All Rise For The Honorable Perry T. Cook by Leslie Connor is an amazing book that deserves much praise. The main character, Perry T. Cook, is a perfectly regular kid… except for the fact that he was born in a jail because his mom is an inmate there. He’s lived there all his life, and the bullies at school use that as a way to tease Perry. But Perry will always have his friend Zoey Samuels at his side. It’s true… but not in the way Perry thinks. When Zoey’s stepdad—a law attorney named Thomas VanLeer, who pokes his nose into everything—finds out that Perry is living in a jail, he decides it is unacceptable. Thomas VanLeer has a plan, and it includes adopting Perry T. Cook and uprooting his life as a result. Can Perry save his mom and himself from being separated? This story is really made up of two plots with two settings: home and school. Perry just wants to get to his real home, the Blue River jail, with his mom and the rest of his family, the other inmates. But this plot slithers into the school plot: Perry’s school assignment. Perry has to write an essay or make some other form of project, and it has to be about his family. It’s the same assignment Perry’s class gets every year. Perry’s teacher is super nice, but she’s not going to give Perry a different topic for his presentation. Perry’s going to have to face the fact that his mother is in jail, and he hatches a plan to collect all of the inmates’ stories of how they got stuck in jail. Perry learns his mother’s story and begins to unravel a mystery surrounding it. While I recommend All Rise For The Honorable Perry T. Cook, the story also has several flaws. Some of the life stories are unrealistic. Mr. Krensky, for example, the grumpy, mean inmate, stole money and used it to buy himself a mansion and all sorts of fancy and expensive things. We have to question, knowing that this novel is realistic fiction, would this really happen? However, besides Mr. Krensky, the novel is pretty truthful in the matters of how many of these people are in jail because of need or accident. Mrs. DiCoco is a woman who hurt her back, got addicted to painkillers, and eventually began stealing money so that she could afford more. Mr. Rojas started an illegal gambling ring to get enough money to send his two daughters to college. It is true that United States prisons have more people in them than anywhere else in the world, even countries that have greater populations than we do. A lot of people in jail shouldn’t be there, and should instead have help. While this book addresses this, it addresses it without criticizing the idea of prisons, prison wardens, and other people like that, who make sure that the lives of people in prison are miserable. In All Rise For The Honorable Perry T. Cook, the warden is “kind,” and Perry’s mother eventually becomes the new prison warden after the old warden retires. This seems a bit ironic, seeing as Perry’s mother was an inmate; the oppressed become the oppressors. Overall, while reading The Honorable Perry T. Cook, I want you to enjoy the story while thinking about its problems and the entire world we live in, which forces people to do bad things and then puts them in a “correctional facility.” Still, The Honorable Perry T. Cook by Leslie Connor is an amazing book by an amazing author. All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook by Leslie Connor. Katherine Tegen Books, 2017. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process!
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Animal Farm and the Concept of Failed Socialist Utopia
Historians estimate that around twenty million perished under Stalin’s totalitarian socialist regime (Keller). Around 18-45 million died in China’s Great Leap Forward under Mao Zedong’s similarly structured dictatorship (SimpleHistory). Many more perished during his Cultural Revolution (Lowndes). Though similar to fascism in terms of death toll and suffering, communism is somehow interpreted as an egalitarian utopia, which is far from the truth. In Animal Farm, George Orwell presents a fascinating allegory of the rise of the Soviet Union and the dangers of communism. Through a simple fable, Orwell provides a detailed study of how absolute power corrupts and how dictatorships don’t ever work even if they have a populist basis. Any system that puts too much power into the hands of a few people is doomed to fail. Stalin leveraged Marx’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” to seize absolute power (Daugherty). Animal Farm’s central idea is that of a failed socialist utopia like the Soviet Union, with egalitarian socialist ideals, corrupted and twisted into something unrecognizable by power-hungry elites. Both Old Major and Karl Marx saw a fundamentally unjust system with flagrant exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoise and challenged the status quo, inciting many revolutions. Karl Marx believed that all of society’s production is carried out by the proletariat, but the bourgeoise steals the fruit of their hard labor and reaps all the benefits, or “for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work” (Marx, 21). Old Major endorses the same beliefs in the relationship between animals and humans, when he says “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself” (Orwell, 4). Karl Marx was against any divisions amongst the proletariat, including classism, nations, or religion, because he believed these differences would be further exploited by the bourgeoise. Old Major’s commandments are similarly structured stating that animals should never have any of the habits of the humans and should always be equal and united. In his speech, Old Major says “No animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal” (Orwell, 5). Both imagined a classless society free of private property, in which everyone received equal shares of the products that labor creates. They saw this as the ultimate and inevitable end result of society. The similarities between Old Major and Karl Marx also spill over to Napoleon and Stalin. While Stalin rose to power through lies, manipulation, and elimination of everyone who stood in his way (starting with Trotsky (Stuart)), Napoleon blazes a similar trail in Animal Farm with Snowball paying the price. Squealer is Napoleon’s mouthpiece, just like how all of the media in the Soviet Union were Stalin’s. Both Napoleon and Stalin controlled the flow of information and relied on propaganda to push their rhetoric, as propaganda is a key component of any authoritarian regime (McGregor). When the pigs stole all the milk and apples on the farm, Squealer justified it to the gullible animals by saying that “Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig” (Orwell, 15). This is a partial truth, as it’s necessary for the well-being of any animal. Though all animals are considered equal, Squealer also says that “We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples” (Orwell, 15). So, Squealer is using propaganda and fear to convince the other animals. Napoleon’s army of dogs is based on the Soviet secret police, who relied on fear to suppress all dissent and to establish a totalitarian regime that controlled every aspect of life in their society (Stuart). Napoleon and Stalin share many