RIP Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction master and author of Fahrenheit 451, died Tuesday night at the age of 91.

The world has lost a prophetic voice. RIP

Ray Bradbury Week

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, officially turns 90 on August 22, 2010. This Friday, fans of Bradbury will ask Los Angeles City Council to declare Aug. 22-28 Ray Bradbury Week. While Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, he moved to Los Angeles in 1934, where he has lived since that time.

A number of celebrations are being planned, including a tribute at the Mystery and Imagination Bookstore, a profile in the Writers Guild magazine, an exhibit of Bradbury books in the public library, a school production of a play based on the novel, an evening of screening TV shows based on Bradbury's writings, and a screening of the Fahrenheit 451 movie which will include an interview with Hugh Hefner and Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury's works include Something Wicked this Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and Fahrenheit 451. He has also been a writer on an astounding 75 films, many of them adaptations of his novels and short stories. His body of work has earned him the National Medal of the Arts and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles is on Facebook for anyone interested in learning more. (You must have a Facebook account to log in.)

A Tribute to Ray Bradbury

The Times Online has printed an article written by author Neil Gaiman entitled, "Neil Gaiman: Ray Bradbury Made Me Want to Write."

In it, Gaiman reminisces about Bradbury, the builder of dreams, as he reviews the many Bradbury volumes he has read and how they have influenced him and shaped the world. Gaiman refers to Bradbury as "The man who gave us a future to fear, one without stories, without books," an obvious reference to Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury at his best really was as good as we thought he was. He built so much, and made it his. So when the wind blows the fallen autumn leaves across the road in a riot of flame and gold, or when I see a green field in summer carpeted by yellow dandelions, or when, in winter, I close myself off from the cold and write in a room with a TV screen as big as a wall, I think of Ray Bradbury . . .

Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most ironic banned or challenged books. A book that portrays a world without books, in which ideas are silenced has not only been challenged but when it was first printed for schools, swear words were expunged without the author's knowledge.

The Banned Book Challenge continues until the end of June. Why not choose Fahrenheit 451 as one of your choices?

Graphic Novel of Fahrenheit 451 Coming Soon

A Publishers Weekly article by Calvin Reid entitled "New Look for Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'" reports that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will soon be adapted to be published as a graphic novel. Artist Tim Hamilton has recreated this science fiction classic with input from Ray Bradbury. It will be released both in hardcover and paperback and will be marketed during the American Library Association's Banned Books Week in September of 2009. Playboy magazine which first ran the original serial in 1954 has purchased the serial rights. The publisher also plans to adapt graphic novels of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An e-book version of the graphic edition will be available for the iPhone.

The Banned Book Challenge continues until June 30. Set a goal and read with us.

If you enjoyed reading Fahrenheit 451, you might also like:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Songs of Leaving by Peter Crowther
334 by Thomas M. Disch
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
The Children of Men, by P.D. James
The Chrysalids (or Re-Birth), by John Wyndham
The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984), by George Orwell
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

What Do Firemen Do?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury depicts firemen burning books. It is what they do. In a story that is disconcerting for those of us who believe in the right of freedom to read, MSNBC reports that firefighters are being trained by Homeland Security in the USA in a test program. They are being trained to look for illegal materials and report people who may be "hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."

While law enforcement officials have stringent rules that control their access to private property, fire fighters have access in order to make inspections for the purposes of preventing fires. The ACLU is concerned about the implications of this program with regard to first amendment issues.

According to New York City Fire Chief Salvatore Cassano, information related to terrorism has been passed on from firefighters to law enforcement since the program began three years ago.

It would be interesting to see what kind of information officials are collecting that they believe relates to terrorism and to what degree one needs to be "discontent" before one is reported to the government.

This would be great fodder for a dystopian novel. Oh, wait....

MTV Movies Blog reports that Tom Hanks is showing great interest in starring as Guy Montag, the “fireman” in Fahrenheit 451.

