I read about it at Althouse:
I don’t know if Kristol knows what he’s telling us we need to “be,” but he’s upset that “pursuant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to purge so-called DEI content from military libraries and classrooms, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was removed, along with 380 other books, from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library.”
Kristol asserts, despite not having read the book, that “‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ is not ‘DEI content.’ It’s a quintessentially American autobiography—a popular and important one. It’s a book a student at the Academy might want to read for his or her education, or for pleasure.”
Why would the story of a particular individual represent the promotion of the DEI agenda?
Althouse goes on to add that a commenter of hers observed that perhaps this was a case of malicious compliance from some anti-Trump holdover. That’s certainly possible. It’s also possible that in general books that aren’t especially related to naval or military matters are being pulled.
The reason I’m writing about this is twofold, however. The first is that pulling a book from a library or a school isn’t “banning” it or making it so that students can’t or shouldn’t read it, but stories in the MSM about Republicans doing that are common in order to depict them as racist troglodytes. The second is a point about the book itself, which is certainly not a DEI polemic or a polemic of any sort: it’s a coming-of-age story. Because the protagonist, Angelou, was born in 1928 and raised mostly in a small segregated town in Arkansas, of course racism is part of the story. But to me – and I read the book when it first came out in 1969, and even own it – it wasn’t the main part at all.
I was going to write a description of the book here, and then I realized – as often happens – that I’ve passed this way before. Here’s the post I wrote about it in 2014, on the occasion of Angelou’s death. Summary version: it’s a great book. Some people don’t like memoirs, but I happen to like them and this one is excellent, touching, and well-written, and was especially powerful if read when it first came out. It also has the single most compelling and sensitive description of child sexual abuse I’ve ever read. Here’s what I wrote about that in 2014:
The rape that occurs [to the author] later, at the hands of Angelou’s mother’s live-in boyfriend when 8-year-old Maya and her brother have been sent back to St. Louis to live with her, is heartbreakingly rendered. Described from the child’s viewpoint, it somehow manages to depict something that has rarely been conveyed so well: how the child’s starvation for paternal affection can set up the neediness that makes him/her vulnerable, how wily and then how brutal the rapist can be, and how a sensitive child might react. In Angelou’s case, when her uncles took revenge and murdered the rapist, she felt that her talking about the rape had caused his death, and so she decided to stop talking entirely …
Angelou wrote many more memoirs besides Caged, and over the years I’ve read quite a few of them. They’re of interest to anyone interested in Angelou’s life, and they constitute a story of overcoming great odds. But none of them even remotely touches the heights of her first book. I’ve often thought that many writers have one book in them that they must write, are driven to write, and that for Angelou that book was Caged. The rest was commentary.
UPDATE 10 PM:
Apparently Kristol got his facts wrong. See this:
I looked at the list. It is NOT Maya Angelou’s book that is being pulled. It is a collection of “critical essays” about her book. The full title is “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Critical Essays.” edited by Mildred Mickle. It’s was the “edited by…” That clued me in. Because I KNOW that Angelou’s book didn’t credit an editor. That, and the 2010 publication date. I looked it up. It’s academic critical essay crap.
If the idiots at the New York Times would bother to actually look up what was being pulled…
I also suspect a little “malicious compliance” by whomever typed up the list. They were sly about not including the full, correct title of the ACTUAL book. (The only thing Mildred edited about “caged birds” is this collection of essays.)
