Jeremi Suri's "The Impossible Presidency"

Jeremi Suri is a professor of history and holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office, and reported the following:

From page 99:

George Washington would have recognized the unifying vision of Abraham Lincoln, but Lincoln’s transformative ambitions would have astounded the first president.

“The war came,” Lincoln wrote; the president acted to help the people find their way through to a better future. He was an active visionary and a collective redeemer, as never before. His beautiful words made him a new kind of leader for a new kind of nation, searching for the “better angels” of its originally sinful nature.

Lincoln’s assassination, one month after his Second Inaugural Address, gives the speech a “farewell address” quality. Lincoln delivered another more informal speech on 11 April 1865, just a few days before his murder, but the Second Inaugural reflects his deepest thinking about the role of the American president. It also shows the fundamental transformation in the presidency from the troubled beginning of his time in office to his sudden and shocking death.

Over two centuries the power of the American presidency has risen, but the effectiveness of the office has declined. I wrote The Impossible Presidency to understand this contradictory phenomenon. Many Americans are frustrated with their leaders, and many are seeking to “blow up” the system. My book seeks to get beyond the name-calling and partisanship, to understand how the presidency has evolved to our current moment, and how we can make the office better for the future. Studying history gives us the broader view that we so desperately need in a time of deep division.

Abraham Lincoln is one of the inspiring figures I examine. He was not a genius, and he was not always effective as president. But he understood the crucial unifying role of the president in times of conflict, and he found the words to define a new America for diverse citizens. Lincoln made the president into a nation-builder, and he left an enduring legacy for his successors. Although few presidents have reached Lincolnian heights, all aspiring leaders should learn from studying his example, and others.

Visit Jeremi Suri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katja Maria Vogt's "Desiring the Good"

Katja Maria Vogt is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York City. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?

Vogt applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Desiring the Good: Ancient Proposals and Contemporary Theory, and reported the following:

Yes, you can get a sense of what Desiring the Good is about by reading page 99. On this page, I address Aristotle’s dictum that the good is different for human beings and for fish. What this really refers to is a way of doing ethics. In ethics, the thought goes, we ask what is good for human beings. This is not a weird kind of species egoism; it is, rather, the question of how we, as human beings, should live. This may well include that we ask what is good for fish as well as other non-human animals and take this into account in our actions. But we don’t ask how fish should arrange their lives: we ask how we should live.

Desiring the Good offers a new version of ancient-inspired ethics, one that considers ordinary motivations as an inroad to ethical theory. On the view I defend, human motivation is guided by the agent’s conception of a good human life. I distinguish among the motivation for small-scale actions like having a cup of tea, for mid-scale actions or pursuits such as moving to London, and the largest-scale motivation to have one’s life go well. One of my projects throughout the book is to explore the relation between these three levels.

On my account, ordinary action is already en route toward the good. We all have a conception of a good human life, even if much of it is implicit, confused, and a work in progress. We all are aiming at what is, by our own lights, a good human life, yet this conception may be muddled and flawed. If so, then ethics has its job cut out for it. If we operate with some such conception anyway, we better get clear about it—in the hopes that what guides our everyday motivations and larger-scale decisions is on target.

Visit Katja Maria Vogt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Einstein's "Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know"

Mara Einstein is a Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She brings more than twenty-five years of marketing and advertising experience to this work. She has worked as a senior marketing executive in both broadcast (NBC) and cable (MTV Networks) television as well as at major advertising agencies working on such accounts as Miller Lite, Uncle Ben's, and Dole Foods. Einstein's books include Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line between What We Buy, Who We Are, and Those We Help.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know, and reported the following:

Page 99 gets to the fundamentals of how advertising is created. Who creates advertising, how do marketers decide what to say, and how does the creative team put the ad together.

Who is responsible for creating advertising?

Advertising is created by teams of two made up of a copywriter and an art director. Based on a strategy statement or creative platform, they will generate a number of creative concepts. These concepts must then pass through the gauntlet of the creative director (who oversees all campaigns within an account), the account team, and finally the client. Along the way, the concept may be shown to a focus group of prospective consumers.

