You Can't Read This Forbidden Books, Lost Writing, Mistranslations, and Codes

by ROSS, VAL

• ISBN13: 9780887767326
• ISBN10: 088776732X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-04-04
• Publisher: Tundra Books

Summary

Wherever people can read, there are stories about the magic, mystery, and power of what they read. Val Ross presents a history of reading that is, in fact, the story of the monumental, on-going struggle to read. From Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon the Great, the world's oldest signed author to Empress Shotoku of Japan who in 764 ordered the printing of one million Buddhist prayers; from the story of Hulagu, Ghengis Khan's nasty brother who destroyed the library of Baghdad to Bowdler and the censorship of Shakespeare, there have been barriers to reading ranging from the physical to the economical, social, and political. Written for children ages ten and up,You Can't Read Thisexplores the development of alphabets, the decoding of ancient languages, and censorship in Ancient Rome and modern America. It's about secret writing, trashed libraries, writers on the run, writers in hiding, books that are thought to have magical powers and mistranslations that started wars. It's about people: from the American slave Frederick Douglass to girls in Afghanistan in the year 2001 who defied laws that prevented them from learning to read. What do all these stories have in common? They're all about how texts contain power and how people everywhere throughout history have devoted their wills and their brains to reading and unleashing the power of the word. With lavish illustrations and an index, this is history at its finest.

Author Biography

Val Ross is a renowned journalist. She has won a National Newspaper Award and is highly respected throughout the publishing industry for her coverage of books and the people who create them. She is deputy comment editor at The Globe and Mail. Her first book, The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories has been nominated for many awards and won the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Nonfiction. Val Ross lives in Toronto with her husband and children.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(4)
The First Readers	4	(4)
Language Lost and Language Found	8	(10)
The Poet and the Emperor	18	(7)
The Made-to-Order Alphabet	25	(6)
The Prayerful Pagodas	31	(3)
The Stolen Story	34	(4)
The Pillage of Baghdad	38	(7)
Giving Books to the People	45	(10)
Darkness upon the Deep	55	(7)
The Cousins and the Code	62	(5)
Books Not to be Read	67	(6)
That Dreadful Mr. Shakespeare	73	(8)
A Book at His Fingertips	81	(6)
Freddy the Slave Boy	87	(7)
The Two-Faced Treaty	94	(7)
The Evil World of-Comic Books?	101	(11)
Days of the Taliban	112	(7)
Access Denied	119	(7)
Source Notes	126	(6)
Picture Notes	132	(3)
Acknowledgments	135	(2)
Index	137