Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms.THIS IS a first-rate piece of journalism: a scrupulously scru·pu·lous adj. 1. Conscientious and exact; painstaking. See Synonyms at meticulous. 2. Having scruples; principled. fair and sympathetic account of a case and controversy set on several different fault lines of the culture war. Mr. Bates's reporting of Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, a case the media dubbed dub 1 tr.v. dubbed, dub·bing, dubs 1. To tap lightly on the shoulder by way of conferring knighthood. 2. To honor with a new title or description. 3. Scopes II, begins with Vicki Frost's discovery that her 11year-old daughter's reader contained favorable depictions of mental telepathy mental telepathy, n a form of anomalous cognition in which an individual may receive information or thoughts directly from the mind of another. , which Mrs. Frost deemed an attribute of the anti-Christ. What follows is a fascinating tale of grass-roots organization and counter-organization, with not-so-grass-roots intervention from outside. Mr. Bates's calm, didactic di·dac·tic adj. Of or relating to medical teaching by lectures or textbooks as distinguished from clinical demonstration with patients. style captures both the broader issues--parental vs. community mores and rights--and the colorful particulars of person and place--the mixed motives and fortuitous circumstances that shaped this case. With the author's own opinions carefully labeled and segregated, Battleground is a thought-provoking, entertaining, and good read --MARK CUNNINGHAM Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms, by Stephen Bates Bates , Katherine Lee 1859-1929. American educator and writer best known for her poem "America the Beautiful," written in 1893 and revised in 1904 and 1911. (Poseidon, 365 pp., $24) |
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