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Have you seen the movie that is based on the book To Kill a Mockingbird? 

                                                                          

It’s rare that a movie captures the magic of a great book, and yet holds its own as a masterpiece of cinema. To Kill a Mockingbird does just that. Released in 1962 it quickly became a much-loved, critically-acclaimed and classic film.

                        

Set in a small Alabama town during the Great Depression, it raises great questions of racism, poverty, ignorance and injustice with enormous grace and emotional power. Moral and deeply humane, the movie is a classic coming-of-age story of childhood innocence lost in the segregated American south.

Gregory Peck stars as Atticus Finch and Brock Peters is Tom Robinson.  Newcomers Mary Badham and Phillip Alford star as Scout and Jem.

                                         

This film also marked the debut of Robert Duvall as Boo Radley. 

                             

The film won 3 Academy Awards out of the 8 it was nominated for. Gregory Peck won for Best Actor. In a 1997 interview Peck said, "Hardly a day passes that I don't think how lucky I was to be cast in that film. I recently sat at a dinner next to a woman who saw it when she was 14 years old, and she said it changed her life. I hear things like that all the time."

     

Harper Lee and Gregory Peck became great friends.  She gave him her father's beloved pocket watch as a gift after playing him in the movie.

The library has To Kill a Mockingbird on DVD and VHS. 

Memorable Quotations from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

 Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Chapter 1 (Scout speaking)

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 2 (Scout speaking)

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 3 (Atticus Finch to daughter Scout)

There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5 (Miss Maudie Atkinson speaking)

The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning:  he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other.  He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't?  Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 7  (Scout speaking)

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake.  But don't make a production of it.  Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 9 (Atticus speaking)

I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 9 (Scout speaking)

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 10 (Miss Maudie Atkinson speaking to Scout)

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11 (Scout speaking)

They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11 (Atticus speaking)
  

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11 (Atticus speaking)

She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12 (Scout speaking)

So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.  Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16 (Atticus speaking)

I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 20 (speech to the jury by Atticus Finch)

Harper Lee at the courthouse depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird

 "I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill.  "Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off."  "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem.  "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them."  "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown.  I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 22

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.  As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 23 (Atticus speaking)

 I think there's just one kind of folks.  Folks.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 23 (Scout speaking)

If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 23 (Jem speaking)

Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 31 (Scout speaking)

Scout, Atticus and Boo

We hope everyone is busy reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  We are looking forward to our citywide read discussion at Bookenders book group on Wednesday, September 29th at 7 p.m. Carl Sederholm, a popular professor at Brigham Young University, will lead the discussion on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Mockingbird: a Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields.  Everyone is invited and encouraged to attend.  

Another book you might want to read is Scout, Atticus and Boo:  A Celebration of Fifty Years of  To Kill a Mockingbird edited by Mary McDonagh Murphy.

To Kill a Mockingbird may well be our national novel.  It is the first adult novel that many of us remember reading, one book that millions of us have in common.  It sells nearly a million copies a year, more than any other twentieth-century American classic.  Harper Lee's first and only novel, published in July 1960, is a beloved classic and touchstone in American literary and social history. In Scout, Atticus and Boo Mary McDonagh Murphy reviews its history and examines how the novel has left its mark on a broad range of novelists, historians, journalists, and artists. 


This book is a collection of essays written by a wide variety of people, all sharing their thoughts and feelings about the beloved classic. Contributors include Oprah Winfrey, Alice Finch Lee, Tom Brokaw, James McBride, Rosanne Cash and many more. The essays are short and poignant, and tell, very personally, about how the book touched many lives as well as reflected the larger struggle for civil rights in our country. This short volume compiled by Murphy, with a charming forward by Wally Lamb, is chock-full of insightful interviews and musings about one of the most important books of our time.

 

Mary McDonagh Murphy

Mary McDonagh Murphy has also filmed a documentary titled Hey Boo for the 50th year celebration.  To view a clip of that documentary you can click on the button to learn more about the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird at the upper right hand corner of the sidebar. After that, click on the "videos" tab and then you can choose to watch the clip.

