David Kinley's "The Liberty Paradox"

David Kinley is the inaugural Chair of Human Rights Law at the University of Sydney, a founding member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, and an Expert Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London. He is the author of Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights and the coauthor of The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Kinley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Liberty Paradox: Living with the Responsibilities of Freedom, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Liberty Paradox deals with happiness. What are our freedoms and responsibilities in its pursuit and how do we negotiate them individually and collectively?

Specifically, the page tells us that in handling “the slings and arrows of fortune, however outrageous,” our “capacity for adaptation” is critical to securing happiness. And adaptation, in turn, boils down to how well we manage expectations, not only in the banality of everyday existence but also when fate changes our circumstances extraordinarily. One might suppose, for example, that winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing injury will inexorably, fundamentally, and lastingly change our levels of happiness. Yet that appears not to be the case in practice. Apparently, we all have what psychologists call a set point of happiness, “to which we nearly always return, regardless of what befalls us in the meantime.” As a result, counterintuitively, “the world is not short of wealthy whingers and paralyzed optimists.”

In terms of the book’s central argument – that liberty’s paradox lies in it necessarily comprising both freedom and responsibility – page 99 reflects one of the enduring conundrums of that relationship. Namely, that while our freedom to choose what makes us happy is always hemmed in by our commensurate responsibility to recognize and respect our neighbor’s freedom to do the same (and all that delicate equilibrium entails), each of us also possesses personal predilections for self-awareness, empathy, and law-abidingness that significantly influence how we process the relationship internally and how we express it publicly. In this respect, much the same can said of the other realms of human life covered in the book – health, wealth, work, security, voice, love, and death. Liberty while living in the company of others is a bargain into which all of us must enter for each of us to enjoy.

Learn more about The Liberty Paradox at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas M. Larkin's "The China Firm"

Thomas M. Larkin is assistant professor of the history of the United States of America and the world at the University of Prince Edward Island.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his book, The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The China Firm begins halfway through a paragraph discussing the nostalgia Americans in nineteenth-century China felt during annual Fourth of July celebrations. The rest of the page describes how such celebrations were a source of friction between American inhabitants of Hong Kong and their British peers; it concludes by switching gears to introduce the expensive social rituals that the port’s American elite performed daily, beginning with an account of riding culture in the colony. The three paragraphs on this page take the reader through themes at the heart of the book: patriotism and nostalgia; Anglo-American tension and amity; class and social performance. To put it simply, the Page 99 Test works.

Expanded upon further throughout the rest of the chapter, the anecdotes on page 99 point to the balancing act that overshadowed American attempts to navigate British colonial and semi-colonial space along the China coast. American elites arriving in nineteenth-century China recognised the social, economic, and diplomatic value of becoming accepted amongst British society, but their efforts to do so were often inflected by their heightened sense of national identity, antecedent tensions between Britain and the United States playing out on a global scale, and their ability to perform the requisite markers of success. The Fourth of July was, for example, an important opportunity to express one’s national pride, but how the broader colonial community reacted was subject to wider circumstances. When things were swell between the American and British communities, the British joined in the revelry; when tensions flared, as they did during the American Civil War, acerbic British commenters in the port’s China Mail newspaper derided the day as an ‘inordinate national vanity.’ We see, then, on page 99, a brief instance reflecting the calibrated performance Americans sustained as they were ‘made’ in and helped ‘make’ British colonial society in China.

Learn more about The China Firm at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hajar Yazdiha's "The Struggle for the People’s King"

Hajar Yazdiha is assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement, and reported the following:

Page 99 concludes a chapter on battles over civil rights memory between the progressive LGBTQ movement and the conservative family values movement. This page describes how each group had worked to claim the memory of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement to take the moral high ground in their political battles.

More importantly, this page describes the consequences of these strategies where conservative groups increasingly use Dr. King to frame themselves as the new oppressed minorities fighting for their rights. As I write on page 99,

As conservative groups attempted to both discredit progressive groups’ claims to civil rights memory and establish their own claims to memory, rainbow coalitions were forming to challenge the reactionary right-wing movements that were gaining popularity in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign.

