Grace Kessler Overbeke's "First Lady of Laughs"

Grace Kessler Overbeke is Assistant Professor of Theatre, Comedy Writing & Performance at Columbia College, Chicago.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of First Lady of Laughs is mainly devoted to transcribing one of Jean Carroll's most famous routines, "The Racetrack Routine" in which she offers a comical peek into the goings-on at the horse races. It is one of the few pages in the book in which the reader 'hears' Carroll's voice more than my own. In that sense, it may not be strictly representative of the book as a whole, since it is an analytic biography, not simply a transcription of her work. However, I do think that the transcribed passages represent a valuable contribution of the book. Stand-up—and performance in general—is such a temporary, evanescent form. Whereas a play script can be published and endure well after the performance took place, that is not always the case with stand-up. My hope is that in the moments where the book shifts performance from the screen to the page, it is allowing that performance to broaden its reach. So in that sense, page 99 gives an accurate representation of (at least one of) the goals of the overall work. This is an interesting exercise—sort of a literary equivalent to the idea of "Every Frame a Painting" in film!

Learn more about First Lady of Laughs at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Wilde's "A Blessing and a Curse"

Matt Wilde is an anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela, and reported the following:

A Blessing and a Curse is a book about how petro-states shape the everyday lives of their citizens in complex and contradictory ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in urban Venezuela over the course of a decade, it explores how the residents of a low-income periphery known as El Camoruco experienced conflictual social change under the governments of first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro. One of the book’s central arguments is that the drive to undertake radical social and political reforms using oil revenues produced an array of moral doubts for the residents of El Camruco, as the circulation of petro-dollars in local and everyday settings led to new dilemmas for the pro-government grassroots activists (chavistas) who play a central role in the book’s analysis.

Situated in a chapter titled “The Moral Life of Revolution,” page 99 encapsulates these doubts perfectly. It describes how one of the book’s main protagonists, a local chavista leader known as Rafael, wrestles with the offer of a free Blackberry smartphone from a representative of the local mayor. In 2009, the year in which the encounter took place, Blackberry smartphones had a particular cultural cache in Venezuela. As expensive and highly valued imported commodities, they were associated with the kind of North American-flavoured conspicuous consumption that might be found in the salubrious shopping malls located in the wealthiest zones of cities like Caracas and Valencia. But as a socialist community leader who hailed from the poor barrios of Valencia’s south – communities that are both geographically and symbolically far from such malls – the offer of the Blackberry constituted a moral hazard for Rafael. As he explains on Page 99:

I’d be really embarrassed to walk around with a phone like that, really embarrassed. To walk around with a tremendous telephone like that with the people who are with me – with where I’m from – I couldn’t do it.

Although tempted by the smartphone, Rafael eventually decides not to accept the offer, concluding that he’s better off with the simple cell phone he already used. In doing so, he’s able to “walk the walk” of socialist asceticism without feeling morally compromised. The scene captures precisely the kind of lived uncertainties that shaped the Bolivarian Revolution even in its most optimistic period. It also shows how the Venezuelan people experienced undercurrents of the political and economic tensions that would later spill over into a profound crisis under President Maduro.

Learn more about A Blessing and a Curse at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carlos Alberto Sánchez's "Blooming in the Ruins"

Carlos Alberto Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University, where he teaches and publishes on Mexican philosophy and its history. He grew up in Michoacán, Mexico and King City, California. He is the co-founder and executive editor of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy.

Sánchez applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us toward the Good Life, and reported the following:

Page 99 is one of the culminating pages of Chapter 9, “Be Late to Parties,” which discusses the Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla’s views on punctuality. In this page, I summarize a quote from the previous page which, I claim, “could easily describe our current state of robotic hurriedness. It is the need to fulfill this value that we can blame for road rage, work-related injuries, and other time-related stresses.” This value is what Portilla calls “punctual being”— the idea is that we want to be punctual at whatever cost. I continue, “However, arriving on time once or a million times does not make me punctual in the sense that my very being, the way that I exist in the world, is itself punctual. There is more to life than being punctual— or generous, or trustworthy. Besides, tomorrow or the next day I may fail at being punctual, generous, or trustworthy. It is said, for instance, that in eighteenth- century Königsberg, Prussia, townsfolk would set their watches by the impeccable routines of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Year after year he would take his evening walk at the same exact time, so people knew what time it was when he passed by. But was he at one with punctuality? Had he achieved a “punctual being”? A day came in 1804 when he no longer passed by, when he was no longer punctual. Death made this so. Hence, the answer is no, he was not at one with punctuality. Ultimately, Kant was just a person with a good track record of having kept a strict routine. What this means is that a value, like punctuality, or generosity, or politeness, is only a guide for my actions, something that helps me make sense of and act on the world in which I live. Portilla says that one truly becomes punctual, or one completely fulfills the demands of the value of punctuality, only in retrospect. This is when all of my “on times” are collected into a memory of me, and the final verdict by those who knew me becomes ‘He was punctual.’”

