Robert Zimmerman's "The Universe in a Mirror"

Robert Zimmerman is an award-winning science writer and historian whose work has appeared in Natural History, the Wall Street Journal, and Astronomy, among other leading publications. His books include Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel and Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It, and reported the following:

I approached the 99-page test with great skepticism, a skepticism that was in many ways confirmed when I looked at page 99 of The Universe in a Mirror. The book tells the epic and sometimes heart-breaking tale of the Hubble Space Telescope and the men and women who risked their careers and family lives to build and fix what has undoubtedly been the most successful and important scientific instrument ever put into space. Not only has Hubble reshaped the field of astronomy, it has completely changed the human perception of the universe.

The events described on page 99, the change from one project manager to another early in Hubble's construction and the problems that change caused, seems at first glance to be relatively unexciting. As with all history, the context that surrounds such an event is what will give the event its life and energy. Thus, reading this single page, out of context, leaves the reader somewhat high and dry, lacking the background necessary to understand the human difficulties of the situation.

Page 99 does contain a single phrase, however, that does encapsulate the context of the situation and helps explain the many problems that plagued the entire history of the Hubble Space Telescope. That phrase is "penny wise and pound foolish."

Repeatedly in Hubble's history the telescope was crippled by foolish attempts by numerous individuals to try to save a few dollars by either reducing the scope of the telescope or simply not doing the work necessary to make sure the telescope was built correctly. For example, in 1972 NASA's administrator arbitrarily limited the telescope's budget to approximately $300 million, a number picked out of the air with no connection to actual cost, in order to please the budget counters in Congress. It was this artificial number that ultimately caused the difficulties in construction, contributing more than anything to the error that eventually left the telescope's mirror deformed.

Similarly, in 2004 the last shuttle servicing mission to Hubble was cancelled for many of the same "penny-wise" reasons, requiring a political battle and the eventual resignation of the man who made that decision in order to reinstate the mission, now scheduled for the fall of 2008.

To me, writing good history means writing the story of ordinary human beings struggling to make difficult decisions with limited knowledge. The consequences of those decisions is what determines the history, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. In the case of the Hubble Space Telescope, the telescope's intrinsic potential for unveiling the unknown repeatedly forced the right decisions on everyone involved, and the result has been images of the heavens that are often so beautiful and revealing that it is difficult for words to describe them.

Read an excerpt from The Universe in a Mirror, and learn more about the book and author at the Princeton University Press website and Robert Zimmerman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin N. Schiff’s "Building the International Criminal Court"

Benjamin N. Schiff’s Building the International Criminal Court is the first book to combine a history of the development of this new international organization with legal, internal and international political, and operational details that present a theoretically informed and accurate, but highly readable, introduction and analysis of the Court and the challenges that face it.

Schiff applied the “Page 99 Test” to the book and reported the following:

Chapter 3 examines the Court’s founding document, the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Appendix 3B contains the Statute’s definitions of the crimes over which the Court has jurisdiction, and page 99 includes part of Article 8, detailing War Crimes. Since this is part of a negotiated international treaty text, it gives no idea about the style, argument, or breadth of the book, which is more a political and operational analysis than a dry legal exposition.

The main point of Appendix 3B is to show how in international law and in the Statute, the concepts of war crimes in international and internal conflicts have converged with each other. The main point of the book is that the International Criminal Court has a very broad mandate, represents an amalgamation of contrasting legal traditions, embodies some serious organizational contradictions and has rather little power, but is at the forefront of the institutional development of international efforts to respond to humanity’s most heinous crimes.

Read an excerpt from Building the International Criminal Court, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Benjamin N. Schiff is Professor of Politics, Oberlin College.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Salamon's "Hospital"

Julie Salamon, author of seven books including The Devil's Candy and Rambam's Ladder, was a reporter and critic for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Here are her thoughts on the “Page 99 Test” and her most recent book, Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids:

Since the genesis of my book Hospital is rooted in serendipity, I was intrigued by the Wheel of Fortune aspect of the Page 99 test. I found Maimonides Medical Center through chance, and was lucky enough to be granted amazing access for an entire year to this big, urban hospital. What intrigued me was the complexity of a modern hospital, given an added charge by its Brooklyn location, a center of immigration. More than 60 languages are spoken at Maimonides.

The book’s subtitle is Man Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids. Page 99 takes place in a chapter that looks at the complications involved in moving patients through the system, the “red tape” and “money” part of health care. It fairly represents crucial aspects of the book if not the entire landscape.

