Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A true classic, April 7, 2007
There used to be a time that the word "classic" meant something. Nowadays, it seems to only mean "more than ten years old"; quality doesn't come into the equation at all. Take, for example, the cable channel American Movie Classics, which typically features movies that are forgettable regardless of age. I prefer the classic definition of "classic", one that means something that is not only really good but withstands the test of time.
Put another way, look at the Da Vinci Code. A decent book and a phenomenal best-seller, but will people still be reading it decades from now? Only time will tell. Time, however, has already told on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is clearly, by any use of the word, a classic. Although forty-seven years old, it is still as good as ever.
Set in the town of Maycomb, Alabama during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird tells the tale of the Finch family: widower father Atticus, young son Jem and younger daughter (and narrator) Scout. Atticus, an attorney, has been appointed to represent Tom Robinson, accused of raping a 19-year-old girl named Mayall Ewell. Since Tom is black and Mayall is white, guilt is assumed by most of the town and the trial a mere formality. The truth plays little part.
Maycomb is a stratified society. There are the "respectable" people, who - with or without money - are considered the aristocrats of the community. The Finches fit into this category. There are the poorer white people, from the poor-yet-proud Cunninghams to the "trashy" Ewells. At the bottom are the blacks. Though Atticus refuses to participate in this classism (and tries to lead his children to do the same), he is pragmatic enough to acknowledge its existence.
This novel may have the trial of Tom Robinson as its centerpiece, but there is plenty more going on as we take a tour of an impoverished town in the Deep South. With this book, Lee has written one of the Great American Novels. And while some great authors are not easily readable (for example, Faulkner), Harper Lee holds the reader from the beginning to end.
Has there been any author who has written something so great in his or her only effort? Yes, there are authors like Margaret Mitchell who wrote Gone With the Wind (which has a far more romantic version of the Old South), but her career was cut short by an early death; Lee is still around and still has no other books published. The one book she wrote, however, is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. It is a true classic.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pulitzer Prize Winner, December 21, 2007
When did ISBN's come into use? The 1962 Popluar Library paperback edition (price: 60 cents) that I own has a Library of Congress card catalogue number. I also have the fortieth anniversary edition.
I grew up about forty miles from Miss Lee's hometown. I graduated from Miss Lee's alma mater, the University of Alabama. I have climbed to the top of the clock tower of the courthouse made famous in this book.
I grew up a couple of decades after Scout, a couple of dozen miles down the road, in another small Alabama town. I read To Kill a Mockingbird as a child, and reread it every year or so. My paperback copy is held together with Scotch tape. My anniversary edition is a treasure I do not lend out.
As a child who lived pretty much the same childhood as Scout and Jem, I identified heavily with them, and like most who have read and loved this American Classic, I have longed for a father like Atticus.
It is no exaggeration to state that this novel, more than any other, influenced my thinking, and shaped my life. I am a writer, you see. It is certainly no surprise to me that readers tell me they see similarities between my first novel and the one that told the story of my own childhood better than I ever could, the one that certainly influenced both my desire to write and the topics I choose to write about.
Whenever I think that I might write a memoir of growing up in Alabama, I read this book again, and know that I don't need to. Miss Lee told my own story, those long, dusty summers filled with friends and playing outdoors, the neighborhoods where everyone knew all the children and generally, what they were doing, the lurid rumors and legends constructed of gossip and cautionary tales, secret pacts and promises, moss-covered trees hanging over slow muddy rivers, the far-off rumblings of trouble and upsets as the civil rights movement marched inexorably closer to us, and the quiet in which it finally came to face us. I remember the silence in which they marched, and I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird again, lying on my bed, windows open to non-existent breezes, wondering. Was Tom Robinson real? Did that really happen? What is happening now? Can I stop it? Can I do something? With all the restless yearning inside me, at ten years old, I reached for something, reading that book, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, trying to see clearly what was coming.
When I read this book, I remember Scout, the little girl who fought against change, who didn't quite understand the changes that happened despite her best efforts, and I see the girl that I was, straining to see, to understand. I wanted Scout to be my best friend, and you know what? She was. I have always liked books better than people. Some books are better friends than many people I know. Some books have helped me more, sustained me, taught me, kept me entertained, and led me closer to the person I want to be, than any person ever could. Like Scout, I am too stubborn to be told what to do and what to think. But books, that's something else.
To Kill a Mockingbird will remain a treasured, dear old friend.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply Essential Reading Vividly Encapsulates Depression-Era Racial Hatred in the Deep South, April 15, 2008
Some books so fluidly transcend the stories they contain that the characters and setting almost become incidental to the universal themes they express without contrivance. Such a book exists in Harper Lee's masterful 1960 novel, one of the most revered pieces of fiction this country has ever produced. Set in rural, Depression-era Alabama, it is a classic coming-of-age story about a precocious nine-year old tomboy named Scout. What she experiences is palpable in the virulent racism surrounding the persecution of Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping Mayella, the abused white daughter of an unrepentant bigot, Bob Ewell. Representing Tom in court is Atticus Finch, Scout's father and the moral compass of the story.
The plot moves toward a deepening exploration of the intractable conflict between tolerance and ignorance and how the pre-existing environment of hatred and mistrust makes innocent people guilty by pure circumstance. Scout embodies these themes within her own journey toward womanhood and her questions of what society expects of her. Through the travails of Tom and the town's outcast, Boo Radley, and primarily through her father's example, Scout recognizes how innate goodness can exist even in the direst circumstances. Likely because the story is semi-autobiographical, Lee is able to vividly capture the rural south and the pervasive mindset during the Depression with spellbinding accuracy. Yet for all that, the book's lasting legacy has more to do with Lee's particular lierary gift in bringing a genuine universality to her themes.
Other characters weave in and out of the story - including Dill, Scout's wannabe boyfriend and the Truman Capote doppelganger - and each plays a key role in shaping the novel's core conflicts. I have to say that the author's particular literary strengths come to the fore in her empathetic depictions of the evolving relationships between these characters, for example, Scout and her father Atticus, Scout and her brother Jem, the children and Boo. Nothing seems extraneous in the story Lee tells, no small feat for a 336-page novel. She brings intense emotion to her prose, especially in describing the uncontrollable fury created by racial hatred and false accusations, for instance, in the lynch mob scene before the trial and in the vengeful attack on the children. The timing of the book's original 1960 publication turned out to be prescient, as the Civil Rights movement was just becoming national in scope thanks to the efforts of Martin Luther King and his brethren. Even if you have seen the masterful 1962 film, you owe it to yourself to read Lee's literary masterwork and sadly the only novel she ever wrote.
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