In a society that is obsessed with sex, so many Americans are afraid of it and the words that are associated with the act, including parts of the genitalia. More open societies would barely even blink an eye, but here in the United States it seems a huge uproar can be caused by such a word, just one word.
Everyone knows what a scrotum is. If you are young and don't know yet, you'll learn in a biology or SEX-ED class sooner or later. So when a Newbery award-winning children's book is published that tells a special story, it is condemned by many school librarians as having 'Howard Stern-type shock value'. Why the harsh criticism and widespread censorship? All for one written word singled out of thousands.
Winning the Newbery Medal is no small feat. The honor of being presented with it is akin to receiving a Grammy, Tony or Academy Award in literature. To be selected for the award requires writing a book of great magnitude that can deeply affect the reader and have a lasting impact. This is exactly what happened to Susan Patron last month with her book, "The Higher Power of Lucky."
From SouthCoastToday:
Susan Patron readily admits that she always dreamed of winning the Newbery Medal, the "Academy Award" of children's literature.
In fact, Patron, a Los Angeles librarian, thought she had a chance to win with her latest children's novel, "The Higher Power of Lucky" (Simon & Schuster, $16.95), which details how a feisty 10-year-old girl named Lucky finally comes to terms with her mother's untimely death. But the book, published in November, generally didn't elicit wows from reviewers, and Patron decided it just wasn't her time to win a Newbery Medal.
So Patron, 58, was both surprised and incredulous to receive a telephone call early on the morning of Jan. 22 from the Newbery Medal Committee, informing her that she had indeed won the top award.
"When the phone call came, I asked the committee (on speaker phone), if they were sure," Patron said in an interview. "I thought they meant I'd won a Newbery Honor. I couldn't quite assimilate what they were saying.
As you can tell, she was very excited about the news. The article goes on to describe the book in more detail and I highly suggest you check it out or even buy the book (Amazon link) to see it for yourselves. She wrote the book over the course of ten years while working as a senior children's librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. Susan has heard nothing but praise from literary critics. Unfortunately this is not the case for many other librarians like herself, all because of that one word.
When censorship rears its ugly head, its proponents single out ideas in certain books or a "bad word" which, in this case, was taken out of context. In the book, "the word" comes up when the main character (Lucky) hears the other character say that their dog was bitten by a rattlesnake on the scrotum:
“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”
Don't you just want to burn the book on the spot?
From the NY Times:
The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.
On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.
Many libraries have banned the book already and others are considering it. They have a strange fear about telling their children the names of body parts, which causes them to only focus on this point, completely neglecting the merit of the book in its entirety. Here is what a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee had to say:
Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship.
“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” she said. “That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Pat. This is a case of blatant censorship and these 'monitors' need to quit banning books that have 'icky' words in them. I'm not a librarian but I do love to read and am always glad to see people expanding their minds by reading all different types of material, especially books which win high honors. It seems that these censors need to grow up and deal with the fact that scrotums exist in the world by the billions, and not try to hide it from anyone, including children.
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