Brenda Cooper's "Wings of Creation"

Brenda Cooper is a futurist who works with Glen Hiemstra at Futurist.com. She’s the co-author of the novel Building Harlequin's Moon, which she wrote with Larry Niven. Her novel The Silver Ship and the Sea won the 2008 Endeavour Award. Her solo and collaborative short fiction has appeared in multiple magazines, including Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Oceans of the Mind, and The Salal Review.

Cooper applied the “Page 99 Test” to Wings of Creation, the third book in the The Silver Ship trilogy, and reported the following:

On page 99 of 381, our heroes, Chelo, Joseph, and Kayleen, are sitting with the exotic winged-human couple Matriana and Daniel, and the doctor Chance. They are discovering the peculiar cultural difficulties that plague the flying humans:

Chance is speaking. “The mod for fliers is very painful.” A bitter anger boiled lightly under his words and showed in his eyes. “The infant fliers-to-be are drugged so they forget the pain of growing wings. Many die.”

Kayleen grimaced. “So why do it at all? If it kills so easily, why make flier? And worse, why let kids try it? They haven’t chosen.”

Chance nodded, his face softening, but his words were matter-of-fact. “The death rate for infants is far lower than adults.”

She shivered. “It seems…wrong.”

“It is wrong,” Chelo snapped.

The table fell silent. Chance’s fingers did a short dance over the data-button reader, and in front of us, the fliers flew. They morphed from the simplistic holograms we had been looking at to the beautiful beings that had taken our breath away, from sketch to real video, the men and women riding on air, smiles filling their faces. After we’d all watched for a few moments, Matriana echoed Alicia’s words from this morning. “Because to be us is the most beautiful thing in the universe.”

This passage is the first deep dive our characters get into the core of the book’s central plot, which is that our young and partially-trained heroes must solve a very big problem in order to, hopefully, stop a very big war. In Wings of Creation, I deal with beauty and the concepts related to the link between suffering and spirituality through the fliers, and with the pitfalls inherent in the idea of ownership related to the design of anything biological and sentient though other parts of the book. There is also love and betrayal, and the dog Sasha.

So far the early comments I’ve had back on the book are quite good, and I hope it is the best so far in the series that stated with Endeavor Award Winning novel, The Silver Ship and the Sea.

Read an excerpt from Wings of Creation, and learn more about the book and author at Brenda Cooper's website and her LiveJournal.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan M. Reverby's "Examining Tuskegee"

Susan M. Reverby is the McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She is editor of Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. She writes on the history of American women, health care and race.

Reverby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy, and reported the following:

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of the most powerful racialized events in American culture, standing with slavery and lynching as the symbol for the failure to treat African Americans as rights bearing citizens. In the study, begun by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1932 in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, doctors tracked, but did not treat, hundreds of black men with late stage syphilis. The doctors explained instead that the aspirins, tonics and vitamins, and even a diagnostic spinal tap, were treatments for the men’s “bad blood.” The study went on for forty years until a newspaper story in 1972 made public what had been known in the medical community for decades. Media coverage was followed by outrage over the deceit and intentional deaths of at least 16 of the men, a federal investigation, a Senate hearing, a lawsuit, new rules on informed consent and medical research, and then histories, documentaries, poems, plays and in 1997 a federal apology from President Bill Clinton.

In Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy, I trace out how the study happened and why it did not stop despite questions raised over its ethics. I explain why differing individuals became involved and understood their roles in it. I trace how the study’s many stories became imbedded in American culture and the rumors, some true others not, that continue even decades later. The point of the book is to look at the complexity of what happened and why “Tuskegee” remains a potent political symbol.

Page 99 is about the testimony given to a federal investigating commission in 1973. It explains why the white doctors who ran the study thought in medical terms (late latent syphilis does not always harm individuals, the heavy metal drugs used to cure the disease might be worse than leaving it alone, penicillin when it became available would not help these men). The black doctors, who had worked on the study, now saw themselves as having been lied to and could not justify it in terms of debates how to treat the disease. To them, it was racism pure and simple.

This page captures the tensions of reading the study as only medical on the one hand and only racial on the other. I argue we must understanding how medical thinking is often racialized and that scientific fervor can be misread in the context of a racial inequality.