I’ve tried throughout the book to mingle personal stories with larger social and medical issues as these issues play out on the ground. On Page 99, Douglas Jablon, the exuberant head of patient relations, describes Sondra Olendorf, the head of nursing, with characteristic hyperbole: “I feel she dropped from heaven, and I don’t even think she got hurt.”

Olendorf has to deal with the realities of delayed lab work, nursing shortages, low morale. On Page 99 she designates a nurse to be a “bed manager,” someone whose entire job is to help get patients out of the hospital faster. “Being a bed manager took Romanelli (the bed manager) outside her zone in the hospital and sparked a kind of existential awakening. She had never thought about her unit in relation to the rest, apart from maybe housekeeping and pharmacy. Who has time to reflect on all the links in any chain…”

Learn more about the book and author at Julie Salamon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

W. Patrick McCray's "Keep Watching the Skies!"

W. Patrick McCray is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology and Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age, and reported the following:

When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, thousands of ordinary people across the globe seized the opportunity to participate in the start of the Space Age. Known as the “Moonwatchers,” these largely forgotten citizen-scientists helped professional astronomers by providing critical and otherwise unavailable information about the first satellites. Using homemade telescopes and other gadgets, Moonwatchers witnessed firsthand the astonishing beginning of the Space Age. In the process, these amateur scientists organized themselves into a worldwide program of satellite spotters that lasted until 1975.

When I flipped to page 99 of my new book on Moonwatch, I found myself caught in the story of Nunz Addabbo, a professional engineer living in Terre Haute, Indiana, who organized and led one of the world’s best Moonwatch teams. Addabbo’s tale points to how Moonwatch in the United States drew upon three different “Cold War cultures.”

One was a culture of vigilance. In the 1950s, many Americans feared a nuclear strike delivered by the Soviet aircraft. In response, hundreds of thousands of Americans – the patriotic and the paranoid alike – joined the Ground Observer Corps and maintained alertness against a Soviet bomber attack. The Corps combined watchfulness with strong elements of civic participation and, in some cases, a fair helping of Cold War suspicion. The appearance of Soviet satellites in American skies extended the general public’s fear of invasion into outer space. Addabbo, a new arrival in Terre Haute, experienced some this paranoia himself when he tried to start his Moonwatch team and found that his unusual name and itinerant professional experience aroused initial suspicion in the local civil defense office.

Moonwatch also drew strength from the vibrant and active amateur science community. Enthusiasts read about science, saw it depicted in movies and television shows, and bought toys and hobby kits with science themes. Like automobile tailfins and hula hoops, the resurgence of citizen-scientists reflected America’s postwar economic prosperity. Budding investigators used their disposable income to buy telescopes, ham radio gear and other instruments manufactured by one of the many companies that sprang up in the 1950s. The growth of amateur science clubs was part of the 1950s era pattern of civic engagement when membership in groups like Rotary and the Kiwanis Club peaked.

Amateur science activities also held a special attraction for children and teenagers. Before the surprise of Sputnik, toy companies produced a wide range of science kits that helped stimulate scientific curiosity among children. Science fiction movies and the UFO craze of the early 1950s help stimulate their interest. Think of the huge popularity of Mr. Wizard…over 100,000 kids claimed membership in one of the 5,000 Mr. Wizard Science Clubs that sprang up in North America. The fact that his “assistants” were precocious children added to the show’s long-lived popularity.

Together, these three groups – vigilant citizens, amateur scientists, and science-oriented teens – became the basis for Moonwatch. Page 99 of Keep Watching the Skies shows how civic duty, the virtue of vigilance, intense public interest in science and space, and the long tradition of amateur science in the U.S. were all strands in the Cold War cultural tapestry of the 1950s. Taken together, they helped create the cloth from which Moonwatch was fashioned.

Read the Introduction to Keep Watching the Skies!, and learn more about the book and the author at W. Patrick McCray's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Benoit's "Noble Lies"

Charles Benoit is the author of Relative Danger, Out of Order, and Noble Lies, a nominee for ForeWord Magazine's Mystery of the Year award.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Noble Lies and reported the following:

Most of Noble Lies is told in a limited third-person point of view that follows the hero, but scattered throughout the book are short chapters that let you know what’s going on from the perspective of some minor, reoccurring characters. Page 99 falls in one of those chapters.

