SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010 “
KLMNO
—Britain’s Daily Mail on the former prime minister’s decision to donate profits from his memoir to wounded soldiers. Visit Political Bookworm
6voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
B For once in his war-mongering, money grubbing career, Tony Blair has done something decent.”
B7
HISTORY REVIEW BY ELAINE SHOWALTER
A marriage shaken apart T
he title of historian Ilyon Woo’s provocative book certainly sparks curiosity and debate. Which of our many American divorces merits the ad- jective “great”? In this case, it’s the one granted to Eunice Chapman, who won a legislative decree in New York in 1818 that was a victory for maternal custody rights in an era when children legally belonged to their fathers. And what about the challenging subtitle? Woo viv- idly tells the story of the Chap- mans’ broken family, beginning with a dramatic sentence worthy of Stephen King: “Five years after the children first disappeared, it had come to this: a hundred strangers circling the Shaker village, torches lit.” It sounds like the villagers marching on Dracula’s castle. In their 19th-century heyday, the
Shakers, now nearly extinct and benevolent curators of quaint mu- seums and expensive furniture, were a flourishing radical sect that lived communally, prayed vigor- ously, saw carnal love as the cause of sin and demanded celibacy from their followers. But they were nei- ther predators nor polygamists. So why did Eunice Chapman have to fight them? The full story of the Chapman divorce is more controversial than sensational. In 1804, poor and desperately afraid of becoming a spinster, 26-year-old Eunice Haw- ley married James Chapman, a widower 15 years older whom she found “disagreeable, and repul- sive.” They had three children, but he turned out to be an alcoholic, a
THE GREAT DIVORCE A Nineteenth- CenturyMother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times By Ilyon Woo Atlantic Monthly. 404 pp. $25
philanderer and a failure. In 1811, James decided to strike out for a new life on his own, selling their home in Durham, N.Y., and aban- doning the family. With the help of her relatives and the Presbyteri- an church, Eunice managed to find shelter and support her chil- dren.
By 1812, however, James had had
a religious conversion and decided to join a Shaker community in nearby Watervliet, which offered to cleanse him of his sins, give him a home and financial security, and bestow “a sense of acceptance and
a reason to live.” In exchange, he entered a period of probation dur- ing which he promised to settle his affairs, make amends to his wife and children and, if possible, bring them all into the Shaker fold. But Eunice refused. Although the Shaker community was prosper- ous and immaculate, she did not like their way of life or their atti- tudes about sexuality, maternity and chastity. Eunice hoped to force James to provide child support. In- stead, he forcibly abducted the children — George, 10; Susan, 8; and Julia, 4 — and took them to Watervliet, where the Shakers took them in. In a few states, abandoned spouses of Shaker converts could sue for divorce and claim property rights. But in New York, where di- vorce was granted only on the grounds of adultery, Eunice had to obtain a special legislative act of re- lief, approved by both houses in Al- banyand ratified by a higher Coun- cil of Revision. She took four years to achieve her purpose, through ex- hausting delays, reversals, vetoes and retrials. The divorce, however, did not give her custody rights to the children, who had been secret- ly moved to another Shaker com- munity; she had to locate and re- claim them by “collecting my forces for a new invasion,” using moral and media pressure to ob- tain their release. By the time she had achieved her goal, the children were “bona fide Believers” who had to be deprogrammed and rec- onciled to life in the sinful world. Eunice’s triumphant battle, Woo concludes, has continuing
resonance both internationally and in the Unites States, where “the competing issues of custody, marital, religious, and state rights persist.” But the story Woo tells in nuanced and absorbing detail is far more ethically complex. Eu- nice’s special divorce and custody act was an exceptional case that had little effect on divorce law overall. New York law was not re- vised until the 1960s. Moreover, the children’s rights, needs and preferences were completely ig- nored by all. Most important, Eunice’s tac-
tics left their legacy in American politics. She used her charm to conduct an anti-Shaker smear campaign, falsely accusing them of child abuse and covert sexual practices, depicting them as “evil captors” rather than generous protectors, threatening them with arson and mob violence, and ex- ploiting American anti-sect emo- tions in the media. Woo calls this divorce “great” because it was accomplished against overwhelming odds, by a mother with fervent belief in her maternal rights. But it is hard to say whether the victory was un- biased and honorable, let alone exemplary.
bookworld@washpost.com
3 books about education reform
by Diane Ravitch
Now that the Obama administration has invited the states to com- pete for $5 billion in stimulus funds, the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores and close low-per- forming schools. Since so much power and money are arrayed on one side of the issue, it is useful to consider dissenting views. These three books have the power to change the national discussion of what now passes for “school reform.”
mine Our Future” (Teachers College, $21.95) contains a valuable lode of practical and research-based advice about how to im- prove our schools. Darling-Hammond does something that the Obama administration has not: She reviews what the top-perform- ing school systems around the world do to get great results. Their highest priorities, she shows, are building a strong, experienced staff and making sure that every school has access to a rich, well-balanced curriculum in the arts and sciences. Finland, the highest-performing nation, has not relied on testing and accountability to achieve its current status.
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Elaine Showalter is a professor emeritus of English at Princeton
University and the author of "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx."
RELIGION REVIEW BY MICHAEL MEWSHAW JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST
A pastor of the Dinka tribe in South Sudan mourns the death of a villager killed in one of many inter-tribal raids. Such conflicts are examined by Eliza Griswold in “The Tenth Parallel.”
