Letters

Taking Issue

While The Zoo on the Road to Nablus, a true account of a zoo in the West Bank, sounds like an interesting book, the reviewer, Ibtisam Barakat, is dead wrong in her assertion that the situation in the West Bank is hopeful because "The zoo, after all, remains open." (Book World, June 1).

For the animals imprisoned in the Nablus zoo, the situation is the exact opposite of "hopeful." It is bleak and cruel. Note the photo of the male lion that accompanies the book review. This magnificent animal is trapped in a concrete and steel bar cage, as opposed to the more natural conditions of modern zoos. Beyond that, what this lion really deserves is his birthright, which is to be free to roam miles and miles of wilderness where he can be with his own kind and live as nature intended.

One would think that Palestinians, themselves trapped in wretched conditions, would not subject animals to that misery. I wish the book reviewer had not ended her thoughtful review with such a thoughtless observation.

--MICHAEL GURWITZ

Silver Spring, Md.

Ibtisam Barakat replies:

Thank you for caring about animals. I wish you had read the book before declaring that my expression of hope was thoughtless. The lion you refer to is one of three castrated and maneless lions that were going to be killed by their Israeli keepers if another home was not soon found. The Qalqilya zoo offered the lions a home. It was a win-win solution -- for the zoos and for the lions. The book reflects the suffering of animals and people living under a devastating occupation, but it does not neglect the hope in the struggle to stay alive, and to arrive at freedom and peace, no matter how small this hope is.

Jonathan Yardley's valuable review of Washington: The Making of the American Capital (Book World, May 18) doesn't capture the full vision in George Washington's determination to place the capital city where it is today. Our first president surely knew about the navigability of the Potomac -- after all, he lived there -- and intended that canals be built to connect the Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio River. Brooks Adams, the great-grandson of John Adams, wrote in his introduction to Henry Adams's The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) that Washington expected that the opening of this path to the West would stimulate industrial development of iron and coal, freeing Maryland and Virginia from their dependence on slavery, and thereby peacefully perpetuating the Union.

There was never sufficient and timely support by the federal government of such canal plans, known then as "internal improvements" and viewed by many in Congress as wasteful and unnecessary government spending (the term "pork" had apparently not yet been invented). John Quincy Adams took up the cause and, as president, broke ground for the Chesapeake and Ohio canal in 1828, but its route was difficult. The Erie Canal, built with the full support of New York State, and the Baltimore and Ohio railroad soon provided more effective routes to the West. Meanwhile, as Brooks Adams explained, the cotton gin meant that "the breeding of slaves for the cultivation of this cotton . . . became more profitable in Virginia than industry in iron and coal." The founding fathers' gamble on the peaceful displacement of slavery in Virginia was a failure, but it was an honorable gamble whose motivation extended beyond Washington's real estate speculations and the symbolic value of the city's location.

--CORNELIA STRAWSER

Washington, D.C.