Page 99 is a fairly good representation of the book as a whole. The book itself is meant to introduce readers to Mexican philosophy in a way that is neither technical or hard to grasp. And page 99 does this well. Each chapter is written in such a way that the philosophical idea expressed in an illustration (Kant’s punctuality here) that readers may find either amusing or familiar. Here, on this page, I try to mix the philosophical idea of punctuality with comments about how we all want to be on time but ultimately fail; how death is the only “on time” you’ll ever achieve, and so on.

I wouldn’t say that Blooming in the Ruins passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors. While it is a good representation of the tone of the book, the rest of the book contains many more stories and anecdotes that readers will appreciate, find amusing, or instructive. In other words, the book is even less technical than page 99 and much more so than any philosophy book that the reader may run into.

Visit Carlos Alberto Sánchez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson's "Handcrafted Careers"

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. His writing and research explores how work, race, and culture intersect in the new economy. He lives and makes a home in both Albuquerque, New Mexico and Ojai, California.

Wilson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us smack dab in the middle of a chapter entitled, "Embrace the Shit!". The page begins with a quote from a woman brewer named Jordyn who is talking about submitting one of her male coworkers to a chokehold to "prove that she belongs in this space." Later down the page, we hear from a man named Sonny who works behind the scenes at a brewery repairing draft systems and scheduling deliveries.

Page 99 centers one of the book's main goals: taking readers behind the scenes to illuminate people and their work in the craft beer industry that aren't typically in the spotlight. In an industry dominated by "bearded white guys," we hear about the experiences of white women and people of color who must find their way in brewery workplaces, often not in the sexy "creative-craft" jobs that the public associates with the industry.

Nearly halfway into the book, readers will have zipped past the main argument, which is laid out at the beginning. Class privileged white men enjoy advantages in the craft beer industry that allow them to seamlessly enter this industry and advance into desirable jobs focused on creative production while minority workers get channeled along other less desirable career tracks. I show how bearded white guys leverage not only their material resources and social connections but also land opportunities because their "passion-driven" approach to their career gets idealized by brewery top brass. This becomes a key mechanism of social reproduction within an industry known for trying to do things different from those big bad corporations.

Visit Eli Revelle Yano Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey M. Pilcher's "Hopped Up"

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of History and Food Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Planet Taco: The Global History of Mexican Food (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (2012), and Food in World History.

Pilcher applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

substitution of domestically brewed beers for imported German brands to be a patriotic duty. By contrast, German migrants drove the expansion of the Russian beer industry, replacing the former predominance of English ales and dark native beers with Munich and Pilsner-style lagers. Pasteurized beer shipped from Moscow and St. Petersburg competed for the Siberian trade with German brewers who settled in Irkutsk and Blagoveshchensk. Beer also trickled through the Balkans, courtesy of Hungarian brewers, who learned their trade in Austria, and of Serbians, who exported it to Macedonia and Salonica.

Industrial modernity transformed the beer drinking cultures of Europe and North America, even though marketing was often inspired by rural nostalgia. Despite the efforts of Central European brewers to advertise the high quality of their products, over the long run consumers were generally unwilling to pay more for imported goods when they could buy a similar product brewed locally. In Amsterdam, for example, Bavarian beer had cost four cents more per liter than domestic beers in the 1880s but a decade later the difference had fallen to only one cent. Likewise in the United States, although imported Bohemian beer sold for double the price of local beers about 1880, the premium also declined over time. Brewers and consumers alike thus questioned the meaning and value of genuine beers from cities such as Munich and Pilsen.

