Author Archives: Ryan Dowell

Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar

Yasukuni Shrine History-Memory-and Japans Unending Postwar (9)

WKU Libraries’ November 12, 2015 “Far Away Places” speaker series event at Barnes & Noble Bookseller, Bowling Green, Kentucky featured Professor Akiko Takenaka, who teaches the History of Modern Japan at the University of Kentucky. She talked about her new book Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, published this summer by the University of Hawaii Press.

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New Displays at ERC

South Africa Display in large case across from ERC Circulation desk

IYO South Africa Display in large case across from ERC Circulation desk

 

WKU Libraries’ Educational Resources Center has installed new displays to advertise ERC resources as fall approaches. ERC Library Assistant Rebecca Nimmo was responsible for creating the displays, using her past experience in art installation and curation to better convey information in a visually pleasing and thought-provoking manner.

Patrons will see a Goosebumps-themed Halloween display in the Ellison Die area with a sample of ERC’s collection of spooky juvenile and young adult literature.

 

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Goosebumps’ catchphrase “Readers Beware: You’re in for a Scare!” serves as the inspiration for the Halloween themed display

 

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The Goosebumps theme to promote horror genre reading during the Halloween season

 

Inspired by WKU’s International Year of South Africa there is an art installation in the large display case across from the Circulation desk promoting notable South African figures Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and South Africa books available in ERC.

 

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Main display case promoting books about South Africa in ERC

 

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ERC display supporting WKU’s IYO South Africa by honoring historic figures Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela

 

Finally Ready Reference display area currently hosts an installation honoring LGBT History Month, with an assortment of juvenile and young adult educational books and novels featuring LBGTQ+ characters.

 

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LBGT History Month Display, including And Tango Makes Three

 

Display includes a sample of ERC's LGBTQ+ collection

Display includes a sample of ERC’s LGBTQ+ collection

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The Queen with Six Fingers: Anne Boleyn in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy

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Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Professor of Humanities, Dept. of Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Kentucky, spoke about her most recent book The Queen with Six Fingers: Anne Boleyn in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy in the Far Away Places event on Wednesday, October 21, at Barnes & Noble in Bowling Green, KY.

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The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia

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John Hardin, Professor of History at WKU, talked about his recently published work The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia in the WKU Libraries-organized Kentucky Live! event on the evening of October 8 at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

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Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week

Event Flyer

WKU Libraries celebrates Banned Books Week between September 27 – October 3 to support the efforts of librarians in promoting intellectual freedom and combating censorship. To mark this week there are Banned Books Week displays on the 5th floor of Cravens library and at the Educational Resources Center (ERC) in Gary Ransdell Hall. All books in the displays are available to be checked out!

Cravens Library 5th Floor Display

Cravens Library 5th Floor Display

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5th Floor Cravens Display

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Reasons for Book Challenges

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ERC Display

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ERC Display

Students at the ERC Banned Books Week Display

Students at the ERC Banned Books Week Display

The American Library Association maintains a list of the titles and reasons for frequently challenged books.

Below is an excerpt of an article published this week in American Libraries about Banned Books Week and the continued importance of fighting censorship for the freedom to read.
http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/banned-books-week-roundup-2015/

“Banned Books Week Roundup 2015: Recently banned and challenged books in US libraries and elsewhere

George M. Eberhart | September 29, 2015

As Banned Books Weekis celebrated September 27–October 3, it’s helpful to remember that there is still a need for vigilance to ensure the freedom to read. In 2015, books are still challenged (when an individual or group requests the removal or restriction of materials from a library or curriculum) and banned (when materials are removed outright from circulation), not only in the United States but in other countries as well.

Kristin Pekoll, assistant director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, says that librarians and teachers often feel frustrated by these efforts to restrict the scope of reading. “More and more, they are reaching out to our office for support because they’re feeling silenced by their administrations,” she says. “While the fear of losing their jobs is real, more often librarians tell me about professional retaliation in the form of book budget cuts or bad evaluations. The theory is that if their lives are made miserable enough, they’ll quit, and the books will be censored because no one is there to defend them.”

