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Themes Videos 151 videos
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Bestsellers: The Help 9594 Views
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Description:
Historical fiction novels like The Help can whisk you back to a place and time that you may have only read about in history books. Or... a place and time that you would have read about in history books if you hadn't been slacking off on your assigned reading.
Transcript
- 00:04
The Help, a la Shmoop. We laughed, we cried… we’ll never eat pie again.
- 00:10
The Help has been selling like hotcakes for a while now.
- 00:13
But it actually has the critical cred to back up its popularity. That's right: Even stuffy
- 00:18
types love The Help.
- 00:20
Some folks are even comparing it to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which always
Full Transcript
- 00:24
ranks high in the “best books ever” debate.
- 00:27
So will The Help follow in To Kill a Mockingbird’s footsteps? Will it ever make the move from
- 00:33
bestsellerdom to classic lit? Sure, The Help isn’t a classic yet, but
- 00:37
how many stories are called “classics” right away?
- 00:41
Plenty of jerks thought Charles Dickens was a worthless hack, and we all know how that
- 00:45
turned out.
- 00:47
The important thing was that Dickens’ books were popular, just like The Help is today.
- 00:51
Of course, popularity isn’t everything. You’ve got to have respect, too. Sorry,
- 00:56
Twilight.
- 00:57
But The Help is no slouch in that department, either. “Popularity plus Respect plus Time
- 01:02
equals Classic” is an equation that’s worked in the past, so maybe it'll work for
- 01:07
The Help, too. If that equation isn't enough for you, throw
- 01:10
some racism into the mix. We're serious. Books about tough subjects like racism have a history
- 01:17
of making their way into the world of classic literature.
- 01:20
We’re thinking way beyond just To Kill a Mockingbird – there’s The Color Purple,
- 01:25
Invisible Man, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry…
- 01:29
The list of tales about ignorant scumbags goes on and on…
- 01:33
…and guess what The Help is about?
- 01:35
Okay, so The Help has all the makings of a classic, but it's definitely not a shoe-in.
- 01:40
Why? Well, lots of people think The Help is just reality TV in novel form.
- 01:48
The black maids serve as the cameras, giving us a semi-scripted view of the badly-behaving
- 01:52
wives of a particular town.
- 01:54
Sound familiar? Deep down, could The Help just be the print
- 01:58
version of “The Real Housewives of Jackson"?
- 02:03
When we get sick of rich ladies being terrible harpies on TV, we may get sick of stories
- 02:08
like The Help, too. So what do you think?
- 02:11
Is The Help headed toward the literary hall of fame…
- 02:13
…or is it just another one-off bestseller destined for oblivion?
- 02:20
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
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