I Ban Books for a Living

Banned Books Week is mercifully coming to an end today. The annual event that seeks to educate the public on what titles are being suppressed in the United States is sponsored by the American Library Association. Thousands of stores and libraries across the country, including the Boulder Book Store, feature displays of "banned books" intended to rile up our customers and alert them to the outrage being perpetuated throughout the land.

I am not all that interested in the hysteria. It's not exactly Fahrenheit 451 out there. No one's snatching books out of the hands of adults. Hell, Laura Bush, first lady to the Commander-in-Chief of Intolerance, helped launch the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Perhaps my unease over making a big deal about banned books in America is because you can get anything you want, anywhere you want on the internet. Banned books are a tough sell as a piece of marketing these days. I heard a number of wise cracks as people looked at our store's display. The truth is that you can get many things that a sane society would actually ban delivered in an innocuous brown package right to your door. In today's world, how can you ban anything at a local level? It just doesn't make sense.

I first started dissenting from the banned book celebration several years ago when the word "challenged" was used instead of "banned" on many of the titles. The bookstore would get a list of "challenged" books that we could use in our displays. Many of these were books that some zealous parent in a small rural hamlet had objected to on a middle school reading list. The locals realized that the complaint wasn't worth taking up and the book remained on the school reading list. Somehow those books qualify for inclusion in Banned Book Week. To me, that's not a banned book.

Many banned or challenged books occur in schools. Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolover and Toni Morrision all make this year's list. But what is really happening? Only McCarthy's book Child of God and Morrison's Beloved were actually removed from any reading list. Kingsolver's Animal Dreams was moved from a ninth-grade reading list to the eleventh grade, while Oates' Sexy and Morrison's Bluest Eye were deemed not offensive. Even Beloved, which was removed in an A.P. English class in Louisville, Kentucky, isn't threatened with an outright ban. Two parents are asking that students get parental permission to read it.

Contrast those mild challenges with what I do everyday as a professional book banner. As the head buyer of the Boulder Book Store, I spend many days meeting with publisher sales reps deciding what books will be placed on our shelves and which ones will not enter our store. There's no committee to review my decisions. There's no oversight at all. Once I decide I don't want a book, in all likelihood that book will never make it onto our shelves.

My reasons for banning books include: the book will probably not sell; the cover is an affront to my aesthetic sensibilities; no Boulderite in their right mind will be interested in the topic; the editor was rude to me at an author dinner; I'm in a terrible, terrible mood because the rep and I haven't stopped for a lunch break.

I admit that the Boulder Book Store is not as important to literacy as a junior high school in Lake Oswego, Oregon where they actually let children read Gail Giles' Shattering Glass, albeit with the disclaimer that it contains "mature content/language." But we do have our place in the community. In fact, in a recent article about our 35th anniversary celebration the local paper called us "the city's literary heart."

I am the black in that heart, gleefully rejecting books that the reps proffer with glib phrases like, "I'll pass on that one," "Are you kidding?" "Why is that even being published?" and "Skip." Sure, I feel guilty about some of these books that I ban from the store. There were two books in particular in last week's Random House appointment that made me hesitate.

The first was David Horowitz's One Party Classroom, a sordid tale about how colleges are turning our young people into dangerous left-wing types. I almost bought it for the sake of not appearing politically biased, until the rep asked me to look up Horowitz's previous book, The Professors. That one was an expose of the 101 most dangerous academics in America. Did they bring weapons into the classroom? Were they convicted sexual predators? No. They just made the mistake of disagreeing with Horowitz's addled political values. They were liberals like Horowitz once was. Well, it turns out I didn't buy The Professors for the store and no one seemed to notice. We didn't get a single special order or complaint. In One Party Classroom, Horowitz names "the worst school in America." Maybe it will be the University of Colorado. That would make me lift the ban.

The second and more guilt-inducing book was Best African American Essays: 2009 edited by Debra J. Dickerson. Bantam paperbacks is launching a new series of African American essays and also short stories. I opted to buy five of the short story collection but skipped the essays. In part because stories outsell essays by a margin of 5 to 1. Also, I wasn't sure how I felt about the series as a whole. Fifteen years ago we used to have sections or displays of African American fiction, Native American fiction and gay fiction. Now, many of those titles seem to succeed in the "fiction" section. Readers seem more willing to accept the diversity of fiction out there without wanting it labeled. In fact, we've had customers get upset when those titles appeared in special sections. I'll be interested to see how Bantam's collection of short stories does this year.

