Battleground: One Mother’s Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms, by Stephen Bates (Poseidon, 365 pp., $24)
THIS IS a first-rate piece of journalism: a scrupulously 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 Scopes II, begins with Vicki Frost’s discovery that her 11-year-old daughter’s reader contained favorable depictions of mental telepathy, 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 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.
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