To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Lippincott
A youngster with a broken arm, an arm that didn’t heal well but that still works fine for football, starts off this first novel, and ends it.
The boy is Jem. His sister Scout, as the family calls her, tells this story about their childhood in Alabama in the mid-1930s, when Hitler was persecuting Jews and Germany and when Jews got along all right in Alabama but Negroes did not.
The head of the family is Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer; his servant Calpurnia does what she can lovingly to compensate to the children for the lack of a mother. The boy and girl, with a companion, Dill, keep pretty busy wondering about a neighbor recluse, Boo Bradley, and his eccentricities, acting one day like a friend and another like a foe—only the close of the book tells which.
But little by little they are forced into a thorny awareness of t heir father’s most pressing case: The court has ordered him to defend a Negro, Tom, accused of raping Mayella, of the poor-white, trashy Ewells.
Echoes of local hostility to Atticus reach the young folks, the father tries to shield them, they witness a tense and dangerous encounter on the jail steps, they sneak in at the trial, they are not allowed to forget Bob Ewell’s mad threats.
The story begins in a purposely easy-going way; in fact you may be tempted for a while, as I was, to dismiss it as too slight. But it turns into a powerful picture of an abused Negro, a jury unshakable in its prejudices, ignorant and evil no-good whites, and a lot of good to balance the bad. It is a Literary Guild selection.
--W.G. Rogers
From the Carteret County News-Times, Morehead City and Beaufort, N.C., page 9, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 1960
No comments:
Post a Comment