On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the U.S.

LaRue (The New Inquisition), a librarian and former president of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, serves up an uneven exploration of the motivations, methods, and results of censorship in regional libraries. Most censorship attempts, he argues, stem from parents’ quixotic wish to protect children from “the darker or more complicated sides of adult life” and from “current demographic majorities seeking to suppress writings based on the experiences” of LGBTQ individuals and people of color. Illuminating the challenges librarians face, LaRue notes that public libraries’ obligation “to serve the whole community” can lead to conflict, as when he purchased for his Colorado library a children’s book “about a man who leaves his wife and child to live with another man” for a mother in a similar situation, who wished to read it with her young son, only for another patron to take offense and rip the book apart. Such stories offer revealing on-the-ground insights into how censorship plays out in individual libraries, but the book’s second half loses steam as it offers conventional takes on the importance of public libraries refusing to privilege particular faiths in its selections and the perils of trying to bar problematic books from shelves (“The constitution does not guarantee the right not to be offended”). The results are hit or miss. (Sept.)