North Shore Times (New Zealand)
Banning books just too simplistic
Just as my family’s numerous new arrivals have brought untold joy, they’ve forced a flurry of child-proofing.
In the past year or so, various houses have had various dangers addressed. Cat bowls are now on benches, rubbish bins are tucked away and appliances are strictly switched off at the wall because holy hell did you read that story about that poor poppet? Because I did, and now I can’t get it out of my head.
Anyway, with each new milestone, more potential misfortunes are revealed, which is why I’ve been preparing for the future.
But although I’ve been turfing out the cat, tying shut the pantry and stashing the you-know-what well out of reach it seems I’ve missed the most dangerous thing of all: the bookshelf.
While I’ve been putting foam stoppers on doors, New Zealand’s book-slingers are future-proofing for fear the culture war targeting books is heading this way.
Arguments about what our children are reading have been around for ages, of course.
Adults have long cancelled Harry Potter’s author, changed Dr Seuss and rewritten Roald Dahl, but all of this is old news.
Now, librarians and teachers are preparing to defend books about same-sex couples and gender identity; reading material some lobby groups believe will warp young minds. And, while it’s tempting to downplay their power, these paranoid weirdos have form.
In the US, demands to ban books have risen 38% in the past year, the highest level ever recorded, just as it’s been reported more than 1600 books were banned from school libraries during the country’s 2021-22 school year.
Of those books, 41% included LGBTQ themes, protagonists or prominent characters while 40% included people of colour. Books with issues of racism and rights were also among the victims.
In Aotearoa, parents are being encouraged to question library and school policies regarding sexuality and gender.
One of those groups, Family First, succeeded in getting the award-winning young adult novel Into The River banned in 2015.
All this has led The Library Association to develop a tool kit supporting libraries with any challenges as to what’s on their shelves. Still, some educators are nervous, and they should be.
Everyone has the right to challenge a book, just as some books must be banned. In 2021 there were nearly 1300 banned or restricted books in New Zealand; the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto and a manual for manufacturing P among them.
Yet what’s being targeted now aren’t topics of terror or clandestine chemistry but books for kids and young folks. And while opposers would cloak themselves in morality, they’re typically rabid mobs refusing reason and personally hounding those disagreeing with them.
Also, they’re just wrong – books can shape, move and motivate children, but only so far.
Take me, for example; having grown up on The Famous Five and illicit readings of the
Marquis de Sade, the reckonings would have seen me become a bike-riding sadomasochist with a penchant for picnics.
Nonsense, obviously, because only one of the three pastimes has ever piqued my interest, let alone held it for long.
Seriously though, this socalled culture war isn’t really about books, but lives. That’s because it’s not the writing these groups want erased, it’s the people that they don’t agree with.
Thankfully, I don’t believe New Zealanders will allow the sickness plaguing the States to gain any further foothold here. Even so, I’ll be keeping a close eye on that list of our banned books just in case any happen to be missing from my own shelves.
Keeping kids safe is a work in progress after all.
James Croot
‘‘My world is getting smaller. If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured, or a pickle.’’
As his book titles have suggested, it’s the ‘‘incurable optimism’’, subversive humour and frank honesty of 1980s and ‘90s Hollywood star Michael J. Fox in the face of a progressive, degenerative, incurable disease that has really struck a chord with people around the globe.
It also makes this endlessly inventive, entertaining, enlightening and yes, emotional documentary one of the year’s must-see movies.
Director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, He Called Me Malala) has meticulously crafted, but with a pitch-perfectly light touch, a potent combination of archival footage and modern-day interviews that help drive a dual narrative of the Edmonton-born actor’s rise to becoming the boy prince of Hollywood (‘‘I was bigger than bubblegum,’’ he laughs) and, as he puts it, ‘‘the cosmic price he’s paid for that success’’.
Particularly striking and effective is the extensive use of clips from Fox’s film and TV projects (everything from Family
Ties to Spin City and The Secret of My Success to The Hard Way) to covey emotion and reflect, particularly visually, the stories and feelings Fox is also projecting via voice-over.
Yes, inspired by his four bestselling memoirs (particularly 2020’s No Time Like the Future : An Optimist Considers
Mortality), this is very much his story in his own words.
You’ll learn how his greatest skill as a child was his ability to run away from any potential bully, how his parents supported the budding thespian’s desire to shift to the bright lights, big city of Tinseltown (‘‘If you’re going to be a lumberjack, you may way as well go to the forest,’’ his Dad apparently said) and how he was so ill-equipped to live on his own in the early years there that, ‘‘I washed my hair with Palmolive and my dishes with Head and Shoulders’’ and ‘‘Ronald McDonald was my exclusive nutritionist’’, before money became so tight that he lived off jam packets and sold off his sectional couch section-bysection.
Of course, there are plenty of pre-production and on-set anecdotes about his time on his big break – the TV sitcom Family Ties – and especially those crazy three-and-a-half months when he survived on very little sleep as he ‘‘moonlighted’’ as the replacement star for a little time-travel comedy called Back to the Future.
However, it’s his candidness about his struggle to handle the resulting fame, his confusion as to what was happening to his body when his pinkie first became ‘‘auto-animated’’ and the lengths he went to try to keep it under control – and a secret – so he could continue his career, that provide the greatest pull and mostengrossing viewing.
That – and his self-effacing, upbeat humour in his on-camera discussions with Guggenheim. ‘‘Is this the sad sack story of Michael J. Fox, who gets a debilitating disease – and it crushes him?’’ the director asks him at one point. ‘‘Yeah, that’s boring,’’ Fox instantly replies.
‘‘I’m not pathetic, I’ve got a lot of shit going on,’’ he adds, later comparing himself to a cockroach, given his seeming indestructibility, despite damaging falls essentially now being a regular part of his life.
Like the equally brilliant Val and the criminally stillunavailable-to-see-in-New
Zealand Introducing, Selma Blair, this offers both heart-rending and inspiring viewing.