Three More Reasons Not To Ban Books

Leigh: Telling it like it is.

I'm breathless with awe over my fellow blogger Sommer Leigh's stunning series of personal essays on why we shouldn't be banning books. Please go read them now.
http://sommerleigh.com/archives/4357

Book Review: Julie of the Wolves, Reissued

One of "Most Frequently Challenged" 
Kid's Classics, Now an eBook

Open Road Integrated Media has reissued Julie of the Wolves as an eBook. Were books just better in the olden days? Nah, probably not. But rereading Julie after all these years (it was first published in 1972, by Harper and Row, and was championed by one of my heroes in the book biz, editor Ursula Nordstrom), it might seem that way. In fact, Nordstrom commissioned Julie after a single brief meeting with author Jean Craighead George. In George's memory:

[Nordstrom] was bent over her desk in concentration, her gray hair grooved where her fingers had pressed. Hearing us, she turned around and her penetrating eyes met mine head on. She nodded to say she knew who I was and why I was there.
"I want to write a book," I said, "about an Eskimo girl who is lost on the Arctic tundra. She survives by communicating with a pack of wolves in their own language."
"Will it be accurate?"
"Yes."
"I'll write you up your contract and advance now."

Celebrating Banned Books Week

Banned! The Higher Power of Lucky

It might just be the one book that made me want to write children's literature (Okay, maybe the exact equation is more like: HP of Lucky + The Kneebone Boy + Freak the Mighty + Holes = Gail Shepherd chained to a desk trying to channel the 12-year-old mind). By the time I even got to the offending word on page one, I was totally hooked. In Susan Patron's Newbery-winning piece of genius, The Higher Power of Lucky, we come upon 10-year-old  Lucky Trimble, "crouched in a wedge of shade behind the dumpster" eavesdropping on a 12-Step meeting. Short Sammy is explaining how he hit rock bottom.

Sammy told of the day when he had drank half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all day in his parked '62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.