Now, most of my fellow bookstore buyers would not say that they are banning books from their stores. To say that "We are carefully selecting titles for our customers" is one way to spin our disdain for over ninety percent of the books that are published each year. My favorite highfalutin term is that we are curators. Instead of debating about exhibits featuring Mattisse and Picasso, we argue over whether to face out Danielle Steele or Nicholas Sparks.

Banned Books Week takes us away from the real threats facing books. The annual event started in 1982, before the internet existed. If a book wasn't carried by your town's library, it wasn't easy to find. That's not the case anymore thanks to the world wide web. The new threats are more insidious. Truly controversial books are having a hard time finding major publishing houses and also of getting media exposure. While we fret over one parent's unsuccessful attempt to remove copies of Harry Potter from the school libraries in Gwinnett County, Georgia, important books are not being published at all. Does anyone really believe that kids are deprived of their Harry Potter fix?

Naomi Wolfe's End of America and Vincent Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder both were bypassed by major publishing houses in America and have received scant review attention in the nation's newspapers. Those authors were famous enough to find other avenues for their books. (Wolfe was published by Chelsea Green, and Bugliosi by Vanguard Press.) What about authors that are less fortunate? It's impossible to ban or even challenge a book that can't get published.

I must admit that I don't really have a problem with a parent challenging a book that their child is being asked to read in school. Reading about these school challenges is almost heartwarming because so many of them fail for the right reasons. School boards debate the merits of books, prosecutors read Toni Morrison, and they almost always decide that the books should stay in the library or the curriculum despite the parent's objection. It's called a dialogue. It's what open societies do to establish acceptable mores.

Is that so terrible? Most people would not object to their ninth-grade child being assigned one of the great American novels of the 20th century. But what if that novel was Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint? I don't think I'd be comfortable with a giggling 14-year-old asking me to explain the literary merits of a scene in which the protagonist is masturbating with a refrigerated piece of meat. I'd probably challenge it before I could ever get into that awkward conversation.

I would ban my own favorite novel.

The Day Eloquence Died in Dallas

The marshes just north of Cape May, New Jersey were off to my right as I sped up the Garden State Parkway last August in the passenger seat of my father's air-conditioned, 1990s Jaguar sedan. A great blue heron daintily picked its way through the reeds, its long neck swaying ever so slowly as sea gulls swooped in from overhead and the long grasses blew back and forth in the early evening breeze, undulating like waves in the middle of the ocean. I was mesmerized by the scenery, particularly the vibrant greens and blues that were lit up by the day's dying sun rays.

I looked over at my dad, effortlessly driving. He was dressed in a button-down shirt, nice slacks and gleaming black leather shoes, a casual outfit for a Philadelphia lawyer. He didn't seem to notice the gift of nature just beyond the car's window. His eyes were on the road, but his mind was back in the early 1960s. His full attention was focused on the words of John F. Kennedy booming through the stereo speakers. Pure joy lit up his face as Kennedy's clipped upper-class New England accent came to us as clearly as the day's news on the radio.

It made me happy as well. After all, I was the one who had given him Let Every Nation Know: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words by Robert Dallek for Father's Day two months earlier. It was clear that my dad knew the compact disc that came with the book by heart. When Kennedy's speech came on regarding the integration of the University of Mississippi, he put his fingers to his lips when he sensed that I was about to interrupt. When the speech ended, he said to me, "See how he did that. He included everybody. It was all of our responsibility to make sure that there were equal rights. It wasn't divisive. It was everyone's problem if one man was denied his rights."

I sat silent for a moment. I was amazed by Kennedy's words, not necessarily by their content, but by the words themselves. He assumed that he was speaking to an intelligent audience. His vocabulary would make an English professor proud, and yet he was easily understood. His words moved me. Me, the cynic who regards him as overrated. After all, I have rebelled against the mythology surrounding him for as long as I can remember. But here was a voice that beckoned. He peppered his speeches with phrases that make you stop and ponder and hope.