A Golden Age?

Parisians flocked to drink a bock with the dapper young Anton Dreher at the Universal Exposition of 1867, but the popularity of his amber Vienna lager was already being challenged by its golden Bohemian rival. Even before the fair opened in Paris, Austrian official J. John observed: “In the struggle between light and brown beer, it appears that the light is gaining more followers day by day.” Just six years later, when the Austrian capital hosted its own World’s Fair, the Bayerische Bierbrauer reported that Pilsner was “preferred to the famous Viennese beers, even in Vienna.” But Pilsner spread not only as a commodity in trade, but also as a recipe made by brewers far beyond its Bohemian home town. As it traveled, the meanings of the style continued to change, in part because improved technology and consumer preferences drove a convergence of other beers toward the light, clear qualities of Pilsner. Brewers in Pilsen responded to this competition by seeking legal protection for their trade name, but they faced an uphill battle defending their claims in distant courts.

Hopped Up passes the Page 99 Test. The book is about the commodification and global spread of lager beer. Page 99 falls in chapter 3, called “Inventing Pilsner,” about the clear, light, sparkling beer from the Bohemian town of Pilsen that has become a global standard, from Budweiser to Tsingtao. Just as migrations (Germans settling in Siberia, as they had in St. Louis) and stepwise “trickle trade” carried lager beer to Eastern Europe, it also spread through Europe’s global empires as both imperial settlers and colonized peoples alike sought out this symbol of modernity.

The middle paragraph summarizes a section on the transformation of drinking cultures during the industrial era. The urban middle classes went to bucolic beer gardens for leisure while the working classes visited taverns and pubs to purchase beer that they might formerly have brewed at home on the farm. The section particularly questions the meanings of genuine Pilsner when brewers elsewhere could use the same name to sell a similar beer at a cheaper price. There is still a global market for premium brands, but most beer drinkers today purchase local beers, even though the breweries are often owned by giant conglomerates such as AB Inbev.

The final paragraph begins the chapter’s concluding section on the late-nineteenth-century triumph in Europe of golden Pilsners over dark Munich lagers and amber Vienna lagers. Despite the popularity of Pilsner, local variety persisted. These days, the co-existence of Bud Light and craft beer illustrate the power of capitalist market segmentation to sell a beer for every taste and social position. Hopped Up uses beer to demonstrate how commodities have pervaded modern life on a global scale.

Learn more about Hopped Up at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yujin Nagasawa's "The Problem of Evil for Atheists"

Yujin Nagasawa is Professor of Philosophy and Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at the University of Oklahoma. Before joining Oklahoma, he held the H. G. Wood Professorship of the Philosophy of Religion and served as the Co-Director of the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK. Currently, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Religious Studies, published by Cambridge University Press, and as the book series editor for Cambridge Elements in Global Philosophy of Religion. Nagasawa also served as the president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion from 2017 to 2019. He was the principal investigator for the Global Philosophy of Religion Project, a $2.42 million research initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Dynamic Investment Fund at the University of Birmingham, from 2020 to 2023.

Nagasawa applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Problem of Evil for Atheists, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls within Chapter 4, where I develop a version of the problem of evil for axiarchism—a novel alternative to traditional theism that posits the world exists not because God created it, but because an abstract "creatively effective ethical requirement" necessitated its existence. On that page, I explore whether axiarchists can escape the problem of evil by appealing to modal realism, which maintains that all possible worlds exist to the same extent as the actual world, with each being ontologically on a par. However, the Page 99 Test does not capture the full scope of my book, as that discussion only represents a small part of my broader argument—that the problem of evil poses a challenge for almost everyone, including theists, pantheists, axiarchists, and even atheists.

Throughout the book, I argue that traditional theists, who typically embrace supernaturalism, are better positioned to address the problem of evil than naturalist atheists, as the most viable solution requires a supernaturalist framework. Conversely, if atheists manage to develop a successful naturalist response to the problem, traditional theists could adopt it, as theists’ supernaturalist ontology encompasses naturalist ontologies. If my argument holds, the problem of evil should no longer be viewed as a challenge exclusive to traditional theists; it may, in fact, present an even greater challenge for atheists.