It's incredible how well the Page 99 Test works here! Though we’re only getting a snapshot from one of the cases in the book (other chapters take on different social movements), the takeaways about the co-optation of civil rights memory are a throughline. From page 99 we get a sense of how the book explores the political misuses of Dr. King and how they matter for contemporary politics.

One of the major takeaways of The Struggle for the People’s King is that the political misuses of Dr. King and civil rights memory are not just rhetorical. These are intentional political strategies and they have powerful effects. These misuses of memory don’t just change the way we collectively remember the racial past. They also shape the way we make sense of the present, tackle social problems together, and direct action toward the future. This is where the real danger of historical revisionism lies, in its capacity to evade social reality.

There is a popular way of understanding the divisive nature of American political culture as a matter of polarization. My book shows that it is not that we are polarized into different sides of the same coin. Through the politics of historical revisionism, we have diverged in our conceptions of social reality. We are living on different planes.

Despite this grim reality, at the core of The Struggle for the People’s King are these perennial questions about identity and belonging. What does it take to feel like we belong, to a community, to a nation, and to one another? How does our understanding of our place in society, our connection to its past, shape our imaginations of what type of society may be possible?

Dr. King said, “The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open.” My book is an invitation to readers to confront the past, present, and future with eyes wide open, to come together in community, to be visionaries.

Visit Hajar Yazdiha's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Holmes's "The Graft Hybrid"

Matthew Holmes is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental History at the University of Stavanger, where he examines the modern history of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) in urban spaces. His previous postdoc position at the University of Cambridge investigated science and agriculture in the British Empire. Holmes's new book, The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics, explores the creation of chimeral plants and animals. He also publishes on the history of biotechnology, morphology, and natural history.

Holmes applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Graft Hybrid and reported the following:

Although page 99 of The Graft Hybrid does not engage with the book’s titular subject, it does provide an entry point to one of the greatest controversies in the history of biology: whether grafting different plants and animals together could produce new species. Page 99 introduces a botanical power couple, Mabel Rayner and William Neilson Jones, lecturers at Bedford College, London. In 1920 Rayner and Neilson Jones published a textbook that described the famous experiments of Gregor Mendel on pea plants. Mendelian genetics, they claimed, had great practical promise for breeding new plants and animals for agriculture. Grafting only received a brief mention.

Reading page 99 alone would give a one-sided view of The Graft Hybrid, and indeed, of the history of biology itself. Alternatives to Mendelian genetics as an agricultural tool persisted across the twentieth century. One of these alternatives was graft hybridization. Over the course of the twentieth century, biologists from around the world claimed to have been able to artificially create an extraordinary array of new species: from strangely colored chickens and salamanders to potato-tomato hybrids. If we read beyond page 99, we find that Neilson Jones also published an influential 1934 book titled Plant Chimaeras and Graft Hybrids. In it, he claimed that it was theoretically possible for the cells of grafted plants to fuse together to create new hybrid species.

The story of the graft hybrid has many twists and turns, which Neilson Jones experienced. While the first edition of his book on graft hybrids was widely praised, its second edition – released in 1969 – was harshly criticized. In the Soviet Union, genetics was under attack as a bourgeois science, with graft hybridization promoted in its stead. Neilson Jones’s fall from grace reflects the larger argument of my book, which demonstrates that belief in the existence of graft hybrids was scientifically respectable until the “Lysenko affair” in the Soviet Union divided biology along ideological lines.

Visit Matthew Holmes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eileen M. Hunt's "The First Last Man"

Eileen M. Hunt is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Artificial Life After Frankenstein and Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in "Frankenstein."

Hunt applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination is the center of the book. On this page you will find some of the core and controversial themes of my third book on Mary Shelley (and of Mary Shelley's own life!): incest, love triangles, and how they spread wider social conflicts including the metaphorical plague of war. In the following passage drawn from page 99, I describe how the teenage Mary Shelley became obsessed with the figure of Oedipus from the time she eloped with Percy Shelley in 1814, when she was just 16 and he was 21 and married to another woman. Sometime in the couple's first year together, Mary Shelley wrote down and modified a quote from the original ancient Greek from Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes in the endpapers of her first journal book, which she co-kept with Percy:

