Civil Rights | Harker US Book Blog

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been yearning to read Go Set a Watchman for the longest time. A highly anticipated sequel of sorts to the acclaimed classic To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchman was released just this summer. I bought a copy last week to annotate and read, and I can now say that while this sequel isn’t for everyone, it certainly has its perks. The novel characterizes the life of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who returns to her Alabama hometown after a few years in New York. During her visit, the dissonance between her childhood memories and the reality of her town becomes clear. Disillusionment is a key theme in Lee’s novel–Jean Louise realizes that the world isn’t a dichotomy of good and bad, but rather a morally gray setting that people simply make the best of. Watchman is more realistic than Mockingbird. Although it is more somber, it is nevertheless poignantly written. While Lee’s prose is incisive and delightful to read, there was a discrepancy to her characterization that I found disturbing. For instance, it was very difficult to connect the older Jean Louise to Scout in Mockingbird. Watchman also reads more like a rough draft than a full-fledged novel–and the ending wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped it would be.

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The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Fire Next Time, written by the legendary 1960’s Civil Rights advocate James Baldwin, is a book every adolescent and young adult living in the United States should read. For the first half of his book, James Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew who is incarcerated, trying to inspire him to transcend anger in dealing with an unjust society. In the second half, the author writes about his own childhood growing up as an African-American boy in Harlem, and also his views upon the influence of Christianity on race relations. Though published in 1963, the book brings to light a problem that still exists today: a broad recognition of the inequity between races, but hardly any cooperation or a change in mindsets to be made. This book, with all its emotions, from thrilling to frustrating, is definitely something we should all read to educate ourselves about the state of our society, not just in the past, but also in the present.

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