Visit Yujin Nagasawa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Doran's "From Tudor to Stuart"

Susan Doran is Professor of Early Modern British History, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, University of Oxford.

Doran's academic career at the University of Oxford started in 2002, with teaching posts first at Christ Church and then at St Benet's Hall, Regent's Park College, and St John's College. Since 2008 she has been a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and in 2016 the University awarded her a Professorship. She has written extensively on the Tudors, especially Elizabeth I, and worked with curators to edit catalogues of four major exhibitions in London.

Doran applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I, and reported the following:

Given its size and remit, From Tudor to Stuart could hardly be summarized in one page. Nevertheless the Page 99 Test works well since it makes two statements crucial to Part I of the book, which has as its focus how James VI of Scotland came to succeed Elizabeth I and what problems he faced during his first year as king of England. The first statement is that James’s successful accession on 24 March 1603 occurred only because he was the "last credible heir standing" and no other potential claimants challenged his title. As I explain on page 99, the putative claims of Lord Beauchamp (the great-great grandson of Henry VII), Arbella Stuart (Henry VII’s great granddaughter), and the Infanta of Spain came to nothing.

My second statement on page 99 is that James’s title to the English throne was "plainly dubious" since he was “not the direct heir by statute nor of the queen’s body”. Previously, I describe how and why the English privy council had pretty much elected James but tried to present him as the legitimate hereditary king as well as Elizabeth’s nominated heir. Towards the end of page 99, I tell how the mayor and aldermen of the City of London attempted the same when the proclamation announcing James’s accession was brought to Ludgate and the Tower. There they carried out a “public performance which emphasized James’s legitimacy” in order to counter any opposing views. Later on in the chapter, I demonstrate how the public responded to the confusion concerning James's constitutional position.

Of course, there were other problems that James faced in 1603 – Elizabeth’s legacy, new conspiracies and plague – all of which are discussed on other pages of Part 1, but the uncertainty concerning James’s right to the throne is something I wanted highlighted in the book, and it is clearly there on page 99.

The remainder of the book (Parts 2 and 3) addresses another issue: was James I a different kind of ruler from Elizabeth and was 1603 a watershed in English history? Here I look at the personnel in the court and council, the continued repression of puritans and Catholics, new policies such as union with Scotland, the successful implementation of the Elizabethan drive for overseas colonies and plantations in Ireland, and much else.

Learn more about From Tudor to Stuart at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul M. McGarr's "Spying in South Asia"

Paul M. McGarr is Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at King's College London and author of The Cold War in South Asia, 1945–1965.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book describes the extent to which the Central Intelligence agency (CIA) developed a large and active presence in Cold War India. The CIA operated several stations, or bases of operation, in India that were concerned not only with espionage, or undercovering the secrets of the Indian government and Eastern bloc missions in the subcontinent, but also covert action, or hidden activity conducted to influence political events. Page 99 details how, somewhat paradoxically, and following the outbreak of a brief and bloody war between India and China over a contested Himalayan border, the Indian government turned to the CIA to help it gather intelligence on its Chinese adversary and conduct paramilitary operations intended to destabilise China’s borderlands and occupy Beijing’s security forces.

Appropriately, page 99 provides a clear insight into a central theme in my book. Namely, the complicated, often conflicted, and ultimately counterproductive secret relationship between the CIA and Indian governments during the Cold War. In many ways, page 99 encapsulates in a few short paragraphs the essence of the nearly hundred pages that proceed it and the two hundred or so pages that follow. These expand upon and illuminate the interventions that foreign intelligence services, in the form of the CIA, Britian’s secret agencies, and Soviet bloc bodies, such as the KGB and GRU, undertook in India and the significant and enduring impact these have had on the political and social fabric of South Asia. The spectre of a ‘foreign hand’, or external intelligence activity, real and imagined, has come to occupy a prominent place in India’s contemporary political discourse, journalism, and cultural production. Spying in South Asia sets out how the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in the subcontinent and the relationships forged between external secret agencies and India’s governments to promote democracy came to be associated at all levels of Indian society with covert action, grand conspiracy, and justifications for repression. In doing so, my book uncovers the ongoing and troubling legacy of a fifty-year Cold War battle for hearts and minds in the Indian subcontinent.

