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  • I won't comment on the book's message, except to say that people worldwide today can still use a lesson or two on accepting other people who are different from themselves.

    Read the book, not for your school reading assignment but for the sake of reading, and you will understand what Harper Lee ... Continue

    I won't comment on the book's message, except to say that people worldwide today can still use a lesson or two on accepting other people who are different from themselves.

    Read the book, not for your school reading assignment but for the sake of reading, and you will understand what Harper Lee had to say.

    Equally brilliant but easily overlooked when reviewing this book is the writing, the language if you will, Harper Lee employed to construct the world of Scout.

    Yes, she constructed not only a story, not only a series of events, but an entire world as seen by a child growing up in Maycomb during the 30's.

    Not much of a writer myself, but I write novels on and off. And I believe in a minimalistic approach: the less you say that's unrelated to your main story line, the better. Don't waste two chapters on developments that can be summed up in two paragraphs.

    And we see a fine counterexample in "Mockingbrid".

    Reading the opening pages, you will find no trace of the theme advertised on the back cover: "a lawyer in the deep south defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl." Instead, it is as if you can breath the hot summer's air, while running around in the yard as a seven-year-old.

    Those big houses, you have in fact never set foot in one, and have only seen them on American TV shows such as Knight Rider. And back then you were in the living room of some apartment building in some Asian city. But the fact doesn't stop you from feeling that world of Scout.

    And that's what drew me into the book. Not the message of acceptance and equality; not the social or historical value of the book. It's because I can feel so vividly another time, another age, another world all together. I can almost touch it if I just reach out, or it seems.

    Harper Lee maintained the same touch throughout the book. This is not a story about the trial and the aftermath, but an account of Scout's childhood through her own eyes, with the trial standing out as one big event.

    I don't think I can spell out my thought very clearly. What I mean to say is, it is so near-impossible to keep your focus while detailing on everything big and small. I certainly can't, and many published writers failed at one point or another at achieving the right balance.

    Yet Harper Lee did it-- not a "balance" between the two, which implies some sort of deliberate exclusion. She maxed out both sides.

    Pure genius. Something we can only admire and not copy. We are really not created equal in this case, and what can I say?

    

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• ― pthow said on Jul 20, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • Read with the class in 7th grade

    

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• ― Alex Highgate said on Feb 6, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • I never had to read this in school. In my attempt to read the classics that I had missed along the way, I picked this up one summer. I was most impressed!

    Harper Lee's writing is wonderful. Too few writer's possess that use of language she has.

    

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• ― Batona said on Apr 22, 2007 about the Mass Market Paperback edition| Add your feedback

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

One of the best-loved classics of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It has won the Pulitzer Prize, been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recent, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the century (Library Journal).

HarperCollins is proud to celebrate the anniversary of the book's publication with this special hardcover edition.

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