My reading group chose this book, because we felt that there weren't many books out there that focused on the topic of censorship and the protection of children and innocence. But while she brings up many issues that shows censorship as troublesome, she addresses them in such a dry manner that it became harder to read as the book became more or a summary of all the court cases there have been regarding the issues. It would be a great book for a communication or law class, but for recreational reading, it was very difficult for us as readers to get to the end of the book.

Though the scholarly discussions of legal cases were trying (pardon the pun) to get through, they were worth the effort. They helped to dramatize the incredible amounts of time, energy, and emotion misplaced in the "harm to minors" protectionism racket. Due to her civil libertarian background, I was surprised to see her frequent attempts to present (or at least understand) both sides.

She points out that censorship itself may have "modeling effects, teaching authoritarianism, intolerance for unpopular opions, erotophobia, and sexual guilt." In her conclusion, she comes utterly to the point: "Censorship is an avoidance technique that addresses adult anxieties and satisfies symbolic concerns, but ultimately does nothing to resolve social problems or affirmatively help adolescents and children cope with their environments and impulses."

She revisits the virtues (for all of us, including children) of ambiguity, catharsis, and irony and says that the humorless overliteralism of so much censorship directed at youth "reduces the difficult, complicated, joyous, and sometimes tortured experience of growing up to a sanitized combination of adult moralizing and intellectual closed doors."

Bravo to this book. It's time that someone injected facts and logic into debates that primarily have been based on myths, fears, guesses, hopes, assumptions, and hysteria.

A previous reviewer wants to know why we don't have more data on how, say, pornography affects teenagers. One reason is that a controlled experiment would be nearly impossible: finding teenagers who haven't been exposed to any pornography is difficult enough, but for a scientist or social scientist to get approval from human review boards for the other half of the experiment (the teenagers that you're going to make sure have been exposed to plenty of pornography, to study its supposed effects) would be nearly impossible. But as the previous reviewer points out, we have a vast profusion of anecdotal evidence: pornography is widely available in Europe, which seems to have fewer of the supposedly pornography-related problems than does the United States. Second, since almost all teenagers voluntarily expose themselves to pornography, it's safe to observe that the vast majority of them suffer from no effects. Who are we protecting with laws prohibiting minors from obtaining pornography? Parents who cannot and will not deal with the fact that their 12-year-old son is always horny and quite probably already is sexually (if not emotionally or intellectually) an adult?

It doesn't take long to find errors in this book: just read the wholly inaccurate plot synopsis of The Last Picture Show, which is hardly obscure or difficult to find on video, and thus would have been easy to check.

Or how about the reference to a film receiving an R rating from the MPAA *several years prior to the establishment of the MPAA's rating system*?

Had this been a book of insights or analysis, a few such lapses might have been forgivable. But this is a dry reference work, with little interpretation by the author: and dry reference works require a higher standard of accuracy.

Even though this book brings important items out to light, the work itself is lacking and at times incomplete. It also has a strong sense of sensasionalism to it, think of watching NBC on daily news. The mention of films like The Great Dictator as items under censorship and controversy is in itself sensasionalistic, as opposed to Citizen Kane which is not mentioned at all, gives a better idea of how subtle and hyped this work is, besides, the constant reference to the De Grazia book by title Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment, makes it look like it is a copy of such book and no actual research was ever done to actualize, itemize or distinguish one text from the other. In short this book could be helpful on legal matters and cross reference from one legal case to another,since it does provide the actual case numbers and states where cases where trialed (picture yourself battling the Supreme court and having this book as a resource for enlightment on appeals, injunctions and motions), as far as film is concerned, I personally know of at least 125 more banned films within one decade alone and after the Hays Production Code or the Christian Legion of Decency to write a book on. Sova deserves credit for sticking it out with the female stars and the sex/erotic/porn oriented genre, but I for one think of film as a much broader medium in which the powers that be relish to exert their power to limit the means of expression whether this be of religious, sexual or political nature. Recommended for the high school reader with a strong suggestion to do further reading