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BURNING ICE: The Moral and Emotional Effects of Reading by Sister Mary Corde Lorang

BURNING ICE: The Moral and Emotional Effects of Reading

By

Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1968
Publisher: Scribners

Sister Mary Corde Lorang expands her 1944 study of the effects of reading on high school students through extensive use of questionnaires, and concludes that reading can have strong good and bad moral effects. High school students in five states, in Hawaii, Africa, Guatemala and the Philippines, in both parochial and public schools, set forth their reactions to a varied group of books. The correlation between the ""bad"" effects on students of ""bad"" books seems high. Those who do not share the author's angry condemnation of the liberalizing tendency in censorship will probably question her lack of precise sample portraits, the obscure sources of evaluative literary judgments, deplore want of specifies in classroom presentation of the purpose of the questionnaires. All readers may find the treatment a bit crowded with conclusions scattered and hard to find. However, the direct quotes from students are interesting, occasionally amusing. Random sampling in a growing controversy.