On this page, we’re following a petty Thai thug-wannabe as he follows the book’s hero through Krabi, a coastal town in southern Thailand. On page 98, the thug was remembering the things he saw the day the tsunami hit Phuket, and at the top of page 99, he remembers how he used to be sad all the time. But he shrugs off these memories, noting that now that most everything was back to the way it was before the wave hit, “he didn’t feel as sad anymore.”

The thug does not like ferangs – foreigners – and has little good to say about people in general, so if this is the only page you read you might think the book was filled with misanthropes and complainers. But in the middle of the page, as he’s recalling how “the big American and his girlfriend” arrived in Krabi, the thug hints at something more interesting:

“Yesterday he had watched them as they climbed out of the long-tail at Chao Fa Pier, these two, Jarin’s whore Pim, an old man and a boy.”

A couple ferangs, another man’s ‘whore’ and a pair of innocents all arriving at an exotic location in a Thai-style motorboat, being watched by a man who no one seems to notice – not the plot of the book, but yeah, a good sense of what it’s about.

Watch the video trailer for Noble Lies, and learn more about the author and his work at Charles Benoit's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Boellstorff's "Coming of Age in Second Life"

Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, and reported the following:

Coming of Age in Second Life is an ethnography of the virtual world Second Life. The book explores a range of issues in Second Life and also, as is typical of most ethnographic work, thinks outward from these issues to pose broader questions about human life online. Page 99 of Coming of Age in Second Life includes the following:

Because objects could have permanence only on property, residents without property were largely excluded from building, an important dimension of Second Life sociality. Such residents often termed themselves “homeless.” Some residents were homeless because they did not like building or saw no benefit in owning property; others were homeless because they could not afford to own virtual land […] Fundamental to Second Life culture during my fieldwork was that textures, scripts, prims, and even entire builds could be sold; Second Life was a commodity economy.

This passage is representative of Coming of Age in Second Life in that it emphasizes that questions of inequality do not disappear when we go online. Virtual worlds hold great promise for human sociality, a promise as dimly understood at present as was the potential of the Internet in its early years. However, there can certainly be negative aspects to virtual worlds. I think it is crucial that we find a language with which to discuss such issues without sliding into a pessimism wherein we dismiss virtual worlds as the exclusive provenance of either “alienated geeks” or a mass culture that is, Matrix-like, cut off from its own reality.

The questions about property and commodification raised in the passage above are part of a larger argument in Coming of Age in Second Life in regard to what I term “creationist capitalism.” I define this on page 206 as “a mode of capitalism in which labor is understood in terms of creativity, so that production is understood as creation.” There is no inevitable reason why virtual worlds must be structured around capitalist principles, but for good or ill it seems that the vast majority of them to date are predicated on a specific understanding of capitalism linked to creativity, customization, and modification. One thing that I (and many others) will be watching in the years to come is how forms of inequality continue to be reproduced but also challenged by all those engaged in the design and everyday social life of virtual worlds.

Read an excerpt from Coming of Age in Second Life, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Visit Tom Boellstorff's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cathy Pickens' "Hush My Mouth"

Cathy Pickens is the author of the Southern Fried Mystery series featuring Avery Andrews.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to the latest book in the series, Hush My Mouth, and reported the following:

Excerpt from page 99:

“Some of us were out one night, after a football game or some such. Telling ghost stories. Must’a been near Halloween. We drove across the bridge and stopped to see if we could hear the baby crying.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory. “Ol’ Campbell decided he’d impress his girlfriend, so he got out to walk back across it.”

“What baby?”

“You never heard tell of the crybaby? Suppose to hear a baby crying if you walk across the bridge at midnight under a full moon.” He snorted.

“I take it you didn’t hear any crying.”

“Only crying I heard was that dumbass Campbell.” He smiled broadly. “Jennie Lee was sitting in the front seat of that old Plymouth I used to have. I got out to watch Campbell, she slid over to the driver’s seat and put that sucker in gear. I barely got the back door open. She was moving when I jumped in. But not before I heard it.”

He laughed out loud, one of his contagious belly laughs.

“Not that baby,” I said.

“Naw. Campbell. Screaming like a girl. He must’a run a good half mile, chasing us and yelling before she stopped the car.”

On page 99 of Hush My Mouth – a traditional murder mystery with a Southern flavor – attorney Avery Andrews is eating in the local meat-and-three-vegetables restaurant with Chief Deputy Rudy Mellin. They’ve been comparing notes on a two mysterious deaths in small-town Dacus, South Carolina.

