___________________________________'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man falsely charged with the rape of a white girl.

The perennially beloved and treacly account of growing up in a small Southern town during the Depression....To read the novel is, for most, an exercise in wish-fulfillment and self-congratulation, a chance to consider thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would never harbor the racist attitudes espoused by the lowlifes in the novel.