For the holidays, JK Rowling has handwritten ten unique copies of a companion book to the Potter series: The Tales Of Beedle The Bard. The books will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s on December 13th, 2007 with a starting price of $100,000. All proceeds will benefit the charity the Childrens’ Voice. The complete copy will be viewable online at JK Rowling’s site before the auction.
Source: ecorazzi
How the first amendment helps fight banned books and ensure our freedom to read freely.
Not many bookworms have time to think about what guarantees our freedom to read what we want, when want to read it, wherever we want to do so. There are so many countries around the world where you can’t just read any book that you take a liking to. It boggles the mind to think about.
If you are lucky enough to get your hands on a contraband book in some countries, you certainly don’t have the freedom to sit under a tree on a beautiful day and read it under a clear blue sky. You’d have to read it in secret and keep the book and your newfound knowledge hidden.
So how did America get so lucky? When we ratified the Constitution, we included the First Amendment. You can read the full text of the First Amendment here.
Over the years we have had to fight battle after battle to keep the freedoms inherent in this Amendment. So who and what do we have to thank for keeping our freedom to read intact over the years? Quite a few lawyers and judges, as it turns out.
You can read a synopsis of the struggle over the First Amendment on this page. It includes brief descriptions of the groundbreaking cases and other facts surrounding the First Amendment and its effect on Banned Books.
Out of the Top 100 books of the 20th Century as listed by the Radcliff Publishing Course, 42 are or have been on the banned or challenged book list.
The 42 Banned or Challenged Books from the Radcliff Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century:
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
(challenged due to language and sexual
references)
• Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
(banned and challenged numerous times over the years for being anti white, obscene, language, vulgarity,
content, sexually explicit, violent, blasphemy, moral issues, and more)
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
(banned or challenged for language, vulgarity, taking the lord’s name in vain, sexual references)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
(banned or challenged for use of the word nigger, for promoting racial segregation, for racial themes, for language)
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
(banned or challenged for sexual and social explicitness, rough language, violence, racial and reglious issues)
• Ulysses, James Joyce
(Burned in US and other countries)
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
(Banned and challenged for violence and sexual material)
• The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
(Banned or challenged due to violence, sexual content, racism and demoralizing humans)
• 1984, George Orwell
(banned or challenged for being procommunist and sexually explicit)
• Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
(banned or challenged for obscenity)
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
(banned or challenged for profanity, lack of patriotism on the part of the author, blasphemy, indecency)
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
(banned or challenged for sexual reference)
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
(banned or challenged for a variety of variation son the theme of lacking in moral content and promoting
promiscuity)
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
(burned in Nazi bonfires, banned in several US cities)
• As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
(banned or challenged for obscenity, abortion references and sexual content)
• A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
(banned in several US cities)
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
(banned in several US cities)
• Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
(banned or challenged for sexual explicitness and language)
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
(banned or challenged for violence and vulgarity)
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
(banned or challenged for racial issues and obscenity)
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
(banned or challenged for issues of race)
• Native Son, Richard Wright
(banned or challenged for language, violance, sex, profanity)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
(banned or challenged for encouraging criminal behavior, corrupting youth and containing passages of bestiality,
violence, torture, dismemberment, death, and depraved acts)
• Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
(this book has been banned or challenged in numorous places, but is noteworthy for being burned in North Dakota
as late as 1973)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
(banned overseas)
• The Call of the Wild, Jack London
(banned overseas, burned in Nazi bonfires in 1933)
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
(banned or challenged for depicting rape, violence and hatred of women)
• All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
(challenged in several US cities)
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
(banned overseas, burned in Nazi bonfires 1933)
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
(banned or challenged for sexual themes and moral issues)
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
(banned or challenged for language and profanity)
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
(banned or challenged for sex, violence and profanity)
• Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
(banned overseas, author et al sentenced to death by the Ayatolla Khommeni if he ever sets foot in his home
country again, book banned in many US cities)
• Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
(challenged, never banned)
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
(challenged in several US cities)
• A Separate Peace, John Knowles
(banned or challenged for language and sexual content)
• Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
(banned for obscenity)
• Women in Love, DH Lawrence
(banned or challenged for obscenity)
• The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
(banned in Canada and Australia)
• Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
(banned as obscene)
• An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
(banned in Boston and burned in Nazi bonfires 1933)
• Rabbit, Run, John Updike
(banned or challenged for obscenity, indecency and sexuality)
(you can view the complete list of 100 greatest novels here)
In a nod to changing technology, Harper Collins will offer content for the iPhone. Nice!
HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, http://mobile.harpercollins.com, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White’s “Soul Catcher” and Michael Korda’s “Ike,” a biography of President Eisenhower.