We would like to know what you think.  Would you agree that To Kill a Mockingbird could be our national novel?  Why or why not.  Please leave a comment and let us know.

Ahoy!

Guest Post by Taffy Lovell, one of our Great Reads moms:

September 8th, 2010 found many inquiring minds meeting the the Pleasant Grove City Library for another awesome round of Great Reads for Girls, which meets monthly during the school year.  This month the book we read was Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Captain Tammra introduced us to the two authors and Captain Yara tested our knowledge of the book (some of us didn't finish the book but that should NEVER stop any mother and daughter from showing up!).

1st mate Taylor led us on a hunt through rows of books to find clues which led us back to a treasure chest full of fun toys and gadgets. But our voyage was not over yet! We gathered around and made "shooting stars" and finished our evening eating delicious star-shaped sugar cookies. There were many frosting-tinged smiles all around.

Do you feel like you missed out? Never fear! Great Reads For Girls will meet on October 13, 7 P.M. @ the PG Library. The book is The Witches by Roald Dahl, just in time for Halloween! Stop by the library and pick up your copy. 

Peter and the Starcatchers

September's book for Great Reads for Girls is Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. This book will be featured at our Wednesday, September 8 meeting at 7 p.m. 

Join us for a night of pirates, treasure hunts, discussion and treats!

Pulitzer Prize winning humorist Dave Barry, best selling mystery writer Ridley Pearson, and illustrator Greg Call have combined their talents to create a series of prequels to the J.M. Barrie classic Peter Pan. This is the first of those stories. The result is a fast-paced and fluffy pirate adventure, complete with talking porpoises, stinky rogues, possible cannibals, a flying crocodile, biting mermaids, and a much-sought-after trunk full of magical glowing green "starstuff." Ever hear of Zeus? Michelangelo? Attila the Hun? According to 14-year-old Molly Aster they all derived their powers from starstuff that occasionally falls to Earth from the heavens. On Earth, it is the Starcatchers' job to rush to the scene and collect the starstuff before it falls into the hands of the Others who use its myriad powers for evil.

On board the ship Never Land, an orange-haired boy named Peter, the leader of a group of orphaned boys being sent off to work as servants in King Zarboff the Third's court, is puzzled by his shipmate Molly's fantastical story of starstuff, but it inextricably binds him to her. Peter vows to help his new, very pretty friend Molly (a Starcatcher's apprentice) keep a mysterious trunk full of the stuff out of the clutches of the pirate Black Stache, a host of other interested parties, and ultimately King Zarboff the Third.

Greg Call's wonderful black-and-white illustrations are deliciously old-fashioned and add plenty of atmosphere to a silly, swashbuckling story that shows us how Peter Pan came to fly and why he, and his story, will never get old.

                                                        Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson are longtime friends but Peter and the Starcatchers is their first writing collaboration and the first time either of them have written literature for children. They loved working on this book series together. Dave and Ridley also play together - in a band that is.  Dave plays lead guitar and Ridley plays bass guitar in the literary all-star garage band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. The band is comprised of some of America's favorite authors. 

Dave is a Pulitzer Prize-winning nationally syndicated humor columnist for the Miami Herald. His column appears in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad.  He is also the author of more than 20 books. Dave went to Haverford College where he was an English major. He now lives in Miami, Florida with his wife Michelle, a sportswriter. He has a son, Rob, and a daughter, Sophie.

Ridley Pearson has also written over 20 novels.  He likes to write books that are frightening and suspenseful.  He grew up in Riverside, Connecticut.  In 1991 he was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University. Ridley, his wife Marcelle and their two daughters now divide their time between the Northern Rockies and the midwest.

 

Great Reads for Girls

Great Reads for Girls is a fun book group at the library. Girls between the ages of 8 and 16 are encouraged to attend with their mothers or other caring adults. The book group meets on the 2nd Wednesday evening of each month at 7 p.m. 

Come and join us for our fourth year of Great Reads and enjoy

book discussions,

games,

refreshments,

crafts,

prizes,
and lots of fun.

Hope to see you there!