Patricia Blessing's "Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire"

Patricia Blessing is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History at Princeton University. A scholar of Islamic architecture in the eastern Mediterranean, Iberian Peninsula, and Iran, she is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest.

Blessing applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes aspects of the relationship between Ottoman and Mamluk architecture in the fifteenth century, using the example of a building in Amasya, Turkey. The example here is the Bayezid Pasha Mosque, built in 1414. The text on the page describes elements of the building, provides historical context, and makes connections to other types of architecture that will be explored later in the chapter. The page also talks about who the patron was, and what his position was within the Ottoman elite, so explains how he came to commission a building like this in the first place.

The page gives a good idea about the book, with one big exception: there aren’t any images on it. Since the book is about architectural history, it features close to 170 images, most of them in color. Many of them are my own photographs, taken during my research trips. There are references to several images on this page, so a reader would at least know to expect them later on. From the text on the page, one can understand that Ottoman architecture is the main subject of the book, and that the fifteenth century plays a role. I am not sure to what extent a reader would understand that this period is at the core of the book project since the only other example of a building that is mentioned is a 14th-century one in Cairo.

Follow Patricia Blessing on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Dyer's "People of the Screen"

John Dyer is VP for Enrollment and Educational Technology and Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He has been a technology creator for over 20 years, and his research focuses on the intersection of faith and technology, including Bible software, digital ecclesiology, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism.

Dyer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of People of the Screen is an analysis of the way Bible software developers think about what their larger goals are. “the common point made by all the Bible software teams was that all forms of Bible engagement have the potential to help people achieve a changed life, and that life change is more important than the form … evangelical ministries and Bible software developers are less concerned with conclusion, interpretation, or forms of engagement than with reiterating the end goal of spiritual transformation that happens through Bible engagement. In this sense, Bible engagement itself is not the end goal, but a means to the end of ‘life change.’” That ended a section focused on average church-going Bible readers, and half way through page 99 and new section begins, entitled “A Time Machine for Pastors” which explains how desktop Bible software is designed to bring a variety of historical research to pastors preparing sermons which presents a different financial model than phone-based reading apps.

Although I can’t say page 99 is the “single best page to introduce what the book is about” it seems like a fair representative of the kinds of things that are happening in the book and touches on many of the finer points without spelling them out directly. At a basic level, People of the Screen is about what happens when people shift from reading the Bible in print to reading it on screen. But it turns out this shift is not like the shift from scrolls to codices or from a hand-written codex to a printed book. In those cases, we left the previous technology behind, but today it appears that readers, both religious and not religious, use a combination of print and digital reading. People of the Screen is also about the unique role of evangelicals in developing Bible software and the characteristics of the evangelicalism as a whole that make it tend to resist some elements of culture change while embracing others, notable technology.

Page 99, then, does surface some of the complexities of the way evangelicals think about the Bible itself. They don’t believe that it’s just a book with information that one needs to learn (like a history or science book) and it’s not merely a set of rules one needs to follow (like a legal or ethic text). It is those things, but for evangelicals, the Bible is also a kind of conduit to connect with God, and when one connects with God, that should bring about a changed life, one that is more peaceful and has less conflict (or sin). Page 99 section talks about how evangelical Bible programmers attempt to develop apps that encourage people to read more, not merely for more information, but more life change.

At the same time, these apps aren’t free, so I’m glad that page 99 also introduces the realities of the business models of Bible apps. One of the key ideas of the book is that evangelicals approach technology with what I call “Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism” and this page has a little bit of all of those things.

Follow John Dyer on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bob Blaisdell's "Chekhov Becomes Chekhov"

Bob Blaisdell is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections. He lives in New York City.

Blaisdell applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In most Chekhov biographies, Leykin comes off as the crooked editor and publisher that all of us writers have in mind as blocking or exploiting our genius. But however much Chekhov defamed and mocked him, however much we naturally side with our hero and hold in contempt anyone or anything hampering his literary development, Leykin is my favorite supporting character.

