To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

4/5 rating. 181 pages.

Book #20 of 2022. Read April 24 2022.

This is the classic story of the Finch family in 1930s Alabama. The book deals with the topics of racism, prejudice, and justice.

Scout, the young narrator, tells about her life of a few years. Her father, Atticus, and her brother, Jem are huge parts of her story. While there are a lot of tales about the every day occurrences of childhood, things become much more difficult when Atticus is called to defend Tom Robinson, a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman. Everyone assumes that this is an open-and-shut case, as who would pick a black man’s word over that of a white woman’s during this period? But Atticus’s appeals and his stellar job of laying out the facts begin to sway some of the town. Can this possibly be enough to save Tom’s life?

I love the innocent, but probing questions that Scout asks about this case. If the townfolk believe Tom, how might they still find him guilty? And maybe even more importantly: “If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?”

I think that almost everyone reads this book in high school. That really is an excellent choice, but I think that it’s a great book for people to go back and read again and see if we have changed that much. If not, what can we do to bring about a more equitable society?

Quotes:

“I suppose she chose me because she knew my name: as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.”

“Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their ways like you was so high and mighty!”

“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.”

“There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy working about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

“‘Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,’ Atticus said.”

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin bit you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

“No suh, scared I’d hafta face up to what I didn’t do.”

“Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

“Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an’ then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home – “

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