I Love You, Madame Librarian by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five is now on my "must read" list for the "Banned Book Challenge." I was not that familiar with Vonnegut, other than the fact that he is almost the spitting image of a friend of mine. I am fascinated by what I have read about him and how his life inspired his writing. I like his punchy, satiric style. Check out his writing below.

I Love You, Madame Librarian by Kurt Vonnegut

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

With thanks to Luminiferous Ether, who is about to become a librarian herself, from whom I cribbed this article about Kurt Vonnegut and admits to shamelessly cribbing it from Michael Moore who shamelessly cribbed it from "In These Times."

Reporting on the Challenge April 2, 2007

Freedom to Read Poster 2003
Take the "Banned Book Challenge" along with the people below.









138 people, including the people listed below, have pledged to read over 1476 books in the Banned Book Challenge. (I knew the math would get me in the end.) I realized today that 22 people have set a goal of over 25 books and my Excel spreadsheet did not include the books in the total.) Thus the jump from last week's total.

Banned_for_life14, USA, 6
Katya, USA, 10
Quixotic, UK, 5
John, USA, 2
lifelongreader, UAE, 2
chica3545, USA, 3
Kayla, USA, more than 25
Dnc1ngQueen, USA, more than 25
Lauren, USA, 10
tkempton, USA, 5

Check the comments below for titles that have been submitted. There are a number of study guides or papers prepared by Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University for two of the books being submitted as completed titles -- Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and the Dystopian Tradition and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Muzzle, Stiffle, and Subvert: From the Bizarre to the Absurd

The Signal: News for Santa Clarita Valley has an opinion editorial that deals with a number of censorship issues in the US. The article by Willy E. Gutman is entitled "Only in America: From the Bizarre to the Absurd."

The author points out a number of situations which in his opinion reflect,

White House-led efforts to muzzle the press, stifle artistic expression and subvert free thought while stepping up its own deceitful propaganda is being daily turned up a notch with a series of seemingly isolated but intimately linked initiatives that reflect the Bush administration's obsession with controlling information - and the minds of Americans.

Included in his examples is the challenge to Fahrenheit 451 during "Banned Books Week" but the whole article is worth a read.

New Bradbury Book

Sci Fi Weekly features an interview with author Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is the author of 35 books and numerous short stories, including Fahrenheit 451. At the age of 86, he is about to release his next book Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451.

...Match to Flame, will be all about my unconsciously leading the way to Fahrenheit 451, which I wrote in the autumn of 1950. I wrote it in nine days at the library of UCLA. Down in the basement, I found a typing room where I could rent a typewriter for 10 cents a half-hour. I moved in with a bag of dimes and I spent $9.80, and nine days later I finished Fahrenheit 451 in its first version, which is 25,000 words....Two years later, Ballantine Books came to me and said, "We love your story The Firemen [the original title]. If you find a new title for it and add words to it, we'll publish it." So I sat down, wrote an additional 25,000 words and changed the title from The Firemen to Fahrenheit 451.

Ironically, Bradbury's publisher removed swear words from Fahrenheit 451 without his knowledge.

More from Down Under

In a previous post Fahrenheit 451: Banned Books: A Strange Protest? you heard about a number of Melbourne University student who had staged a book burning as a protest to the banning of two books from the country.

An article by Christopher Bantick in the Courier-Mail is critical of how the Federal Government has restricted what people can read. The University of Melbourne library was forced to remove the books after they were reclassified otherwise they would have been breaking the law and would run the risk of being prosecuted.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock defends the government's actions, stating,

The Government is keen to ensure that inflammatory material is not used to encourage the naive and impressionable to engage in acts of terrorism.

According to Bantick,

It is hard to imagine a more blatant attack on freedom of speech. Even so, the ban shows something more. This is the Government's fear of opinions contrary to its own narrow social conservatism.

He goes on to challenge the idea that the government has the public good in mind and reminds his readers that Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, has forseen the consequence of allowing a government to decide what is good for society. "Because you don't have to burn books, do you, if the world starts to fill up with non-readers, non-learners and non-knowers?"

