Nan Levinson

This is a collection of a dozen or so accounts of people who have experienced conflicts over their freedom of speech in America. It's divided into three sections: The first involves conflicts with government, including the story of a reporter in Puerto Rico who, after filming a controversial interview, was pressured to give up her tapes and reveal her sources, and that of a soldier who believes that his application for conscientious objector status during the first Gulf War caused him problems with the army in part because he spoke out against the war. The second section features people dealing with various attempts, mostly by private individuals or organizations, to censor art, from a teacher ordered to remove LGBT-themed books from the classroom to a former porn star dealing with controversy over her sexually explicit performance art. The final section consists of two stories that didn't really fit anywhere else, one involving a fireman who sued for his right to read Playboy at the firehouse while off-duty, the other about a company trying to prevent a doctor from publishing a paper about an occupational health hazard facing their workers.

I have to say, I found the first section difficult going. I kept thinking that these stories are important, and so I should find them interesting, but they weren't written in a particularly gripping way, and they tended to get bogged down in large amounts of detail. It also didn't help that this book was published in 2003 and so all the stories in it are from the 1990s or earlier, as the post-9/11, internet-dominated landscape of today's government-vs-free speech issues is so different from that of the 90s that there are real limits to its relevance.

Fortunately, as I moved past that and into the rest of the book, I found things more engaging. Levinson uses these stories as a springboard for discussion about free speech issues, and while her commentary doesn't necessarily include any groundbreaking insights, it does provide a lot of food for thought. Unsurprisingly, for someone moved to write an entire book on the subject, Levinson tends to be a pretty hardline advocate for free speech protections, but even she recognizes that many of these situations are thorny and complex. They certainly made me think more about the questions of what exactly constitutes speech, why speech should be protected, and just where and when it's reasonable to draw the line on what's acceptable.… (más)