(Music)
Hi! My name is Cassaundra Bash, and I'm
actually going to do an Ancilla Pick--I'm doing it a little differently
because I'm not interviewing anyone.
This is my Ancilla Pick. 
I have chosen
Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451"
in honor of Banned Books Week
and the
ironic part about that is that 
this is a book about censorship
and lo and behold, it made it onto
the Banned Books Week list.
"Fahrenheit 451" addresses
censorship in a unique way.
Instead of having the
strict government
taking over--
and there is an element of government censorship in it--
but what Bradbury actually
really is trying to impress upon
his readers is that 
it doesn't take a government banning
books to remove books from shelves.
All it takes is people who
stop fighting to defend the books.
He's imagined a world where
people become so offended so easily 
by every little thing that
they start removing books left and right 
and banning them officially
until there really is basically
no books left,
not even the Bible,
because the Bible is offensive to some.
There are, believe it or not, people who
find the Bible offensive,
just like there are people who find the Koran offensive, or
any other book
that has anything controversial
because controversy is everywhere.
And, in this book,
Bradbury addresses
what would happen if
society had
no access to information.
Even the news is controversial.
Think about what's covered in the news, and
think about what would happen
if we had no news,
no books,
no information available to us.
Well, society would stagnate.
You need that controversy to make changes,
so to speak--
to have dialogue,
to express your differences.
There is no diversity in
Ray Bradbury's book
because there's no controversy--everybody has
been trained to think alike. The book is--
I'll give you a brief description of the book--
to get you hooked so you'll read it--
the book is about
a man named Montag.
He's a fireman,
and firemen in this world do not put out
fires, they start them.
They set fire to books.
Books being illegal,
they seek and destroy.
Houses do not burn anymore, 
so firemen have to
use a special lighter fluid and they will burn the entire
house to make sure they get
every single book
that may have been squirrelled away.
So, Montag is one of these firemen,
and one day he becomes curious and
he finds a stash of books
and he actually smuggles
one out, 
and starts to read it, 
and he becomes hooked.
He realizes what's in these books
and he realizes how important it can be.
And he finds that
there are others who 
have hidden away
and who are 
basically closet readers.
Unfortuantely for him, the Chief, the 
Fire Chief, figures it out, and
he's warned lightly,
but he ignores that warning,
and then he becomes a fugitive.
He's on the run.
They set out upon him an
electronic Hound, 
and the Hound, his one
purpose is to--
I should say "it's" one purpose
because it is a robot--
it's one purpose is to
kill anyone who is a fugitive,
and it has a hypodermic needle
with a drug in it that will kill you.
And so he has to avoid the Hound, 
and the firemen, and to
make his escape
and find someplace safe to survive.
I'm not going to tell you if he does or doesn't, 
because then you
wouldn't read the book! (Laughter)
So I want you to go and
check out this or one of the other very fine 
books out on display for 
Banned Books Week.  
We'll have them up for another 
probably couple of weeks at least--
probably mid-October at the very earliest
 is when I will take these down.
They've been up for awhile and I know a few of you 
have read some, so keep it up!
This is Cassaundra Bash, 
and this has been another Ancilla Pick.