The original meaning of the journal’s Greek quote adapted from Aeschylus, however, might be inferred from its probable writing in Mary Shelley’s hand, and its placement at the very back of her first notebook, which ends in May 1815. Her copying and modification of this passage from Seven Against Thebes would suggest that she was a quick study. Perhaps it was Shelley’s guilt over disobeying her father Godwin during her elopement that inspired her preoccupation with the choral lament of the “heavy fate” of Oedipus. In 1834, Shelley disclosed in passing to the woman who nursed her, Maria Gisborne, that her stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont noticed “long before” she was fourteen that she had an “excessive & romantic attachment to my Father.” Mary Jane may have attempted to purge the family of a younger female rival for Godwin’s attention by helping to arrange for the adolescent’s departure in 1812 to live with the Baxter family in Scotland.

Akin to the exposure of the infant Oedipus by his parents, Shelley’s youthful exile would backfire upon her family. Upon her first return to London from Dundee, in November 1812, she met Percy at a dinner party at her father’s table. Upon her next return, in 1814, they fell in love, courted on her mother’s grave, and ran away to France with Mary Jane’s daughter Claire.

But Mary and Percy’s scandalous three-way elopement with her stepsister did more than anger their joint father-figure Godwin and his second wife. It infused an incestuous and conflictive dynamic in their romantic relationship from the very start. As she filled the final pages of her first journal book in the spring of 1815, Shelley’s cursive grew ever larger and more uncontrolled.

Page 99 of The First Last Man doesn't tell you the whole story of this study of how Mary Shelley's 1826 novel, The Last Man, helped to generate the modern genre of postapocalyptic pandemic literature, film, and television. But it does give you a lot of reasons to pick up the book and read it: to figure out why and how the deeper interpersonal conflicts of Mary Shelley's complex familial and romantic life—especially with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, her father William Godwin, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont—led her to develop not just one, but two, of the major sources for contemporary political science fiction: Frankenstein and The Last Man!

Learn more about The First Last Man at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kashshaf Ghani's "Sufi Rituals and Practices"

Kashshaf Ghani is an Assistant Professor in the School of Historical Studies at Nalanda University, India. He specializes in pre-modern South Asia, covering the period 1000-1800, focusing on the history of Sufism, its practices, interactions, networks, and regional experiences. He is also interested in Indo-Persian histories, interreligious interactions, history and culture of the Persianate world, and Asian interconnections. Ghani studied History at Presidency College, Kolkata, and the University of Calcutta, where he completed his PhD. He has held teaching and research positions at Aliah University, Kolkata; University of Calcutta; The Asiatic Society, Kolkata; Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris; Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin; and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata.

Ghani applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sufi Rituals and Practices: Experiences from South Asia, 1200-1450, and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of a chapter that translates, for the first time, for English readers the 14th century treatise of Usul al-Sama by Maulana Fakhr al-Din Zarradi, who defended, through 10 principles, the Sufi practice of sama – listening to music and poetry for spiritual ecstasy.

Page 99 concludes the third principle which discusses the qualities of musical instruments – like duff, and the kind of emotions it creates in the heart of the listener. If duff is played while reciting good messages, then it is considered lawful. On the other hand if the playing of duff accompanies wine drinking, it will give rise to improper thoughts. Hence in such occasions musical instruments are forbidden. Rather than the sound of instruments, Sufi saints in sama are enraptured by poetry and verses, that are recited by the singer.

The fourth principle begins by elaborating on the quality of poetry and verse, the best of which constitute well-measured and rhythmical verses. The clarity in the latter is brought about by the reciter, who should be an individual of pure heart. It is by the blessing of the divine – considered the real creator of the poetry – that the heart of the listener is inclined in love and passion, towards God. Good voice is a blessing of God, in the sense that it leaves a beneficial impression on the heart of the listener. The grace of God descends on the listener when his mind and body is in harmony.

The page thus captures the end and beginning of two core issues that concern the practice of sama – the concluding points on the use of musical instruments like duff, and beginning the discussion on the recitation of poetry and verse. This page helps the reader connect to the main concerns of the book – historically situate the importance of Sufi rituals; the formalization of core Sufi rituals like sama and zikr; their role in the institutionalization of Sufi traditions in South Asia; along with the contribution of important Sufi masters, disciples and texts in consolidating the traditions of Sufi ritual like sama.

