Steven Levingston's "Little Demon in the City of Light"

Steven Levingston is the nonfiction editor of The Washington Post. He also writes books and plays and does some book reviewing.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris, and reported the following:

On page 99 in Little Demon we bump up against Sigmund Freud as a young medical student strolling the streets of Paris in the 1880s, gathering his perceptions of the French. “I don’t think they know the meaning of shame or fear,” he wrote home. “The women no less than the men crowd around nudities as much as they do round corpses in the Morgue or ghastly posters in the streets announcing a new novel.” Though Freud was an odd, cocaine-dependent neurotic at the time, he captured the French sensibility and, in that single description, revealed a quality of the entire book. Little Demon sets out to tell not just a murder story but a tale that grows out of the very terrain of Paris in the Belle Epoque. The book shows the French much as Freud characterized them. Paris in the 1880s and 90s was a landscape of men in top hats and monocles, women in outrageous hats, and carefree strolls along the boulevards. To the outside world the city floated on a champagne bubble. “It is we,” declared a French journalist, “who have infected the world with gaiety, this brightness.” But Paris also was a troubled place. Since the Prussians humiliated France on the battlefield in 1870, the country slept fitfully, tossing and turning over a grim question: Was French glory a thing of the past? The indignity of defeat lingered. The scars were written on the drunks in the alleyways, the blank-eyed syphilitics in the insanity wards, and the anxious faces of the politicians. And Freud’s point about Parisian immodesty and decadence was well-taken. The French were connoisseurs of sex, and lovemaking was an art. Just listen to the famous author Alphonse Daudet exulting over the “glorious frenzy” of sex “with a woman who is naked, a woman one rolls on top of and covers with kisses: copulation as practiced by artists, men of passion, men who really love women.” It was enough to make Sigmund Freud blush.

Learn more about the book and author at Steven Levingston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker's "Busted"

Wendy Ruderman has a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining the Philadelphia Daily News in 2007, she worked at several media outlets, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, WHYY-TV and WHYY-FM, the Trenton Times, the Associated Press, and the Bergen Record.

Barbara Laker graduated from the University of Missouri Journalism School and worked for several newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She began working at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1993 and has been a general assignment reporter, an assistant city editor, and an investigative reporter.

Ruderman and Laker won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Laker applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love, and reported the following:

Open, Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love, to page 99 and hopefully, you’ll feel as if you’re on an exhilarating ride into Philadelphia’s underbelly with Wendy and me.

In this part of the book, we’re beginning our search for women who say they were victimized by Officer Tom Tolstoy, a cop known as the “Boob Man,” because he had allegedly sexually assaulted and terrorized large-breasted women during drug raids.

Even cops outside Philly were familiar with Tolstoy’s nickname and told me about it. So we now knew that the cop with the breast fetish wasn’t urban myth. We just had no idea how many women he had allegedly assaulted – and whether we could find them.

On page 99, we meet Lady Gonzalez, a soft-spoken, almost demure woman who, during a drug raid, was cornered by a cop who lifted her shirt, fondled her breasts and pushed her jeans down to see the “crack of her ass.” She didn’t know the cop’s name. But she could describe him: a husky, barrel-bellied cop of average height. He led her into a small room off her kitchen. He shuffled his feet closer to hers. She tried to back up and there was nowhere to go.

Although Wendy and I knew the cop’s name we couldn’t use it yet. We didn’t have the goods. We believed and trusted Lady Gonzalez. She had told her husband and neighbors the very night the assault had happened. But we needed more.

The reader will wonder if we ever get the “goods” on this cop. And if so, how we get them.

Without names of other victims, addresses or dates, it would take unrelenting perseverance and using the kind of shoe-leather reporting that is at the heart of Busted.

So by page 99, we believe the reader will be hooked, already at one peak of a roller coaster and heading into another – with anticipation.

Welcome to the breathtaking, thrilling ride.

Learn more about Busted at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen R. Palumbi & Anthony R. Palumbi's "The Extreme Life of the Sea"

Stephen R. Palumbi is Professor of Biology and Director of the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University. His film projects include the BBC series The Future Is Wild, the History channel's Life after People, and the Short Attention Span Science Theater. His books include The Death and Life of Monterey Bay and The Evolution Explosion. Anthony R. Palumbi, Stephen's son, is a science writer and novelist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic and other publications.