Nineteen years older than Chekhov, Leykin was of peasant stock. As a provincial boy he was apprenticed to a shop owner in St. Petersburg, where he was also enrolled in a school. “He had written, by his own account, more than 20,000 short stories and sketches, and called himself ‘a man of letters’ with great pride,” writes Mikhail Chekhov. According to Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, Leykin’s humorous writings, which the Chekhov brothers had grown up reading, were primarily about Russian merchants and their domestic lives, but the fiction’s “wide popularity with less-literate readers rapidly dwindled at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Leykin had been a literary father to the three eldest Chekhov boys. Mikhail Chekhov, who did not work for him, described him: “He was short, broad-shouldered, lame in one leg, and eccentric.” Because he was unattractive and had a bad leg, Chekhov and Alexander would refer to him as “Quasimodo.”

PHOTO {Nikolay Leykin.}

Earlier in their relationship, Chekhov could and did explain the difficulties he had crafting comic stories to size. Though a proud professional, Chekhov always had an artist’s sense of proportion, and he sought space and the allowance for his own discretion about topics. Even at the age of twenty-three, Chekhov had stood up for himself to Leykin....

To my surprise, page 99 is a good page! Not necessarily typical, but good. I have written two narrowly focused biographies, but I can’t say I know how to introduce real people as characters. I don’t know how to bring out their qualities and I have little confidence in my judgments of them. I don’t even know how to fairly judge my heroes, Chekhov and Tolstoy. How can I show their essence? I can’t. I can only give my very limited impressions of people I have never met. Nikolay Leykin is someone I only ever knew the existence of through biographies of Chekhov and Chekhov’s letters. I did read excerpts of Leikin’s letters that are quoted in the notes of the excellent Soviet edition of Chekhov’s Collected Works.

When I found a collection of Leikin’s comic stories in Russian and tried to read one, I saw that it would not be easy; the language is quick, allusive, and idiomatic. There are no stories by Leykin translated into English, as far as I was able to find. He is known today only because he was Chekhov’s humor-story editor from the time Chekhov was 21 to age 27. Chekhov once teasingly threatened to depict Leykin in a story, and Leykin said he would be flattered by the attempt, but there is no story identified by Chekhov or his acquaintances that points to Leikin. (If there had been, I would have grounded my impressions of Leykin on Chekhov’s fictional depiction.) My presentation of Leykin should be and is, I hope, acknowledged as limited. He was shrewd enough and vulnerable enough to call out Chekhov’s social and literary excuses in 1887, in particular about not writing for Fragments as much as he promised he would (the success of Leikin’s humor magazine had depended through 1886 on Chekhov’s work as “Antosha Chekhonte”). As I regularly point out in the book, Chekhov, financially supporting his parents and younger siblings, could always rely, no matter his immediate squabbles with Leikin, on emergency loans from “Quasimodo.”

Learn more about Chekhov Becomes Chekhov at the Pegasus Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Poll's "Aquaman and the War against Oceans"

Ryan Poll is an associate professor of English at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the author of Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization.

Poll applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Aquaman and the War against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of my book, readers discover an idea central to my project: how humanism is a form of violence inextricable from other forms of violence, including racism, genderism, and ableism. Moreover, this page asks if empathy, as theorized by ecofeminists, can help dissolve these linked structures of hate. The middle paragraph of page 99 reads:

Ecofeminist scholar Greta Gaard defines ecofeminism as “an evolving praxis” that centers on “entangled empathy.” Entangled empathy is an intersectional paradigm and praxis that recognizes the inextricable connections between “human justice, interspecies justice, and human-environment justice.” In contrast, empathy as policed and practiced by Humanism only extends to others recognized as Humans. This narrow form of empathy not only excludes nearly all nonhuman animals (with exceptions for select species enfolded into the Human everyday, like dogs), but moreover, such empathy also excludes most humans. Humanism excludes individuals not raced as white, not gendered as masculine, and not able-bodied.

Page 99 exemplifies my project in numerous ways. First and foremost, the page illustrates how I read popular culture in relation to critical theory in surprising, unexpected ways. I am certain that if someone randomly picked up my book on Aquaman, they would not expect a detailed discussion of ecofeminism and a critique of humanism! As this page encapsulates, popular culture is a form of critical thinking and engaged readers must learn to swim with the critical currents of popular culture, and at times, learn to swim against such currents. As Fredric Jameson teaches and as my book practices, interpretation is a political act.

