An informed look at Southern history refracted through the lens of fiction.
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 character—hardly 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.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4494-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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