Terry McAuliffe: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

What many people might not have fully processed is that the quote stemmed from a debate about books in schools. Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) had attacked McAuliffe for, as governor, vetoing a bill to allow parents to opt their children out of reading assignments they deem to be explicit. The impetus was a famous book from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, “Beloved,” about an enslaved Black woman who kills her 2-year-old daughter to prevent her from being enslaved herself.

While that effort took place years ago, it was rekindled as a political issue at a telling time. Not only are conservatives increasingly targeting school curriculums surrounding race, but there’s also a building and often-related effort to rid school libraries of certain books.

The effort has been varied in the degree of its fervor and the books it has targeted, but one particular episode this week showed just what can happen when it’s taken to its extremes. Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.

As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.  “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”  Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”

It’s easy to caricature a particular movement with some of its most extreme promoters. And there is a demonstrated history of efforts to ban books in schools, including by liberals. Such efforts have often involved classics such as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men” for their depictions of race and use of racist language more commonly used at the time the books were written. More recently, conservatives have often challenged books teaching kids about LGBTQ issues.

But advocates say what’s happening now is more pronounced.  “What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack,” said Nora Pelizzari, a spokeswoman at the National Coalition Against Censorship.  She added that the apparent coordination of the effort sets it apart: “Particularly when taken in concert with the legislative attempts to control school curricula, this feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we’ve seen in recent years.”

Even as the news broke Tuesday in Virginia, another school board just outside Wichita, announced that it was removing 29 books from circulation. Among them were another Morrison book, “The Bluest Eye,” and writings about racism in America including August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fences,” as well as “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the white supremacist group. The books haven’t technically been banned, but rather aren’t available for checking out pending a review.  “At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” a school official said in an email.

The day before, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order calling on state education officials to review the books available to students for “pornography and other obscene content.” Abbott indicated before the order that such content needed to be examined and removed if it was found. He reportedly did not specify what the “obscene content” standard for books should be.  Abbott added Wednesday that the Texas Education Agency should report any instances of pornography being made available to minors “for prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”

The effort builds upon a review launched last month by state Rep. Michael Krause (R), who is running for state attorney general. Krause is targeting books that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Krause doesn’t say what he intends to recommend about such books, but he accompanied his inquiry with a list of more than 800 of them, including two Pulitzer Prize winner “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and Pulitzer finalist “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There has also been an effort by Republicans in Wisconsin not focused on books, but broadly on the use of certain terminology in teaching students. As The Hill’s Reid Wilson reported about the state GOP’s particular effort to ban critical race theory from schools:

[State Rep. Chuck] Wichgers (R), who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.  Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.  The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”

Back in September, a school district in Pennsylvania reversed a year-long freeze on certain books almost exclusively by or about people of color. A similar thing happened in Katy, Tex., near Houston, where graphic novels about Black children struggling to fit in were removed and quickly reinstated last month. Many such fights have been concentrated in Texas.

There has also been a recent effort by a conservative group in Tennessee to ban books written for young readers about the civil rights struggle. Supporters cite the anti-critical race theory law the state passed earlier this year. And school officials in Virginia Beach recently announced they’d review books, including ones about LGBTQ issues and Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” after complaints from school board members.  Indeed, oftentimes the books involved are the same.

As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, such battles are part of a much larger debate over excluding books that has been injected with new intensity amid the anti-critical race theory push and now, apparently, with the demonstrated electoral success of that approach.  The Spotsylvania County, Va., example is an important one to pick out. While the two members floating burning books have aligned with conservatives, the vote was unanimous. It was 6-0 in favor of reviewing the books for sexually explicit content. School officials expressed confidence in their vetting process but acknowledged it’s possible certain books with objectionable content got through that process.

The question, as with critical race theory, is in how wide a net is cast. Sexually explicit content is one thing; targeting books that make students uncomfortable or deal in sensitive but very real subjects like racial discrimination is another.  There is clearly an audience in the conservative movement for more broadly excluding subjects involving the history of racism and how it might impact modern life. And while it’s difficult to capture the targeting of books on a quantitative level nationwide, this is an undersold subplot in the conservative effort to raise concerns about what children might learn in school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/10/i-think-we-should-throw-those-books-fire-movement-builds-right-target-books/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_headlines&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3541dc9%2F618cf7c59d2fdab56b84bbc5%2F59698df69bbc0f6d71c2fb70%2F44%2F71%2F618cf7c59d2fdab56b84bbc5

Robert B. Parker Passes Away Working At His Desk

Crime Novelist, Spenser Creator Robert B. Parker Dies At 77
(By Patricia Sullivan, Washington Post, Jan 20, 2010)

Robert B. Parker, 77, a popular and prolific author of hard-boiled American crime fiction who was best known for the 37-book Spenser series, which became an ABC television show in the 1980s, died Jan. 18 at his writing desk at home in Cambridge, Mass. The cause of death was not known, but his longtime agent, Helen Brann, said it appeared to have been a heart attack.

Mr. Parker helped revive the detective fiction genre with Spenser (no first name), a wise-cracking, street-smart and surprisingly literate Boston private eye. The character -- a former boxer and former state police officer -- is a gourmet cook who grapples with complex relationships with a witty female companion, an African American alter ego and a foster son. Named for Edmund Spenser, a Shakespeare contemporary, the character and series became favorites of literati who enjoyed crisp, witty prose. Mr. Parker's work was notable for its quick pace, evocative descriptions, sharp dialogue and focus on themes such as women in contemporary society and the troubled status of adolescents. His protagonists were tough guys -- prone to violence but true to a moral code as they protected a lesbian writer in "Looking for Rachel Wallace" (1980) and investigated drug smuggling in "Pale Kings and Princes" (1987) and "Pastime" (1991).

