Join us in fighting back against censorship! Choose from this curated selection of titles within Pfeiffer Library that have regularly appeared on ALA's frequently challenged books lists:
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds; Ibram X. Kendi
Call Number: E184.A1 R49 2020 CCU
ISBN: 9780316453691
Publication Date: 2020-03-10
The crucial, empowering, #1 New York Times bestselling exploration of racism--and antiracism--in America. This is NOT a history book. This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race. The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited. Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives. Download the free educator guide here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Stamped-Educator-Guide.pdf Now available for younger readers: Stamped (for Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Call Number: HV5132 .W35 2005
ISBN: 9780743247542
Publication Date: 2006-01-17
MORE THAN EIGHT YEARS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST The extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world's most gifted storytellers. The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family. The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered. The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family. The memoir was also made into a major motion picture from Lionsgate in 2017 starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, and Naomi Watts.
Call Number: PN6747.S245 P4713 2003
ISBN: 0375422307
Publication Date: 2003-04-29
BEST SELLER * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * "A memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran.... That Satrapi chose to tell her remarkable story as a gorgeous comic book makes it totally unique and indispensable." --Time Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's best-selling graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane's child's-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Call Number: PR9199.3.A8 H3 1986
ISBN: 0395404258
Publication Date: 1986-02-01
First published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale is a novel of such power that the reader is unable to forget its images and its forecast. With more than two million copies in print, it is Margaret Atwood's most popular and compelling novel. Set in the near future, it describes life in what once was the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead. Reacting to social unrest, and a sharply declining birthrate, the new regime has reverted to -- even gone beyond -- the repressive tolerance of the original Puritans. Offred is a Handmaid who may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant because she is only valued as long as her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now. Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Call Number: PS3503.R167 F3 1991
ISBN: 0345342968
Publication Date: 1987-08-12
For use in schools and libraries only. A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.
Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, John
Call Number: PS3537.T3234 O45 1937
ISBN: 0553209450
Publication Date: 1965
The simple-minded giant, Lennie, is one of Steinbeck's most poignant characters. He has to rely on George, his mentor and protector, but even George can't save Lennie from his worst enemy - his own strength. Clinging to each other in their loneliness, the pair dream of a place to call their own.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Call Number: PS3551.L35774 A27 2007
ISBN: 9780316013680
Publication Date: 2007-09-12
A New York Times bestseller! Over one million copies sold! A National Book Award winner! A Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner! Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. With a forward by Markus Zusak, interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney, and black and white interior art throughout, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Call Number: PS3551.N27 B54 1984
ISBN: 0892290021
Publication Date: 1976-01-01
When a curandera comes to stay with a young boy, he tests the bonds that tie him to his culture and finds himself in the secrets of the past.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Call Number: PS3551.N464 Z6 1996
ISBN: 0394429869
Publication Date: 1970-01-12
Superbly told, with the poet's gift for language and observation, Angelou's autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas - a world of which most Americans are ignorant.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Call Number: PS3562.E26 T6 1960
ISBN: 0397001517
Publication Date: 1961-01-01
Harper Lee's classic novel of a lawyer in the Deep South defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recently, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the twentieth century.
Call Number: PS3563.O8749 B4 1987
ISBN: 0394535979
Publication Date: 1987-08-12
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.
Call Number: PS3572.O5 S6355 1980
ISBN: 9780905712475
Publication Date: 1980
Compilation of Kurt Vonnegut's tales gathered into one convenient volume.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling; Mary GrandPré (Illustrator)
Call Number: PZ7 .R79835 Ham 1999
ISBN: 0439136350
Publication Date: 1999-10-01
For twelve long years, the dread fortress of Azkaban held an infamous prisoner named Sirius Black. Convicted of killing thirteen people with a single curse, he was said to be the heir apparent to the Dark Lord, Voldemort.Now he has escaped, leaving only two clues as to where he might be headed: Harry Potter's defeat of You-Know-Who was Black's downfall as well. And the Azkaban guards heard Black muttering in his sleep, "He's at Hogwarts . . . he's at Hogwarts."Harry Potter isn't safe, not even within the walls of his magical school, surrounded by his friends. Because on top of it all, there may well be a traitor in their midst.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse-five ; The sirens of Titan ; Player-piano ; cat's cradle ; Breakfast of champions ; Mother night by Vonnegut, Kurt
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