How do marketers decide what to put in an ad?

Using a combination of market research (what is going on in the business environment) and marketing research (everything the company has learned about the target consumer), advertisers will develop a message that they hope will resonate with their target audience. This information is synthesized into a short document called a creative brief. The information in this document is what the creative team uses to come up with the advertising.

What exactly is contained in a creative brief?

A creative brief, sometimes called a creative platform or a strategy statement, provides a distillation of consumer research and defines the elements that need to be included in the advertising for the creative team. There are variations in the format, but it will always include an objective, a definition of the target audience, a detailed product description and how consumers relate to the product, a one- line promise or consumer benefit, an accompanying one- or two- line support statement, and either a description of the brand personality or a definition of what the tone and manner should be— that is, should the commercial be serious, funny, or irreverent. Other elements that may be included are competition and known problems that inhibit usage. Bottom line: the creative platform defines who the advertising is talking to and what the advertising should make consumers think, feel, or do after having seen it.

Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know provides an overview of the advertising and marketing industries as well as tools to help readers understand advertising’s subtle, and not so subtle, impact on their life.

The prevailing wisdom is that Americans see upwards of 3000 advertising and marketing messages per day. And, while we may not be conscious of all these commercial messages as we walk the aisles of the supermarket or scan our Facebook feeds, they influence our product purchases—from cars to clothes to coffee. People’s preference for Starbucks over Dunkin Donuts, for example, has as much to do with the brand mythology created through marketing as it does with the flavor of the java. Our product usage has become building blocks for our personalities; as the commercial says, “I’m a Mac.”

Advertising is rarely based on product attributes. Coke doesn’t say it is a syrupy fizzy water, it sells the idea of happiness and friendship. Using emotion to sell products is a strategy that began over a hundred years ago and has been exacerbated by the use of technologies that rely on consumers to proliferate advertising messages via social media. The more angry or happy or awestruck we are, the more likely we will be to forward the advertising to our friends and family. Good examples here are Red Bull’s space jump or Dove’s “Sketch Artist.”

The more we use mobile devices—and we are using them at an increasing rate—the more we are faced with someone trying to sell us something. Ad blockers help to reduce the commercial assault, but as consumers got better at avoiding ads advertisers got better at hiding them. Confusion has gotten so bad that it is difficult to discern the difference between an ad and a news article, a legitimate recommendation or a paid Influencer tweet.

And while we surf and scan, advertisers scoop up our personal information, watch our every online move, connect that to our offline purchases, and then use all that data to sell us more stuff. The Internet is first and foremost an advertising platform—an idea many forget while watching the latest YouTube video or reading about the president’s latest tweet storm.

Learn more about Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Compassion, Inc.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Alexandrova's "A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being"

Anna Alexandrova is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, having previously taught at the University of Missouri St Louis. She writes on philosophy of social sciences, especially economic modelling, explanation, and the sciences of well-being.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being, and reported the following:

If only I had known about Ford Madox Ford and his page 99 test... As I didn’t, my page 99 does two things that are probably as uninteresting to most readers as they are obligatory to academics: signposting where the argument is going and bowing to relevant literature. It also has lots of empty space, which is about as informative. Please don’t judge my book by its 99th page.

But the idea I am servicing with all these accoutrements is good and right. The fundamental problem that animates this book is that today social and medical sciences are asked to speak on well-being, quality of life, and happiness – phenomena whose definitions are a matter of values – and science must speak on them while adhering to the ideals of precision and objectivity. The collision of these two ambitions – to advise on what is good for us and to do so scientifically – forces all sorts of new and distinctive compromises. As a scientific object well-being needs to have a clear and unambiguous definition (which it doesn’t normally), a precise measurement scale (which it doesn’t normally), a measurable connection to behaviours and material goods (also elusive). I have found that scientists resolve these tensions by modifying both the object of research, i.e. well-being, and the norms by which they study it. As a result of such, often sneaky, dovetailing ‘well-being’ ends up meaning something a little different and the traditional scientific ideals are also not what they used to be.

