To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee Harper

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.