Learn more about Spying in South Asia at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Guthman's "The Problem with Solutions"

Julie Guthman is a geographer and Professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.

Guthman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food, and reported the following:

If you turned to page 99 of my book you would first encounter a discussion of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), explaining how they produce cheap human food at a huge cost to animal welfare and the workers who keep the animals alive and reproducing. The text then zooms out to claim how issues with protein production are implicated in several of the grand challenges that supposedly animate Silicon Valley’s entry into agriculture and food. That means, as I write, that so-called “alternative proteins” – those designed to substitute for animal products – “carry a lot of weight for the entire sector in terms of delivering its much ballyhooed impact.”

Page 99 gives you a pretty good idea of what the book is about. For it illustrates that many past agri-food technologies such as CAFOs, which were designed both to make animal agriculture more efficient but also to protect animals from disease, created some of the problems to which Silicon Valley imagines it can better respond. What page 99 doesn’t quite capture, though, is another major point of the book: that Silicon Valley solutions are not up to the task. They are not only guided too much by the hype and funding culture of Silicon Valley; they generally misunderstand the character of food system problems, providing instead overly simple, techno-approaches to deeply complex and fundamentally political problems. It is not clear, for example, that bioengineered plant-based substitutes for burgers are less resource intensive than conventional meat production, inasmuch as they are undoubtedly more humane. And it is far from clear that producing animal product substitutes for the vegan-curious undermines the worst of animal agriculture, as more regulation might do.

Unfortunately, as I describe in the book, Silicon Valley’s wrong-headed, entrepreneurial solution culture has proliferated far beyond the tech sector, including to universities. As such, students are being trained to come up with and pitch the next “big idea” for making the world a better place, rather than dig into the intellectual and practical work of learning the origins of societal problems and how social movements have or can respond to them. Action without reflection and humility is no way to fix food – or anything else of critical importance to life on earth.

Learn more about The Problem with Solutions at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Wilted.

--Marshal Zeringue

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's "Fitness Fiesta!"

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, has three screenshots from a commercial called “Let it Move You.” This 2014 marketing campaign advertised Zumba Fitness, a Latin-based dance-fitness program. Many people lauded “Let It Move You” as a progressive campaign featuring people with diverse body types and backgrounds. The three stills on page 99 show a traffic cop, a food truck customer, and an office worker who all spontaneously start to do their Zumba moves at inappropriate times.

Most US fitness programs embrace a “feel the burn” mentality and muscular physique. In contrast, Zumba Fitness’s slogan is “Ditch the workout, join the party!” Page 99 is in a chapter called “Selling Fun” that shows how “fun” in Zumba is intimately tied to racial hierarchies that depict whiteness as disciplined and intelligent, and racial others as instinctual and primitive. Fitness Fiesta! analyzes “tropicalized Latinness,” that is, a top-down construction of “Latin” culture as something carefree, exotic, and hypersexual. In this context, the trope of fun presents Zumba as a space where anything goes, thus implying that Latin culture is completely uninhibited and different from the US mainstream.

The three photos on page 99 illustrate this perfectly. The premise of the commercial is that Zumba Fitness is so irresistible that you won’t be able to stop moving and having fun, even if it is inconvenient or dangerous. One photo on page 99 shows the traffic cop abandoning her duties to dance causing a car wreck. The other two photos show women dancing provocatively. A woman at a food truck does a “booty pop” where she juts out her behind and jumps backwards, disrupting the orderly line. Lastly, the office worker climbs on top of the conference table and slides across it, grabbing her male coworker’s tie and staring lustily into his eyes. These moves conform to the hypersexualized “Latin lover” stereotype that has been endemic throughout US popular culture for decades.

Overall, the photos on page 99 demonstrate an important part of my argument that Latinness is constructed as foreign, exotic, and primitive. But they do not capture a central tenet of the book. Zumba Fitness presents cultural appreciation as central to its ethos even though it also embraces stereotypes of Latinos and Latin culture. Fitness Fiesta! argues that this contradiction mirrors the dangerous assumption that the US is a “postracial” society devoid of racism, when in actuality systemic racism remains pervasive. Page 99 doesn’t grasp this full argument, but it is a good visual representation of tropicalized Latinness in the Zumba Fitness universe.

Learn more about Fitness Fiesta! at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue