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The style of writing is not for everyone. Is it well written? Yes and no. It seems to try too hard, resulting in a book that doesn't generate much desire to keep turning the pages.
The personalized glimpse of history is interesting, but the tale is weary.

Like many youngsters, I was assigned To Kill a Mockingbird to read as a 15 year old. Unlike most, however, the assignment was for speed reading class . . . rather than American Literature.

Don't ever read this book for speed reading class.

I always intended to get back to the book for a more leisurely reading that would allow me to take in the obvious brilliance of Harper Lee in more ways. I was pleased to find that my local library offered an unabridged reading by Roses Prichard (an actress with a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Southern California) for Books on Tape.

In the first 15 seconds, I knew I had made a winning choice. Roses Prichard turns Scout (Jean Louise) Finch into a girl you'll feel like you've known all your life. Take the time to find this wonderful recording: You'll discover more in this book than you've ever thought could be in a book describing the thoughts and experiences of a five- to eight-year-old narrator.

Jem and Scout Finch are the only children of Atticus Finch, a highly principled lawyer in the small Southern town of Macomb, Alabama, whose wife died young of a heart attack. Unlike many novelists who cram their story into a few hours or days, Harper Lee showed the good sense to give us the family history and to let the children grow up over a few years before entering the heart of her tale. It's good story-telling and is great for character development.

Jem is five years older than Scout but tolerates her company as long as she doesn't start acting like a girl. That's fine with Scout who prefers overalls to dresses any day. As Jem grows older, he finds himself taking on the role of protector as well.

The children acquire a summer friend, Dill, and decide they want to meet the reclusive Arthur (Boo) Radley, a neighbor who always stays indoors. They have many adventures that will remind you of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher in Injun Joe's cave.

The book is written in pre-Civil-Rights-era Alabama when consciousness of the bad things done to African Americans wasn't very well developed among those who weren't African Americans. The only people in the story who seemed to appreciate the full horror of discrimination are those who are honestly trying to live the Christian life. But even many practicing Christians proved to be blind to their African American neighbors' needs and concerns.

Harper Lee does a fine job of skewering all of those who are hypocrites on the subject of race. She even takes an appropriate shot at northerners who avoid the company of African Americans.

In a way, this book was The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Civil Rights Movement, developing the consciousness that helped to change some attitudes towards African Americans.

The story also features lots of insights into Southern "justice" of the day -- inside the court, in the jury box, in jail, and in prison. To bring the evils of the attitudes to bear, Harper Lee tells us that it's wrong to kill a mockingbird . . . they only sing for us to enjoy and don't do any harm. By the end of the book, some of those in Macomb begin to feel that way about harmless human beings who do good, as well.

You can learn more about Southern culture and attitudes in the early 1960s by reading this book than by studying a dozen nonfiction texts. Harper Lee got it right. One of the lightning rods for racial tension in those days was unwarranted sexual fear of African-American males. That theme is fully developed through having an African-American be accused of raping a white woman.

But what I think makes this book timeless is its focus on what it means to be a good person . . . the story of Atticus Finch and his struggles with being both a good man and a good father.

But years from now you won't forget Scout: She's one of the great heroines in American literature and an important prototype of what the next generation should have become in loving other people.

Appreciate the untapped potential all around you!

I have found that even bilingual people with excellent articulation skills and few pronunciation problems nevertheless suffer from a limited vocabulary, especially for daily activity. So I recommend ESL students and teachers start with a picture dictionary. I recommend the Oxford Picture Dictionary because it is the most comprehensive. The New Oxford Picture Dictionary is also on my recommended list, but the original is much better. For travelers, bilingual editions double as survival kits.

this has to be on my all time favourites list. i tear up every time i read it. its a beautiful story about unconditional love, i'd say between a mother and a child. its great to see stories like this in today's society where what you 'really need to worry about' is people cheating you, someone ripping you off, not getting your fair share, etc.. society's so focused on the individual and selfishness is so celebrated that stories like this are refreshing to read and much needed in my opinion. to be honest i was surprised to see the negative reviews, but i guess that has to happen with widely read books, there's always a critic, and this is a good thing. but i would like to say in response that, yes the boy is taking from the tree and the tree never asks for anything, just offers everything, this is true. but, the reader takes on the perspective of the tree, the giver, and they experience this giving as something joyous, as an expression of love. when you love someone don't you want to do something to make them happy? and when someone gives you something you want or need, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes not, isn't that a great feeling? to know that they care, sometimes enough to go out of their way, just for you? the boy never demands anything from the tree, the tree offers to make the boy happy, like a parent (or even a grandparent, anyone who cares really). parents do everything for their children, sometimes this goes unnoticed, but they continue to do it because they love their children with all that they are. you can definitely pick out abuse if you look for it, but only if you look for it, not if you take the story as it is. it is a story about loving no matter what, and it kind of makes me sad that some people take that as abuse, especially when the boy did nothing offensive or abusive. he just took what was offered.

it's a beautiful story, and i think everyone should read it at least once in their lives.