Right Now, WriteItNow2 is the Best Tool for Writers
If you are a writer who has been stuck using Microsoft Word, the behemoth of all behemoths, to do your writing, you will jump for joy over WriteItNow2 by Ravens Head Software. If you are a true Microsoft Word or Word Perfect devotee, read no further – you won’t appreciate that WriteItNow2 does everything they do and more for under $40. That’s right – full functionality as a word processor, plus features specific to writers, for under $40. Have I got your attention now?
Instead of the straight laced, straight line interface of Microsoft Word and Word Perfect, WriteItNow2 uses a Java-based tab system to enhance your focus on your writing. That makes it incredibly easy to keep track of where you are headed in your piece, what your notes are, title names, characters, plot points – it’s all laid out for you in easy to see tabs. No more scrolling up and down the many pages in your document struggling for continuity. No more trying to remember that obscure macro you found once that told you how to track theme in a story. WriteItNow2 does the tracking for you.
The Features:
1) Simple Interface. There are four items on the menu bar: File, Export, Setup and Help. Under “File” you can Save, Save As, Load a Story, Start a New Story, or perform a Global Find/Replace. Under “Export” you can Export your story to a txt file, html file or rtf file format. Under “Setup” you can unlock the software after registration, change your background, font, font format, font size, adjust your clock settings and toggle spell check from US to British English (there were versions offered in other languages at time of purchase, but I purchased the English version). Selecting “Help” gets you a tip of the day, a contextual help menu or a regular indexed help menu – both searchable.
2) The Tabs. The tabs are under the menu bar and include Overview, Chapters, Characters, Events, Locations, Ideas, Notes, Charts and Submissions. You can type your entire piece in the Overview tab if you are writing an article, short story, review, non-fiction or other type of story that would not require chapters. If you are writing a work of fiction or non-fiction long enough to require chapters, you place your main book or story title in the Overview section along with your author information, then move to the Chapters tab to begin writing. You start and name each chapter using the chapters tab, and do your writing for each chapter under the chapter tab. There are arrows that move you from chapter to chapter, formatting buttons to align your text and whatnot that have the standard appearance similar to those on Word and Word Perfect as well as a nice in-line undo/redo feature and section-ready help button.
Under each of the tabs you will find three more function buttons – Options, Edit and Links. When you are in a tab, “Edit” is your faithful friend, offering you word count, spell check, grammar check, cut, copy, paste, insert, find, replace and my personal favorite – the Readability button. That’s correct! WriteItNow2 will analyze what you have just written and give you a synopsis that tells you what the age level your writing is currently appropriate for and how difficult your piece is according to the words used, length of sentences, sentence structure, grammar and also uses the Flech-Kincaid grade assessment scale as well. How cool is that? It has helped immensely in keeping my target audience in focus when writing a series of how-to ebooks, and has helped me break out of the more simplistic how-to writing rut when switching to my novel.
The “Options” button under each tab has the ability to Save, Load, Export, Create or Sort. Need to send an excerpt to a publisher? The Options button can help you select the right chapter and get the file into the right format to send along to an editor. Need to write in a new character? The Options button Create feature will help you with that also. In the same area is the “Links” button. This assists you with placing both in-document links (offering ways to link to ideas, chapters, character descriptions, notes, charts and more) and external links to web sites.
Back to the tabs… The next tab is the “Character” tab. This has some neat features, among them ways to link characters to each other and tell how and when they met, a way to track when a character was born or deceased, married or divorced, a sliding scale to adjust the personality traits of a character – the software will then show you if your character’s ‘character’ has been off course for too many pages – and there is even an add-on for suggesting character names (I passed on that feature at purchase – the Baby Name book works just fine for me). In addition to all the features specific to the Character tab, it also has the standard toggle arrows, in-line help button, link button, edit button and options button – each tab has those features, actually. After “Characters” comes the “Events” tab. Here you can create main story events and time frames, associate them with your characters, locations, notes or ideas and track your story arc to ensure interest.
Following Events is “Locations”, which gives you a place to describe houses, towns, cities, vistas – whatever your story needs. You can then associate the locations to characters, events, chapters, notes, and ideas. In the “Ideas” tab next door you can jot your idea down, give it a title and come back to it later to incorporate it into your piece. You can even link it to a locations, chapter, event or character to make it easier to find later. There is plenty of room to write a detailed idea, however; the software writers still provided a separate “Notes” tab for you. This is a a nice feature in that it allows you to keep ideas for the plot separate from notes on facts and figures, but it has a similar interface so you can get in the habit of entering data in a simple way.
In the “Charts” tab you can track your story arcs, plot points, character development, action levels and story time line if you choose – all in easy to read, full-color graph and chart form. You can sort the events by time or item, and you can also track relationship arcs under a separate chart tab within the chart tab – just to make sure you don’t have cousin Bob jump off the cliff in chapter one, only to miraculously return to attend a bat mitzvah in chapter twelve, for example. I have no idea how the relationship tracking system accomplishes this in this software, but so far in testing it I haven’t seen it miss a character, event or location yet in it’s tracking system. Very impressive.
