Mockingbird by Charles J. Shields
#4 in my 2007 book challenge was Mockingbird, a biography of Nelle Harper Lee. I read both To Kill a Mockingbird and In Cold Blood last year, and this was an interesting and informative companion book. This is the first and only bio of Lee, so Shields has the good fortune of no competition, as well as the good timing to publish in the wake of the films Capote and Infamous. Exhaustively researched in spite of Lee’s refusal to participate, the book did not feel tight and polished. I saw a number of typos (e.g., “the” left out of “on other hand”), usage errors (e.g., another thing coming, rather than the lesser known but correct “think”), and unwieldy sentences. The strength of the book is the exhaustive research of the author, particularly around the time that Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and helped Capote research In Cold Blood. There was good evidence of her writing habits, her strengths and weaknesses, and her family ties. It also gave different views into certain aspects of In Cold Blood. Shields attempts to answer the obvious question of why Lee never wrote another book as early as the introduction. I wasn’t sure why he would want to give away his conclusions so quickly after he did all the research that follows. The detailed intro also made a lot of what followed feel repetitive. The subject was fascinating, but the book itself would have benefited from more thorough editing, both of copy and in structure.