Visit Kashshaf Ghani's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathaniel Wiewora's "Sins of Christendom"

Nathaniel Wiewora is an associate professor of history at Harding University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sins of Christendom: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Evangelicalism, and reported the following:

On page 99, I look at the ways antebellum evangelicals honed in on the physical depictions of Mormonism's golden plates as a way to express disapproval and doubt concerning Mormonism's origin story. They stated incredulity about the size, weight, and shape of the golden plates. Concluding that the plates would have weighed several hundred pounds, these evangelicals wondered how Joseph Smith would have ever been able to carry them. This disbelief over the material existence of the golden plates went along with evangelical doubt about the true authorship of Mormonism's founding writ. Antebellum evangelicals assumed the Book of Mormon had human origins, but they also thought it must have been the work of someone other than Joseph Smith.

The Page 99 Test gives an incomplete picture of the argument in Sins of Christendom. Page 99 occurs in the middle of a larger chapter, where evangelicals claimed the Book of Mormon was uncanonical. In addition to the physical characteristics of the Book of Mormon, evangelicals pointed out the ways, they believed, that Joseph Smith had copied the appearance and content of the Bible, as well as plagiarizing his revelation from preexisting sources. What page 99 does not reveal is how this detailed concern with the veracity of the Book of Mormon reveals much more than mere religious intolerance. The antebellum criticisms about the ways Mormonism used and abused scripture resonated within evangelicalism because they faced many of the same debates and dilemmas about the uses and abuses of their own sacred texts. Focused on proving that the Book of Mormon was not an ancient document, evangelicals at the same time grappled with a growing feeling that their own Bible was itself a product of history. The overlapping nature of these charges against Mormonism’s scriptural practices and internal tensions over how to read and understand the Bible allowed evangelicals concerned about how their coreligionists mishandled scripture to use Mormonism as a foil to mark out the boundaries of how one should correctly read and interpret the Bible.

Page 99 lays out the content of antebellum evangelical anti-Mormonism, but this book is really not about the criticisms themselves. My book examines how evangelicals used religious intolerance. Evangelicals responded to their initial contact with Mormonism with predictable religious animus, but anti-Mormonism had wide ranging consequences in antebellum America. Heresy hunting shaped evangelical beliefs and practices. In their earliest years of encounter, evangelicals developed a diverse and vibrant anti-Mormonism. Evangelicals simultaneously disagreed with their coreligionists over the same complaints they levelled against Mormonism. The sense that Mormonism was too similar to their own faith displayed and deepened divisions within the evangelical movement. They accused each other of being like the followers of Joseph Smith in order to define orthodox evangelical beliefs and practices.

Learn more about Sins of Christendom at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Lawson's "Regional Politics in Oceania"

Stephanie Lawson is Professor Emerita of Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University; Honorary Professor in Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University; and Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg. She has previously held teaching and research positions at the University of New England, the Australian National University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of Birmingham as well as other visiting positions. She is a past president of the Australian Political Studies Association, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and the current President of the Pacific Islands Political Studies Association. Her publications span the fields of comparative and international politics, normative theory and Pacific Studies on issues ranging from nationalism and ethnic politics to the theorization of democracy and human rights in cross-cultural settings. Her books include Culture and Context in World Politics (2006), Theories of International Relations: Contending Approaches to World Politics (2015), and International Relations (4th edn, 2023).

Lawson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her most recent book, Regional Politics in Oceania: From Colonialism and Cold War to the Pacific Century, and reported the following:

I was quite disappointed when I opened page 99 of my book and found part of a detailed discussion of the politics surrounding the establishment and early years of Oceania’s first substantive regional organization – the South Pacific Commission – in the early post-war period. It was certainly not a page that would strike a reader, casual or expert or something in between, with anything approaching fascination. Even so, it is an essential part of a longer account of the difficulties facing the region’s major colonial powers of the time – the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand – in reconciling their different interests in coming together to create what has turned out to be an extremely important organization (since re-named the Pacific Community) that lies at the heart of coordinated service delivery and technical assistance for the people of the Pacific Islands.