Here is a roundup of recent instances of book challenges in US school libraries, as well as one public and one academic library:

  • In February, parent Catrenna Lopez initiated a challenge to Gilbert Hernandez’s graphic novelPalomar after her son checked the book out from the Rio Rancho (N.Mex.) High School library, saying the content included “sexual graphics, prostitution, child pornography, child abuse, explicit sexual scenes, nudity.” A review committee met on March 16 and decided by a 5–3 vote that Palomarshould not be removed, but students under 18 would need a parent’s permission before it can be checked out. However, school librarian Brenda McCandless had independently made the decision to remove the book from the system in violation of school policy. (KOAT-TV, Albuquerque, July 7; KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, July 14.)
  • In mid-September, Hamilton Boone, the parent of a teen at Satellite High School in Satellite Beach, Florida, wanted Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved pulled from the Advanced Placement summer reading list because of what he called its “porn content.” However, after he admitted that he had not actually read the entire book, the school’s challenge committee unanimously voted to keep it on the reading list. (Melbourne Florida Today, Sept. 11.)
  • Two books, The Librarian of Basra and Nasreen’s Secret School, both by Jeanette Winter, werechallenged in the Duval County (Fla.) School District in July on the grounds that they “promote the Koran and praying to Muhammad,” according to Dianne Haines Roberts, grandparent of a student. She wanted the books removed from the 3rd grade curriculum. However, as the National Coalition Against Censorship pointed out in a July 30 letter to School Superintendent Nikolai P. Vitti, “Arguments that the books promote Islam are misguided: Learning about life in an Islamic culture is no more promoting Islam than learning about a Christian character is promoting Christianity.” The school decided to allow parents to opt their children out of reading the books. (WJCT-TV, Jacksonville, Fla., July 13.)
  • Allen Burch, principal of Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Florida, pulled Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from the summer reading program in August after he received a few dozen complaints from parents about the book’s “profanity and atheism.” According to school policy, challenged books must go through a school review process, but Burch claimed this did not apply to summer reading lists. The Leon County School Board stood by Burch’s decision, but high school student Jaclyn Weinell wrote an op-ed piece for the Tallahassee newspaper that said the school ban was an attack on free thought and praised the book: “Student readers are encouraged to think—about autism, about family, about atheism, and about science—and see the world through the eyes of a 15-year-old narrator with a rather unique viewpoint.” (Tallahassee [Fla.] Democrat, Aug. 13, 24.)
  • In early September, Jackie Sims, the mother of a 15-year-old boy at Knox County (Tenn.) Schools’L&N STEM Academy, had objected to Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks when he brought it home as part of his summer reading, calling it “pornographic.” The school fully supported keeping the book, which details the true story of an African-American woman who in 1951 had a sample of her cells taken for research without her knowledge or consent, but Sims seemed determined to challenge the book at the district level. Skloot herself weighed in, saying that Sims had “confused gynecology with pornography” and that her objection was based on a passage that describes Henrietta Lacks’s infidelity and another that discusses her intimate discovery that she had a lump on her cervix. (WBIR-TV, Knoxville, Tenn., Sept. 9.)
  • Lee Runyon, principal of West Ashley High School in Charleston, South Carolina, pulled Courtney Summers’s Some Girls Are from a freshmen Honors English summer reading list in late July after aparent complained that the novel’s explicit content describing underage alcohol and drug use, sexual assault, and body image were age-inappropriate. Runyon replaced the book with Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak on the reading list, but did so without giving the school board a chance to review the challenge. Former YA librarian Kelly Jensen responded by collecting 830 donated copies of Some Girls Are and giving them away to teens in the area, with the help of the Charleston County Public Library. (Charleston Post and Courier, July 28; Book Riot, Sept. 4.)
  • In May, A. C. Reynolds High School in Asheville, North Carolina, temporarily suspended the use of Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling The Kite Runner in an Honors English class following a complaint from former school board member and parent Lisa Baldwin, who objected to “homosexuality and sexually explicit scenes.” The book was pulled from classrooms, pending review by two committees that finally recommended keeping it. In September, the Buncombe County School Board added a policy allowing teachers to continue using materials that have been challenged until a final decision is made. (Asheville Citizen-Times, May 4, Sept. 3.)
  • After a local Tea Party chapter circulated petitions to have two LGBT-themed books removed from the children’s section of the Hood County Library in Granbury, Texas, religious conservatives spoke at a July 14 meeting of the county commissioners and said their objections to This Day in June and My Princess Boy were based on their Christian faith. In the end, the commissioners agreed with the library board and recommended the books stay in the children’s collection. (The Raw Story, July 15.)
  • Tara Shultz, a 20-year-old student at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California, and her parents in June attempted to have the school put a disclaimer on the syllabus of Associate Professor Ryan Bartlett’s English 250 fiction course because four of the graphic novels that he uses as course materials contain “lesbian oral sex, suicide, homosexuality, pedophilia . . . murder, torture.” The novels werePersepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Y: The Last Man Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, and The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman and various artists. Initially, College President Cheryl Marshall agreed to the disclaimer, but later backpedaled and decided to leave the decision up to individual instructors. (Redlands [Calif.] Daily Facts, June 15;Riverside [Calif.] Press-Enterprise, July 2.)

