Little Blog On the Prairie

Evil, evil HTML Mencken, for pointing me at this:

Is it safe to let kids read?

We’ve all heard about librarians who don’t want filters to protect children. What about books? Who’s watching the publishers? Greg Smith’s blog notes that recently he looked through a publisher’s catalog at the YA titles and found:

A book on paralysis
A book on death of a parent, alcoholism, and unwanted pregnancy.
A book on death of a parent through cancer
A book on alcoholism
A book on armed assault with a deadly weapon
A book on death of both parents in a car crash
A book on death of both parents in a car crash and an unwanted pregnancy
A book whose catalog copy is vague, but appears to involve at least armed robbery and child abandonment
An historical book on suicide
A contemporary book on suicide
A book on death of a parent and economic hardship
A book on censorship. And sex.
A book on death by accidental shooting (or general stupidity)
A book on child abandonment, alcoholism, and an accident of indeterminate nature (resulting in, possibly, death)
A book on divorce
A book on death of a parent, economic hardship, robbery, and risking death.
Two books on (1960s) sex, drugs, and rock & roll (and therefore, at least metaphorically, death)

I’m glad I read only horse and dog stories when I was a kid (and Laura Ingalls Wilder); a lot of them were sad, but at least they didn’t commit suicide or steal.

I know, let’s build a big bonfire and burn all those nasty seditious, depressing books in a grand conflagration of all that’s icky.

Then, let’s decapitate those nasty liberal publishers in a loving, biblically Christian sort of way and just pop their heads up on a pole outside the church, so everyone can see what dwelling on unpleasantness can lead to.

Then there’ll never be any more bad things, never, ever again and all will be puppies and rainbows.

There, now, isn’t that nicer?