Page 99 provides observations on French attitudes that were very much at variance with those of most of the other colonizing powers. France was to pursue strategies that strongly resisted decolonization while the UK, Australia and New Zealand became much more attuned to the ‘wind of change’ that started blowing from the 1960s onward. Although undoubtedly paternalistic, the latter three had, from the beginning, supported Indigenous participation and greater agency in political affairs. The US position, however, was closer to that of the French – one reason among others why much of the Micronesian sub-region was the slowest to gain at least some measure of independence.

One important theme raised by page 99, and well-illustrated by the fuller account, is that the colonizing powers were not all lined up on one side of a colonizer/colonized divide, all following the same imperial script. Nor were the colonized territories at one in resistance to colonialism. They, too, had different standpoints and interests and, difficult as it may be to conceive now, some even resisted decolonization.

Page 99, however, hints at only one aspect of a longer, and much broader, account of the world’s largest geographical region – often now referred to as the ‘Blue continent’. In addition to canvassing aspects of regionalism from a comparative perspective, the book charts the story of the region from the earliest Indigenous settlements, over thousands of years, through to the period of European exploration from the late sixteenth century and then to the formal colonization of most island groups by the late nineteenth century. Of special interest is the division of the broad region into the sub-regions of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, a division that has its origins in European racial thinking but which Indigenous islanders have made their own. In addition to investigating key aspects of Indigenous social and political organization within these sub-regions, the book also delves into the politics of subregional organization and the Melanesia/Polynesia divide in particular.

In turn, these accounts contribute insights into a politics of identity as played out between the sub-regions as well as between the Pacific Island Countries on the one hand, and Australia and New Zealand on the other. The latter remain members of both the Pacific Community (as do the USA and France) as well as of the region’s premier political organization, the Pacific Islands Forum, founded in 1971 primarily to provide island leaders with a venue for political discussions which the French (and to a lesser extent the USA) would not allow in the older organization.

In the early independence period, a broad discourse developed under the rubric of a ‘Pacific Way’ also came to suggest a common identity shared by all Pacific Islanders but also implied that they ‘did things differently’ (at least vis-à-vis Western ways) when it came to political practices at local, national and regional levels. This has been an important theme in discussions about culture and democracy in the region. The emergence of a ‘Melanesian Way’, however, demonstrated tensions and contradictions underlying the catch-all ‘Pacific Way’ which tended to privilege Polynesian identity and did not resonate widely in Micronesia either.

There are also more recent issues concerning security, political economy and geopolitics all of which raise concerns about neo-colonialism in the region. This involves not only ‘traditional’ colonial powers, but also newer actors – China in particular. Indonesia’s colonization of West Papua and the outcomes for Indigenous Melanesians there also casts a very different light on some of the book’s key themes.

Above all, the book is designed to provide not just a detailed account of the history and politics of the broad region (which draws as well on important anthropological work), but to provide a critical perspective on many of the assumptions embodied in a range of works that tend to see issues of colonialism and hegemony, identity and agency, in two-dimensional terms.

Learn more about Regional Politics in Oceania at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia Kindt's "The Trojan Horse and Other Stories"

Julia Kindt is Professor of Ancient History, ARC Future Fellow (2018-22), a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, and elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is a contributor to TLS, the Australian Book Review, Meanjin, History Today, the Conversation, and other magazines. The first woman appointed full professor in Classics and Ancient History at Sydney University, she is a historian of ancient Greece with a broad interest in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the ancient world and a particular expertise in the history of ideas (including religion, historiography, and classical reception studies). She was a member of the ARC College of Experts (2019-2022) and is senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religions (ORE), Associate editor in the editorial collective of Public Humanities (a new journal published by Cambridge University Press), and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Ancient Historyand Antichthon.