Learn more about the book and author at Susan M. Reverby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Z. Tamanaha's "Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide"

Brian Z. Tamanaha is professor of law at Washington University School of Law. His books include On the Rule of Law and Law as a Means to an End.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging, and reported the following:

Here is the first full paragraph on page 99:

This conventional picture, however, fails to acknowledge the massive increase of intrusive legislation that occurred from the final decade of the nineteenth century onward. “The most casual newspaper-reader and observer of legislation,” an editor wrote in 1887, “must have had his attention attracted to a growing tendency in our legislation toward the regulation of private and personal concerns.” “At no time and in no country has legislation been so active,” remarked a commentator in 1911.

A legislative onslaught it was….

As bad luck would have it, page 99 is poorly representative of the book. Although most of the book does not go into great detail about legal regulation, this page catalogues various types of social and economic legislation enacted in the 1890s.

Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide debunks a historical narrative that dominates debates about judging within the U.S. legal culture. According to the conventional narrative, lawyers and judges at the turn of the 20th century widely believed in “legal formalism”—the idea that judges engage in mechanical deduction when deciding cases. In the 1920s and 1930s, the story tells, the legal realists destroyed the formalist view of judging by demonstrating that law is filled with gaps, contradictions, and inconsistent precedents; the realists argued that judges manipulate legal rules to reach desired outcomes.

The book shows that this standard narrative is false. Legal formalism, it turns out, was a myth created by critics (including the legal realists themselves) to discredit courts at the turn of the century. Lawyers and judges at the time did not think judging was deductive, and the legal realists were not radical skeptics about judging.

This conventional narrative, although baseless, is widely accepted as true today. The book explains how this false account became entrenched within the legal culture, and went on to warp political science research on courts as well as legal theory debates about judging.

Page 99 taken in isolation is not a good measure of “the quality of the whole” because this page is dry in content (although it is a better indication than page 66, which is blank). Unless there is something magical about page 99 that I am unaware of, the test proposed by Ford might work better if it involved reading three pages, say 9, 99, and 199. (Oops. I just checked—that fails as well. Page 9 and page 99 are the final pages of chapters, with hardly any text.).

Read an excerpt from Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James P. Sterba's "Affirmative Action for the Future"

James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-five books, including Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate, Does Feminism Discriminate against Men--A Debate, Justice for Here and Now, and Terrorism and International Justice. He is also past president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, and several other philosophical organizations.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Affirmative Action for the Future, and reported the following:

On p. 99, I maintain, “If one wants to replace [diversity affirmative action] programs with a well-funded program that does help the least advantaged in society, for example, my proposed $25 billion a year equal education opportunity program, I am sure that every defender of diversity affirmative action would favor the change, assuming that it was not possible to have both programs. However, the political reality in both India and the U.S. is that we either retain these affirmative action programs with all their limitations or we have nothing. When faced with such a choice, surely affirmative action programs deserves our support.”

That is how I view the justification of affirmative action in the U.S. today. It is the best politically feasible response that we currently have to deal with two persistent realities.

The first reality is the one I mentioned in the above quotation. It is our political inability to provide the funding for a really equitable K-12 educational system that would enable minority students to fairly compete for entrance to elite colleges and universities. This political unwillingness is no better seen than in California, when after it abolished affirmative action in 1998 to the detriment of minorities, it still refused to provide an equitable K-12 education to minorities throughout the state.

The second reality is that one that I discuss at the very beginning of my book where I cite study after study showing the persistence of significant racial and sexual discrimination in U.S. today. Since direct government response to this continuing discrimination, like its response to inequitable K-12 educational opportunities, is both sporadic and weak, affirmative action programs still remains one of the more effective tools we have for undermining the racial and sexual prejudice that fuels this continuing discrimination.

In addition, building on my agreement with the 75% of Americans who are currently opposed to legacy preferences, I argue for an economic-based affirmative action program that would use slots currently given to legacies at elite U.S colleges and universities that receive tax-exempt status and governmental funding in order to make those colleges and universities more inclusive of those who are economically disadvantaged in the U.S.

Learn more about the book at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven E. Landsburg's "The Big Questions"

Steven E. Landsburg is a Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, where students recently elected him Professor of the Year. He is the author of The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, More Sex is Safer Sex, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics, two textbooks in economics, a forthcoming textbook on general relativity and cosmology, and over 30 journal articles in mathematics, economics and philosophy.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Questions and reported the following:

In partial penance for killing his wife and children, Hercules agreed to slay the many-headed hydra. But each time Hercules severed a head, two grew back in its place.

On page 99 of The Big Questions, I describe a far more insidious sort of hydra, one that grows vast numbers of new heads almost every time Hercules cuts one off. But they grow back in patterns that a sufficiently clever Hercules can exploit and win the day.

