Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Our Schools

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, thoughtful, readable, and provocative
Review: A brilliant look at some of the more intractable intersections between the legal and the moral, here in the context of schools and the education of our kids. Bates wrestles with the issues, to be sure, but without preaching -- he leaves it to us, the parents, to draw our own lessons. Read this if you care about your child.

Rating:
Summary: Hot issue, Even hand
Review: Stephen Bates must have invested three or four lives of time interviewing the original participants and digging up the actual letters and documents of this highly complex series of interconnected events. No, it is not out of date. The flaming issues of that date are merely the warning flickering of huge blasts of fire still to come. Scopes I was had nothing on this.

At the same time his balance and meticulous fairness to all sides is one of the most impressive things about this book. Few people can treat religiously motivated people as rational, or religion as as relevant a topic as any other free speech.

All in all it is as griping as any mystery novel yet it portrays an issue of political correctness versus individual liberty which is both a local and a national matter even more important than the future of our entire educational tradition.