‘That Librarian,’ by librarian Amanda Jones, reviewed - The Washington Post

In her book “That Librarian,” Amanda Jones shares the story of what happened to her when she stood up against censorship.

Review by Christopher Myers

August 27, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. EDT

Amanda Jones deserves a better subtitle for her new book, “That Librarian.” The anodyne “The Fight Against Book Banning in America” fails to capture the flavor or thrust of this intensely personal and often harrowing book. Please allow me, then, to offer Jones’s publisher a few suggestions for a more accurate (and compelling) subtitle for the eventual paperback edition of the book: “The Memoir and Manifesto of a Freedom Fighter,” “Dispatches From the Trenches of America’s Culture War,” “Jousting With Trolls, Telling My Story, and Defending the Freedom to Read.”

Any of these would be better. This is, after all, a book that begins with a death threat leveled at Jones because ... she opposed censorship in her local public libraries in rural Louisiana. Jones’s fortitude in the face of such intimidation, and her subsequent work as a spokeswoman for libraries and library patrons, make for an important and engrossing story.

Jones, a middle-school librarian in Watson, La., first ran afoul of right-wing activists when she testified at a meeting of the library board of Livingston Parish (the Louisiana equivalent of her local county) in July 2022. Her testimony, printed in full at the end of the book, was a measured and cogent argument for allowing public libraries to follow their own well-established policies in creating and curating balanced, broad collections of books and other materials. “All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves in our PUBLIC library collection,” she said that evening. “Censoring and relocating books and displays is harmful to our community, but will be extremely harmful to our most vulnerable — our children.”

Some content could not be imported from the original document. View content ↗

Within a few weeks of her testimony, right-wing activists (primarily from an organization with the Orwellian name Citizens for a New Louisiana) had pilloried Jones online, falsely accusing her of, among other things, peddling pornography to children and advocating the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds. Then came the death threat.

The tactics used against Jones and her parish’s libraries will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to political discourse or the media in the last decade, and particularly to anyone who has tracked the assaults on public and school libraries in recent years. The tactics are four-pronged: 1) decontextualize quotations or excerpts from books; 2) launch relentless and ruthless personal attacks from the safety and relative anonymity of social media; 3) invoke the safety of children as a rationale for censorship; and 4) lie shamelessly.

Jones documents the painful personal effects of these tactics — she saw several friendships crumble, and at one point in the middle of the crisis she had to take a leave of absence from her job to safeguard her mental health. But she also recounts her decision to fight back, filing a civil suit charging her attackers with defamation and becoming an unofficial national spokeswoman for the freedom to read.

Jones has maintained her sense of humor through this ordeal, and that humor leavens what is at times a difficult read. In response to right-wing claims that she and other librarians and teachers are indoctrinating children with liberal worldviews, Jones writes, “If I had the ability to indoctrinate children, I would indoctrinate them to be kind to one another, return their library books on time, and stop putting their chicken nuggets from the cafeteria in the book-return box.”

Jones is at her best when pulling back from her own struggles to offer a wider view of the current landscape of library challenges, and of the importance of libraries in communities and public schools. She forcefully argues that libraries, especially public libraries, must be as inclusive as possible in the books they offer patrons, and she points out that most of the current challenges are aimed at books with authors and characters of color or who are LGBTQ+.

And she sees a larger agenda at play in the attacks on libraries. “This is a huge movement ... well funded and well coordinated,” she writes. “It is about marginalizing and erasing cultures and groups of people, it is about defunding public institutions, it is about dumbing down society for a more easily led population, and it is about using libraries for political gain. At the end of the day, the pro-censorship movement is about privatizing education and privatizing libraries for a group of people who are seeking to line their pockets.”

Jones is also adept at pointing out the hypocrisy of pro-censorship activists. She identifies, for example, the paradox that right-wing activists are at pains to protect children from certain books but refuse to take any significant steps to protect those same children from the next school shooting. She mentions her “gal pal Val,” a local elected official who “loves to talk about keeping kids safe in libraries” but “gives an AK-15 as a door prize at campaign fundraisers.” (If there is one quibble with this brave book, it is the casual, almost conversational style of Jones’s writing, which is occasionally clunky and recursive.)

Jones ends the book with a helpful and clearly organized tool kit for citizens who want to support and defend their public and school libraries: “Start small and point out lies and hypocrisy with your family and friends. ... You don’t have to show up with signs of protest. Standing in solidarity by reaching out ... and showing up just to be a presence, can be supportive.” It’s the perfect conclusion to her courageous story. Because while the book makes clear the importance of libraries, what it makes even more clear is the importance of conscientious citizens, like Jones, willing to speak up and stand up for their libraries.

Christopher Myers is a retired high school librarian and reference librarian who lives in Portland, Ore.

That Librarian

The Fight Against Book Banning in America

By Amanda Jones

Bloomsbury. 288 pp. $29.99

More from Book World

Love everything about books? Make sure to subscribe to our Book Club newsletter, where Ron Charles guides you through the literary news of the week.

Check out our coverage of this year’s Pulitzer winners: Jayne Anne Phillips won the fiction prize for her novel “Night Watch.” The nonfiction prize went to Nathan Thrall, for “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.” Cristina Rivera Garza received the memoir prize for “Liliana’s Invincible Summer.” And Jonathan Eig received the biography prize for his “King: A Life.”

Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too. If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024. And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

A note to our readers

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.