In particular, page 99 is part of a chapter that centers on Mera, Aquaman’s intimate partner and a superhero in her own right. This chapter charts how Mera, in the comics, experiences myriad forms of patriarchy when she ventures from the ocean to the surface world. As I argue, when Mera enters what may be called the Kingdom of Humans, she enters a Kingdom of Patriarchy in which women are devalued, degraded, and open to gratuitous forms of violence. Mera, I argue, develops a feminist imagination while on the surface world, and moreover, she inspires alternative reading practices than those practiced by patriarchy, such as ecofeminism, which is discussed on page 99. As I argue, Mera’s experience of systemic and everyday patriarchy in the comic books reflects the treatment of women within the corporate structure of DC Comics, and moreover, anticipates the treatment of Amber Heard, who played Mera in the 2018 blockbuster Aquaman, on social media.

Overall, my book argues that the characters in Aquaman, including Mera and Black Manta, one of the few African American supervillains in mainstream comics, are accessible figures for understanding the centrality of oceans to the modern world, and how these same characters can be used to narrate how ecological justice is inextricable from social justice.

Follow Ryan Poll on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Humes's "The Forever Witness"

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose many books include Garbology, Mississippi Mud, and the PEN Award-winning No Matter How Loud I Shout. He splits his time between Seattle and Southern California.

Humes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Forever Witness takes readers to the story of “Baby Alpha Beta,” a newborn abandoned in 1987 not far from Disneyland, at a supermarket that was part of the now-defunct Alpha Beta chain. A janitor found the baby girl behind the store, wrapped in a yellow blanket in a milk crate next to the trash bins. Her birth mother was never found. A local nurse who read about the baby in the local newspaper—which dubbed her “Baby Alpha Beta”—was entranced, and ending up fostering, then adopting the little girl.

If page 99 is all you read, you would have absolutely no idea that The Forever Witness is a true crime story about families devastated by murder, a seemingly unsolvable crime, a revolution in forensic science, and battles over genetic privacy. But if you read a little bit further, you would learn that Baby Alpha Beta was the key to almost everything in the book—a vital and even eerie backstory to the cold case revolution that unfolds in The Forever Witness.

The use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases was pioneered by CeCe Moore, and the techniques she invented were in essence beta-tested when she was asked by Baby Alpha Beta—now known as Kayla Tovo—to identify the mother who abandoned her. Moore did so, along with the rest of her biological family, and in the process she unintentionally solved a crime with genetic genealogy for the first time: child endangerment. Years later, she would later use the same techniques to solve the murders of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook, the case at the heart of The Forever Witness.

The eerie part: Baby Alpha Beta was born the same day in November 1987 on which Tanya most likely died. The child who was key to solving the case came into the world at the same time Tanya left it.

Learn more about the book and author at Edward Humes's website.

The Page 99 Test: Force of Nature.

The Page 99 Test: Garbology.

My Book, The Movie: Burned.

The Page 99 Test: Burned.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rumya Sree Putcha's "The Dancer's Voice"

Rumya S. Putcha is an assistant professor in the Institute for Women's Studies as well as in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia. Her research interests center on colonial and anti-colonial thought, particularly around constructs of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Dancer’s Voice describes the way the religious ritual of thambulam (ceremonial offering) operates for Indian dancers:

The surreptitious gifting of money within the practice of thambulam is consistent across nominally Hindu settings. The same practice is observed, for example, when one seeks the blessings of a priest… The exchange of money and financial support in general is something that flies under the radar in the transnational classical dance scene. During my time in Chennai, it became clear that the impact of NRI (non resident Indian) wealth is particularly important to any understanding of how power operates for women who consider themselves dancers. Dancers are paying for their class time, and this can mean more than simply dance training. It can mean being cast in a new production or being asked to help with choreography, and it can also mean the permission to talk back—to have a voice—in class. For some, this ability to speak and to have agency also extends to the right to an independent artistic life. Access to recorded music is carefully controlled and guarded. Only some students are allowed to bring a device to rehearsal and record the music. These recordings allow dancers not only to practice on their own but also, in some cases, to perform without their guru. A dancer’s freedom and ability to grow as an artist and to develop their own artistry thus depends on access to music. This access, in turn, must be granted by or purchased from the guru.