Finally we come to what may be my favorite feature – the submission tracker. The final tab, titled “Submissions”, allows you to input who you sent your story to, when, if they responded, what they will pay you, what your copyright is, if they have paid you, etc. What an awesome feature! Now you can keep your submission tracking right with the story as it goes from publisher to publisher – no more spreadsheets! This feature is a wonderful, wonderful idea. Many publishers allow simultaneous submissions – with this feature you no longer have to worry about forgetting to pull your story from submission to the first five publishers once it gets accepted by the sixth – you can look at the list right in front of you and immediately update the status of all publisher submissions in one window and get your notification cards ready to send out by mail right then and there.
How I Found It:
I stumbled across WriteItNow2 by accident while searching for a completely unrelated book (thank you Google!). I had tried so many other programs and hated them. I’d been using Microsoft Word, but it was too expensive, bulky and irritating to use when writing – too difficult to keep track of your thoughts without killing a forest in index cards and paper. WriteItNow2 eliminates the need for extra scraps of paper and easy to lose index cards- you just take notes right in the software. I had tried other authorware, but found that a lot of it made too many suggestions (actual plot ideas, name correction, automatic changes) and didn’t allow you, the writer, to think for yourself – I didn’t like that either. WriteItNow2 allows you to write, and offers a simple, basic analysis of word count and difficulty that helps keep you on track without giving you “suggestions” you didn’t want or need.
When I saw WriteItNow2 online and noticed it had a free demo, I figured “What the heck?” and downloaded it to my Mac. I haven’t looked back since. The ease of use, the compact program, the features, the purchase price – they all added up to a very happy camper here. And did I mention that in addition to being under $40 (a steal, trust me) upgrades are free for life? That was another major selling point for me when I found it – as long as Ravens Head is making new versions of WriteItNow2, you get to upgrade your copy for free. What a great idea – no more being taken advantage of by “MicroSuck”! Another selling point – they offer it for Mac OS X and PC (Win 95 and up). It is very hard to find specialized software like this for the Mac, which is what I use. I was pleased as punch they not only made this, but it worked!
The Synopsis:
This is the first time I have been able to wholeheartedly endorse software in a long time. Love the interface, love the platform availability, love the ease of use, love the purchase price, love the features, love the free upgrades – love it, love it, love it.
For the detail minded:
I chose the Download option (you can buy a CD instead)
I bought the Mac OS X version
I am running the software on an iMac G3 desktop and may move it to an iMac G4 or MacBook Core Duo laptop when I purchase one – it will work on all of them.
It uses a Java based interface and offers export file formats to work with most major word processing program out now should you need to send your mss (manuscript) out in rtf or txt formats, and also offers html formatted exports
It is a compact program
It cost me 19.95£ ($35.27 USD at time of purchase)
It is made by Ravens Head Software, a British company
It comes in several languages
It took under 5 minutes to download the software file, and under 10 minutes for my registration code to arrive when I purchased it
Recommended:
Yes
Where to buy it: ravensheadservices.com
Cook Books are an often overlooked source of reading material. Sure they have invaluable recipes for your holiday needs, but often they offer much more. A glimpse into a culture long gone, stories from other nations, even novels – Like Water For Chocolate was a cookbook surrounded by a beautiful story.
In honor of Thanksgiving, here are some of my perennial favorites for the holiday season:
• The Book Of Thanksgiving: Stories, Poems, and Recipes for Sharing One of America’s Greatest Holidays
• I Like You: Hospitality Under The Influence
• The Joy of Cooking: 1931 Facsimile Edition
• The Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition
What are your favorite cook books for Thanksgiving? Do you have traditional dishes it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without?
Tags: thanksgiving cookbooks
With thanks to the ALA, Bartlett’s Famous Quotations and Quotable.
“Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.
The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”-Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education
“First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”-Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Ashcroft V. Free Speech Coalition (00-795) 198 F.3d 1083, affirmed.
“Before the week is out, be a patriot: Encourage a child to fall in love with a book. Apply for a library card. And accept the ALA’s invitation to Let Freedom Read.”-Linda Campbell, Star-Telegram Staff Writer
“Here’s a novel thought: Don’t restrict books” – unattributed
“If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”-George Orwell, author, c. 1945
“For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that-either now or in the uncertain future-patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality,
because everything we do is observable and recordable.”-The Eternal Value of Privacyby Bruce Schneier
“Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.” -George Orwell, 1984
“I don’t want to be shut out from the truth. If they ban books, they might as well lock us away from the world.”-Rory Edwards, 12, Washington Post, Getting It Down at Writing Camp
“A popular government, without popular information, or the mean of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”-James Madison
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It act that could most easily defeat us.”-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
Tags: banned book quotations
Hire Me On 