Avery and Rudy knew each other in high school – not close friends, just that “sort of know” that happens in small towns. Avery went away to become a lawyer, then reluctantly came home after losing her temper with a lying witness in a high-profile trial and, as a result, losing her job. Rudy worked himself up to chief deputy while she was gone.

Their renewed friendship represents both the warmth and frustration of familiarity.

My close-knit, small-town upbringing prompts me to speculate about knowing people at different stages of their lives. Would I have liked my husband had I known him in high school? (Maybe not.) What was my dad like as a boss? Would my mother and I have been friends if we’d been contemporaries? (I like to think so.)

Page 99 also shows the role of humor in these mysteries. Even in tragic or scary situations, humor provides leavening.

Avery, who fought returning home, is showing signs of settling in, of becoming a part of the town, someone townspeople turn to when they’re in trouble. And she’s putting together her past and her present, with old friends made new and with a completeness she couldn’t know without the help of friends and laughter and a sense of continuity.

Read an excerpt from Hush My Mouth, and learn more about the author and her books at Cathy Pickens' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gilbert King's "The Execution of Willie Francis"

Gilbert King is the author of Woman, Child For Sale: The New Slave Trade in the 21st Century, which was selected by the Detroit Free Press as one of its ten notable books of 2004. In addition, King has contributed articles to numerous newspapers and magazines, including Ring Magazine, Playboy, and the San Diego Union.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, we learn the background of Father Maurice Rousseve, the Creole priest in St. Martinville, Louisiana who counsels seventeen-year-old African-American Willie Francis in the months leading up to, and, surprisingly, just after Willie's botched execution at the hands of two drunken executioners in 1946. In some ways, Father Rousseve's story forms the heart of my book, as Rousseve was born and raised in the Seventh Ward--the quintessential Creole section of New Orleans, where his parents encouraged music, religion and education above all else. His parents were very successful in this indoctrination as Maurice and his brothers and sisters became writers, professors, architects, teachers and nuns, respectively.

In contrast to the opportunities the Rousseves enjoyed while living in New Orleans, the blacks of rural St. Martinville were stifled and forced into a life of plantation work. There were no schools for blacks beyond sixth grade, and Willie Francis only made it as far as third. So when Father Rousseve arrives in St. Martinville to run the Catholic church for blacks in town, he is continually frustrated that the opportunities for blacks are severely restricted by whites. Yet, ironically, Rousseve chooses a white priest as his assistant.

Father Rousseve strongly believed that Willie Francis was purposely tortured in the chair by the drunken executioners, who lowered the voltage so that Willie would not lose consciousness during his electrocution. He was also convinced, as were many in town, both black and white, that a Cajun deputy sheriff named August Fuselier, whose gun was found at the scene of the murder Willie was convicted of, was responsible for the death of Andrew Thomas, the popular Cajun pharmacist in town. At the same time, Rousseve has a great deal of respect for Bertrand DeBlanc, the young Cajun lawyer who comes to Willie's legal aid following the botched execution.

Page 99 of my book captures the complexity of heritage and race in 1940s Louisiana, which is so important to this story. So I'd say Ford's statement holds up pretty well in this case.

Read an excerpt from The Execution of Willie Francis, and learn more about the book and author at Gilbert King's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Fister's "In the Wind"

Barbara Fister is the author of two mysteries, On Edge, and the newly released In the Wind.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to In the Wind and reported the following:

Excerpt from page 99:

The man I recognized as an undercover cop held up one of the flyers. “Why is this college providing a forum for a right-wing hate group?” He looked around for support, and a rumble of agreement came from the protestors. The provost opened his mouth to respond, but Folkstone interrupted.

“That’s not true. We’re not a hate group.” His voice was high-pitched and a little jittery with earnestness. “On the contrary, we applaud the efforts of native peoples who struggle to maintain their identity in the face of one-world globalism. All we’re asking for is the same right to our racial identity. It’s the law that is racist. Repatriation rights are limited to non-Europeans.” That caused an irritated reaction from the crowd, and he seemed to gain momentum from it. “The fact is, Europeans reached these shores long before Columbus. Those bones have been identified by scientists as being of Caucasian ancestry. The government wants to deny the historical facts by burying the evidence. This is a pattern—” He was drowned out by boos.

“How are these remains being handled?” a woman called out, her voice angry and accusatory. “Are they being treated as objects of study, pawed over by scientists?”

