A vividly personal case for books that teach young readers how to cope with desire and live a life of self-acceptance.
Looking back at “a largely forgotten” trial.
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Many books have been freed from censorship by courts, James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover being only two of the most noteworthy. Aycock, a North Carolina writer and librarian who has devoted much of his life to the freedom of literary access, argues that another case matters. In 1982, the Supreme Court heard Island Trees v. Pico. “In the process,” he notes, “it gave us the first—and so far, only—library book ban case to be decided by the United States Supreme Court.” The case dates to 1975, when the Island Trees Union Free School District, on Long Island, sought to ban 11 books from its libraries, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Oliver LaFarge’s Laughing Boy. “No one had complained about these books,” he writes. “There had been no challenges, no letters to the editor, no public shouting matches. …The board simply acted. Like a sleeper cell.” Was removing these books a violation of the First Amendment? The court split. But what matters is the larger question of how potentially transgressive or challenging content can help young people make personal and social decisions. Each of the books in the case gets a full reading here, and the payoff is this: “Teens want sexual information. They need it. …When people search for information, they usually have one of three goals: to seek answers, to reduce uncertainty, or to make sense of a situation.” These goals, for Aycock, constitute the social function of literature. They also constitute the personal impetus for his book. “I entered middle school in 1985 and never received any sex education at all,” he writes. “Is it any wonder I turned to novels?” What makes the book more than a screed against the censor is the author’s unique personal investment. As he says, books teach what cannot be taught in class.
A vividly personal case for books that teach young readers how to cope with desire and live a life of self-acceptance.Pub Date: June 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798216196471
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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