CENSORS AT WORK

A book that will matter on the issue of censorship: Robert Darnton’s provocative and insightful Censors at Work. Darnton takes us beyond easy moral judgments by exploring how censors actually did their work in three cultures: Old Regime France, British India, and Communist East Germany.

Darnton confronts the big issues of censorship not through abstract analysis but by exploring the actual workings of three cultures in which the state sought to control the power of print. He shows censorship to be not simply a one-sided repression by the state but an ongoing, multi-layered negotiation between censors, authors, officials, booksellers, readers, and other makers of culture. Offering no absolutes, no studies in right and wrong, Darnton doesn’t shirk moral judgments – he believes in First Amendment rights – but he doesn’t apply that belief in his understanding of the past. Instead we find in his pages all strains of humanity: wandering minstrels, devious peddlers, seditious missionaries, and smart, talented people whose work as censors occupied a middle ground between state authroity and individual expression. The material on Communist East Germany is especially important, drawn directly from new research in the archives of the Communist party, and contains revelations on the lives and work of important German authors such as Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym. Robert Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard University. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, election to the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal conferred by President Obama. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the London Review of Books, as well as a trustee of the New York Public Library. His 1996 book The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France won the National Book Critics circle Award.