The 2005 Carnegie award has been won by Mal Peet. In his acceptance speech he said "that reading is fundamental is of course true. But as the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Award ceremony takes place on July 7th, it is perhaps appropriate to say that reading is also anti-fundamentalist." He declared that libraries offer the arsenal in the war of understanding and criticised Blair and Bush: "how can they [Bush and Blair] have forgotten history, and forgotten Vietnam? How can Bush be so illiterate and unlearned? I think the opposite of learning is literary amnesia, in its wider sense, and I worry we are suffering from this on a large scale at the moment." These latter remarks seem to have been censored out of the official press release.
Some comment on the "arsenals" allusion on librarians' e-lists suggested that Peet's homage to Sidney Ditzion's description of libraries as arsenals of the democratic culture went unrecognised. Ditzion's book, published by the ALA n the US in 1947, epitomised the hopes for libraries in that brief window of post-war optimism before McCarthyism.
Peet, Mal
Tamar
London: Walker, 2006 1406303941
