The ABCs of Book Banning

I rate this highly based on the lack of coverage given elsewhere to the people affected by the far right extremist efforts to create an under-informed generation. The documentary is honest in stating that it is giving voice to the children affected by banning & restricted books.

I was moved by the words of one girl who stated it simply "Why?". As a 65 year old who benefited from a an expansive availability of books at home & through public & school libraries, I developed a love a reading. My mother never limited our choices from the books shelves. She knew that a child must be exposed to many voices in order understand themself & others.

If you want your kids to be weak, small minded, full of fear, full of hate for the "others" that are "not like them", you ban books. If you want your kids to repeat the most heinous atrocities in history, you ban the books that can teach them the lessons that need to be learned and understood. If you don't want your children to be more intelligent, more empathetic or more intuitive than you, you ban books.

This short documentary is merely putting voice to the children who are being deprived of history, biography, fantasy, imagination, other points of view, understanding your neighbor, understanding themselves. SO SCARY!!

I watched this to see if they had anything new to say about the subject, my skepticism wasn't disappointed. The idea that books are banned is a modern progressive piety when the boomer "banned books" reading list is required syllabus reading, and even that has under their influenced waned to the point where it is more likely a kid has read Harry Potter than 1984, never mind anything harder like Solzhenitsyn.

The books in the documentary are all found in big box stores, "my 2 gay penguin dads", they are so not banned they are corporate approved, we are long past the point where Tipper Gore was putting warnings on rap music in Walmarts. It boils down to this, they are not afraid that children won't be exposed to the distilled thoughts of great thinkers through the ages, they are afraid they won't be exposed to what is little more than dumbed down coomer self affirmation ideology, selfie culture grade affirmation literature of crass self obsession and nothing higher.

None of this is about teaching kids how to think, but its the idea of the kid who reads, the kid who repeats the correct opinions for the pleasure of their librarians or teachers.

It was too much to hope this would have some critical examination, at 26 minutes it just flips from quote to quote from their book selection like a chain of tiktoks no depth at all, a low bar for agitprop in 2023.

I don't understand why this is even nominated by the Oscars. Disappointing. It was a highly politicized topic that is poorly introduced, partially represented, with unartful execution. A shallow, senseless propagandistic piece of self-entertainment.

Without holistically introducing the problem of "book banning" and providing scientific arguments to both sides of the problem, the film cut straight into getting some well-rounded children on footage to sway the emotionally inclined public. Nothing substantial there, barely even representational. Same with the slide-by-slide enumeration of "banned" books with some superficial quotes. It was like watching a PowerPoint. Seriously. A YouTuber can do better than this.

I sensed no scientific nor artistic spirit in this piece of slideshow of a film. The biggest failure about it as a documentary- it's neither provocative nor informative.

What an amazing short film!!! I am just enthralled and amazed by Grace Linn, who was 100 years (young) when she stood up and shared her feelings and opinion about book banning. I was equally impressed with the children that were interviewed. Knowledge is power; there never should be a ban on a book. Doing so allows the word to have power over you.

I almost want to start a book club that has one primary goal - to read and review banned books and then make them available to anyone, but especially children, who want to read them.

We must learn from our past. The only way to do that is to read. I was very impressed with this short documentary and it deserved the Oscar nomination.