 Two notable instances of book-banning occurred this year in Italy and New Zealand:

  • One of the first official acts of the new mayor of Venice, Italy, Luigi Brugnaro, who took office June 15, was to pull nearly 50 children’s books on LGBT topics from libraries in the city’s preschools. Protests immediately erupted from residents, publishers, librarians, and 250 authors, who wrote to the mayor asking to have their own books removed in solidarity with the banned authors. Brugnaro soon reversed course and whittled the titles down to twoOphélie Texier’s Jean a deux mamans(Jean Has Two Mothers) and Francesca Pardi’s Piccolo uovo (Little Egg), the latter a story about an unhatched egg that encounters multiple types of happy families, including a pair of gay penguins, lesbian rabbits bringing up a family, a single-parent hippo, a mixed-race dog couple, and kangaroos that adopted polar bear cubs. Pardi even wrote to Pope Francis in July about the ban, sending him copies of her books, which, she emphasized, promote the Christian value of tolerance. Then on August 18 English musician Elton John, who owns a house in Venice, criticized the mayor in an Instagram post for politicizing children’s books: “Beautiful Venice is indeed sinking, but not as fast as the boorishly bigoted Brugnaro.” The mayor responded via Twitter, scolding him to stick to the facts and explaining that he was not homophobic, but he wanted to give parents more control over their children’s reading. A scholastic commission has been appointed to examine the books. (New York Times, 18; The Guardian [UK], July 16.)
  • A conservative lobbying group, Family First, on September 3 managed to get New Zealand’s Film and Literature Board of Review to place an interim ban on Ted Dawe’s award-winning YA novel Into the River, making it the first book banned in the country in 22 years. The group objected to the book’s explicit language, sexual content, and portrayal of drug use. Any individual, bookstore, library, or school distributing or exhibiting the book is now subject to a stiff fine until the full board makes a ruling. Joanna Mathew, executive director of the Library and Information Association of New Zealand,said she had “read the book, and while there is content in there that is confronting, it doesn’t warrant being banned.” (Auckland New Zealand Herald, 7; The Guardian [UK], Sept. 7.)

The purpose of Banned Books Week is to draw national attention to these efforts to remove or restrict access to books or other materials, even those that some consider unorthodox or dangerous. OIF’s Pekoll summed it up:The more we talk about these cases and bring the harms of censorship to light, the more courage and endurance librarians will have when they need it the most.”

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Tyler Fleming, “King Kong: The First South African Musical”

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Tyler Fleming, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisville, spoke about “King Kong: The First South African Musical” in our Far Away Places series and as part of the Year of South African celebration on Thursday, September 24 at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore, Bowling Green, KY.

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Jane Olmsted, “Seeking the Other Side”

Kentucky Live-Seeking the Other Side (8)

Jane Olmsted kicked off this season of WKU Libraries’ Kentucky Live! with a presentation of her book of poems Seeking the Other Side. The event took place in the Western Room of the Kentucky Building on WKU Campus on the evening of September 17, 2015. It concluded with Jane Olmsted signing her books.

