Banned in the U.S.A.

Move over, Harry Potter -- a couple of penguins have knocked you off the top of the Banned Books List.

J.K. Rowling's popular series of books about the young wizard had led the American Library Association's Banned Book List of "challenged" books for the first five years of the 21st century.

But in the latest survey, covering 2006, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell's "And Tango Makes Three," a children's book about two male penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo who hatch and nurture a baby penguin, rose to the top of the list.

The 2006 list and other books will be highlighted around the country during this week's Banned Books Week, an annual "celebration of the freedom to read."

Judith Krug, director of the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom and the compiler of the Banned Books List since the project began in 1982, says the list represents "challenges" -- or formal, written complaints -- filed with a public library, school library or bookstore requesting that books be removed because of their content or appropriateness. Krug says that from her experience, the 546 challenges her office heard about in 2006 represent only 20 percent to 25 percent of the actual number of challenges nationwide.

While past Banned Books Lists have included such famous works as John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," and the 2006 list features Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved," Krug points out that this year's list "has a lot of coming-of-age stories for young people." These include the "Alice" series of books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, which have been attacked for their sexual content and language, and Chris Crutcher's "Athletic Shorts," in which teenage athletes deal with such issues as racism and homophobia.

Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, a co-sponsor of Banned Books Week, is not surprised about the changes in the 2006 list.

"The list kind of reflects the current controversies that are going on," Finan says. "There's a constant series of complaints about violence or profanity or sexual explicitness.

"The fact that there are a couple of books on the list this year that are so-called 'pro-homosexual' reflects the debate that's currently going in society as to how homosexuals should be treated," adds Finan, the author of the recently published "From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America."

"So it's not a surprise that new subjects come to the top every once in a while, or that at one time, Harry Potter headed the list," Finan says. "That reflected frequent challenges by conservative Christians to Halloween imagery and things like that."

In one prominent case involving J.K. Rowling's books, Krug says, the school board in Cedarsville, Ark., "removed Harry Potter books from all the school libraries within their district. We did go to court and the court restored the books."

According to Krug, "individual parents" continue to be "the primary mover to ban or challenge books. They become concerned with their own children first, and then by extension, with everyone's children.

"My feeling is," Krug says, that "your rights end where my nose begins and I am more than capable of determining what's appropriate for me, my children and, in this case, my grandchildren."

Pat Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, a book publishers trade association and a co-sponsor of Banned Books Week, notes that there is more organized opposition to particular books from conservative Christian organizations than before.

"James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and people like that love to tell people what it is they should be offended by," says Schroeder, who was a Democratic member of Congress from Colorado for 24 years before working with the publishers association. "They're protecting the cultural values and God, motherhood and apple pie."

About the writer:

• The Bee's Bruce Dancis can be reached at (916) 321-1112 or bdancis@sacbee.com.