A $500,000 gift to fight banning of books in U.S.

The chief executive of Penguin Random House will donate at least $500,000 of his own money to PEN America, a free-speech group, to fight book banning in the U.S. Of the bans and restrictions Markus Dohle told The New York Times, “That is dangerous.

It’s unimaginable. And it is very urgent, and it ties into the future of our democracy.” The Dohle Book Defense Fund will help pay for lawyers, consultants, and public campaigns and media events.

Dohle was raised in postWorld War II Germany and “has worked in a number of restrictive environments, including Poland in the 1990s, Russia in the early 2000s and today in China,” the Times said.

PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel: “In previous times, we’d deal with a few of these situations a year. Now we’re dealing with new challenges and bans every week, and at a much larger scale.”

Related: The British newspaper The Guardian has, online, a 1933 article and detailed list of authors whose books were banned from German public libraries or deemed “objectionable”: tinyurl. com/1933blacklist

Obituary notes:

P.J. O’Rourke, political satirist, was 74. Among his 20-plus books: “Parliament of Whores” (1991); “Holidays in Hell” (war correspondence, 1989); and ”How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016” (2018). (There he remarked in an author’s note, “The American public wasn’t holding either political party in much esteem. What the American public was holding was its nose.”) ... Valerie Boyd, author of an acclaimed biography of Zora Neale Hurston, “Wrapped in Rainbows,” was 58. The cause was pancreatic cancer. Boyd also edited a collection of Alice Walker’s journals, “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire,” due in April. (NYT, Washington Post)