I think the Page 99 Test works! It helped me see, from a different perspective, how I listened for “the dancer’s voice” on this one page, and more generally across this particular chapter, which is titled “Silence.” The book is about the media-driven forces that animate Indian womanhood. Specifically, I explore how the public persona of the Indian dancer reveals that citizenship for women operates as a performance. I argue that such performances require and normalize separating women’s voices from their bodies. By theorizing “the dancer’s voice,” this book uncovers how performances of Indian womanhood since the early 20th century have relied upon, recycled, and in some cases, subverted a victim-heroine dynamic and in doing so have come to characterize what it means to identify as an Indian woman. Toggling between India and the U.S., between film, archival, and ethnographic analysis, and the past and the present, the personal and the public, the book shows how the dancer’s voice reveals quiet strategies of resistance and subversive acts of compliance.

Follow Rumya Sree Putcha on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Bellin's "Mass Incarceration Nation"

Jeffrey Bellin is the Mills E. Godwin, Jr., Professor at William and Mary Law School. Prior to becoming a law professor, Bellin served as a prosecutor in Washington, DC.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How It Can Recover, and reported the following:

One of the themes of the book is that mass incarceration arose, in part, because officials funneled more and more matters to the criminal courts. These matters used to be resolved informally (outside of court) or not at all. One of the best-known examples is drug offenses. While marijuana, cocaine and heroin were illegal long before the dawn of mass incarceration in the 1970s, it used to be much less common that someone using or selling those drugs would be arrested, brought to court, or incarcerated. The same can be said for many other offenses like drunk driving, unlawful immigration, or gun possession. Page 99 is a portion of a discussion of another important example: domestic violence.

Although little discussed, a change in the policing and prosecution of assaults, and especially domestic violence, is one of the most dramatic policy changes across the era of mass incarceration. As explained on page 99, part of this change was the disappearance of once-common, non-punitive “domestic relations courts” as domestic assaults were increasingly treated, first like any other assault, and then, as a particularly serious form of the crime.

This is an important point because it reveals that among the many policy changes that led to mass incarceration are some with noble intentions. All these changes, alongside other important factors (not at all mentioned on page 99!) contributed to the dramatic rise in this nation’s incarceration rate between 1970 and today. This does not mean that we should not do everything we can to reduce the number of people incarcerated in this country. But it does suggest that getting back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s is a difficult challenge. And that process must begin with an unblinking understanding of the scope of the problem – the goal of my book.

Follow Jeffrey Bellin on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Glory M. Liu's "Adam Smith’s America"

Glory M. Liu is a lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Political Theory Project at Brown University from 2018-2020.

Liu applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book lands us in the middle of a discussion of key changes in academic political economy in America after the Civil War. Specifically, this page discusses the increased specialization in economics courses, and the influence of rival schools of thought, specifically the German Historical School. This is important context for what ends up being an inflection point in Smith’s American reception. American academic political economists begin historicizing Smith. They begin relegating him and his ideas to the past, though they never really give up on his lasting importance as the founder of the discipline.

On the one hand, I think readers will get a pretty good sense of what my book is like from this page. They’ll get a sense of how I chart important intellectual shifts, and in particular, they’ll get a little taste of how the shift from “Political Economy” to “Economics” in the academy changes the way people encounter, interpret, and use Adam Smith’s ideas in the late nineteenth century. By page 99, I’ve charted some of the origins and evolution of the discipline and shown how many political economists began to self-consciously style themselves as followers of Adam Smith, or continuing the tradition that Smith founded. On the other hand, I think readers might raise an eyebrow at what appears to just be a bunch of “textbook knowledge” about what academic economics looked like between, say, 1860 and 1890. The book is much more than a compilation of textbook knowledge about the history of economics. I use the history of economic thought in order to show how and why certain thinkers—like Smith—become canonized, often in narrow and politically charged ways. And I’m also interested in how Smith comes to represent an entire way of thinking, a mode of reasoning that becomes incredibly politically powerful.

