On July 19, 2022, Amanda Jones, a middle-school librarian in a small rural town in southern Louisiana, attended a meeting of the board of the Livingston Public Library. During the public comment period, she spoke out against censorship. Jones immediately became the target of vicious, unrelenting smears and even death threats. Labeled a “groomer” and a “pedophile,” she was falsely accused of teaching anal sex to children. The preposterous lies, orchestrated by a group called Citizens for a New Louisiana, left her flabbergasted and distraught. “I never knew that it was possible to cry so much that your eyes bruise and swell shut,” she writes. “I never knew you could work yourself up to the point of not being able to draw breath in your lungs, and cry so much that your sinuses close for a solid week.”

That Librarian is an account of Jones’s ostracism from a community in which she has lived her entire life. Despite being honored by School Library Journal as Co-Librarian of the Year in 2021, she was vilified for daring to advocate for access to books. Her initial shock and grief are succeeded by anger and a determination to fight back against the vigilantes defaming her. “I decided to take matters into my own hands and reclaim my reputation,” she states. “I filed police reports, hired an attorney, and started the process of taking back my life.” In addition to the lawsuit against her maligners that, initially unsuccessful, is now working its way through appeals, her book is part of that effort.

Although Jones mocks the stereotype of the librarian as a prim and sober matron, she herself stares out at us from the cover of That Librarian standing in front of a book case and draped in a sensible red cardigan. Embarrassed to have voted for Donald Trump, she seems an unlikely national champion of intellectual freedom. Much of her book is written in the tone of a country bumpkin marveling over unexpected fame. The prose is unexceptional and the text repetitious, a magazine article inflated into a book. But the author’s courage and determination shine through the mud slung by her detractors.

Libraries, book stores, and school curricula have been overwhelmed by an epidemic of bibliophobia, of hostility toward books. The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom reports that 4,240 titles were challenged in the United States in 2023, an increase of 92% over 2022. The all-time leader in book banning is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which itself depicts a dystopian world in which Big Brother, like Citizens for a New Louisiana, denies the right to read. Other frequently banned books that are also themselves about tyranny include Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Would-be censors are currently obsessed with LGBTQ content, since Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, Geoge M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay lead the list this year. In a free society, no self-appointed censors should be telling the rest of us what we can read.

Not even the Library of Congress, which hold 32 million books, can house everything in print. But Jones’s point is that acquisition decisions ought to be made professionally, on the basis of the quality and relevance of the titles, not in response to ideological pressures. The attack on libraries is symptomatic of a general dumbing-down of American culture and a campaign to erase parts of that culture. To safeguard our ability to read freely and widely, we need more heroes like That Librarian.  

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That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones; New York Bloomsbury 2024, $29.99.