How to Defend Books and Why: Book Bans and How We Fight Them

From Ginsberg’s Howl to libraries, from prisons to Palestine

You’re invited to the book revolution!

Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement. 

In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature. 

From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco’s City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who’ve stood up against them. Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance. Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller. He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other. 

Keep reading for an excerpt from Danny Caine’s How to Defend Books and Why, available now through our site or arriving on indie shelves near you on 6/2/26!

INTRODUCTION: BOOKS UNDER SIEGE

The Actual Hoax

On January 24, 2025, Donald Trump’s Department of Education (DOE) declared that it was ending “Biden’s Book Ban Hoax.”1 The defiant press release also announced that the DOE was dismissing 11 complaints about what it calls “so-called book bans.” The cases in question aren’t about banning books, according to the press release, but rather “a school district’s removal of age-inappropriate books from its libraries.” In describing its hasty review and dismissal of the cases (the press release came five days after Trump’s inauguration), the press release declares, “Attorneys quickly confirmed that books are not being ‘banned,’ but [rather] school districts, in consultation with parents and community stakeholders, have established commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials.” Here’s what those “commonsense processes” look like: In the 2021-2022 school year, PEN America reported 2,532 attempts to restrict access to certain books, most of which had been professionally reviewed for age appropriateness.2 In the next school year, that number ballooned to 3,362. Then, for the 2023-2024 school year, that number nearly tripled to 10,046, an easy all-time record for the number of attempts at banning books. But numbers, drastic as they are, are only one way to look at the crisis (which is a real crisis, despite what Trump’s DOE says).

In actual practice, here are a few ways these “commonsense processes” manifest: Hostile takeovers of school boards. Defunding public libraries. Turning school libraries into discipline centers. Grown adults humiliating and shouting at brave teenagers who are trying to give public comment at library board meetings. Individual parents bulk challenging hundreds of books at a time. Adults reading out-of-context passages into city council microphones to try to spook local politicians into banning books. People building websites with the explicit purpose of making this hostile and deliberately ignorant misreading possible. Mislabeling anything that even addresses sex as “pornography,” and the librarians who foster access to it as “groomers.” The Republican establishment funneling huge amounts of money into the so-called “grassroots” groups driving this effort, even while the groups claim that their money comes from T-shirt sales. Librarians being harassed, doxxed, made to fear for their safety. Underlying all this are two factors: first, a growing desire on the Right to eliminate public education altogether, replacing it with private Christian schools that nonetheless receive government funding. Second, nearly every book targeted by this well-organized and well-funded movement is either by a queer author, by a BIPOC author, or intended for queer or BIPOC readers.

Book bans are not the hoax. Rather, the hoax is the right-wing narrative that all this is happening to enshrine so-called “parents’ rights.” Another hoax: that this is only about books. Indeed, what we’ll call the book ban crisis is actually about the dismantling of secular education and the targeted elimination of identities that fall outside the Christian nationalist worldview. Any attempt to deny this? That’s the actual hoax.

The Quickly Unfolding Crisis

Admittedly, this book was difficult to write because there was simply so much happening while I was writing it. Every day brought some sort of news story about a new book ban, piece of legislation, or other attempt to curtail access to books. Just as it seemed like right-to-read crusaders had curbed the damage from the 2023 Texas legislative session, the 2025 session ramped up with even more damaging bills introduced. While I was beginning my edits, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor that allowed parents to opt their children out of school discussions of books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes. The activist organization Authors Against Book Bans called the decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor “a tragic failure for both the right to read and the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.”

Just to keep track of all this, let alone write a coherent book about it, felt impossible. When I asked Philomena about how she kept track of everything, she said that at times “My whole brain is just bill numbers, just rattling around in there and then trying to keep track of each bill’s status and peculiarities.” So, I suppose that’s one of the first points I’d like to make: This is happening everywhere, and it’s happening a lot. There are a lot of ways to curtail access to books, and the book banners are doing it all. Even if you think it’s all happening in Texas and Florida, I assure you that somewhere close to you, someone is attacking your freedom to read. I cannot provide an up-to-the-minute comprehensive index of all these assaults, for the simple reason that I’m turning in the final draft of this book more than six months before you’ll read it. Instead of a comprehensive tick-tock account, I’ll opt to tell representative stories that try to capture overarching truths of the crisis. In addition to reading these stories, I invite you to find the current data about where you are, as well as efforts to locally fight back.

Bash back against book bans in your community with How to Defend Books and Why, shipping now from Microcosm, available at your favorite local Microcosm dealer 6/2/26.