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Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

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Parents: Do you really want your children coming home from school excited to tell you about a new book they read that involves the slaughtering of a whole family? In Cold Blood is a book that gives perspective to the horrific realities of american crime. After the Clutter murder took place in 1959, Capote journeyed to holcomb, Kansas where he journaled the feelings and thoughts of those in the town when the crime took place. His gathered information altogether amounted to the creation of the nonfiction novel. Today however, the battle continues between which side is more important: the protection of child innocence or the exploration of new information. In today’s society for children, exposing inappropriate subject matters at a much younger …show more content…

In today’s world kindness and hope should be prevalent. Not violence. Books that students reads should be like the non human forms of role models for students. Books have the power to teach us things we never knew and they have the ability to expand our horizons in many ways. Consequently, books such as In Cold Blood should not hold a place in school shelves because of its intense imagery that for children can be quite terrifying. As a first hand account of this, author Steve Earle of BBC News writes in his article “The Book That Changed Me” about his personal experience of the gut wrenching book. Earle describes that “my ghoulish nine-year-old-self had been awakened by a chilling revelation” (Earle). Earle reads In Cold Blood as an innocent child and it turned his mind to a whole new perspective that nine year olds should not have to go through. Not only are these books exposing students to inappropriate subject matters, but subject matters that children of young ages don’t understand and their minds have not matured enough to understand. In the book George by Alex Gino, Gino comments that “Sexuality was not appropriate at elementary levels” (Hauser), to highlight that students read material at school that may contradict the beliefs they are taught at home. Most children don’t understand the capacity of the topic at which they are reading, which essentially makes the meaning of the book

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