Amy Sarig King Stands Up To Censorship

The Book Case

ABC News

Fiction, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.1 • 766 Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have expressed a desire to keep The Book Case non-political. But there is one issue we feel should not be a source of contention - and that is book banning and book challenges. We have been looking for a relatively safe way to approach the issue and think we’ve found it in a book by Amy Sarig King entitled Attack of the Black Rectangles. The "black rectangles" to which she refers are those black stripes that represent redactions of language. Amy writes for young people— target audience probably 11 to 16. But this book reads well for adults as well and addresses an important subject. It is a fictionalized account of an actual book redaction that her son discovered in a school assigned novel about the Holocaust. Amy argues, persuasively we feel, that young people don’t need this kind of ‘protection’ and that it’s a slippery slope from redactions to actual book bans. She has both a lovely book and a powerful argument. Afterwards we talk with Jonathan Friedman of PEN America who has written a thorough report about how the number of book challenges and bans are growing across the United States at an alarming rate. Books mentioned in the podcast: Attack of the Black Rectangles by Amy Sarig King (A.S. King) Me and Marvin Gardens By Amy Sarig King (A.S. King) The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Dig by Amy Sarig King (A. S. King) Ask the Passengers by Amy Sarig King (A. S. King) Reality Boy by Amy Sarig King (A. S. King) Everybody Sees the Ants by Amy Sarig King (A. S. King) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Salutations to all you book casers, I'm Charlie Gibson.
0:09.7	I feel like you really missed out because we did a previous take of this open, and I sang.
0:14.5	I sang Joel Gray's welcome, and I thought it was beautiful and fantastic.
0:19.6	And Joel Gray may have won an Oscar, but I think
0:22.6	I bested him. We're being sued by Joel Gray at this point, but that's another issue that we
0:28.2	won't bother you all with. We are pleased to have you with us for another edition of the bookcase,
0:32.9	and our guest today is Amy Serrag King. She writes books primarily for young adults in the young teenage years
0:41.2	and mostly about emotional problems. But we got very much intrigued by her latest book, which is
0:47.1	just out. It is called Attack of the Black Rectangles. And that title we thought was really
0:53.9	interesting and intrigued us. What she's
0:56.0	referring to are the redactions that can occur in various books. I think we're all somewhat
1:02.3	familiar with redactions, given what's happened with the affidavit and the Trump issue. We have
1:07.3	wanted to avoid politics on this bookcase. but there's one issue that really does concern
1:12.6	Kate and me, and that is book banning. Book banning and book challenges are very much in the news
1:18.5	right now, and they are growing by considerable numbers around the country, as we're going to be
1:23.9	talking about in this podcast. I want to take a minute to draw the line between book challenges and book bans.
1:29.3	A book challenge is when somebody writes down or makes objection to a book in a collection.
1:36.3	A book ban is the action that is taken after that.
1:40.3	So the book ban is sort of the actual codification of the removal of the book if that
1:46.0	happens. But a book challenge, which is far more common in this country, is, you know, that's a
1:50.6	letter, that's a school board meeting. And I just wanted to make that distinction as well.
1:55.0	We mentioned that, or I mentioned the fact that this is growing and it is growing geometrically.
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