Book Review: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

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“ You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

I know I am risking a serious “Film At 11” moment and a club upside the head from Captain Obvious for voicing this, but nabbit dog I still think it needs to be said To Kill a Mockingword is one of the Best and Most Important American novels ever written. Okay, I said it, and I will wait patiently while you get your Duhs and DERs out of the way and hang your “no shit” signs outside for Inspector Holmes.

Okay, now given the grunt load of reviews this book has I know I’m not the first person to wag my chin about how amazing it is. Still, I am going to chance to come off like that annoying dingleberry at the tail end of a huge porcelain party because I truly have a pile of love for this book.

Introduction:

Author Name: Harper Lee

Genre: Non- fiction

Language: English

To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee is it no doubt a classic, both in literature and cinematography? The book offers a powerful discussion of human morality and racism. Readers, especially those with a fondness for timeless novels, will enjoy this outstanding combination of realistic and historical fiction novels. It is beautifully written and immensely entertaining with representation in themes of prejudice and morality.

About the Author:

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) was an American novelist best known for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee has received numerous accolades and honorary degrees, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 which was awarded for her contribution to literature. 

She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird. The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936 when she was 10. 

The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. It was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. She also wrote the novel Go Set a Watchman in the mid-1950s and published it in July 2015 as a sequel to Mockingbird, but it was later confirmed to be her first draft of Mockingbird.

About the Book:

I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to encourage me. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways, this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.

Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird portrays an accurate reflection of people's affairs in the southern United States during the 1930s. The story, which is set around a single-father household in a rural community in Alabama, includes a vast display of symbolism to connect the main plot with numerous subplots. 

Through her novel, Lee sets straight the old-fashioned Southern culture for the realism of Southern culture. The timing of this book also matched with the early Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Although slavery was ended roughly half a century before To Kill a Mockingbird was published, African Americans were still deprived of lots of their basic civil rights. Conditions were little improved up to the time when this novel was published. 

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Blacks were degraded by the Southern society by the segregation of public bathrooms and drinking fountains, and also by forcing them to ride in the back of the public buses. In addition, there was still discrimination within the justice system. Blacks were excluded from juries, and could also be arrested, brought before a judge, and even found guilty with very little reason. 

There have been countless cases in history's past where a white individual charged an African American with an alleged crime. This was seen throughout the book with the Tom Robinson case. Just like the jury in past trials, the jury for the Tom Robinson case was all white and all male; the trial was also held in a segregated courtroom.

The events dealing with race relations have a convincing connection with those in To Kill a Mockingbird, which is set just about thirty years prior. The South was hit hard by the Great Depression since farming was still the way of life in the South. Small farmers, like Walter Cunningham in her novel, often could not earn enough money to cover all their payments, let alone living expenses.

The purpose of this book served is to show how ridiculous the culture of the South was regarding discrimination against blacks. Harper Lee gets the reader thinking, not only about the way people were treated in the past but how we should be treating people nowadays. 

The book also deals with tolerance for diversity and standing up for what’s right. It’s about showing people, who are going through adversity, that you care – and there’s a lot of adversity in her novel. It is the Great Depression, and some of the community can’t pay Atticus with money, so they do the honorable thing, the only thing they can, and pay him with the goods they produce.

My Review:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, many thoughts have filled my mind. I think by reading this book, that perhaps Harper Lee has fulfilled her intentions with me as a reader, that I have therefore become a better person. I find Atticus a very idealistic, moral character. He has a great sense of humor and tries his best to raise his children as a single parent. 

I like how Lee used the first part of To Kill a Mockingbird for us to get to know Atticus as a person and a father, not just as a white lawyer defending an African American. Atticus also has strong views on the treatment of whites toward blacks; I loved what he said in the book: “As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”

My rating for this book is 5/5

You can easily get this book from Amazon: To Kill a Mockingbird

Written By – Prachi Mann

Edited By - Anamika Malik