Kindt's highly regarded books include Rethinking Greek Religion (2013) and Revisiting Delphi. Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (2016).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human, and reported the following:

Flipping forward and opening The Trojan Horse on page 99 will get you right into the thick of the fascinating story of the Cyclops Polyphemus and his encounter with Odysseus as represented in Homer’s Odyssey. I show that the way in which the Cyclops features in Homer’s famous story anticipates and reverberates not only with later philosophical views on the scope and limits of what it means to be human; the story of Odysseus’ run in with Polyphemus also foreshadows some of the tropes in which certain humans are typecast as ‘other’ and ‘less than human’ in much more recent times. This applies for example to the Cyclops’ man-eating habit and to the fact that he cannot seem to tolerate wine – two stereotypes about human ‘otherness’ that feature in many ethnographic accounts of distant peoples well into the twentieth century. I point out that the consumption of wine as a marker of humanity also features in various other chapters of the book (and the human-animal entanglements they depict) for example in a painting of the Minotaur by Pablo Picasso and in Joseph Kafka’s account of Red Peter, an ape who becomes socialised as a human.

Yes, the Page 99 Test works. Really well actually. The sample page touches upon several themes central to the book. In discussing the problematic humanity of the Cyclops the page directly points to the questions at the core of the book: what makes us human? What (if anything) sets us apart from all other creatures in the world? The contrast between the clever wit of Odysseus and the dim-witted Polyphemus (who is easily tricked by Odysseus into letting Odysseus and his comrades escape from his island) references a powerful argument made by certain ancient and modern thinkers: that the human stands out from all other creatures through the presence of logos (ancient Greek for ‘speech’ but also ‘reason’). This position originated with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle but became one of the most influential and widely-shared arguments made for human exceptionalism and superiority. And yet, as I show in this book, the ancient Greek and Roman world also featured a large array of other thinkers who used narrative and storytelling to push back on this argument and to showcase the many ways in which humans and other animals are alike.

At the same time, the forward-facing cross-references to Picasso and Kafka on the sample page provide an inkling as to how the book is structured: the book has ten chapters each of which revolves around a single ancient creature which, like the Cyclops Polyphemus, sits uneasily between human and animal: The Sphinx, Xanthus (Achilles’ speaking horse), the lion of Androclus, the Trojan Horse, the Trojan boar, the political bee, the Socratic gadfly, the Minotaur, and the Shearwaters of Diomedea. Each chapter starts from the ancient stories that brought the creature in question alive; each chapter then sets out to follow the trail of the creature into the modern world and into the work of a modern thinker who speaks to the question of what makes us human. The figure of the Sphinx, for example makes, an appearance in the works of the Viennese physician and inventor of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and the Socratic gadfly (which first emerges in Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial) helps to define the politically engaged citizen in the oeuvre of the famous political theorist Hannah Arendt. Overall, then, the book shows how views first articulated in the ancient Greek and Roman world have shaped and continue to shape modern (Western) conceptions of the human.

Learn more about The Trojan Horse and Other Stories at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jodi Magness's "Jerusalem through the Ages"

Jodi Magness is Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of numerous books, including Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth, The Archaeology of the Holy Land from the Destruction of Solomon's Temple to the Muslim Conquest, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, and The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Magness applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Jerusalem through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades, and reported the following:

Readers who open my book to page 99 will probably find themselves somewhat lost. This page is in the middle of the chapter on Judahite Jerusalem, which focuses on the year 587 BCE, shortly before the city’s destruction by the Babylonians. The book introduces readers to Jerusalem by presenting the history and archaeology of the city in different periods, from its beginnings to the Crusades. Without the preceding historical and archaeological framework for Judahite Jerusalem, most readers probably will not be able to understand or appreciate the discussion on page 99, which describes inscribed seals, bullae, and stone capitals from a late Iron Age public building recently excavated to the south of the Temple Mount. Among these is a stone seal that belonged to a woman named Elihana daughter of Gael. Seals (which were used to seal documents by making an impression into a lump of clay) and bullae (clay sealings - that is, lumps of clay impressed with a seal) bearing female names are rare because ancient Israelite families were patriarchal. Most women did not own seals since they did not conduct business in their own name. The Elihana seal and other finds were discovered among the debris that filled the public building, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

The Page 99 premise is intriguing, but Jerusalem’s story is so rich and complex that I doubt any one page in my book can convey an accurate impression of the overall contents. I hope that readers of this blog will discover this for themselves by reading the entire book, or, at least, the chapters on periods of interest to them.

Visit Jodi Magness's website.

--Marshal Zeringue