The Higher Power of Scrotums: Book Drives Librarians Nuts! - Page 2

Under normal circumstances, it might have been years, possibly never, before I got around to reading this year's Newbery Award winner, but fortunately controversy made reading it a vital necessity. One does not have to go far into The Higher Power of Lucky to find the word. It's right there, on page one. Our heroine overhears a dramatic story about a man whose dog was bit on the scrotum by a rattlesnake.

If I'd thought the controversy was silly before, reading the context elevated it to positively asinine. We're not even talking about a human scrotum, but a canine one, similar to any one of the millions presently on display in living rooms, yards and parks across the country. I had assumed based on the level of hysteria that the scrotum was perhaps doing something vaguely offensive or scatological, instead of valiantly withstanding the attack of a rattler. Considering the average dog's propensity for doing embarrassing things to their privates, usually in public, this particular scrotum is positively heroic.

If the "controversy" had stopped with the Publisher's Weekly bit, it would have been easily shrugged off. Unfortunately, what with all the concern over troop surges and military hospital failures and where oh God where on Your Green Earth shall Anna Nicole be buried, it was apparently a slow news week, and the scrotum controversy went national. The New York Times and Newsweek both picked up the story, leading to an explosion in scrotal related newspaper stories.

Many of the articles, like the original PW one, failed to mention the fact that the scrotum in question belonged to a dog. The New York Times article did have one woman insisting that this was yet another example of the "Howard Stern" effect on our country, where people just use nasty words for no reason but to upset good decent people. Comments like this always reveal more about the commenter than the commentated (like maybe they haven't read the book), but what bothered me more was the thought that the people who actually wrote the articles had not read the book. How else to explain the inclusion of quotes like "you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature" without any kind of fact-based alternative perspective? Either the reporters hadn't read the book (which isn't that long, people) or else the reporters were more interested in la scandale than the truth, and we know that never happens.

Article Author: Kati Irons

I am a film and music librarian for a public library system. Like many of my kind, I suffer from RKS, or Random Knowledge Syndrome. These musings are the inevitable end result of that condition.

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