similarities, but Animal Farm is not an exact replica of the Soviet Union. Though Stalin collaborated with the capitalists in World War II, similar to how Napoleon makes friends with the farmers in Animal Farm, he never reverted Russia back to a tsardom or abandoned the communist rhetoric, while Napoleon completely strays from everything the ideology of animalism once stood for. The animal farm ends as a total failure because they never manage to build the windmill to industrialize the farm and their living standards never improve, but the Soviet Union rose to being a superpower that challenged the United States for many decades during the Cold War before it finally fell (SimpleHistory2, Stuart). Stalin’s collaboration with the allies was a temporary measure, and he later betrayed them, establishing socialist dictatorships in the territories he seized from Germany (SimpleHistory2). On the other hand, Napoleon colludes with the humans and even invites them to the farm for a game of poker to show his solidarity, causing some friction when “Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously” (Orwell, 60). The animal farm is permanently renamed to its pre-revolutionary name, signaling the abandoning of all founding principles. Napoleon announces in his speech that “the name ‘Animal Farm’ has been abolished. Henceforward the farm is to be known as ‘The Manor Farm’—which is its correct and original name” (Orwell, 59). All commandments are erased except for that of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” George Orwell captures the giddy rise and inevitable corruption of utopian socialist ideals in a way that can be understood by everyone in a cute but gritty allegory. It’s horrifying to see the transformation of what starts out
Conservatives Want to Ban All My Favorite Books, by Emma, 9
Something I know from personal experience is that Melissa, by Alex Gino, is an amazing book that has been praised widely for its inclusion of the LGBTQ community. In 2016, it was awarded the Stonewall Children’s Book award. The book is about a transgender girl who wants to be Charlotte in her class production of Charlotte’s Web, but is not allowed to because her teacher says she is a “boy.” The novel used to be called George, but people complained that Alex Gino was deadnaming their character, and the title was changed to Melissa. While a lot of people think that Melissa is a great book that addresses the problems that transgender kids face, it has been banned by many school districts. The book has been moved up and down the American Library Association’s Top Ten Most Challenged Book list, from number three to number five to number one on the list, before becoming the first most banned book ever. The Wichita, Kansas public school system banned the book from its district libraries, and when the book was included in the Oregon Battle of the Books, two school districts removed their students from the competition in retaliation. Those critical of the novel said the book had “sexual content,” of which there is none whatsoever, thereby mixing up sex with gender identity. Some critics went as far as to say that Melissa just did not go with or reflect “community values.” However, it is important to learn about real issues like this in the world, and these “community values” should be expanded to include all people. Some people simply disliked the novel because they thought a book about a transgender girl was not appropriate for children. Children should know about the real world, and they shouldn’t be banned from learning about what actually happens. Insisting that young people shouldn’t read these books signifies that transgender people or members of the broader LGBTQ community are somehow “wrong” and that their existence should be hidden. While this news may be outrageous, this is not the only recent book to be banned by schools. New Kid, by Jerry Craft, is also under the status of “banned.” While Melissa was banned because it was about a transgender character, New Kid, a graphic novel about a Black boy from the Bronx who attends a school full of rich, white kids, was banned for bringing up the subject of racism. New Kid was banned from Texas schools after a parent had complained that it promoted “critical race theory,” which is not actually taught in public schools. What conservatives call “critical race theory” is actually just the history of racism in the United States. According to someone from the far right, the words “white people owned slaves” is critical race theory. Right-wingers are upset about people knowing the truth, because the truth is embarrassing, infuriating, and could very well help overturn the whole system. As I move on, you will begin to see a pattern. Books that are banned are banned for the fact that reading about the topics they contain makes certain people “uncomfortable.” Another banned book, The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, is a novel about a Native American boy living on a reservation struggling at his new all-white school. This book was banned in the Stockton, Missouri School District because of violence, bad language, and sexual content. Many banned books address issues that conservatives don’t want to address. The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-time Indian is about racial injustice. In one scene from the novel, the main character punches a white boy for bullying him. Critics of this book claim this promotes violence, and, while this scene is indeed violent, it shows what the main character’s school is like and the violence that racism produces, and it impacts how the rest of the story works. This book was also banned for bad language, but the idea of swear words just circles around random words which have somehow been considered as “bad.” This book was also banned for “sexual references,” which are probably the scenes where the character talks about women’s bodies. While this is problematic in some ways, the book uses this to expand upon the character, and just because you dislike something in a book, doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be allowed to read it. The way this novel addresses these topics is realistic, but its right-wing critics use the novel’s references to racism and violence as a jumping off point to challenge it. All of the challenges to these books either mix up terms or want to suppress certain topics. In Melissa, critics confuse sex and gender. In New Kid and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, critics want to suppress conversations about racism and violence. Why do we need to tell young people that a topic is not appropriate for them, or that they can’t read a certain book? Why do some adults think that young people don’t have the ability to read difficult texts and think about their meaning? If they are concerned that young people will struggle with understanding these books on their own, all the more reason to teach them in schools. Books should not be banned; they should be discussed. I am nine years old, but I don’t shy away from books with demanding content. Important questions and issues should not be hidden from young people because they might find them challenging or confusing. All books worth reading require discussion; no book requires banishment.
