Book Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

Why would we go and disturb all the peace
For a ban on a book that offends not the least
It's a story of a different time but the same
Problems of today, with the prejudiced to blame

Book: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

**** (out of five stars)

To be perfectly honest, I'm sort of getting tired of writing book reviews...but since I promised I'd keep it up, I'll continue but today's will be short because I didn't find the book particularly make-fun-of-it worthy.

I'd never read this book in high school or before, and hearing that To Kill a Mockingbird has been banned by countless school boards had me intrigued. I knew that it had something to do with a rape trial in which a black man is accused of having raped a white woman. The narrative is good, the main point of the book is well played out (it has to do with persecution of the innocent) but I still don't get why the book is censored out of many curricula when it would be a welcome addition to any literary repertoire.

The book is peppered with the "n-word" all over the place...but it's really used to demonstrate (A) the dominance that the whites exerted over the blacks in American South post-slavery, and (B) that prejudice against blacks was rampant. And this is definitely not something that should be covered up. While this issue of prejudice against blacks may only be a small part of the current situation in which people of many different ethnicities are prejudged the book just serves as a lesson that this is indeed wrong (incidentally, maybe it's a good thing right now, in a period in which Muslims are constantly being looked at as terrorists when the truth is that your Muslim neighbour from Pakistan or Kuwait has no affiliation whatsoever with Al Qaeda--he just happens to be brown and a follower of Islam).

I think every kid should have the chance to read this book in school and perhaps that's the best way to teach tolerance to children -- disguise it in a good story.