Eliza Griswold`s ” The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline between Christianity & Islam” charts the struggle over who speaks for God in the latitudes where rival beliefs come to blows. The tenth parallel
- the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator
- is the front line where Christianity & Islam collide. Here, from Nigeria, Sudan & Somalia to Indonesia, Malaysia & the Philippines, both religions are experiencing huge & sometimes violent reawakenings. Award-winning journalist Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years travelling this area & meeting its people, asking where belief ends & secular conflict begins, & examining how encounters between faiths will shape the future. ” Her dispatches are compelling. She writes beautifully.. .and explains, more than any newspaper headline, what has gone wrong”. (Michael Binyon, ” The Times”). ”A fascinating journey.. .full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue, which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions”. (Linda Robinson, ” The New York Times”). ” The author brings to her book a sharp eye for telling details & a keen sense of place.. .she visits some of the riskiest places on the planet & tracks down terrorists, warlords, renegade priests & aspiring Christian martyrs”. (Michael Mewshaw, ” Washington Post”). ” Her book is a richly textured fugue that dramatizes the dizzying interplay between notions
- faith, morality, identity
- & nations”. (Julie Cline, ” Los Angeles Times”). Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation, received both the first Robert I. Friedman Award for investigative reporting & a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her journalism has appeared in ” The Atlantic”, ” The New Yorker”, ” The New York Times Magazine”, & ” Harper`s Magazine”, among others. A collection of her poems, ” Wideawake Field”, was published by FSG in 2007.