Tag Archives: Song of Solomon

Schools Cowed by the Religious Right

By Robin Bates | Published: April 4, 2011

Holly Blumner had a vision. A member of the St. Mary’s theater department, Holly wanted to stage Susan Zeder’s Mother Hicks, a adolescent girl’s identity quest, and then take it into area schools. This post is the story about how rightwing groups have so terrified our schools that the vision died.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged adolescence, censorship, Huck Finn, Mark Twain, Mother Hicks, Susan Zeder, Toni Morrison | Comments closed

Is Father-Son Conflict Inevitable?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2009

I had an interesting conversation with my two sons yesterday as we drove them and my daughter-in-law to the Portland airport, marking the beginning of the end of our summer vacation. The conversation began with me wondering why there weren’t works of literature that accurately capture the kind of father-son relationship that I feel that […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Defoe, David Copperfield, fathers and sons, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Henry IV, Homer, Human Stain, Lawrence Sterne, Nicholas Nickleby, Odyssey, Oedipus, Oliver Twist, Philip Roth, Road, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Tristram Shandy | Comments closed

The Favorite Books of American Presidents

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2009

I’ve had fun discussing the reading of Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas over the last couple of days, and while I’ve come up dry on further posts about the Supreme Court and literature, it has given me the idea of periodically dipping into reading stories of other political figures. I’ll start a list here, beginning […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Abraham Lincoln, Al Gore, Albert Camus, Barack Obama, Bible, Bill Clinton, Book of Job, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Cremation of Sam McGee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edward Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Alexander, Eric Carle, From Russia with Love, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George W. Bush, George Washington, Ian Fleming, James Dickey, John Kennedy, Joseph O'Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Mr. Flood's Party, Netherworld, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Proverbs, Richard Corey, Richard Nixon, Richard Sheridan, Robert Frost, Ronald Reagan, School for Scandal, Shooting of Dan McGrew, Stendahl, Teddy Roosevelt, The Red and the Black, The Stranger, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Toni Morrison | Comments closed

Empowering Conversations about Race

By Robin Bates | Published: May 8, 2009

As I look back over this past week of entries, what conclusions can I draw? First, that literature can serve the cause of race relations in this country. The friendship between Huck and Jim spurred my dreams of black-white friendship when I was a child being raised in segregated schools in the south, and it […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged black anger, censorship, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, race relations, Toni Morrison, white fantasies | Comments closed

When I Defended Song of Solomon

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2009

I think it was 13 years ago or so when I read in our county newspaper that a high school student was objecting to a book he had been assigned to read in an Advanced Placement English class. The book was Toni’s Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning Song of Solomon, a book on the Advanced Placement list, and […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged censorship, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, power of literature, Toni Morrison | Comments closed