What's more astonishing is that even a very unclever Hercules is guaranteed to win, provided he plays long enough. What's most astonishing is that while Hercules is guaranteed to win, that fact cannot be proven.

Or more precisely, it can be proven only if you assume the consistency of arithmetic (that is, a given arithmetic problem can't have two correct answers) -- something which in turn is unprovable (unless you assume something else equally strong). But we know that Hercules always wins, because we know that arithmetic is consistent -- even though we can't prove it.

We know arithmetic is consistent because arithmetic is not just the manipulation of meaningless symbols -- those symbols are *about* something, and the something they are about is the system of natural numbers, which exists and has properties quite independent of what we can or cannot prove.

I believe that the natural numbers are the starting point for all existence, and there is a sense in which everything is made of arithmetic. In The Big Questions, I've tried to explain what I mean by that, and why I believe it's true.

I'm not sure I'm right, of course -- who but a lunatic could be sure he was right about this sort of thing? But I hope I've shown how ideas from mathematics can potentially illuminate the biggest question in philosophy, namely: Why is there something instead of nothing?

Philosophy poses a lot of other interesting questions, too: questions about the sources of our knowledge and beliefs, the difference between right and wrong, and the best way to live our lives. I've tried to tackle all of these questions with ideas from other disciplines, especially economics, mathematics and physics. And I've resisted no opportunity for an interesting digression along the way.

Read an argument introduced on Page 29 of The Big Questions and peruse the index.

Learn more about the book at The Big Questions website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saleem H. Ali's "Treasures of the Earth"

Saleem H. Ali is associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont and serves on the adjunct faculty of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He was chosen in 2007 by Seed magazine as one of eight Revolutionary Minds in the World for his work on using the environment to help resolve conflicts.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed, and a Sustainable Future, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Treasures of the Earth starts off with the continuing description from the previous page of a famous Cold War fiction essay on materialism by David Reisman titled "the nylon wars." I then try to link the rise of nylon to the prominence of fossil fuels during that period and subsequently transition to a segment in the book which is titled "Guns, Guano and Butter." This enigmatic segment is part of a chapter in the book which is titled "The Darker Side of Fortune: the psychology of treasure dependence." Here I try to provide a natural history of some of the most momentous scrambles for resources as a result of our treasure-seeking behavior.

Using a play on words from Jared Diamond's celebrated volume and a pinch of economic jargon (guns versus butter production functions), I describe how "guns and butter are inexorably linked to a common mineral need that led to many colonial conflagarations in the past. Regretably, terrorists have also been able to make the connection between the common chemistry of feeding humanity and blowing it up." I then go on to describe how nitrates are an essential ingredient for fertilizers but also for many kinds of explosives.

Bat and bird poop deposits, or guano as they are more elegantly called, were the world's most significant source of nitrates before the discovery of a chemical process to synthetically manufacture nitrates was commercialized in 1910. Page 99 starts to describe how the world's most prized guano deposits in the Atacama desert of Chile became the source of war between regional powers.

The breadth of topical and geographic coverage, as well as an attempted user-friendly tone of the narrative with the use of provocative section headings and alliteration, is happily captured by the page 99 test.

Learn more about the book at the official Treasures of the Earth website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew G. Walder's "Fractured Rebellion"

Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford, where he is also a Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement, and reported the following:

The Red Guard movement was at the heart of China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1968. University and high school students formed marauding bands at the behest of Chairman Mao and attacked teachers, school officials, and eventually higher party officials. They terrorized ordinary citizens and officials alike. But they also formed factions that fought against one another with a puzzling ferocity that intensified into violent campus warfare by 1968. For decades, foreign scholars have thought that these factions expressed the conficting interests of different social groups in the student population: student leaders, party members and the offspring of officials formed a more “conservative” faction that sought to limit the damage to the regime, while students from more ordinary backgrounds pushed to alter their monopoly of power and privilege. This interpretation turns out to be wrong: students on each side were from similar social backgrounds, and were fighting to justify choices they made in novel and confusing situations in a closed and authoritarian political system that made a “political error” a life-ruining prospect. Page 99 describes the backgrounds of the students who emerged as leaders of the “radical” faction at Qinghua University, China’s premier scientific and technical university and Beijing’s largest. They included the sons of decorated revolutionary veterans and party officials, leaders of the Communist Youth League, and party members from poor backgrounds—precisely those who enjoyed privileges once thought to be the prime motivation to defend political authorities rather than attack them. Page 99 does not describe these students’ destructive activities and mutual warfare—this comes later in the book. But it does go to the heart of the puzzle presented by red guard factions and the book’s overall effort to unravel the confusing and obscure politics of the period. The book’s central message is that the politics of the red guards were not driven by the conflicting interests of different social groups, but by the ambiguous choices and personal risk encountered by students in a closed and authoritarian political system in the midst of a dangerous self-inflicted crisis.