This is not in the least a criticism. There are no immutable meanings of words, nor rules of science written in the sky. One scientific norm this field has already redefined and rightly so is objectivity, which is what my page 99 is all about. If objectivity means detachment from value judgments and commitment to facts and nothing but the facts, there could be no science of well-being. It couldn’t even get off the ground in its initial act of delineating its subject matter. A better ideal of objectivity for this field is to embrace value-ladenness but set up public and explicit rules for how value judgments should be justified to the individuals and communities about and for whom this research exists. It can be done and it has to be done because good life is too important not to know about.

In a sense the science of well-being is too big to fail.

Learn more about A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alvaro Jarrín's "The Biopolitics of Beauty"

Alvaro Jarrín is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil, and reported the following:

Plastic surgery in Brazil is permeated by anxiety: patients frequently remark that plastic surgery will provide them the “right appearance” needed to succeed in life, and that without it they will suffer discrimination and social rejection. My book argues that this anxiety reflects a widespread perception of beauty as condensing race, class and gender inequalities onto the body – the realm of bodily aesthetics becomes the terrain upon which citizenship claims are made and become undone. For low-income patients seeking plastic surgery in publicly funded hospitals, in particular, these surgeries are understood as unavoidable risks that they must take in order to achieve or secure upward mobility.

In page 99 of my book, I tell the story of Leila, a fifty-five-year-old social worker who described her own nose surgery and her daughter’s nose surgery as necessary interventions that provided them more opportunities in life and thus brought them happiness. Leila made a clear distinction between one’s face and one’s body: while she felt that only “thinner” noses associated with European heritage were beautiful and harmonious, she regarded the nation’s “black and Indian heritage” as providing sensuality to Brazilian bodies. This racialization of bodily features haunts the descriptions of beauty in Brazil, and supports the notion that some types of racial mixture are more aesthetically pleasing than others.

Plastic surgeons, above all, are very invested in this “raciology of beauty” and imagine themselves as correcting the errors of “miscegenation.” Opening plastic surgery services in publicly funded hospitals has historical ties to biopolitical concerns with producing a more homogeneous and beautiful citizenry. The idea that beautification is a measure of racial progress can be traced back to the Brazilian eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, and some plastic surgeons still frame their discipline as aiding eugenics. Individual stories like Lucia’s, I argue, can only be interpreted within this longer history regarding how racialized, classed and gendered bodies have been long perceived as providing different types of value for the nation, putting particular pressure on working-class women of color to seek out plastic surgery.

Learn more about The Biopolitics of Beauty at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gideon Reuveni's "Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity"

Gideon Reuveni is Reader in History and Director of the Centre for German-Jewish studies at the University of Sussex. His central research and teaching interest is the cultural and social history of modern European and Jewish history.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity, and reported the following:

Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity explores the changing nature and dynamic of consumer cultures in the context of Jewish history. It reveals the multifaceted process through which minorities are able to maintain a separate identity through consumption while concurrently, as consumers, feeling integrated in their host societies. Consumerism, it is here argued, refashioned Jewish cultures and provided new venues to imagine cultural belonging beyond the existing denomination of religious, social and political differences. The significance and contribution of this study is that it locates Jewish history within broader developments that may have facilitated cultural diversity and Jewish identities. In a wider sense, the book’s innovation lies in the fact that it employs a cultural approach to economic activities, suggesting that the very coherence of the economy and its ability to function depends very much on the aptitude of people to interact, to allocate values and norms to others, and on their willingness to share mutual representations.

Page 99 falls in the introduction section to part two of the book, which deals with the relationship between consumption and politics. In this page I call attention to the connection between Hannah Arendt's reading of the “Jewish condition” of victimization and exclusion from the world of political realities and her understanding of the “human condition.” Unable or unwilling to develop along industrial capitalist lines, Jews, Arendt argues, concentrated in consumer-oriented professions facilitating the emergence of a modern, passive and worldless, consumer society. Her view of consumer society neatly corresponds to her position on so-called Jewish passivity, and the failure of Jews to act politically. The ensuing chapters contest Arendt's reading. They do not only depict consumption as a site of resistance, but also reveal how Jews struggle to negotiate between their desire to retain Jewish distinctiveness with the demand for political and social emancipation.

