Welcome to the futureOriginally Posted by blacklabel
Just finished Go Set a Watchmanby Harper Lee
http://www.amazon.com/Go-Set-Watchma.../dp/0062409859
If you liked To Kill a Mockingbird you may or may not like this book. This is the original book Lee wrote in the 1950s. Her publisher, Lippencott, told her that the book had too many stories within stories and asked her to go back and write a book focused on one of Scout's recollections from her early childhood. While Mockingbird is a wonderful book, it seemed so myopic and contained an idealistic focus from the memory of a six year old Lee. Watchman IMO is a much better book. Told from the now 26 year old Scout's perspective and learning that not all is as she assumed it was. People are not perfect and they do not live in a perfect world. Real men must live to be useful in the community they serve and sometimes this means they do things they have to do but do not always agree with. There are ways of having principals even when faced with numerous evil choices.
I particularly liked the exchange between Scout and her Uncle Jack, who was trying to provide a framework of history for why the South is the way it is as compared to the rest of the nation in the 1950s. Uncle Jack's, also called Dr. Finch, explanation for the reason for the South's fighting the Civil War is one of the best, most succinct, I have read in literature. This was apparently Lee's opinion on the issue of segregation in 1954 after the Sup Court's opinion in Brown v Board of Education. Lee is probably not understood today by most of the people who reviewed the book and instantly seized upon the overused epithet "racism." Uncle Jack calls the issue of racism incidental to the Civil War and states that racism is equally incidental to the battle over Civil Rights in the 1950s. He points out that 95% of southerners did not own or could never have imagined owning a slave. They were fighting for the same reasons Angles, Saxons, and Celts had been fighting for thousands of years. They were individuals attempting to prevent someone from outside their culture from coming in to change their way of life. In the 1950s, the rest of the country's notion of federal government had far passed the original notion of national government envisioned in the Constitution. The South was again being forced to change to conform to the rest of the country and Uncle Jack opined that he hoped that this new civil war would be less bloody than the last one. Sixty years later, we can see the Civil Rights battle was much less bloody than the Civil War. IMO, sadly the one casualty of the national attitude towards government has been our Constitution.
History is linear. We may study the past to assist us in our present to attain the future. We can never repeat the past. Even when we try to recreate, we find we only have an echo of the past and often a poor one at that.
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, cool.
