Samantha Hines, Librarian at the Mansfield Library, Missoula College University of Montana, discusses Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein.
Transcript
The book I've chosen to discuss is "Where the Sidewalk Ends" by Shel Siverstein. When I was thinking about banned books and looking through some lists of books that were banned, I saw this one on there, and I was surprised.
I have a very clear memory of first grade, sitting in the library with my first grade class, and the librarian reading a poem out of this book, and she held up the back of the book, and she said, "Look at this man. This is not a man who likes children." And you can tell, he's definitely a very grumpy fellow.
But we all loved his poems. Every time the librarian got this book out and read it to us, we would listen, we would laugh, and we understood it was completely absurd. It was just, it was funny! And when I read that it was a banned book, I wasn't surprised, sadly. But it reinforced to me, a lot of the time that books are banned, it's because people think children can't understand, they can't relate to it, they'll get the wrong idea. And if you're reading this book, you're certainly not going to eat babies—which is one of the reasons it was banned! Because there's a poem that promotes cannibalism, you're not going to, you know, throw your baby brother out, you're not going to sell him—well, maybe you'll sell him—but you're not going to get those ideas from a book.
That's part of the problem with banning books. It makes it a little bit more attractive to seek out these books for us counter culture types.
My name is Samantha Hines, and I'm the Missoula College librarian, and I read banned books.