Mr. Parker wrote 65 books in 37 years and was among the top 10 best-selling authors in the world, Brann said, with 6 million to 8 million books sold. He received the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best novel (1977) and its Grand Master Award (2002) and Mystery Ink's Gumshoe Award for Lifetime Achievement (2007). In addition to the "Spenser: For Hire" TV series, which starred Robert Urich, Mr. Parker's Jesse Stone novels became CBS TV movies starring Tom Selleck in 2005. "Appaloosa," his 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 movie directed by and starring Ed Harris. Mr. Parker created a third fictional private eye, Sunny Randall, at the request of Academy Award-winning actress Helen Hunt, who asked him to write a novel with a female investigator. The first book in the series did not become a feature film, but it was a bestseller. His prodigious output was the result of a disciplined work ethic: He wrote five pages a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. "I started writing the Jesse Stone novels because I realized that at this point in my career it takes me three to four months to write a Spenser novel and as a result I have a lot of time on my hands," he told Bookreporter.com in 2000. His next book, "Split Image," a Jesse Stone book, is due out next month. He had turned in several books that have not been published, including some in the Spenser series, Brann said.

Robert Brown Parker was born Sept. 17, 1932, in Springfield, Mass., and graduated in 1954 from Colby College in Maine. He went into the Army for the next two years. He received a master's degree in 1957 and a doctorate in 1971, both in English from Boston University. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the private eye in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Mr. Parker earned his living as a technical writer at Raytheon and in the advertising department of Prudential Insurance until the doctoral degree got him a full professorship at Northeastern University in Boston, where he began to write seriously. His first novel, "The Godwulf Manuscript," sold within three weeks of completion. Over the next five years, Mr. Parker wrote four more Spenser novels, each increasingly successful. In 1979, he was able to quit teaching and devote himself full time to writing.

So clearly and consciously did Mr. Parker consider himself an heir of Chandler's that the Chandler estate in 1988 asked him to complete a 30-page manuscript left uncompleted at Chandler's death. The result was "Poodle Springs," a novel that carries both authors' names on its title page. It was panned by the New York Times Book Review as "a chaos of tawdry shortcuts." Mr. Parker, who claimed not to read reviews of his work, nevertheless wrote a sequel to Chandler's classic "The Big Sleep," calling it "Perchance to Dream." Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Joan Parker of Cambridge, and two sons. In interview after interview, Mr. Parker refused the opportunity to make the idea of writing detective fiction seem mysterious. "The art of writing a mystery is just the art of writing fiction," he told the Boston Globe magazine in 2007. "You create interesting characters and put them into interesting circumstances and figure out how to get them out of them. No one is usually surprised at the outcome of my books."



'Spenser' Novelist Robert B. Parker, 77, Dies In Mass.
(By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY)

Robert B. Parker, the celebrated writer of more than 50 books, the best known of which were his Spenser novels about a wisecracking ex-boxer turned Boston private eye, died today in Cambridge, Mass. He was 77. "This is a man who had an enormous following," says Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and a friend of the prolific writer for 30 years. "He was extremely successful. People just loved his books." The Associated Press reported an ambulance was sent to Parker's Cambridge home Monday morning on a report of a sudden death. The death was of natural causes and was not considered suspicious, says Alexa Manocchio, spokeswoman for the Cambridge police department.

Parker will be sorely missed. "People just loved Spenser," Penzler says. "They loved the other books, too, and they sold nearly as well as the Spensers. Let's face it. Sunny Randall (the lead character in six novels) sounded very much like Spenser, and so did Jesse Stone." Split Image, the ninth novel featuring police chief Stone, will be published by Putnam on Feb. 23. Spenser's popularity surged with the TV show Spenser: For Hire, which premiered in 1985 starring Robert Urich as Spenser and Barbara Block as love interest Susan Silverman. It ran for three seasons. Urich also starred as Spenser in four TV movies. Joe Mantegna played Spenser in three subsequent made-for-TV films. Stone Cold was one of about a half-dozen Jesse Stone novels made into TV films starring Tom Selleck.

Chris Pepe, Parker's editor at Putnam for more than 20 years, says Parker "was an absolute straight shooter, completely charming. What you saw was what you got. He was just totally professional. He was the best person to work with. He made my job really easy, and it will probably never happen again." Parker's books about the irreverent tough-talking Spenser — 37 were published — will be what he's most remembered for. "The Spenser character was a lot like Bob himself," Penzler says. "Very funny and smart-alecky. He had that kind of a mouth. He was honorable and loyal. Those are characteristics that are not as ubiquitous as we might like." On Parker's writing style was spare and razor-sharp: "It was absolutely pitch-perfect dialogue," Penzler says. "Most of his books were dialogue, anyway. It's the way Bob thought, the way he spoke, in funny short bursts. Other people would take four paragraphs, and he in one sentence could sum up a situation in a humorous way with perception and intelligence." In addition to the February publication of Split Image, Blue-Eyed Devil, a Western, will be released in May. And, luckily for his fans, there are some Spenser novels in the production pipeline, according to Pepe. "We don't have hard dates yet, but there are more on the way. You haven't seen the last of him. That's for sure."