The vice-chancellor of the University pointed out that by banning the books, the Australian government was limiting the legitimate research of staff and students.

The Council of Australian University Librarians, Australian Library and Information Association, Australian Society of Authors and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, in a joint statement on September 25, noted pithily: "Banning books takes away not only our right to read the opinions of others but also our right to disagree with what they say. We can't refute what we can't read."

While Australians may not be able to obtain a paper copy of these books, ironically they are available online for would-be terrorists.


Defense of Muslim Lands
Join the Caravan

Biography of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam

What would your reaction be to a similar banning in Canada? I'm not sure that anything except pornography is actually banned in Canada besides anything that has been deemed "hate" literature. Are you fearful of would-be terrorists making use of these books in Canada? Since Adbullah Yusuf Azzam was an advisor to Osama Bin Laden, it is likely that the terrorist have already read his writings and we would do well to understand what terrorism is about from this leader's point of view.

Fahrenheit 451 Burning with Irony

According to a news article in the Courier, Diana Berm, a sophomore at Caney Creek High School, of the Conroe Independent School District, Houston was offended by the language and content of Fahreneheit 451, the classic book about book burning and banning by Ray Bradbury. While Bradbury's book has been truncated by his publisher and strong language blacked out by well-meaning teachers, it has not been outright banned as far as I can tell (however, I am open to correction).

Alton Berm, the student's father objects to this novel being used as classroom reading material and wants to have it removed from the curriculum for all students saying,

"It shouldn't be in there because it's offending people. ... If they can't find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn't have a book at all....It's just all kinds of filth."

Although he had not read Fahrenheit 451, he found excerpts that go against his religious beliefs, including being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain.

The book has been used in the county's curriculum for at least 19 years. A committee will now review the content of the book and reconsider its use in the classroom.

What is sad to me is the non story that has been published by the Courier and the amount of time a committee will take in reexamining its county's curriculum choices. As long as a student has a way of opting for a different novel, I believe their parents do not have a right to force the removal of materials that have been chosen by educators.

Watch the story.

Banned Book Display Banned

Banned Books

Posted 2006-10-05

According to the Daily New Record, Banned Books Week was not recognized by all libraries. Harrison High School in Virginia had set up a display of banned books in order to bring the issue of freedom to read to the consciousness of their students. Included were titles such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Fahrenheit 451, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Bible.

Superintendent Donald Ford noticed that students seemed to be enticed into reading particular titles just because they were in the display and felt that in the interests of the students, the display should be removed.

The editor of the local paper concludes with:

Today’s word has been "irony." Now let’s move on to words such as "ideas," "literature," and "freedom."

A bigger irony would be that the students are even more intrigued by what titles would have been in the display, that they would read them and discuss censorship issues at school

Ideas for Recognizing Banned Book Week

Check the link to the ALA Web Site for ideas on how to recognize Banned Book Week which begins the last week of September. Check the sidebar for lots of resources on banned books and Fahrenheit 451, in particular.

Fahrenheit 451 Searchers and Lurkers

OK. I have seen all of you out there looking for anything you can find on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Curiosity? Essay due? Whatever the reason, I have placed additional links to good sites for information just for you. Why? I searched "Fahrenheit 451" "why banned" yesterday and found a ton of links that have dropped those very keywords into metatags to bring you to their sites which are selling things, getting you to sign up for things, etc. enticing you in with your request.

Check the links to the right under "Fahrenheit 451 Links" for lots of study guides, teacher resources, a site with the full text of the first chapter, and much more.


As for Fahrenheit 451 being banned, I cannot find an example of a full banning. It was butchered by publishers and some schools had teachers black out the swear words.

In 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature, Nicholas Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Sawn B. Sova explain that author Ray Bradbury learned that Ballentine books, his publisher had been censoring and removing sections from his Fahrenheit 451 for years without his permission. 75 passages were "edited" in order to eliminate words like "damn," "hell," and "abortion."

Can you say, "Irony?"