I told my dad that it made me sad to listen to these words. He assumed I was speaking of the assassination, but I wasn't. "No one speaks like that anymore," I said to him. "Clinton just droned on and on. His speeches were more filler than substance. I hated Reagan's 'aw shucks' act, and Bush truly sounds like a moron compared to Kennedy. It would be even more embarassing if you actually agreed with anything Bush said." As the sun glinted off a canoe in the marshes, I realized that our country's biggest problem might be that politicians don't believe in the people anymore. At least not the way Kennedy seemed to in those speeches.

It took me a few minutes to regain my equilibrium and step back from the abyss that is the Kennedy mystique. We were closing in on the diner where we would meet up with my wife and my sister's family for dinner. They were driving in my sister's minivan; perhaps they knew it was going to be a Kennedy-fest in the Jaguar. Immediately before leaving for the restaurant, my sister and I had given my dad his birthday present: a Kennedy action figure that sported a replica hand-crafted suit and came with a mini-biography and a timeline. Its best feature is that when you push the wool suit's lapel the President's unique vocal cadence comes to life, and the doll flawlessly delivers a dozen of his most famous phrases.

As we turned off the Garden State Parkway and Kennedy launched into a commencement address, my dad turned down the sound. "You know, I really think that Oswald acted alone," he said. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He had advanced every crackpot theory on the assassination since I was 10 years old. For awhile it was the Cubans, then it was the Russians, then it was the Russians and the Cubans, then it was the mobsters. He even entertained my crazy theory that it was Lyndon Johnson and the Texans. We had examined every angle, from Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, to the grassy knoll, to the magic bullet theory, endlessly ruminating on the same facts and opinions until he'd come to the same conclusion that something just wasn't right. It was fishy. Fishy enough to fill a library with all of the tomes that I had given him and that he had eagerly read over the years. Including Gerald Posner's 1994 Case Closed that concluded Oswald had acted alone. My dad had quickly dismissed it at the time.

When I was 13, my father had a court case in Dallas. He took me down for the trial, and during the days, I ran around the book and record stores in town, swam in the hotel pool and drank enough Dr. Pepper to drown a small dog. In the evenings, we drove the route of the motorcade, slowing down in Dealey Plaza as my father measured out the distance to the grassy knoll in his mind and craned his neck back to see where Oswald's shots emanated from. Over and over again, we drove the route, as the rancid soda bubbled up in my throat. He gripped the wheel and muttered about how it didn't make sense, they were hiding something.

We finally arrived at the diner and stepped out of the car, into the sea-side humidity to wait for my sister. When I asked him how he had come to the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone, he simply said, "It's the only thing that makes sense." When I prodded him a little more, he told me that someone would have cracked by now if there was a big cover up. That, of course, had been my exact theory ever since giving up the Texas conspiracy 25 years ago. I decided not to remind him of that, as my adorable nephew and niece came bounding out of my sister's car and running over to us.

My Father's Day gift this year will reinforce his new belief about the assassination. Vincent Bugliosi, the author of Helter Skelter, the riveting account of Charles Manson's crimes, is weighing in on the Kennedy assassination with Reclaiming History. Bugliosi, a lawyer, prosecutes Oswald in the murder using forensic evidence, a reexamination of key witnesses and a healthy dose of common sense. In W.W. Norton's catalog copy, we are assured that in his 1,632 pages, Bugliosi picks apart every conspiracy theory, and that he will "shed fresh light on this American nightmare. At last we know what really happened. At last it all makes sense."

The book sounds huge, but I wonder how many pages you could fill with all of my father's thoughts, conjectures and ruminations on the assassination. Would 10,000 pages even be enough to cover all of the different conversations he has had on the topic?

All I can say is that it's about time that someone makes sense of it all. It's time for everyone to stop inventing paranoid conspiracy theories and perhaps try to understand just what it was that we lost that day in Dallas. It seems to me that the politicians have never forgiven us for that day. We are perpetually being punished by our nation's rulers with pandering platitudes and an endless barrage of inanities. Isn't there anyone out there who can treat the public with respect? Isn't there anyone who will say something -- anything -- as intelligent as Kennedy used to? Whether you agreed with the man or not, you can't help but appreciate his words.

Perhaps that's asking too much. Maybe it's enough to know that this summer I will be back in Cape May with my family, and as the sun sets on another fine day, my father will start up the endless conversation about the wonders of John F. Kennedy. I will hold silent for a moment, allowing the myth to take hold before I mention how he set Vietnam in motion, blundered on Cuba and hesitated on civil rights. Ah, but he did it all so eloquently.