Visit Glory M. Liu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Between Light and Storm"

Esther Woolfson is the author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary, which was short-listed for the Wainwright Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability and is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Aberdeen University.

Woolfson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her recent book, Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Between Light and Storm describes the growth of 19th century industrial meat production, particularly in the United States.

I’m not sure I’d have chosen page 99 as a first introduction to the book not because it doesn’t adequately represent it, but because it does. The page is part of a chapter called ‘Blood’ which deals with our relationship with the animals we eat. It’s not an easy subject perhaps but it is a fascinating and increasingly important one. In the chapter, I trace the history of our meat-eating through the by-ways of religion and history, from developments in ancient Levantine thought to the industrialised food-production of today. On the way, I reach page 99 and the growth of the meat industry in the United States and one of the still-relevant dilemmas in which many people find themselves—where do our sympathies, if any, lie towards the fates of other species? I quote a book by Upton Sinclair. Published in 1906, it characterises the dilemma:

‘The Jungle’ (is) a lengthy account of the hardships and tragedies of a Lithuanian stockyard worker, his fellow workers and the unhappy creatures they dealt with. Although the book’s main purpose was to be a rousing call to socialist action by detailing the horrors of the industry, the appeal to readers for sympathy for the workers became eclipsed by their sympathy for the animals. ‘I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach,’ Sinclair declared.

As on page 99, I try in the rest of the book to hit the public, or the reader, wherever I can in reflecting on how humanity has reached the moment when vast numbers of species are facing extinction and as that sublime poet W.S. Merwin says in his poem ‘A Message to Po Chu-yi’, ‘we are melting the very poles of the earth.’ I write about animal cognition and question ideas of human superiority. I write about animals in art and literature and about the crazy and hidebound ideas of ‘tradition’ which underpin so much wanton cruelty to animals. I write about the love we may feel for some creatures and the inexplicable lack of love we may feel for others. Not only on page 99, I write on the other 297 pages about the urgent need for us to extend our compassion to other species.

Visit Esther Woolfson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony D. Cooling's "Still a Hollow Hope"

Anthony D. Cooling is a Budget and Revenue Officer.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Still a Hollow Hope: State Power and the Second Amendment, and reported the following:

Page 99 in Still a Hollow Hope: State Power and the Second Amendment is conveniently a microcosm of the book’s learned lessons, that the Supreme Court follows the culture rather than leads it, is hamstrung by the weaknesses of courts in that they have no power to implement their own decisions via the sword of the executive branch, that they do not have the legislative power of the purse to allocate funds to implement their decisions, have no control over the timing of cases, and that a court itself can be divided against itself with slim majorities based on the timing of presidential nominations for seats. The page is noting for the reader why it was over a decade after Heller and McDonald, the two cases where SCOTUS decided that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms and incorporated it against state encroachment, until they took another case. They stayed hands off the issue of guns except for remanding a case about stun guns, saying the ban was inconsistent with Heller. This hands-off approach happened because of the aforementioned weaknesses and thus Courts are generally loath to put themselves at the center of a political controversy unless they are aware that they will be supported in a decision, which they were not during the Obama administration. This is especially true when SCOTUS, as the page notes, was split 5-4 in its ideological divide. By 2019, the next substantive case SCOTUS took was only after Trump took office and there was a strong pro-gun 6-3 majority on the Court.

When SCOTUS decided Heller/McDonald, they set lower courts up to receive a hail of firearms related lawsuits, then they went largely silent themselves, justifying it with allusions in their McDonald decision to state experimentation, under the well-worn mantra that states are laboratories of democracy. The result wasn’t as much that there was variation in the states, but the various circuit courts becoming split. These splits across the states and the lower courts, the page notes “are a product of a divided public, culture, and elected government.” Indeed.

Follow Anthony Cooling on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue