Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Fourth Edition

Nicholas Karolides

Description

Throughout history, tyrants, totalitarian states, church institutions, and democratic governments alike have banned books that challenged their assumptions or questioned their activities. Political suppression also occurs in the name of security and the safeguarding of official secrets and is often used as a weapon in larger cultural or political battles. Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Fourth Edition illustrates the extent and frequency of such censorship in nearly every form of writing.

Entries include:

• Animal Farm (George Orwell)


• The Appointment (Herta Müller)


• Born on the Fourth of July (Ron Kovic)


• Burger's Daughter (Nadine Gordimer)


• Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)


• Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)


• The Fugitive (Pramoedya Anata Toer)


• Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea)


• The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)


• Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)


• The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas)


• The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)


• Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig)


• Manifesto of the Communist Party (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)


• Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)


• Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler)


• Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)


• Snow (Orhan Pamuk)


• The Struggle Is My Life (Nelson Mandela)


• The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien)


• The Vaněk Plays (Václav Havel)


• and more.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Literature
• Censorship
• Ban (law)
• List of books banned by governments
• Politics
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438149899
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Fourth Edition
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Contents Entries 365 Days The Affluent Society Bailey, Thomas A. Cancer Ward Dai Qing Eban, Abba Fail-Safe Galbraith, John Kenneth Handbook for Conscientious Objectors I am the Cheese Jefferson, Thomas Kantor, Mackinlay La Farge, Oliver Machiavelli, Niccol Nelson and Winnie Mandela O Brien, Tim Paine, Thomas Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Said, Edward Ten Days that Shook the World The Ugly American Vincent, William S. Waiting Yangtze! Yangtze!
Entries
365 Days
1971

The title, 365 Days , refers to the standard maximum tour of duty in Vietnam. The title is apt, for there is throughout the text a consciousness of time already served and time remaining in the tour of duty. "You've been in Nam how long?" "How much longer do you have in country?" The months, the weeks, the days are counted.
Glasser, a physician serving during the Vietnam War in an army hospital in Japan that received medical "evacs" from the casualty staging area, establishes his purpose in the foreword. He writes not "in desperation" or "to prove a point," but to offset the sinking feeling "that nothing would be remembered except the confusion and the politics." His focus is on the men and their experiences. He tells their true stories, in their language. He was part of the stories set in Japan, the hospital stories; the stories set in Vietnam are "from the boys I met."
This collection of 17 sketches reflects a wide range of situations and men, giving the reader a sense of broad contact with the war from multiple perspectives. The several hospital sketches are set in different units: surgical, psychiatric, burn. The combat scenes vary: an infantry company on a "sweep," an ambush team, a mechanized "track" battalion, a search-and-destroy mission, a cooking unit, and a helicopter "chopper" rescue mission. The personnel range, too, from the neophyte to the massively trained and experienced, enlisted men and officers; from medics to nurses and doctors.
"Go Home, Kurt," the first sketch, sets the action and the tension, both the physical-emotional and the ethical-political. Kurt is brought in by chopper, bleeding profusely, close to death. In an exhausting two-hour operation, Peterson, the surgeon, cleans out the infection, ties a perforated artery, and closes the wound. The operation takes ten units of blood, but the leg stays on. Kurt survives. The ethical-political tension takes shape during the recovery period: Kurt's sense of duty to the men in his unit begins to falter as he talks with other evacs, friends from the unit. He questions, doubts, fears; yet he's nagged by the thought of a "lot of guys still there." Tension is expressed among the surgeons: A couple send the patients back as soon as they are well, no matter how many days are left of their tours; others, like Peterson, seeing the young soldiers as victims, arrange medical extensions to use up the last days.
"Mayfield" and "Track Unit" portray company and battalion operations respectively, establishing the nature of the fighting and the quality of the men. Sweaty-hot, muddy, dusty, explosively hazardous, the fighting is dominated by a kill-or-be-killed mind set. The men crawl through mud, wade through muck and paddies, scratch through tangled underbrush. The land is laced with mines, some spewing thousands of steel balls, others propelling explosive charges capable of blowing off legs, shattering arms and heads.
The men are described as sloppy, fatalistic, but professional: They fight well when they fight; they follow orders and do what is expected of them, including killing, but without illusions or convictions. They fight for each other. They are weary. The time thing of 365 days just nailed it down: no matter what these kids did or how they acted, they knew they had only 365 days of it and not a second more. To the kids lying around him, Nam simply didn't count for anything in itself. It was something they did between this and that, and they did what they had to do to get through it—no more.
The suddenness and frequency of casualty and death are striking. These and other sketches offer statistics. The Tet offensive resulted in 4,114 killed, 19,285 wounded, and 604 missing in action; taking hills 837 and 838 led to 80 percent casualties in two companies. Mayfield muses, "A first sergeant, and he couldn't keep up with the replacements. Five times in the last week, he'd had to bend over the wounded and ask their names.… He couldn't keep a second lieutenant; they ran through his fingers like the mud they worked in. He'd lost three that month alone, one right after another."
Several young lieutenants are featured, each exquisitely trained, superbly capable of survival in Vietnam War-style battle. An account of airborne and ranger training is detailed in "The Shaping-Up of McCabe"; the evolution of the man to a sharpened, hardened killer is evident. Responsive to fighting, the lieutenants are nevertheless dedicated to their men and to saving their lives, as illustrated by Dennen in "Track Unit."
An older officer, Bosum, is presented, perhaps as contrast. He is described as sincere and dedicated, but "locked into the early 1940's" mentality—"… they desperately want to win, or at least not to lose, and are always, even within the shifting quagmire of Nam, pausing a bit, trying for a better way." As brigade commander, Bosum's better way in effect sacrifices men. There are no reserves; there is less rest. Intent on driving out the Vietcong, Bosum orders a push and no pull back. Whole platoons are wiped out. After the battle, an expensive victory, a grenade is rolled into Bosum's tent.
Individual heroism and loyalty are represented throughout, but particularly in "Medics" and "Choppers." The medics' skill and calm efficiency are matched by their selflessness, their apparent disregard of danger to themselves. Growing up in a hypocritical adult world and placed in the middle of a war that even the dullest of them find difficult to believe in, much less die for, very young and vulnerable, they are suddenly tapped not for their selfishness or greed but for their grace and wisdom, not for their brutality but for their love and concern.
Likewise, the chopper pilots are shown to be risk takers, daring landings under fire out of an awareness of the need of their service to bring in supplies, to bring out the wounded and deceased.
Awareness emerges from the text of the ages of the combatants: 17, 18, 19; again and again Glasser identifies them as "boys" or "kids." He alludes often to healthy adolescent bodies shattered.
A sense of futility and loss permeates the text. The last sketch, "I Don't Want to Go Home Alone," heightens this feeling as Edwards, a burns specialist who has just returned from taking his brother's body home, tries to save the life of David, suffering from 80 percent second- and third-degree burns. We participate in David's fear, his confusion and anxiety, his anger and defiance—and his dying.

Further Information
" 365 Days Returned to Maine School Library." Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom 31 (1982): 33, 67–69.
Entry Author: Karolides, Nicholas J.
The Affluent Society
1958

"… [T]he experience of nations with well being is exceedingly brief. Nearly all throughout all history have been very poor." The exception, "great and unprecedented affluence," is found in Europe and the United States in the last few generations. With this stark assertion, John Kenneth Galbraith sets the stage for his analysis of the economic attitudes and behaviors of this affluent society. Essentially, he attacks current economic thinking. An underlying point is that the standard economic ideas (i.e., "conventional wisdom") were developed in a world where poverty was normal, where scarcity of goods and services was accepted as the way of life.
In the late 18th century, Adam Smith, a key figure in the "central economic tradition" (a phrase used to denote the classical tradition, the main current of ideas in descent from Smith), posited a hopeful vision of an advancing national community in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . In his view, the economic society was regulated not by the state but by competition and the market, the market consisting of small entrepreneurs; people, using their resources, worked for the enrichment of society. Smith perceived that the distribution of wealth depended on bargaining power that favored merchants, manufacturers, and landlords; workers, subject to market forces, "could not for very long rise very far above the minimum level necessary for the survival of the race." This concept became a basic premise—with some qualifications—of economists David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus, Smith's successors in the central tradition; it also served as the crux of Marx's attack on capitalism. According to Galbraith, by the onset of the 20th century, the severity of this position was diminished but not altogether negated.
A presumption of inequality was inherent to the competitive model of the central tradition, defended by the rich, whom it benefited, and conservatives. The competitive, efficient entrepreneur was rewarded as was the comparable worker, but the rewards were not equal. In dissent from the central tradition, some economists, including Marxists, have argued that the redistribution of wealth and income was possible—and necessary. Indeed, some leveling, achie