Battles in the name of God that circle the globe
S
everal hundred miles north of the equator, a lengthy portion of the 10th parallel forms what Eliza Griswold calls a “faith-based fault line” along which Islam and Chris- tianity intersect and often clash in bloody spasms of violence. Starting in 2003, during the Bush administration’s global war on terror, Griswold traveled ex- tensively in this area, reporting on conflicts and tense truces in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indone- sia, Malaysia and the Philip- pines. Although many of these events might be described as reli- gious wars, Griswold takes pains to point out that they are also struggles for local political and economic control, as well as geo- political grabs for emerging mar- kets and resources, especially oil. An American poet and experi- enced journalist, the author brings to her book a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of place. By her own ad- mission, she also brings person- al baggage. As the daughter of Frank Griswold, the former pre- siding bishop of the Episcopal Church, she grew up a preach- er’s kid, deeply steeped in Chris- tian traditions and at home with evangelicals and interna- tional proselytizers such as Billy
THE TENTH PARALLEL Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam By Eliza Griswold Farrar Straus Giroux. 317 pp. $27
Graham’s son Franklin. But she has done her homework on Is- lam, and as a young woman traveling alone, she appears to have encountered no obstacles in Muslim countries that she couldn’t overcome. Admirably evenhanded, she recounts the excesses of funda- mentalism on both sides. For readers more accustomed to hearing about Islamic inflexibil-
ity, she recalls the callous my- opia of Christianity. “Dr. Rich- ard Furman, the head of the World Medical Mission, the medical arm of [Franklin] Gra- ham’s organization, told me that in one of the Samaritan’s Purse’s African hospitals, the doctors will draw a plus or mi- nus sign on a patient’s chart to indicate whether he is an evan- gelical Christian. If not, his op- eration may be postponed until someone shares the Gospel with him lest he die without an op- portunity for salvation.” With no self-congratulatory
New Journalistic posturing, she visits some of the riskiest places on the planet and tracks down terrorists, warlords, renegade priests and aspiring Christian martyrs. Like any ambitious re- porter, she’s not reluctant to take advantage of official news con- ferences in Khartoum or an NGO helicopter into otherwise inaccessible Mogadishu. What’s extraordinary, however, is her persistence in leaving the beaten path to interview the American son of a Somali warlord or a U.S. missionary who survived a Mus- lim kidnapping that killed her husband or a repentant terrorist responsible for dozens of deaths in Malaysia. But unfortunately, the sheer
surfeit of names, places, dates and historical data sometimes threatens to swamp the narra- tive, and Griswold has the same trouble as the reader holding so much information in mind. Ear- ly on, Anglican archbishop Ben- jamin Kwashi says, “God has moved his work to Africa.” Later, Griswold recycles the quote. When Franklin Graham meets Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, she describes the pal- ace grounds where “Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon was murdered by the jihadis.” Two pages later, she repeats herself. On four oc- casions she writes that Indone- sia has the world’s largest Mus- lim population. Three times in 10 pages, she refers to the island of Mindanao as the main home of Muslims in the Philippines. On countless occasions she notes that most Muslims in northern Africa are Sufis. The reason for this repetitive- ness would appear to be that “The Tenth Parallel” draws heavily on articles published over several years in news- papers and magazines. When they were stitched together into a book, extraneous material somehow escaped the copy edi- tor’s blue pencil and has left lumpy seams. More crucially, it escaped someone’s attention that Gris- wold repeats herself in structur- ing scenes. The result is a pat- tern of interviews with “the most notorious member of Balik Islam” or “the most powerful commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front” or the Pope of Terrorism, Hassan Al-Turabi, “the architect of the most vio- lent jihad of modern times.” Af- ter building expectations, the author often rushes through the actual encounters without pro- ducing anything meaningful. It’s understandable how she might be grateful just to get in and get out of so many menac- ing situations alive; no one can fault her courage. But the cruel truth of journalism is that an in- terview that doesn’t advance the story needs to be omitted. Still, Griswold deserves credit
for going where so few dare to venture. In a sense, like the best Christian missionaries, she serves as a witness in both meanings of the word — simul- taneously observing sad reali- ties and, in the process, showing people on the ground something valuable about Westerners.
bookworld@washpost.com
formation Age; $29.99, paper). If American education has a sacred cow, it is Teach for America, which recently won $50 million from the U.S. Department of Education. The organization recruits bright college gradu- ates to work for two years in the nation’s poorest schools. Veltri has taught many of these recruits in her job at the University of Arizona, and she interviewed hundreds for this book. While she admires the young peo- ple who join the program, she raises important questions about the value of placing unprepared teachers in classes with the nation’s neediest children.
2
study Richard Rothstein’s “Grading Educa- tion: Getting Accountability Right” (Teach-
3
ers College and Economic Policy Institute; $19.95, paper). Rothstein and his col- leagues explain in plain language why cur- rent accountability policies, which focus only on basic skills, are making education worse, not better, by narrowing the curriculum. With apt examples, they also show how the pur- suit of numbers distorts more important goals and how schools may get higher test scores without supplying better education.
bookworld@washpost.com
Diane Ravitch is a former assistant secretary of education. Her latest book is “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”
If I were assigning reading to staff members at the Department of Education, I would ask them to
Barbara Torre Veltri’s “Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher” (In-
Linda Darling-Hammond’s “The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Deter-
In 2010 America: Partisan bickering and the powers
of special interests make it nearly impossible to legislate…
What would Ben say?
“A provocative undertaking.” —TOM BROKAW
Find out August 30th.
Michael Mewshaw is the author of 11 novels and eight books of nonfiction, most recently “Between Terror and
Tourism: An Overland Journey Across North Africa.”
www.PoorerRichardsAmerica.com Skyhorse
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