"So the idea that Atticus, in this book, 'becomes' the bigot he was not in 'Mockingbird' entirely misses Harper Lee’s point—that this is exactly the kind of bigot that Atticus has been all along."

"The particular kind of racial rhetoric that Atticus embraces (and that he and Jean Louise are careful to distinguish from low-rent, white-trash bigotry) is a complex and, in its own estimation, 'liberal' ideology: there is no contradiction between Atticus defending an innocent black man accused of rape in 'Mockingbird' and Atticus mistrusting civil rights twenty years later. Both are part of a paternal effort to help a minority that, in this view, cannot yet entirely help itself. Atticus is simply being faithful to one set of high ideals in the South of his time. 'Jean Louise,' Atticus says in the midst of their argument, 'have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?'"

Writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.