Bald M. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds, Revised Edition

Infobase Publishing, 2006. — 440 p. ISBN: 0-8160-6269-2As Margaret Bald shows in this expanded volume, religious censorship over the years and around the world was not a characteristic solely of the secular Left or the fundamentalist Right, but clearly the Right is the dominant censor now. Bald spotlights new examples from Iran, China, India, and the Vatican. But call this the Harry Potter volume: J. K. Rowling’s first book in the series of adventure and make-believe came out in 1999, the year after the Banned Books series was first published, followed quickly by five more books by 2005. All were so heavily censored, and for largely the same reasons—glorification of witchcraft, magic, wizardry, the occult—that Bald has summarized each one individually and then written one collective censorship history. However, the fundamentalist Right in the United States is not satisfied with simply banning Halloween. It is well organized, for instance, in its campaign to soften the rigorous standards of science and break down the separation of church and state in order to include creationism and intelligent design as a valid counter to evolution in school classes. Call it the Kansasization of the U.S. public school system.