The provost looked at Nancy, who seemed to shrink for a moment before she climbed up two steps and announced firmly, “No on both counts. We’ve handled them with the respect they deserve. Until we receive the court’s decision, they are being kept under lock and key.”
---

This exchange would give Ford Madox Ford a feel for the book’s themes. In the Wind explores the parallels between threats to civil liberties in the name of security during the Vietnam war era and today. The story focuses on the hunt for a Native American who once belonged to a radical group and is accused of killing an FBI agent in 1972. Anni Koskinen, a former cop, ends up working for the woman’s defense team at the request of the dead agent’s son, a close friend who has grown disillusioned with the Bureau and the politicized way the investigation is being handled.

In this scene, the plot thickens as a White Supremacist group holds a press conference to lay claim to recently-discovered Native American remains in order to publicize their eccentric beliefs. Supporters of the accused fugitive use the event to draw attention to their cause. As Anni arrives, she recognizes one of the protesters: an undercover cop. He has been reassigned from narcotics to surveillance of dissidents - which has been known to happen. It’s not the main storyline, but is consistent with a common theme: how our fears shape our response to issues.

Ironically, the crime fiction genre draws on our anxiety, just as policy makers do, but fiction can give our fears a nuanced meaning that is often more truthful than what we hear on the news.

Read an excerpt from In the Wind, and learn more about the author and her work at Barbara Fister's website and her blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Howell's "The Darkest Hour"

Katherine Howell's first book, Frantic, was released by Pan Macmillan in May 2007 in Australia, with publication slated for 2008/09 in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the UK.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new novel, The Darkest Hour, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

Ella had to get out of bed again to find the phone book and look up the hospital switch number. They put her through to her mother's room.

'Hi, Mum.'

'Ella! Are you okay?'

'Actually I'm exhausted,' she said, the phone between the pillow and her ear. 'I've been up since yesterday morning.'

'They shouldn't work you so hard.'

'It was my choice to stay, it's a big case.' Ella said, her eyes closed. 'How's your infection?'

'Fine, good, all gone.'

Sure.

'Did you ask about holidays?'

'I can't, Mum, with this case.'

'They don't need everyone on it, do they?'

Ella yawned hugely. She could feel sleep creeping up on her again. 'I'm really sorry but I have to go.'

'Well, if you have to.'

'I'm sorry, Mum. I'll talk to you tomorrow.'

She dropped the phone onto the floor and snuggled deeper under the covers. At last, a big case, I have my big case ...


Joe had the ambulance running when Lauren rushed up minutes before six. She jumped in and slammed the door and Joe accelerated out of the station.

'We're backing up day shift at a burns case in Darlo. Everyone else is tied up.' He roared down George Street. 'Night's going to be shit if the start's any indication.'

Lauren tried to clear her mind. She wouldn't be able to talk to Joe until the job was over. 'Is it a bad one?'

Joe nodded. 'Attempted suicide.' He braked hard as a pedestrian ran across the street in front of them. 'Guy tipped petrol on himself and lit it. He's in an eighth-floor penthouse and the lift's stuffed.'

Lauren took a deep breath. The case would take an hour at least. Then they might have to come back to the station and shower and change. Bad burns left crews smelling like cooked meat, and not in a good way.

So we won't get to talk for a while. Put it to the back of your mind, try not to stew.

As if that was even remotely possible.

Page 99 of The Darkest Hour is a little more than a quarter into the book, and by this point paramedic Lauren Yates is struggling with a bunch of problems. First she found her sister's ex, Thomas Werner, covered in blood beside a murdered man and was threatened into silence, and then she and her colleague Joe fought to save a stabbing victim who told her with his last breaths that Werner attacked him too.

Detective Ella Marconi is thrilled to land this stabbing murder case, and believes Lauren to be the perfect witness because she can testify to the dead man's words.

On this page we see how Ella's also a little stressed by family pressures, and how Lauren is planning to tell Joe that Werner has made new threats. Events conspire to send these plans awry, however, and instead, the following day sees Lauren at the homicide office, begging, to Ella's horror, to take back her statement.

I believe Ford's Page 99 test is applicable here as the pressure is slowly increasing on the characters on this page and the decisions they make while under that pressure lead to further problems. Both these qualities are true of the whole book.

Read an excerpt from The Darkest Hour, and learn more about the author and her work at Katherine Howell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Frantic.

--Marshal Zeringue