This is a well-told true story of her father's case that may have been the model for "To Kill a Mockingbird." Whether it was or not, it is an excellent courtroom drama and description of the time. I particularly liked the author's vivid descriptions, such as how the heat affected how people spoke -- it made me feel as though I was there in 1930s Alabama.

First sentence: Judge W.L. Parks began the telephone call to Foster Beck with the customary courtesies, asking first after his father, then about his law practice. Other questions too: about the dry spell, fishing conditions. Finally, in his own good time, the judge said what he was calling about, the rape case there in Troy.

Premise/plot: Was the trial in To Kill A Mockingbird based on a real case? Perhaps. In 1938, Foster Beck defended a black man, Charles White, accused of raping a white girl, Elizabeth Liger. Though he did his best and there was no clear evidence of rape--or attempted rape--he lost his case. My Father and Atticus Finch chronicles the case and provides a behind the scenes glimpse of Southern life in the late 1930s.

My thoughts: This nonfiction book was fascinating. I have loved To Kill a Mockingbird for most of my life, and I did find quite a few similarities. While there is no "proof" that the book was based upon this exact case, if you are drawn into the story of To Kill A Mockingbird, there's a good chance this real-life case will do the same. It is intense and at times heartbreaking.

Beck is now an intellectual property lawyer, and when Go Set a Watchman came out, with Harper Lee's far more nuanced portrayal of Atticus Finch, he began to think about digging into the circumstances of a case his own father, Foster Beck, took in the 1930s (and which may, in some fashion, have inspired Lee). The defendant was a black man from Detroit, Charles White, unwilling to submit to southern Jim Crow expectations, and ended up accused of raping a mentally challenged white girl. In a fiasco of a trial, an all white jury sentenced him to death Beck's appeal, which the Alabama Supreme Court unanimously denied, is a masterpiece of bigotry and carelessness, and it disrupted the fragile class understandings in the Enterprise-Troy-Montgomery triangle. The author takes some liberties in reconstructing conversations from his memories of talking to elderly relatives, but ultimately this is strikingly useful for laying out the mechanisms of small town southern racism: the elites allowed the poor whites occasional violence, but not against them, and not so much it endangered New Deal programs or business opportunities. He is also unusually clear-eyed about his own family--grandpa's alcohol and OTC cocaine habits, or how it is possible to be a correspondent and supporter of G.W. Carver and also be damagingly paternalistic. The real-life entirely downer conclusion (Wilson is electrocuted, lawyer is squeezed out of his practice in hometown as payback for appealing the sentence) is the fact of Southern life.