BANNED BOOKS WEEK & WINSTON CHURCHILL

This week is Banned Books Week in America and around the world. It is just appalling that such an occasion is still called for in this country, but there it is: the banning of books in American public schools, according to the New York Times, has “skyrocketed,” with over 10,000 individual titles removed in just this 2023-24 school year. That’s almost three times more removals than last year.

We must do something to stop this madness.

“Those who think we can become richer or more stable as a country by stinting education and crippling the instruction of our young people are a most benighted class,” Winston Churchill insisted in 1925. Churchill, of course, recognized very soon thereafter, as early as anyone, that Nazi censorship was the prelude to Nazi dictatorship.

It is worth noting that books by George Orwell, Voltaire, Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle have now been banned by both the Nazis and by numerous American school boards.  James Joyce’s Ulysses, moreover, has only been banned in America.

This would be funny, were it not so senseless, tragic and, ultimately, wickedly destructive. 

In honor of Banned Books Week, we are again donating one dollar from every sale we make this week to PEN America in support of their Banned Books Week fight for the freedom to read whatever you (and your children) want to read.

We also have decided to spotlight two books about Winston Churchill so unfairly negative and, in many ways, inaccurate, that we might easily be justified in banning them from Chartwell Booksellers. Instead we celebrate the right not to ban them but, rather, to make them available to everyone who wishes to read and decide for themselves.

CHURCHILL’S SHADOW: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a writer who has made a career out of disparaging Winston Churchill. This 600-page summation of all the negativity that Mr. Wheatcroft has mustered as a lifelong Churchill revisionist has no place on our shelves. And yet, it is here.

CHURCHILL’S WAR: Triumph and Adversity
By David Irving, a notorious Holocaust denier, who was actually convicted of this crime in a Vienna court in 2006. Irving first published his notorious“Churchill’s War” in 1987, a book that only Tucker Carlson could countenance, riven with debunked Nazi propaganda. This is the author’s 2001 expanded edition, published just after he lost his libel suit in London against an American professor who had called him in print: “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” Mr. Irving denied this too, and lost.

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Keep reading and fighting for the right to read.