I would wish for every high school kid out there to buy this book and look for the literature they've been told they can't read. This would surely be a good way to stick it to the man for the shameful, blatant censorship we place on our schools and libraries. This book is a good indication of how petty and outrageous people can be when it comes to the written word.

This book contains a wonderful list of books banned for social and religious reasons. Fully detailed, it summarizes each book mentioned. Some books I'd never heard of, but I made a special point to buy them. I hope this was the intention of Karolides. If not, oh, well!

Fun! Fun! Fun! ( )

This is pretty decent overview of the main "problem" books across America. It has a nice detailed summary of each book listed and lists and outcomes of challenges across the US and occasionally internationally.

This is one of the more complete books on censorship I've read. Rather than just examining books that have been banned by schools or public libraries, the author looks at a long history of book bannings. These books are separated by catageories: books banned for political, religious, sexual, or social grounds. It encompasses texts from the Captain Underpants series to The Prince. While it does focus more on contemporary literature than classical literature, this is one of the book's strengths. Each of the 120 books is summarized, then a brief history of the banning is examined. Of course, there are many titles that have faced banning and challenges that are not included in this book (most notable, to me, is the absence of A Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, which is often challenged and outright banned), but there are also numerous titles that I haven't seen in other censorship books. ( )