Publisher's ad urges people to read the book for themselves.
Author Laurie Halse Anderson, of Mexico, is back in the fray of the banned-book debate.
A full-page ad in The New York Times on Thursday encouraged people to read Anderson’s book “Speak” and decide for themselves if it should be banned from young readers.
“Speak” tells the story of a teen girl struggling to cope after being raped. The newspaper ad was placed by the book’s publisher, Penguin Group.
Last week was national Banned Books Week, an event created in 1982, sponsored by the American Library Association and other organizations.
Earlier in September, a Missouri State University professor, Wesley Scroggins, in an opinion column in the Missouri News-Leader, encouraged schools to ban “Speak” and two other books, which he said “should be classified as soft pornography.”
Scroggins called for also banning Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Twenty Boy Summer” by Sarah Ockler.
Anderson, who has been an outspoken proponent of intellectual freedom for young people, said in an e-mail that Scroggins “in no way speaks for the people of Missouri.”
She wrote to the superintendent of the Republic, Mo., school district, asking about the status of all three books. He has not replied, she said.
“Speak” was first published in 1999. Sales of the book have recently increased, she said, but she had no hard numbers. Since “Speak” was first published, she’s received “tens of thousands of letters and e-mails” about it from young readers, she said.
From excerpts of that correspondence, many of them describing children’s own accounts of sexual abuse and rape, she composed a poem called “Listen.” Watch her read the poem below.
--Contact Dave Tobin at dtobin@syracuse.com or 470-3277.