Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week

Do you love a book that's been banned or challenged?

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird
By Lee, Harper
1988-01 - Warner Books
9780446310789 CHECK CATALOG

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior-to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 15 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature. …More

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner
By Hosseini, Khaled
2003-01 - Riverhead Books
9781594480003 CHECK CATALOG

Alex Award Winner - 2004
Winner - 2004 ALA Notable Fiction Selection
A BookPage Notable Title
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, takes readers from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
…More

My Sister's Keeper

My Sister's Keeper
By Picoult, Jodi
2005-02 - Washington Square Press
9780743454537 CHECK CATALOG

2005 ALA Young Adult Top Ten Selection

Written with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity, this novel is about a teen who was conceived as a bone marrow match for her sister Kate, and what happens when she begins to question who she really is. …More

The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them



The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them
By The Freedom Writers
With Gruwell, Erin
Foreword by Filipovic, Zlata
2006-12 - Broadway Books
9780767924900 CHECK CATALOG

Shocked by the teenage violence she witnessed during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Erin Gruwell became a teacher at a high school rampant with hostility and racial intolerance. For many of these students-whose ranks included substance abusers, gang members, the homeless, and victims of abuse-Gruwell was the first person to treat them with dignity, to believe in their potential and help them see it themselves. Soon, their loyalty towards their teacher and burning enthusiasm to help end violence and intolerance became a force of its own. Inspired by reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" and meeting Zlata Filipovic (the eleven-year old girl who wrote of her life in Sarajevo during the civil war), the students began a joint diary of their inner-city upbringings. Told through anonymous entries to protect their identities and allow for complete candor, "The Freedom Writers Diary "is filled with astounding vignettes from 150 students who, like civil rights activist Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders, heard society tell them where to go-and refused to listen.

Proceeds from this book benefit the Freedom Writers Foundation, an organization set up to provide scholarships for underprivieged youth and to train teachers …More

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones
By Sebold, Alice
2009-09 - Back Bay Books
9780316044936 CHECK CATALOG

Sebolds mesmerizing and luminous first novel--a #1 national bestseller--builds a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, and even joy, following an unspeakable tragedy. …More

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
By Rowling, J. K.
2009-07 - Arthur A. Levine Books
9780545139700 CHECK CATALOG

Rowling's stunning conclusion to her bestselling Harry Potter series is now available in paperback. As a farewell to the series, "Deathly Hallows" is everything fans of Harry Potter could hope for.--"Time." …More

The Color Purple

The Color Purple
By Walker, Alice
2006-11 - Harvest Books
9780156031820 CHECK CATALOG

Banner] Now a Tony Award-Winning Broadway Musical

"The Color Purple "is the story of two sisters--one a missionary to Africa and the other a child wife living in the South--who remain loyal to one another across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.

"Intense emotional impact . . . Indelibly affecting . . . Alice Walker is a lavishly gifted writer."--"The New York Times Book Review
""Places Walker in the company of Faulkner."--"The Nation
""Superb . . . A work to stand beside literature of any time and place."--"San Francisco"" Chronicle
"""The Color Purple "is an American novel of permanent importance."--"Newsweek
""Marvelous characters . . . A story of revelation . . . One of the great books of our time."--"Essence"
[banner] Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

[bio]
Bestselling novelist Alice Walker is also the author of three collections of short stories, three collections of essays, six volumes of poetry and several children's books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker now lives in northern California.
…More

Prep



Prep
By Sittenfeld, Curtis
2005-11 - Random House Trade
9780812972351 CHECK CATALOG

BookPage Notable Title
A perceptive, achingly funny first novel featuring a middle-class Midwestern teenager trying to fit in at an elite East Coast boarding school, "Prep" is also a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
…More

The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle
By Picoult, Jodi
Illustrator Weaver, Dustin
2006-03 - Atria Books
9780743496704 CHECK CATALOG

BookPage Notable Title
Fourteen-year-old Trixie Stone has been a ghost for 14 days, seven hours, and 36 minutes, not that she is officially counting. With a story that transports readers from smalltown New England to the wilds of the Alaskan bush, Picoult probes the unbreakable bond between parent and child and the dangerous repercussions of trying to play God. Illustrations.
…More

Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem

Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
By Miller, Arthur
Introduction by Bigsby, C. W. E.
1998-05 - Penguin Books
9780141180977 CHECK CATALOG

A Great Books Discussion Selection

The tragedy of a typical American--a salesman who at the age of sixty-three is faced with what he cannot face; defeat and disillusionment. …More

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
By Alexie, Sherman
Illustrator Forney, Ellen
2009-04 - Little, Brown Young Readers
9780316013697 CHECK CATALOG

Alexie's National Book Award winner chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he thought he was destined to live. Includes poignant drawings that reflect the character's art. …More

Invisible Man



Invisible Man
By Ellison, Ralph Waldo
Introduction by Ellison, Ralph Waldo
1995-03 - Vintage Books USA
9780679732761 CHECK CATALOG

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky. …More

Beloved



Beloved
By Morrison, Toni
1987-08 - Knopf Publishing Group
9780394535975 CHECK CATALOG

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.
It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.
Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what shelost and for what was taken from her.
Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance.
In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel.
Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.
…More

The Catcher in the Rye.

The Catcher in the Rye.
By Salinger, J. D.
1951-07 - Little Brown and Company
9780316769532 CHECK CATALOG

The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.

There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices -- but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. …More

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Twain, Mark
2005-01 - Saddleback Educational Publishing, Inc.
9781562549060 CHECK CATALOG

This Graphic Novel Series features classic tales retold with attractive color illustrations. Educatiors using the Dale-Chall vocabulary system adapted each title. Each 70 page, softcover book retains key phrases and quotations from the original classics. Introduce literature to reluctant readers and motivate struggling readers. Students build confidence through reading practice. Motivation makes all the difference. What's more motivation then the expectation of success? …More

Cradle and All

Cradle and All
By Patterson, James
2000-01 - Warner Books
9780446609401 CHECK CATALOG

Former nun and private detective Anne Fitzgerald investigates the mysterious "virginal pregnancies" of two young women, one in Rhode Island and the other in Ireland. Only the Pope knows that one of the women will give birth to the Messiah, and the other the child of Satan. Anne searches for the truth to save the women, and possibly herself. …More

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five
By Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.
1991-11 - San Val
9780808514572 CHECK CATALOG

Launched in November, Dell's Kurt Vonnegut reissue program continues with one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know. …More

Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men
By Steinbeck, John
1993-01 - Penguin Books
9780140177398 CHECK CATALOG

A Great Books Discussion Selection

Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. With illustrations from the movie starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. …More

Animal Dreams

Animal Dreams
By Kingsolver, Barbara
1997-12 - Buccaneer Books
9781568496924 CHECK CATALOG

From the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland, comes a powerful story of love and courage in an exotc southwestern landscape. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American myths, thisis a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's greatest commitments. …More

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