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Loading... Go Set a Watchman: A Novel (original 2015; edition 2015)by Harper Lee (Author)
Work InformationGo Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (2015)
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Etwas wenig Story und viel (Rassen-)Politik. Ich mag aber die humorvolle Schreibweise sehr! ( ) Some spoilers, though not a lot of detail Several reviewers, whose opinions of this book were not favorable--and even negative, apparently do not quite understand what life in the South was and is like for both whites and blacks. The book begins with Jean Louise (Scout) Finch makes her annual pilgrimage home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City by train. She is excited to come back to her childhood, though with the death of her brother Jem two years before, nothing is quite the same at it was. There is an ice cream parlor where the old house stood, Calpurnia has retired and gone to live with her people on the black side of town, and Scout's father, Atticus, in his seventies, has more bad days than good, afflicted with the rheumatism. While Atticus' sister has come to live with him, and his brother, the eccentric doctor who only reads Victorian novels but is much more intelligent and wise than he lets on, lives in town, Jean Louise is still made to feel that she should come home and take care of Atticus, and in the meantime get married into an old respectable Maycomb family (and not the long-time friend and "boyfriend"). She has resisted, not because she doesn't want to do those things, but because she doesn't want anyone to tell her to do those things. In the course of this story, Jean Louise eventually comes to realize that her father is human, that the way of life that she grew up with was, while not a lie, certainly not the truth. This is a picture of a woman who has to come to terms with having had a liberal upbringing while living in a very conservative state. She is a woman who has clung to her childhood fantasies of who her father is, who her friends are, and what her town represents. In Go Set a Watchman, an adult Jean Louise Finch grows up. For fans of To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is definitely written in the same style. There were many questions of the book's authenticity because of it's recent controversy, but regardless of this or whether Ms. Lee actually wanted to have it published, it is still an entertaining and thoroughly thoughtful read. The reader gets a sense of the Old South, just after World War II but before the extreme racial tensions of the 1960's. That was a time of another "Red Scare," of Communists hiding behind every tree and recruiting the black population to their cause behind the backs of whites in their communities. It was a time when people were becoming disenchanted with their government. No longer was the President of the United States revered--that seemed to die with FDR. No longer were people able to trust their government, what with Senator Joseph McCarthy in his waning years as a witch-hunter. And to top it off, it appeared that the Supreme Court was going the way of Abraham Lincoln and totally disregarding states' rights with their laws requiring desegregation. Jean Louise herself finds fault in the way the Supreme Court handled the desegregation filing by the NAACP, stating that it was in violation of the Tenth Amendment, which says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Despite her misgivings, she believes that the law had to be made. That desegregation would eventually happen, though it needed to happen in its own time, when everyone, whites and blacks, were ready. Her disenchantment with Atticus comes from finding out that he agreed with her on the one hand, but completely disagreed with her stance that it needed to occur at all. This is a really difficult book to come to terms with. For those who live in the South, both black and white, this certainly hits home. These same tensions described here are the same as we are feeling today. Is it a coincidence that the book was released during a time of racial turmoil all over the country? Perhaps, but perhaps not. We may never know. I got lost in To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, so I had to check out Go Set A Watchman. Go Set A Watchman didnât hit me as hard as To Kill A Mockingbird, but I loved learning what happened to Jean Louis Finch, since she was the star of the show. She returns home, after living in New York City, seeing Maycomb, Alabama in a new light. Sure, she has gotten older, but she has been away from the small town life. She had left behind her brother, father, and Henry, who patiently waited for her to return, believing they would be wed. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. Jean Louis has done a lot of growing up, but her return gives her many life lessons, showing her that things are not always as they appear to be. Her father has never tried to influence her, and he does not try now. She will become her own person. Every manâs island, Jean Louise, every manâs watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious. Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee did not hit me as hard as To Kill A Mockingbird, but I found so many words of wisdom in the pages, that I found myself nodding my head and thinking, well said. I feel both books should be must reads in English and History classes, for all high schools, North, South, East, and West.
Shockingly, in Ms. Leeâs long-awaited novel, âGo Set a Watchmanâ (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like âThe Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.â Or asks his daughter: âDo you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?â The depiction of Atticus in âWatchmanâ makes for disturbing reading, and for âMockingbirdâ fans, itâs especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. âMockingbirdâ suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while âWatchmanâ asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus. And so beneath Atticusâs style of enlightenment is a kind of bigotry that could not recognize itself as such at the time. The historical and human fallacies of the Agrarian ideology hardly need to be rehearsed now, but it should be said that these views were not regarded as ridiculous by intellectuals at the time. Indeed, Jean Louise/Lee herself, though passionately opposed to what her uncle and her father are saying, nevertheless accepts the general terms of the debate as the right ones. Go Set a Watchman is a troubling confusion of a novel, politically and artistically, beginning with its fishy origin story. .. I ached for this adult Scout: The civil rights movement may be gathering force, but the second women's movement hasn't happened yet. I wanted to transport Scout to our own time â take her to a performance of Fun Home on Broadway â to know that, if she could only hang on, the possibilities for nonconforming tomboys will open up. Lee herself, writing in the 1950s, lacks the language and social imagination to fully develop this potentially powerful theme. Despite the boldness and bravery of its politics, Go Set a Watchman is a very rough diamond in literary terms ⌠it is a book of enormous literary interest, and questionable literary merit. It is, in most respects, a new work, and a pleasure, revelation and genuine literary event, akin to the discovery of extra sections from T S Eliotâs The Waste Land or a missing act from Hamlet hinting that the prince may have killed his father. Belongs to SeriesIs contained inAwardsDistinctions
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HTML: Performed by Reese Witherspoon #1 New York Times Bestseller "Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades." â?? New York Times A landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prizeâ??winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finchâ??"Scout"â??returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the pastâ??a journey that can only be guided by one's own conscience. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of the late Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precisionâ??a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an Amer No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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