There clearly was an oversight in my rearing, because I should have read it when I was 10. If I had, I would have reread it every 10 or so years, with wiser eyes, and seeing things I’d missed.
But at 10 I would have identified with Scout. I also would have been shocked and enlightened by her racial portrait of America, dazzled by her vision of life and friendships in a small town, and dreamed of being even a fraction of the storyteller Harper Lee was.
Instead, I somehow settled for the movie version – until now.
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
Again, it’s a missing piece from my childhood reading list.
Several of my books have covered the same era of the Great Depression, and Steinbeck helped me understand it through a ground-level lens and its human dimensions of devastation. He sets a scene like few can, with insights that sear and stay.
But don’t believe me, consider this passage: “In the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
I’m a sucker for great mystery, be it on PBS or in the pages of a book, and I’m a Gamache groupie.
The chief inspector played only a minor role here, but this book featured Penny at her terror-spinning best, with Clinton’s understanding not just of how government works but how terrorists do.
Named one of the most anticipated novels of the season by People, Associated Press, Time, Los Angeles Times, Parade, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.
From the #1 bestselling authors Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny comes a novel of unsurpassed thrills and incomparable insider expertise—State of Terror.
After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.
There is no love lost between the president of the…
It’s a story of the railroad men who gave birth to America’s first Black trade union, helped spawn the civil rights revolution, and were the fathers and grandfathers of African-Americans who today run cities and states, sit on corporate boards and editorial boards, and number among this country’s leading professors, scientists, and clergy.
The first of them were hired by George Pullman just after they were released as slaves, and they held one of the best jobs in the Black community and one of the worst on the trains. They were maids and valets, nannies and doctors, concierges, and occasional undertakers to cars full of white passengers. Behind the porter’s ever-present smile lay a day-to-day struggle for dignity that separated him from his family.