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Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

On July 14, 2015 Harper Lee’s much anticipated and controversial novel Go Set a Watchman came out in bookstores. The author of the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird wrote Watchman prior to Mockingbird. The new novel follows Mockingbird’s narrator Jean Louise “Scout” Finch some twenty years later as she returns home to Maycomb, Alabama changed by postwar industrialism and especially tense amid the Civil Rights era. Watchman has stirred considerable controversy as readers speculate the reasons for its publication so late in Lee’s life – 55 years after her first novel – and critics debate the novel’s quality and whether it should be viewed as a manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird, its sequel, or a separate work in its own right.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Poster

To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 movie of Harper Lee’s classic novel

Go Set a Watchman (PS3562 .E353 G6 2015, Leisure Reading Collection) is already the bestselling novel of 2015 and has also prompted a renewed interest in the earlier work To Kill a Mockingbird (PS3562 .E35x T6, Cravens 8th floor) and the movie (VR10708, VPAL). To find out more about the author, see: The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee by Marja Mills (PS3562 .E353 Z75 2014, WKU Leisure Books), Harper Lee: A Twentieth-Century Life by Kerry Madden (PS3562 .E353 Z76 2009, ERC), On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections by Alice Hall Petry (PS3562 .E353 Z87 2006), and Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields (PS3562 .E353 Z87 2006).

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WKU Libraries’ International Year of South Africa Bibliography

In cooperation with WKU’s “International Year of South Africa, 2015-2016” series, WKU Libraries has compiled a multidisciplinary bibliography with almost 100 resources pertaining to South Africa in fields like: anthropology, art, economics, history, literature, music, political science, sociology, and travel & geography. The bibliography also includes DVDs of popular South African films and documentaries, CDs by South African musicians, and web resources for travelers.

IYO SA Bibliographyimage

Whether you are interested in books like Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer’s last book No Time Like the Present (PR9369.3 .G6 N6 2012 in the Leisure Reading Collection on the 4th floor of Cravens library) or want to visit our Visual and Performing Arts Library on the 2nd floor of Cravens library for music ranging from Die Antwoord to Miriam Makeba, or recent movies District 9 and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, or are even interested in going to South Africa and want to check out Insight Guides South Africa (REF DT1717 .S68 in the Reference room 1st floor Helm library) or our links to the CIA World Factbook or the U.S. State Department page, this bibliography is a great comprehensive guide to learning about all things South Africa!

You can easily locate information about WKU International Year of South Africa and the bibliography with the links below:

IYO-South Africa for the International Year… page

Bibliography for the IYO South Africa WKU Libraries Bibliography

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Friends of Peggy

 

Peggy Wright

Peggy Wright

Gathered together to celebrate her 90th Birthday at Federal Grove in Auburn, Kentucky and reflect on her long career at WKU.   Nancy Baird described her “travels with Peggy” in Europe and Russia while Helen Crocker spoke of the friendship established among their group of former history professors from 1978  (Nancy Baird, Helen Crocker, Carol Crowe-Carraco, and Peggy plus Sally Ann Strickler, former Department Head of Library Public Services) which has lasted almost four decades, with gatherings to celebrate each of their birthdays every year.  Elaine Moore, former Coordinator of Electronic Resources, now retired in Arizona, sent along greetings, pictures and stories from their trips to the International Reading Association in Norway and Sweden.  Father Andy Garner of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church described Peggy’s many contributions to the church including her counseling of death row inmates at Eddyville and her work with the Detention Center in Bowling Green.  Brian Coutts shared a story of their ill-fated trip to the Toledo District of Belize in 1993 and the “curse of the crystal skull” of Lubaantun.

(From left to right) Sally Ann Strickler, Father Any Garner, Helen Crocker, Peggy Wright, and Nancy Baird

(From left to right) Sally Ann Strickler (Former Head, Dept. of Library Public Services), Father Andy Garner, Helen Crocker, Peggy Wright, and Nancy Baird

(Left to right) Brian Coutts and Helen Crocker

(Left to right) Brian Coutts and Helen Crocker

(Left to Right) Mary Lou Simmons and Brian Coutts

(Left to Right) Mary Lou Simmons and Brian Coutts

Father Andy Garner, St. Joseph's Catholic Church

(Left to right) John Gottfried, Brian Coutts, Mary Lou Simmons, and Father Andy Garner, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church

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