Book Review for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

You may be wondering why I am going to do on a review on a book this old, I mean, most of you probably had to read it for school at some point. Well, I am reviewing it because I've read it three or four times and it is one of my favorite books. If you haven't read it for a few years, I encourage you to read it again because it tries to teach some lessons that are best not forgot.

It can't really be called a "coming of age" story since Scout's too young to be coming of age, she's just eight, but it is about growing up. I believe one of the reasons why I love this story so much is because it takes place in the "good ole days" but shows how those days were also filled with darkness in some ways.

You see, in the town of Maycomb, based on the family you were from, you had a precast mold, "No Crawford minds his own business, The truth is not in the Delafields, etc." and certain families were expected to be drunks or poor or unbeholden to no one. The prejudices go deep, deepest when it comes to the color of your skin. So, alongside the story of the sleepy town, where everyone knows everyone and Scout, her brother, Jem, and their friend, Dill, have free reign of their street and try to get their reclusive neighbor to show his face. There runs a deeper, darker story of a black man wrongfully accused. Condemned, despite Scout's father's best efforts, because what it comes down to is a white man's testimony against a black man's, and a black man's testimony isn't enough in a small Southern town in 1935.

I love the characters. Scout and her rambunctious tomboyishness, her innocence, and the frequent attempts to turn her more into a "proper" lady. I love her brother, Jem, and his, at first, grudging loyalty to his father because he is just beginning to understand there are other, nobler ways to be a "real man" other than hunting, playing football, and being young and strong. I love their father, Atticus, and his sense of fairness, duty, and warmth hidden beneath his aloofness. Their friend, Dill, and his mischievousness resourcefulness. Their cook, Calpurnia, and her sense of pride in herself, her people, and in the family she is working for. I also love the neighbors for all their peculiarities.

It teaches lessons of loyalty and duty; of how essential it is for justice to be blind in regards to race, gender, and socioeconomic status; the importance of children feeling they are needed and wanted, as well as abstractly loved; that sometimes the best way to stop an angry mob is to remind them they're human through the voice of a child; and, though the good ole days were wonderful in many ways, some things are even better now and can be even better in the future.

My only regret is that Harper Lee did not write other novels. I am so glad she at least left us with this treasure.

Yet another reason why I love this book is for the closing remarks of Atticus, in the trial of Tom Robinson, which I think is one of the most excellent speeches ever written. I do not think it is short enough that I can write out the whole thing without infringing on copyright laws, so I won't. Also, it means more having the majority of the book before it, so I encourage you again, read this book or reread it. Here's a (rather long) excerpt from the speech:

Atticus paused, then he did something he didn't ordinarily do. He unhitched his watch and chain and placed them on the table, saying, "With the court's permission -"

Judge Taylor nodded, and then Atticus did something I never saw him do before or since, in public or in private: he unbuttoned his vest, unbuttoned his collar, loosened his tie, and took off his coat. He never loosened a scrap of his clothing until he undressed at bedtime, and to Jem and me, this was the equivalent of him standing before us stark naked. We exchanged horrified glances.

Atticus put his hands in his pockets, and as he returned to the jury, I saw his gold collar button and the tips of his pen and pencil winking in the light.

"Gentlemen," he said. Jem and I again looked at each other: Atticus might have said, "Scout." His voice had lost its aridity, its detachment, and he was talking to the jury as if they were folks on the post office corner.

"Gentlemen," he was saying, "I shall be brief, but I would like to use my remaining time with you to remind you that this case is not a difficult one, it requires no minute sifting of complicated facts, but it does require you to be sure beyond all reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant. To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. This is as simple as black and white.

"...And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to "feel sorry" for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people's. I need not remind you of their appearance and conduct on the stand - you saw them for yourselves. The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption - the evil assumption - that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber.

"Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women - black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire."

Atticus paused and took out his handkerchief. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them, and we saw another "first": we had never seen him sweat - he was one of those men whose faces never perspired, but now it was shining tan.

"One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal...There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and the idle along with the industrious - because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe - some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal - there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court..."

"I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty..."

Perhaps the greatest reason to read To Kill a Mockingbird can be learned from a 1966 letter written by Harper Lee to James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":

“Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

"Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

"I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism...."

I would rate this book as PG for brief violence, light language, but mostly for dealing with some pretty "heavy" stuff, in terms of a man being wrongfully accused of rape, and all the situations which arise from this.