Anthony Palumbi applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Extreme Life of the Sea, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Each flight is only seconds long. Cruel gravity pulls her toward the water – and beneath is the rainbow form of the mahi mahi matching speeds. When she starts to lose altitude, she dips her tail and tags the sea for another burst of power. Up to a dozen times she might graze the surface and glide again. The death race flashes across the sea, covering the 50-meter length of an Olympic-sized pool in seconds. The mahi mahi tracks the flyer, keeping up with the slow curves of her evasive maneuvers. It’s eaten many flying fish, and every new dip of our heroine’s tail offers a fresh attack window. But a missed strike will let the flyer escape, and so the predator holds fast. Both fish are at their physical peaks racing toward the horizon. Only an abrupt splash in the distance tells you that one or the other has won.

Text consumes page 99’s lower half; a picture [inset, left] occupies the top, a 19th-century drawing of a mahi in pursuit of a flying fish. Our book has a good number of pictures, but hardly one per page! We’re lucky here. This is from our “Fastest” chapter, covering the ocean’s greatest athletes. At the base of the page, after the quoted passage constituting the end of our flying fish section, the next section (on the hydrodynamics of whales and dolphins) begins.

This might be my favorite vignette from the whole book. This isn’t smoke-blowing; I cited this very passage as my favorite in our “This Week in Science” interview! It’s got everything I believe makes this book special: evocative language, thrilling action sequences and a focus on character development. With regard to the first, we’ve deployed powerful imagery in the wording, but what may not come through is the meticulous research behind it. A huge amount of work went into making sure every last detail was both accurate and exciting. As for the action sequence: that’s always a great device for holding readers’ attention, but it became particularly important in the “Fastest” chapter. If you’re describing speed and strength, double down and make your words fast and powerful!

But the last element I mentioned is by far the most important. Our mantra during this project was always, “nobody cares about the story until they care about the characters.” To that end, the words “our heroine” aren’t used facetiously. The pages preceding the quoted passage build this little flying fish into quite the protagonist! She’s fast, strong, brave and decisive. We do our best to place the reader inside that flying fish’s little torpedo-shaped body - to make you identify with her, admire her and then root for her in a very real, visceral way. Of course it helps that the stakes are so high. This probably sounds odd, but I grew very attached to that flying fish while working on that section. It’s my favorite because she’s my favorite. I really hope she made it.

Learn more about The Extreme Life of the Sea at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Jeffrey Maxson's "The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence"

Brian Jeffrey Maxson is Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies and an Assistant Professor of History at East Tennessee State University. His research focuses on the cultural and political history of late medieval and Renaissance Europe. His articles have appeared in Renaissance Studies and I Tatti Studies, among other journals. He has held fellowships from the Fulbright and Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundations and given invited lectures at the University of Oxford and the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich.

Maxson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence, and reported the following:

“The archival documents related to the mission in 1477 also attest to the gift-giving function of the diplomat’s opening oration. The Florentine Signoria wrote to their diplomats and summarized the diplomats’ own description of their initial meeting.” Thus, page 99 of my book – The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence – focused on the donative function of humanist oratory in diplomatic rituals – donative in the sense that an eloquent oration served as a gift to a ruler with the expectation of reciprocity. Why was this an important observation to make?

Renaissance humanism was far different than the modern connotations associated with “humanism.” Rather than sharing a particular set of philosophical beliefs, Renaissance humanists were the founders of what today would be called the liberal arts – which, for the Renaissance humanists, comprised the study of history, poetry, grammar, rhetoric, and ethics. For over five hundred years these humanists made the successful argument that the humanities made up the most practical and marketable of the academic disciplines. Consequently, their curricula dominated western schools from around 1450 until the twentieth century. The educational success of the humanists overshadowed the enormous number of original writings also left by these figures, writings that have just begun to become accessible in languages other than Latin or to people outside the special collections of European libraries.

My book was concerned with the seeming paradox of the humanist program: a group, at first very small, of people became convinced that writing in a heavily stylized and often quite difficult style of Latin was the key to creating more ethical, more knowledgeable, and more competent rulers, citizens, and people. How could such a seemingly esoteric idea take on the truly transformative significance that humanism eventually had – in fact, there are still educational models that stress the same classical foundations that the humanists espoused in the 1400s. Page 99 of my book encapsulates part of my argument to answer that question. I argue that, unlike modern academics who must publish original scholarship in reputable places to survive in the academy, most Renaissance humanists were primarily concerned with applying their humanities-based, classically-informed education in spoken eloquence in ephemeral settings. Over the course of the Renaissance people began expecting orators to use at least a smattering of classical references in all kinds of speeches and to attempt to stylize the presentation along humanist models of good taste. In order to succeed in the political and social world people needed the ability to deliver humanist-styled orations and thus they themselves studied humanism and passed that learning onto their children. The change in expectations brought about by humanist oratory created a far more popular Italian Renaissance than has been recently assumed, built upon an intertwined foundation of learned interests, social rituals, political processes, power, and status.

