Letters to the Editor: A peaceful, diverse book festival: Ron DeSantis' nightmare?

To the editor: I wish Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state reportedly has the second-highest number of book bans in the country, had been at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. ("Book bans are on the rise in U.S. schools, fueled by new laws in Republican-led states," April 22)

He would have seen our country in all its diversity — young and old, straight and gay, cisgender and transgender, in almost every color of the rainbow, each of us created as the Bible tells us "in God's image" — wandering around the USC campus.

There, we met authors, heard them speak and asked them to sign our copies of their books, all in peaceful harmony.

Books that certainly included titles unwelcome in parts of Florida. Books that had ideas that didn't meet rigid right-wing conspiratorial standards. Some with ideas about making the world a better place, not a baking, pestilential, fossil-fueled hellhole of hate.

Daniel Fink, Beverly Hills

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To the editor: The book-banning movement seems to be limited to libraries, with little interest in banning the sales of certain titles in bookstores.

I suspect that book banning is, at least in part, an attack on libraries, an attack on being able to read books for free.

Publishers do not make much money when a school or public library orders one copy of a book. But if a book is banned, it is free publicity, and interest in reading (and buying) the book increases.

When Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was first banned by a library in 1885, he told his publisher, "That will sell 25,000 copies for us, sure."

Stephen Krashen, Malibu

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To the editor: Maybe DeSantis can use the land around Walt Disney World in Orlando to build his "Wayback Machine" amusement park.

There, people could experience Jim Crow segregation, no rights for women and the erasure of pertinent history from the school curriculum.

They could visit a place where books are banned by overzealous, power-seeking politicians. Where people are told whom they can love. Where judges drunk with power can decide what medication is allowed, even though they are not doctors or scientists.

I cannot imagine a world without H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury or all the other brilliant and imaginative writers of their ilk.

The past really is prologue, and we need to preserve the basic freedoms that so many worked hard to secure. You decide — the clock is ticking away.

Frances Terrell Lippman, Sherman Oaks

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.