It should be emphasized that there is nothing definitive in this study. My concerns here are to a large extent heuristic and my conclusions are still provisional. The realm of Jewish consumer culture is so large and its history so little known that this book has done scarcely more than set out some preliminary markers that will hopefully facilitate the way for more detailed investigations of this important field of historical inquiry.

Learn more about Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Randy M. Browne's "Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean"

Randy M. Browne is an assistant professor of history at Xavier University and a specialist on slavery and colonialism in the early modern Atlantic world, especially the British Caribbean.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, and reported the following:

Page 99 tells the story of an enslaved African man, La Rose, who had just been given 150 lashes and demoted from his position as driver. On Caribbean plantations, drivers were crucial go-betweens appointed by slaveowners to supervise fieldworkers, enforce rules, and punish other slaves. La Rose’s story is part of Chapter 4, “The Slave Drivers’ World,” which explores the political maneuvering of drivers who struggled to balance the competing interests of their enslavers and other slaves. In this case, La Rose’s manager lost confidence in him after La Rose supposedly gave a sick enslaved man a remedy that instead killed him. Firing La Rose, who had been a driver for at least five years, presented a series of challenges to the manager, who was so worried about La Rose’s response that he asked colonial officials to supervise him until he could be moved to a different plantation.

The manager was right to worry about La Rose’s reaction. Demoted drivers lost not only their elite status and the perks of their position but also what had probably been their best chance of forging a viable life under slavery. Caribbean slave societies were notorious death traps, and drivers stood out for living much longer and better lives than other slaves. The paradox at the heart of this chapter is that being a successful driver was a survival strategy for some enslaved men but one that necessarily required them to cooperate with their enslavers and thus perpetuate the slave system. To be sure, not all of them succeeded.

Surviving Slavery reconstructs cases like La Rose’s—documented in a remarkable archive of first-person testimony from hundreds of different slaves—to reconsider enslaved people’s world on its own terms and develop a new framework for studying the power relationships of Atlantic slavery. The basic premise of the book is that the struggle for sheer survival under desperate conditions was at the heart of enslaved people’s experience. Historians have long been preoccupied—for good reasons—with enslaved people’s efforts to resist their enslavers and achieve “freedom” but one of the biggest conclusions I reached while writing this book was that surviving the plantation world and resisting slavery were not one and the same. More importantly, for most enslaved people, survival took precedence.

Visit Randy M. Browne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wayne Sumner's "Physician-Assisted Death"

L.W. Sumner has published extensively in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. His books include Abortion and Moral Theory and Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the 2009 Molson Prize in Social Sciences and Humanities from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Sumner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Physician-Assisted Death: What Everyone Needs to Know, and reported the following:

As it turns out, page 99 of Physician-Assisted Death is pretty darn interesting (as, of course, is the entire book). It is smack dab in the middle of a discussion of whether psychiatric illnesses should (if they are sufficiently serious, intractable, and distressing) be able to qualify a patient for PAD. This is one of the hotter issues in a generally hot topic: whether PAD is ethical and whether it should be legal.

The book as a whole deals with all (I repeat, all) of the issues implicated in these debates. It provides the interested and conscientious reader with everything he or she needs in order to decide where to stand on these important questions.

Learn more about Physician-Assisted Death at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter J. Marina's "Down and Out in New Orleans"

Peter Marina is a New Orleans native and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Down and Out in New Orleans: Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy, and reported the following:

St. Roch cemetery, New Orleans, two in the morning. We hop cemetery gates tripping on mushrooms. Another night, it’s the swamp this time. The police search for us. We tell them all about that damn gris-gris. Next scene, same city, same night. The Marigny stroll filled with life and street poets, food vendors, and spectators loosening their “uptight sphincters” for the very first time, capturing the carnival of New Orleans life.

Steamy mid-summer night dreams flourish in the swampy, romantic informal nocturnal economy of Frenchmen Street, the home to a nightly carnival of decadence centered on dozens of shoulder-to-shoulder music venues. The “Marigny stroll” offers the flâneur an insider’s peek into thick New Orleans nightlife… (pg. 99)

But city officials occupying the great halls of corruption and scandal of New Orleans city hall make a mess of it all.