Learn more about The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Weil's "A Plague of Informers"

Rachel Weil is professor of history at Cornell University. She lives in Seneca Falls, NY.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England, and reported the following:

You know people like William Carter. They say they are working for the public interest, but they define the public interest so that it is indistinguishable from their own.

William Carter was a freelance hunter of wool smugglers in the late 1600s. Exporting raw wool to France was popular way for folks on the South coast of England to make money, so Carter was often beaten up and reviled for his pains. Yet he kept at it, hoping to be rewarded for his anti-smuggling activity by grateful tradesmen or indeed the Parliament. I call Carter a "patriotic entrepreneur." Page 99 describes Carter's elaborate efforts to represent activities through which he hopes to profit as being in the public interest:

Through his frenzied round of pamphleteering, grassroots organizing, and parliamentary appearances, Carter created the “public” on whose behalf he could be seen to act. His pamphlets simultaneously identified a common interest among clothiers and merchants, and made their interests identical to the interests of the nation. Having defined that interest, Carter visibly lobbied for it. Moreover, he initiated letter writing campaigns and petitions drives that helped members of the trade see themselves as having a corporate interest. The campaigns then allowed Carter to appear to reflect sentiments that he in fact had helped to create.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? And for a reason. Carter's patriotic entrepreneurship was enabled by the Revolution of 1688, the revolution (to which we in the US are ideological heirs) which established a liberal, constitutional polity justified precisely by its identification with the will and good of the public. Patriotic entrepreneurs and their close cousins, political informers, tied their own interests to that of the public. As such they brought into being the bonds between a state and its citizens upon which liberal regimes depend. And yet of course they were also aggressive persecutors of their neighbors and masters of spin. My book, which looks at the immediate aftermath 1688, and at how the new government was both dependent upon and potentially undermined by a raft of patriotic entrepreneurs and informers, brings out the darker side of liberal revolution, in ways that I hope the book will help us think about the present as well as the past.

Learn more about A Plague of Informers at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Stamatov's "The Origins of Global Humanitarianism"

Peter Stamatov is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He works in the areas of sociology of culture and religion, comparative-historical sociology, and the sociology of global and transnational processes. His current research focuses on the intersections of popular politics and religious organizations in early-modern and modern Europe, as well as in the context of imperial expansion overseas. In his earlier work he has addressed issues of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as the political implications of cultural production and consumption.

Stamatov applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy, and reported the following:

The Origins of Global Humanitarianism is about the long, complex and often forgotten history of how our familiar contemporary forms of solidarity with distant others developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It is a book written by an academic for academics. But it is also a book of stories: the stories of the Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, Capuchins, and Quakers who often against all odds stood up and fought for the rights of indigenous people and enslaved Africans in European colonies.

Some of the protagonists of these stories, like Bartolomé de las Casas and Anthony Benezet, are well-known. Some, to use George Eliot’s words from the book’s epigraph, “rest in unvisited tombs.” Have you ever heard of Francisco de Jaca and Épiphane de Moirans, the two Capuchins who crisscrossed Cuban plantations in 1681 calling on slave-owners to liberate their slaves or risk the eternal damnation of their souls? No? Check out page 83 then.

The reader will find none of these fascinating and often moving stories on page 99. The page catches me, instead, in the middle of discussing other writers' contribution to my topic. Academic books are expected to proclaim their distinctiveness. Otherwise why write them? In this context, giving space to other authors in your text can be as deceptive as any of the insincerities of The Good Soldier's narrator. You discuss these fellow writers only in order to highlight the unmistakable wrongness of their arguments as the contrastive background on which your own argument shines seductively at the reader.

So it happens that on page 99 I discuss the explanation of the origins of the modern antislavery movement by three fine historians who have taught me a lot: David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and Christopher Brown. I'm not sure what the page reveals to the reader. To me it brings back memories of the struggle to write prose that captures the essence of these authors' theses, gives them well-deserved credit for their important contribution, yet points out the inconsistencies of their argument. All at the same time.

So, Gentle Reader, do not trust the 99 page test. If it were all in one specific numbered page, Bible dipping would not have been invented.

Learn more about The Origins of Global Humanitarianism at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Leonard's "The Meat Racket"

Christopher Leonard is the former national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. His work has appeared in Fortune, Slate, and the New York Times. He is a fellow with The New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute in Washington, DC. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he lives outside Washington, DC.

Leonard applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Meat Racket describes one of my favorite characters in the book: The attorney Jim Blair.

Jim Blair was the close confidante and adviser to Don Tyson, a business genius who built the largest meat company in the world. (Blair also happened to be close friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton). Blair worked with Don Tyson for decades and became the top lawyer for his company, Tyson Foods. But, as page 99 describes it: Blair “didn’t just handle lawsuits or regulatory matters. He was more like a well-trained attack dog, with a deep and creative understanding of U.S. law. Don Tyson kept him on a short leash.”

As page 99 begins, Blair is conducting a secret mission. He quietly buys up corporate debt owed by one of Don Tyson’s biggest rivals, and uses the debt as a lever to ultimately take over the rival company. It was just one of many acquisitions that fueled Tyson Foods explosive growth through the 1980s and 1990s.

Jim Blair’s story reveals two deeper themes of The Meat Racket.

The first is that the state of our current meat industry is not the result of some historical accident. It is the result of human agency. Today, just four companies control over 85 percent of the beef market and just three firms make almost half of our chicken (that’s compared to more than 36 that did so back in the 1970s). Some people describe this state of affairs in passive terms, as if it just “happened.”

The Meat Racket shows that today’s consolidation is the result of an audacious business strategy. Don Tyson and a few other CEOs with deep pockets saw a business opportunity, and they took it.

The second theme is that Tyson was able to do this because it was a new kind of business, a fact of which Jim Blair was keenly aware. Tyson was neither a farm nor a factory, but a combination of the two. It used this ambiguity to take advantage of every possible loophole in U.S. law. For example, Tyson took advantage of tax breaks meant for small farmers, saving more than $20 million a year by the mid-1980s.

By following the exploits of people like Jim Blair and Don Tyson, readers get a detailed look at how a handful of companies came to control our meat supply.

Visit Christopher Leonard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Auerswald & Stephen Saideman's "NATO in Afghanistan"

David P. Auerswald is professor of security studies at the National War College. His books include Congress and the Politics of National Security. Stephen M. Saideman holds the Norman Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University. His books include For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone, and reported the following:

Page 99 of NATO in Afghanistan contains key insights into our approach when examining NATO behavior in Afghanistan. The book looks inside NATO countries to explore how government structures and party politics shape how battles are waged by NATO militaries. Domestic constraints in presidential and single-party parliamentary systems - such as the U.S. and Great Britain - differ from those in countries with coalition governments - such as Germany and the Netherlands. Those domestic constraints influence how civilians provide direction to their military forces. A leader's type of government influences the guidelines given to their forces overseas, and which tools will be used to ensure that those guidelines are incorporated into battlefield behavior.

Page 99 is part of the chapter that discusses presidential governments - specifically the U.S., France, and Poland - and their contributions to the NATO effort in Afghanistan. Our expectation was that leaders in presidential governments would influence the behavior of their deployed military commanders through two tools: the careful selection of officers and the manipulation of incentives aimed at those officers. These expectations were borne out in the evidence presented in this chapter.

Our discussion on page 99 focuses on the selection of General David McKiernan to command ISAF in June 2008, and General David Petraeus to command U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October 2008. To put these events into context, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had been increasingly dissatisfied with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan during 2007. McKiernan's predecessor, General Dan McNeill, was one of Donald Rumsfeld's last appointments as Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld had instructed McNeill to build the Afghan National Army and conduct counter-terrorism operations. With the situation in Afghanistan rapidly degrading, Gates changed U.S. mission priorities to be more in line with counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, and then selected two senior generals to implement that strategy. McKiernan immediately focused on the behavior of ISAF troops in an effort to limit casualties, and Petraeus brought his population-centric COIN strategy to CENTCOM.

In short, the U.S. used the selection of commanders to effect change in the focus and behavior of its deployed troops. Careful selection of commanders is politically acceptable and indeed only possible in presidential and single-party parliamentary government. The same type of selection process would not have been possible in countries with coalition governments. Page 99, then, is a good representation of one of our book's main arguments.

Learn more about NATO in Afghanistan at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Virginia Berridge's "Demons: Our changing attitudes to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs"

Virginia Berridge is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. She has published widely on the history of illicit drugs, smoking, and alcohol and has worked in both historical and non-historical settings.

Berridge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Demons: Our changing attitudes to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Demons, Our changing attitudes to alcohol, tobacco and drugs tells how new technology led to mass production of beer and spirits, especially whisky, in the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, whisky was the most popular spirit in England , promoted by advertising and labels which became household names. It was a consumer product.

This page is part of a chapter in the book where I discuss the key role of technology in pushing the substances- alcohol, tobacco and drugs –down different paths in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alcohol and tobacco became mass market commodities but opium did not, at least not in the same way. The invention of the Bonsack machine in the 1880s had an impact on tobacco. It enabled the mass production of the cigarette, which became a leading consumer commodity in the early twentieth century. Soldiers smoking in photos of the First World War testify to that change. But technology had a different impact on drugs such as opium. The invention of the alkaloids of morphine, codeine and heroin in the nineteenth century and the development of the hypodermic syringe saw a medical rather than a mass market model come into play. Opium had been a drug with wide cultural usage in the first half of the century but increasingly it was restricted to medical usage and control.

The role of technology is one of a number of factors which had this differing impact on the substances. I also talk in the book about the role of social movements; and of fear, whether of ethnic minorities-the Chinese and their opium smoking-, or of women consuming alcohol; the differing role of professional interests; and the dynamics at the international level.

Such issues have not gone away. In the final chapters of the book, I show how they have continued to help determine responses in the present, and the changing of boundaries between the substances. Technology has a role now through the rise of methadone as a substitute medication for drug users. For tobacco, the promotion of nicotine replacement therapy and more recently the electronic cigarette, delivering nicotine only, have demonstrated the compelling role which technical change can have. This technology has underpinned new directions for both these substances and the rise of what has been called ‘harm reduction’ approaches in policy which aim to mitigate the bad effects of substances rather than trying to stop use altogether.

Learn more about Demons at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

T. Birkhead, J. Wimpenny & B. Montgomerie's "Ten Thousand Birds"

Bob Montgomerie is Professor and Research Chair in Evolutionary Biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He and his coauthors, Tim Birkhead and Jo Wimpenny, wrote their new book Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin to explore the various ways that the study of birds was central to the development of the biological sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Montgomerie applied the “Page 99 Test” to Ten Thousand Birds and reported the following:

Ernst Mayr was an icon of evolutionary biology in the twentieth century. Born in 1904 he lived to be 100 and oversaw much of the transformation of biology into a cutting-edge science. He was also an ornithologist, and we encounter him in chapter 3 on page 99 in a section called ‘Ernst Mayr’s Century’. That chapter—‘Birds on the Tree of Life’—is about the long and tortuous history of bird classification, a story in which Mayr was the dominant figure. On page 99 he is just 27 years old, having recently joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) after a two-year-long and very successful bird-collecting trip to the South Pacific. Mayr was to stay at the AMNH for two decades before moving to Harvard for the next fifty years, laying the foundations for a synthesis of evolutionary biology, systematics and a philosophy of biology.

Page 99 provides a good example of some of the things we wanted to achieve with this book: stories about people who did meaningful studies of birds, and some insights into why the study of birds was—and is—so influential. To help us think about the page 99 question, we turned it on its head and asked whether any single page in our book would satisfy the “page-99 test” to be representative of the book. The answer is a resounding “no”. To meet that requirement a single page would have to tell a little-known story about an interesting character—like that of Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felsö-Szilvás, the eccentric, self-taught, Transylvanian palaeontologist who in the early 1900s developed original ideas about the origins of both birds and flight while traveling around Europe on a motorcycle with his male lover/secretary. It would also have to tell about some interesting discoveries about birds; to show some excellent photos and paintings of iconic birds; to include some historical pictures of interesting and influential people who studied birds—both amateur bird enthusiasts and professional ornithologists; and to provide historical context for the study of bird biology using both timeline diagrams and stories about the often serendipitous nature of discovery. Our book weaves together all those attributes and we have tried to do so in a way that makes the subject both interesting and accessible to anyone interested in learning more about birds and the people who have studied them.

Learn more about this book and the scientific study of birds at myriadbirds.com.

--Marshal Zeringue