With more than a thousand reviews already online, it may not accomplish much to add one more, but I will try. (SPOILER ALERT)

I have read through all the one-star reviews, and I see three broad themes.

1) Rand's ideas are morally objectionable, false, and anyway not original to her.

2) The novel is too long, too abstractly intellectual, and its characters are not realistic or believable.

3) The tone of the writing is angry, belligerent, and filled with hate.

I want to address this third point, which I think is the most damaging and contentious. Greg Nyquist says the book exhibits 'furious, unbridled hatred towards those who do not agree' and that Rand 'desired some kind of awful punishment to be visited' on them. Others say similar things.

Leaving aside for the moment whether this charge is true, even partially, of Atlas Shrugged, it is not true of any of Rand's other novels. No one reading Anthem or The Fountainhead or We The Living comes away thinking that Rand hates her readers, or even just those readers who disagree with her. It is not an essential part of Rand's fiction-writing style to project angry hatred of those who disagree.

There are long stretches in Atlas Shrugged that resemble Rand's earlier work in that she is just describing the action -- Dagny's childhood, or the development of Rearden Metal, or the various political crises and how Taggart Transcontinental must cope with them. For a reader to feel hated when reading these passages means identifying in a personal way with the villains. Some people do manage to do this. Whitaker Chambers, a hardline Communist who later got religion, famously wrote that "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard commanding, from painful necessity: 'To a gas chamber, go!'" He obviously felt very threatened. But most of us do not have personal histories that closely parallel Rand villains.

I think there is a point in the novel where it is possible for the disbelieving reader to feel angrily confronted by Rand, even hated. It is in the final chapters, as events reach a climax, and particularly when John Galt gives his radio speech.

The problem is that the strikers, the men of the mind, are deliberately letting civilization collapse. They know it will mean mass deaths. They also know that those they are leaving behind are not all equally guilty. Many plainly do not understand the issue. Galt's speech is the first opportunity for most of the general public to know what is at stake, why their society is breaking down.

There is just no way for this speech not to project hostility. Galt is meant to be a perfect man, and the speech he gives is like God condemning sinners. He is telling millions of people that they have failed morally and intellectually, that they have let their world be poisoned by bad ideas, and that many of them are going to die as a consequence. He is saying that he could save them, but he won't. If you the reader are in any doubt about the need for the strike, this is a very unpleasant resolution of the plot. Even if you're in agreement with the strikers, it is uncomfortable reading. The tragic fate of Eddie Willers, a highly sympathetic character, has haunted even Rand's admirers.

Now here is the tricky bit, which many of Rand's critics and even some of her admirers just don't seem to get. The book is FICTION. Rand did not actually advocate letting civilization collapse, much less doing it just to punish people she disagreed with. Many of the things John Galt says are meant to carry over into real life, as part of Rand's philosophy. Condemning millions to starvation and death to 'teach them a lesson' is not one of them.

This brings us back to that other complaint about Rand, that her characters are one-dimensional, that her villains are nothing but bad and the heroes are nothing but good, and that her writing is much too ponderous, spelling out every implication over and over. This fails to take into account the very risky and difficult premise of the novel. Critics condemn Rand for understanding her own project. The story is going to end in the deliberate destruction and rebirth of civilization. The villains have to be intensely, vividly, massively bad for the story to make any sense at all. It has to be clear that there is no alternative, that the society the heroes are living in cannot be fixed any other way. Rand worked very hard at making her villains awful and their world irredeemable. But she did grasp the distinction between the world she invented and the world we all live in.

Rand was capable of writing nuanced, realistic, complex characters, such as Kira's family in We The Living. She was capable of writing about characters who grew and changed, like Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. Rearden's inner struggle is meant to relieve some of the starkness of the struggle in AS. The reader can identify with him, more than with the other heroes. But it would be a literary atrocity to have a collection of nothing but nuanced, ambiguous heroes and nuanced, ambiguous villains, struggling to discover the meaning of life for 1,000 pages, and then for the heroes to destroy civilization to get rid of the villains.

In other words, if the reader senses an angry, stark, dogmatic 'vibe' in Atlas Shrugged, there are well-founded reasons for it. The literary integrity of the work requires it. It may not be to everyone's taste, but it is also not quite the gratuitous, involuntary expression of intellectual incompetence and/or mental illness that Rand's critics want to make it out to be.

On a first reading, Fooled by Randomness presents itself as a wise, deep and disjointed introduction to Futility Theory.