Brendan’s Alternate Tagline for A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls:
These dangers are so quaint compared to today.
Quick synopsis:
The story of Margaret Anderson, a publisher who battled literary censorship in the early 1900s.
Fact for Non-History People:
The first book ban in the U.S. was Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan in 1637.
Fact for History Nerds:
Florida currently has the longest book ban list.
My Take on A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls:
Cat murder. Sleeping judges. Great Lake camping. A cult leader. More evictions than you can shake a stick at.
These are just a sampling of some of the wild aspects of Adam Morgan’s superlative A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls. The book was certainly a danger to my free time because I knocked this one out in two sittings. Morgan nailed it.
I love my history to give me the full story. Not a hero’s story, but a human story which shows warts and all. Morgan’s book tells the story of Margaret C. Anderson who was a delight to read about, but I probably wouldn’t have been a huge fan of her in real life. However, we are all deeply indebted to her assault on censorship using her magazine The Little Review in the early 1920s. She was complex and deserved having her whole story told.
Morgan follows Anderson’s life and it quite frankly needed no embellishment even if Anderson herself is caught quite a few times doing just that in her memoirs. It’s these little details that Morgan homes in on which make the book such a fun jaunt. I was completely unfamiliar with Anderson, but I was aware of the efforts in the U.S. and U.K. to censor James Joyce’s Ulysses when it was first created. I didn’t realize that Anderson was the point of the spear in bringing the highly controversial novel to the public in a serialized form.
Anderson isn’t the only character who jumps off the page. Ezra Pound is another person who gets his time to shine, even if he is the second worst person in the entire book. I’ll let the reader find the worst one. Joyce is also here along with Anderson’s many love interests throughout her life. As if putting Ulysses out when decency laws were at their most stringent wasn’t enough, Anderson was also a lesbian when that was also not mainstream.
Morgan’s prose is pitch perfect throughout. He knows when to make a quip, when to point out that his characters are being misleading or hypocritical, and when to sit back and let the story happen. Anderson’s court debacle is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I have read in years. All of these ingredients make for rich and full fleshed out characters. As I said, there are many people in this book who might not be saints, but they are damn fun to read about.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Atria Books.)
Verdict:
Absolutely exceptional. Buy it here!
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