Review by Choice Review
Fifty-five years after the publication of Harper Lee's seminal work To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee's publisher announced the impending publication of Lee's long-forgotten manuscript Go Set a Watchman. Written before Mockingbird, Watchman takes place roughly 20 years after the trial of Tom Robinson and the clandestine heroism of Boo Radley. It features an older Scout Finch who rails against her father's repugnant support for segregationist public policy. This revelation called into question Atticus's place as one of the most beloved characters in American literature. Crespino (Emory Univ.) offers an edifying "biography" of Atticus in all his forms, including the silver screen portrayal by Gregory Peck, and in the process surveys the historical and political landscapes that shaped Lee's fiction. Crespino points to Lee's father, A. C. Lee, as the probable inspiration for the Atticus of Watchman and the precursor to the more idealized and archetypal Atticus of Mockingbird. Weaving a compelling historical narrative, Crespino necessarily relies at times on conjecture to discuss the notoriously private author's motivations, but he does so responsibly. The resultant portrait frames Atticus as a paradox who is at once "a model of the civic ideal" and, in Watchman, a bitter reminder of the detestable legacies of white supremacy and slavery. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --John David Harding, Saint Leo University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ATTICUS FINCH: The Biography, by Joseph Crespino. (Basic Books, $27.) This biography of the much-loved fictional character from Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" brings to life the inconsistencies of the South and of Lee's father, who was the model for the real Atticus. BEARSKIN, by James A. McLaughlin. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Terrible things are happening to black bears in this debut mystery set in western Virginia. And the humans facing off against the novel's ex-con hero, now charged with protecting a wilderness preserve, are just as terrible. THE WORLD AS IT IS: A Memoir of the Obama White House, by Ben Rhodes. (Random House, $30.) In this humane and amiable insider's account of the Obama years, Rhodes traces his intellectual evolution as a key adviser to the president. Starry-eyed at the beginning, he learns to temper his idealism, but in a crass political era, he impressively avoids becoming a cynic. TYRANT: Shakespeare on Politics, by Stephen Greenblatt. (Norton, $21.95.) The noted Shakespeare scholar finds parallels between our political world and that of the Elizabethans - and in his catalog of the plays' tyrannical characters, locates some very familiar contemporary types. THERE THERE, by Tommy Orange. (Knopf, $25.95.) Orange's devastatingly beautiful debut novel, about a group of characters converging on the San Francisco Bay Area for an event called the "Big Oakland Powwow," explores what it means to be an urban Native American. A VIEW OF THE EMPIRE AT SUNSET, by Caryl Phillips. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Set in England, France and the Caribbean, Phillips's fragmented novel uses the difficult, lonely life of the half-Welsh, half-West-Indian writer Jean Rhys (author of "Wide Sargasso Sea") to explore themes of alienation, colonialism and exile. THE MORALIST: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, by Patricia O'Toole. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) O'Toole focuses on the public deeds of a president who has become a source of almost endless controversy. She describes a politician deft at shifting his views to gain power and achieve important reforms. PURE HOLLYWOOD: And Other Stories, by Christine Schutt. (Grove, $23.) These expert stories by a Pulitzer finalist are awash in money, lush foliage and menace, in prose so offbeat it's revelatory. DRAWN TOGETHER, by Minh Le. Illustrated by Dan Santat. (Hyperion, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) In this picture book, a boy and his grandpa, who doesn't speak English, sit glumly until they begin to draw a comic-book epic together, bridging the language and generational divide in a way that's at once touching and thrilling. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Emory history professor Crespino (Strom Thurmond¿s America) offers a nuanced and captivating study of Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird¿s hero and Go Set a Watchman¿s bigoted antagonist, by exploring how author Harper Lee¿s own father provided the model for both versions of the character. Much admired by his daughter, Amasa Coleman Lee (1880¿1962) of Monroeville, Ala., was a largely self-educated, widely read lawyer, legislator, and newspaper editor. Crespino draws on Harper Lee¿s letters, interviews with her family members, and hundreds of A.C. Lee¿s editorials for his paper, the Monroe Journal, to highlight his subject¿s ¿unstinting propriety,¿ horror of mob rule and lynchings, and paternalistic prejudice against African-Americans, whom he deemed unfit for full integration into Southern society. Harper Lee created the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, Crespino explains, out of conflicted feelings toward principled but segregationist white Southerners like her father. He also shows how, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee idealized Atticus in reaction to a more radical, KKK-allied segregationist movement that ran counter to her father¿s values. To defend her father and the Southern values he represented, Harper focused on Atticus¿s preoccupation with his children¿s moral education and told her classic coming-of-age story mainly from a child¿s viewpoint. This insightful work elucidates the literary, personal, and civil rights issues that shaped Harper Lee and her two novels. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Crespino (Jimmy Carter Professor of History, Emory Univ.; In Search of Another Country), winner of the 2008 Lillian Smith Award, delves into new materials to offer an in-depth look into the inspiration of Harper Lee's father, A.C. Lee, for the part of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Many of Lee's friends, remaining family, and publishing associates, in addition to biographer Charles J. Shields, made unpublished letters and papers available to Crespino. He also drew on the archives of the Monroe Journal and the Monroe County Museum to offer insights into the life and times of the Lees. A.C., who was trained as a lawyer and journalist, recognized and encouraged Harper's interests and talents. His response to politics and attitudes in his home were not unusual for the times, and while he did not follow the crowd, his views were ultimately racist and paternalistic. Author Lee would use his attitudes in her fiction, creating Atticus as a hero in To Kill a Mockingbird and tearing him down in Go Set a Watchman. VERDICT This will be of interest to anyone who studies Lee's work.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The creation and evolution of a fictional character serves as a mirror of racial politics.Atticus Finch appeared in two novels written by Harper Lee: as the hero of the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960; and as a more complex characterhardly a "touchstone of decency and goodness"in Lee's first novel, Go Set a Watchman, not published until 2015. Crespino (History/Emory Univ.; Strom Thurmond's America, 2012, etc.) makes the fictional Atticus central to his study of Lee's father, lawyer and newspaper editor A.C. Lee; Harper's career as a writer; and, what gives the book heft, a close look at the Southern politics and civil rights struggles in the 1950s and '60s from which Lee's fiction emerged. When Mockingbird first appeared, A.C. was surprised when his neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama, greeted him as Atticus Finch. "He hadn't recognized himself in the book at all," writes the author. Nor would he have recognized himself in the "shrewd lawyer" with racist views of Go Set a Watchman. Lee's first book was unsettling to many of Mockingbird's fans precisely because Atticus was both a "principled southerner" and "a pragmatic segregationist." While biographers have assumed A.C. was the inspiration for Atticus in Mockingbird, Crespino probes the extent to which Lee portrayed her father in the darker Watchman. Besides drawing on newly available correspondence, he examines hundreds of editorials in which A.C. expressed opinions on local and national issues to offer a nuanced portrait of a man of "paternalistic sensibilities" who "saw no profit in inflaming racial passions on either side of the color line." The Atticus of Mockingbird, who exuded "moral courage, tolerance, and understanding," evolved, Crespino asserts, from the portrayal in Watchman of a man who abided the "hypocrisy and injustice" of his own generation. Lee's Atticus was himself transformed by Gregory Peck in a movie adaptation that underscored stalwart virtue.An informed look at Southern history refracted through the lens of fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