Glance toward another direction of the city to find buskers playing on the Frenchmen Street of broken dreams and gutter punks sneaking into abandoned buildings just off in the dark distance of hurricane ravaged houses still abandoned. We hear Orwell’s words about the conditions of poverty, a society that finds the poor repugnant while simultaneously fearing their potential for revolting.

While tourists consume a watered down and appropriated New Orleans black culture, wealthy carpet bagging gentrifiers price out the black and creole community from their historic homes. Everyone seems to love New Orleans, they love it to death.

A local working class New Orleans boy from Gentility gets a fancy degree and writes a book about joys and heartbreaks of the fascinating yet tragic city of New Orleans pushing towards an increasingly precarious future. As wetland depletion, climate change, and elite urban planners place the final nails in the coffin, we citizens of the swampy soils of New Orleans celebrate this tragedy defiantly second-lining to the final goodnight. The author feels himself drowning everyday as his city slips away, just as did everything but his memories when Katrina tore away all that was left of Odin and Spain Streets. It is time for us to save New Orleans from becoming down and out. It’s time to save the city from the new monsters of modernity that wreak havoc on our land and culture, or risk losing it all.

While the whole quality of the book may not be revealed on page 99, it captures one of the many scenes of the book that tells the story of Post-Katrina New Orleans, its struggles and triumphs, and it’s push to survive and prosper under the most precarious conditions of our times.

Visit Peter Marina's website.

My Book, The Movie: Down and Out in New Orleans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terry Allen Kupers's "Solitary"

Terry Allen Kupers is an award-winning psychiatrist and Professor Emeritus at The Wright Institute Graduate School of Psychology. As one of the nation’s foremost experts on the mental health effects of solitary confinement, he has testified in over two dozen class action lawsuits about jail and prison conditions, the quality of mental health care “inside” and the effects of sexual abuse behind bars. He is a frequent consultant to the ACLU’s National Prison Project and Human Rights Watch and the author of Prison Madness.

Kupers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It is the story of Willie Russell, an inhabitant of Mississippi’s Death Row when it was inside Unit 32, a supermaximum security unit at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and a plaintiff in a historic class action lawsuit where I had the privilege to serve as a psychiatric expert witness:

The temperature rises rapidly, and life in the cell becomes unbearable. In the summer heat at Parchman, this one aspect of the punish­ment cells would make them entirely unacceptable by any standard of human decency or of health and mental health minimum standards. But in addition to this cruel and entirely excessive and punitive measure that clearly serves no legitimate penological objective, Mr. Russell reports that his cell is always filthy, the rain pours in through the walls onto his bed, the toilet floods the cell with backflow from other prisoners’ toilets, there are bugs everywhere, the cell is filled with mosquitoes at night, he cannot sleep at night because the lights are on 24 hours per day, he is not permitted to have a fan, he is not permitted television or radio and there are no activities, and he is even more isolated than other prisoners on Death Row because the Lexsan shield over his door makes it impossible for him to talk to anyone. For two years, he was permitted no mattress, no pillow and no sheets, and had only a blanket and the concrete for a bed. This kind of punitive deprivation and degradation is barbaric, and shocking to human sensibilities. It is the kind of cruel and unusual punishment that is well known to cause intense anxiety and rage, psychiatric breakdown, and in a large proportion of cases, suicide.

…. But clearly the treatment of Mr. Russell constituted torture. Those who have spent a long time in a solitary confinement unit, much like those who have been tortured during war, suffer lasting damage and never make a complete recovery. In the big picture, the decimation of life skills, destroying a pris­oner’s ability to cope in the free world, is the worst thing solitary confine­ment does. In that process are all the elements of torture even without hoods, waterboarding, or electric wires.

Enough said about the horror of supermax solitary confinement. In the book I proceed with more stories plus a discussion of the alternative to solitary: rehabilitation, quality mental health treatment and humane conditions in our prisons.

Learn more about Solitary at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue