Friday Reads

Good Morning!!

Go Set A Watchman, the “lost” book by Harper Lee will be published on Tuesday, July 14, and you can read the first chapter at The Wall Street Journal this morning. Here’s the introductory blurb from the WSJ:

In 1957, when she was 31 years old, Harper Lee submitted her first attempt at a novel to the publisher J.B. Lippincott.

Titled ‘Go Set a Watchman,’ it was set in the ’50s and opened with a woman named Jean Louise Finch returning home to Alabama. Ms. Lee’s editor found the story lacking but, seizing on flashback scenes, suggested that she write instead about her protagonist as a young girl. The result was a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’

‘Go Set a Watchman’ will be published on Tuesday. It has undergone very little editing. “It was made clear to us that Harper Lee wanted it published as it was,” Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins’s Harper imprint, said in a statement. “We gave the book a very light copy edit.”

The first chapter of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ introduces Ms. Lee’s beloved character, Scout, as a sexually liberated woman in her twenties, traveling from New York to Alabama to visit her ailing father and weigh a marriage proposal from a childhood friend. It also includes a bombshell about Scout’s brother.

–Jennifer Maloney

The Irish Times on the conflicting stories about how and when the novel was discovered: New Harper Lee book may have been found years ago.

On the eve of the most anticipated publishing event in years – the release of Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman – comes yet another strange twist to the tale of how the book made its way to publication, a development that further clouds the story of serendipitous discovery that generated both excitement and scepticism in February.

As HarperCollins, the publisher, and Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B Carter, have told it, Carter set out to review an old typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird in August and happened upon an entirely different novel – one with the same characters but set 20 years later – attached to it.

“I was so stunned,” Carter told The New York Times last winter. But another narrative has emerged that suggests the discovery may have happened years earlier, in October 2011, when Justin Caldwell, a rare books expert from Sotheby’s auction house, flew to Alabama to meet with Carter and Samuel Pinkus, then Lee’s literary agent, to appraise a Mockingbird manuscript for insurance and other purposes.

The discrepancy between the two accounts raises questions about whether the book was lost and accidently recovered and about why Lee would not have sought to publish it earlier.

Click the link to read the rest.

Another interesting story from the Aiken Standard: Looking for traces of ‘Mockingbird’ in Harper Lee’s hometown.

MONROEVILLE, Ala. (AP) — Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” is always nearby in the southwest Alabama town of Monroeville.

The quiet city is the birthplace and current home of the 89-year-old author, and it inspired the fictional town of Maycomb in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about race and injustice in the Deep South of the 1930s.

There are other spots around town that actually helped make “Mockingbird,” released 55 years ago.

Start at Mel’s Dairy Dream on South Alabama Avenue, a busy main road in the town of 6,300 people, and walk north toward the square.

The small block restaurant, ringed by service windows and a counter where customers plop down money for ice cream cones, stands on the site of Lee’s childhood home, which was torn down decades ago. Mel’s is just a short walk from the school where Lee attended classes and, by extension, her alter-ego Scout and Jem began their “longest journey together” at the book’s climax.

Lee shared the old house with siblings, her mother and father A.C. Lee, an attorney and Alabama legislator who was the basis for Atticus Finch. Finch returns in “Watchman” as his daughter goes home to Maycomb 20 years later as an adult to the town that shaped her, according to the publisher.

Next door to Mel’s and across a weathered stone fence is a grassy lot with the remains of a house foundation and a historic marker that recalls the site as the one-time home of author Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and the inspiration for the character “Dill” in Mockingbird. As adults, the two collaborated on Capote’s classic crime story “In Cold Blood,” published in 1966.

Read more at the link.

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960; the film version came out in 1962. Links to some background on the movie:

Blu-Ray.com: The Making of To Kill A Mockingbird, by Robert Siegel (2012).

The Wall Street Journal: The Real Story Behind ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (2011).

The Daily Beast: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Makes Its Mark, 50 Years After the Film’s Release, by Sandra McElwaine (2012).

