Gurdon

small town of Gurdon, Arkansas. Lacking in many of things including a grocery store, it is not necessarily difficult to assume the town is dull just by the looks of the uninhabited streets running through the heart of the city. Luckily with my seventeen years of being a local, I am able to understand that these false accusations just scrape the surface of the deeper aspects that actually make the town that I’m proud to call home so rare. Searching all the things that define Gurdon as home to everyone

Some might claim the YA genre has grown to be too dark for its target audience. Meghan Gurdon, a firm believer of this idea, explains why she believes this in her article, “Darkness Too Visible”. Gurdon describes the experience of a mother of three in a bookstore looking to purchase a YA novel for one of her children, when she found herself leaving the bookstore empty-handed due to the content of the teen books. While teen books decades ago contained less violent/corrupted material, times have changed

“The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books,” Meghan Cox Gurdon addresses the controversy on Young Adult Literature. Throughout her speech at Hillsdale College she labels this current category of fiction as gaudy, inappropriate, and sacrilegious. Gurdon’s claim on the content of YA, for Young Adult, books obtains effectiveness through her ability to incorporate real world examples, the claim made by the opposing view, and a moral push. Gurdon intertwines the abundant amount of sources throughout

them. With this being said, a man named Gurdon Buck has shaped the way the medical field is being viewed today. Gurdon Buck, “also known as the father of modern plastic surgery”, is recognized for being the first doctor to include pre and post-operative photographs into his publications. Doctor Buck is acknowledged for being the first person to photograph the development of his operations and the first to make steady changes over several operations. Gurdon Buck is also given credit to for the use

adult (YA) literature isn’t detrimental. Gurdon contends the argument that youths being exposed to darker themes makes the themes less effective and ultimately undermines the intensity of the subjects, as well as spread them. She states this as “Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care” (par. 13). Gurdon says young adult literature takes away

To an extent, I have lived a sheltered life. I grew up with a helicopter mother, an anxious father, and two over-protective older brothers who wanted me to live a happy, healthy, and safe life. They shielded me from everything bad: death, war, pain, destruction, and suffering. I was -- and still am -- the baby of the family; I will forever be the little baby girl who needs to be watched over and taken care of. To them, I am innocent and fragile and delicate and small. From the moment I was born

outside of town do. They think of Gurdon like a place with nothing to do for fun and nothing around. What they don’t know about us is how much pride and spirit we have as a community and the special events that we have during the year. During the fall we have things like football games and the county fair to get excited over, not only that though we also have a thing called the Forest Festival. The Forest Festival is a tradition in our small southern town of Gurdon that happens on the last Saturday

books are "distorted" portrayals of young adult life. Alexie begins by reiterating conversations he had with students about their past traumas. He uses these conversations and the students' reactions to his work to challenge a claim made by Meghan Cox Gurdon, who called his works '"hideously distorted portrayals' of contemporary young adult literature"(1). Alexie retaliates by arguing young adults who have experienced traumatic events cannot be protected. To further expand on the topic, he uses his history

The whole debate started when the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial written by Meghan Cox Gurdon where she described what she saw as a disturbing trend towards ‘darkness’ in young adult literature (Is Current). The article had a major backlash on Gurdon when people started to disagree and argue her statements, such as Maureen Johnson, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes, who went to twitter to start the #YASaves (Young Adult)

joke, I was shocked and ultimately heartbroken from the fact that someone could have the nerve to say such a thing with the purpose of insulting someone else. In addition to that, there is vulgar language scattered throughout the novel. As Meghan Cox Gurdon points out in her article, Darkness to visible, “Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most