But a toddler who is nestled in your lap listening as you read aloud? You might make an argument for using "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as a teachable moment for high school students. I've heard it argued that this can be a "teachable moment" - to share the book and point out how these illustrations are no longer appropriate. But I challenge you to look at these books today and tell me that these representations of people are perfectly fine. The stories have a rhyme scheme and cadence that sticks in the mind and helps a child learn to sound out words and read. The memories of these books are sentimental and happy. You likely first encountered them when you were tiny and loved and being read to by someone you adored - a parent, a grandparent, an older sibling. Honestly, I don't know why the estate didn't make this decision a long time ago. In that book, there are not just offensive caricatures of Asian people ("helpers who wear their eyes at a slant") but deeply offensive depictions of African people wearing grass skirts and topknots while barefoot and shirtless. Let's look at "If I Ran the Zoo," another book that is going out of print. In 1978, Geisel altered the image - removed the pigtail and the yellow tint, changed "Chinaman" to "Chinese man" - but I'm not sure it's significantly better. He drew slanty slashes for eyes and tinted the person's skin bright yellow. In the original version of "And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street," he drew a caricature of an Asian person with a pigtail and wooden shoes. But some of them reflect his outdated and offensive views. But there are already millions of copies of these books out there, and if you are determined to find a copy, you can easily do so. They are merely going out of print, which means that new copies will not be published going forward. It was Geisel's estate, and the estate calls the shots.Īlso: The books aren't being destroyed. It wasn't made by the government, or Amazon, or your local bookseller or library. The decision to let six of Geisel's books go out of print was made by Dr. The folks in charge of a writer's literary estate make decisions about what is to be done with that writer's work, and their decisions are not always popular - witness the estate of Harper Lee publishing "Go Set a Watchman," a book she firmly had not wanted published. (Disinformation: another thing to be outraged by.) So here are a few things I hope you already know:īooks go out of print all the time, and when that happens it is not "censorship." ![]() Moments after the news came out, so did oodles of disinformation. Seuss - will go out of print because they contain racist and offensive material. The big book news earlier this month was that six of the rhyming picture books for children written by Theodor Seuss Geisel - the man we all know as Dr. That is nowhere near the top thousand outrageous things. Insurrection, brutality, systemic racism, gerrymandering, child abuse, anti-maskers, domestic violence. There are so many things in this world to be outraged at.
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