Whilst reading through my daily American book banning stories, there’s a lot more books being “banned” that you might like to think .
I came across this report today in Task & Purpose…
A high school student at a DoDEA school in Europe compiled a list of books pulled from their library, which the student’s parent provided to Task & Purpose.
The books included both novels and non-fiction books on climate change, gender, sexuality, social media algorithms, women’s health, politics, and immigrant stories.
Pulled titles included:
- “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
- “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by Vice President JD Vance
-
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
- “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
- “Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves” by Glory Edim
- “War: How Conflict Shaped Us” by Margaret MacMillan
Sherwood, the superintendent of DoDEA Pacific West, said at the Osan town hall that he is receiving instructions on how to implement the executive orders from DoDEA lawyers and headquarters in Washington, D.C. DoDEA Pacific West officials are working with a regional instructional system specialist who is working with librarians on books that will be removed, he said.
https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/dod-schools-book-removal/
Before i get to the title in question it did amuse me to see Hillbilly Elegy on the list – do they not want people to know how dumb the vice-president is!
Now, to the title in question.
For those of you who haven’t read it.
Here’s a quick precis and a little background
Wikipedia
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932.[3] Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story’s protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared as an inversion counterpart to George Orwell‘s 1984 (1949).
In 1998 and 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the 20th century.[4] In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in “the top 100 greatest novels of all time”,[5] and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC.[6] Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 banned and challenged books of the decade since the association began the list in 1990.[7][8][9]
Read more here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
In the main I’d imagine it is probably most likely unpopular as it is a critique by Huxley of US culture, but one could also argue that with the likes of Musk and psychedelics enthused ultra capitalists getting closer to the centre of power than they have in a long time.
Huxley’s critique of technology and the use of imagined psychedelics (Soma think MDMA) as a tool for societial control and management is probably a text that you wouldn’t want the young reading.
Just a thought.