Turner Classic Movies: Behind the Camera on To Kill A Mockingbird.

Political News

Republicans are really excited about Bernie Sanders, and they seem to be doing everything they can to convince Democrats to vote for him instead of Hillary Clinton–you know, the woman who can beat any of the GOP candidates handily.

At The Daily Beast, Stuart Stevens, one of the masterminds of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign explains how Hillary is going to lose the primary to Bernie Sanders.

Here’s what we know has happened so far in the Democratic primary for president. Since Hillary Clinton started spending money, hiring staff and campaigning, she has lost votes. In Iowa and New Hampshire, she was doing better in the polls in January than she is today. Heck, she had more votes last month than she has today.

Politics is about trends and the one thing we know is that trends escalate in speed as elections near. Even starting out with the huge lead that she did, Clinton can’t allow Sanders to keep gaining votes while she loses votes in the hope that the bleeding won’t be fatal in the long run.

So far Clinton’s approach has been to try to demonstrate to the element of the party that finds Sanders so appealing that she is really one of them. This seems like an extremely flawed strategy that plays directly to Sanders’s strengths. If the contest is going to come down to who can be the most pure liberal, the best bet is on the guy who actually is a socialist. Particularly when running against someone with Hillary Clinton’s long record of being everything that the current left of her party hates.

The truth is, Hillary Clinton has supported every U.S. war since Vietnam. She supported not only DOMA, which her husband signed, but a travel ban on those who were HIV positive. She supported welfare cuts (remember her husband’s efforts toward “ending welfare as we know it”?). She supports the death penalty and campaigned in her husband’s place during the 1992 New Hampshire primary when he left to oversee the execution of an African-American man whose suicide attempt left him brain damaged.

And so on . . . bla bla bla . . .

Truman Capote and Harper Lee in Holcome during the filming of To Kill A Mockingbird

Dylan Byers is very concerned about the New York Times choosing to leave Ted Cruz’s book of their best seller list.

Cruz’s “A Time For Truth,” published on June 30, sold 11,854 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen Bookscan’s hardcover sale numbers. That’s more than 18 of the 20 titles that will appear on the bestseller list for the week ending July 4. Aziz Ansari’s “Modern Romance,” which is #2 on the list, sold fewer than 10,000 copies. Ann Coulter’s “Adios America,” at #11, sold just over half as many copies.

“A Time For Truth” has also sold more copies in a single week than Rand Paul’s “Taking a Stand,” which has been out for more than a month, and more than Marco Rubio’s “American Dreams,” which has been out for six months. It is currently #4 on the Wall Street Journal hardcover list, #4 on the Publisher’s Weekly hardcover list, #4 on the Bookscan hardcover list, and #1 on the Conservative Book Club list.

This week, HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, sent a letter to The New York Times inquiring about Cruz’s omission from the list, sources with knowledge of the situation said. The Times responded by telling HarperCollins that the book did not meet their criteria for inclusion.

“We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy explained when asked about the omission. “This book didn’t meet that standard this week.”

What was the problem with the sales of Cruz’s book?

“In the case of this book, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence was that sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases,” she wrote.

That figures.

Gregory Peck with Harper Lee on the set of To Kill A Mockingbird

Following up on Jeb Bush’s “work e hours” gaffe:

Vox: Jeb Bush and longer working hours: gaffesplainer 2016.

Jeb Bush’s stated goal of 4 percent annual GDP growth, though unrealistic, in general sounds nice. But during a New Hampshire Union Leader interview live-streamed on Periscope, Bush got granular about his plan, revealing that part of the dream is for Americans to work longer hours. The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign have both smelled gaffe and responded with mocking counter press releases, depicting Jeb as smug and out of touch.

tl;dr

Jeb is not being quoted out of context; he really said this.

Jeb is not mistaken: Longer hours worked would push up the GDP growth rate.

Americans already work abnormally long hours for the developed world.

Jeb has no particular policy ideas to make this happen.

Read the rest at Vox.

Josh Marshall at TPM: We’ve Met the Doofus. And He is Jeb.