Read an excerpt from Fractured Rebellion, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Visit Andrew G. Walder's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory D. Koblentz's "Living Weapons"

Gregory D. Koblentz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs and Deputy Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. The Biodefense Graduate Program is a graduate-level research and educational program designed to develop the next generation of biodefense and biosecurity professionals and scholars. Dr. Koblentz is also a Research Fellow with the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Scientist Working Group on Chemical and Biological Weapons at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. in political science from MIT and his M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on international security, terrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction.

Dr. Koblentz is the author of Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) and co-author of Tracking Nuclear Proliferation (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1998). He has also published articles in International Security, Nonproliferation Review, Arms Control Today, and Jane’s Intelligence Review.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Living Weapons, and reported the following:

The proliferation of biological weapons (BW) is one of the most pressing security issues of the twenty-first century. My book, Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security, provides a comprehensive analysis of the unique challenges that biological weapons pose for international security from the perspectives of verification, deterrence, civil-military relations, terrorism and intelligence.

Page 99 is in the middle of a chapter on the verification of biological arms control. The core problem in verifying compliance with biological arms control agreements is that the capabilities for conducting the research, development, production, and testing of biological weapons are virtually identical to those employed by defensive programs and in legitimate civilian enterprises. The overlap between the equipment, materials and knowledge required to develop biological weapons, conduct civilian biomedical research, and develop biological defenses creates what I call a multiuse dilemma. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which bans the development or production of biological weapons does not include a mechanism for verifying the treaty. International negotiations to craft a verification protocol for the treaty collapsed in 2001.

On page 99, I am describing the end of the United Nations efforts to investigate Iraq’s biological weapon program in the 1990s. The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which operated in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, represents the most important effort by the international community to verify biological arms control. UNSCOM was the most intrusive arms control regime ever devised and had access to an unprecedented range of inspection techniques and technologies. Although UNSCOM was successful in uncovering aspects of Iraq’s past BW activities, a comprehensive account of Iraq’s biological agent research, production, testing, and weaponization only emerged following the defection of a high-level Iraqi official in August 1995. The UNSCOM experience provides insight into how the multiple uses of biological technologies complicates verification and the extraordinary measures that were required to overcome Iraq’s attempts to retain an offensive BW capability based on multiuse technologies.

Here is an excerpt from page 99:

Since its first revelations of an offensive BW program in July 1995, Iraq had submitted three Full, Final, and Complete Disclosures of its proscribed biological program to UNSCOM. Given the lies, half-truths, and omissions contained in these declarations, one inspector dubbed these documents “full, final and complete fairy tales.”

Read an excerpt from Living Weapons, and learn more about the book at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Berman's "Radical, Religious, and Violent"

Eli Berman is Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and Research Director of International Security Studies at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Radical, Religious and Violent explains by analogy the most surprising insight I know of in the analysis of terrorist organizations, by analyzing radical religious communities from the inside. It examines the hypothetical case of a young man who wants to marry into a radical religious sect, putting the reader in the role of the prospective bride's parent. The parent is concerned that the prospective son-in-law will pretend to be a committed member of the religious community in order to benefit from the comprehensive social services provided to members, but will shirk on his duties to community and family once safely married with a few children. Radical religious communities such as Hassidim, Amish and Radical Islamists solve the shirking problem by insisting on up front signals of commitment, which typically involve surrendering years of valuable secular education by instead studying holy texts, or not studying at all.

That theory is supported by evidence: comparing religious denominations, we know from numerous studies in the sociology of religion that the more costly the signal of commitment, the tighter is the social service provision network within the community.

The example illustrates the idea of an efficient sacrifice. Sacrifices are wageful in the narrow sense; they destroy value and opportunities. Yet a social norm in which individuals destroy personal opportunities is useful in the broader sense. It allows people to demonstrate their commitment. That explanation covers the ancient practice of sacrificing animals. It also explains current practices common to religious radicals: sacrificing years of secular schooling to community service, years of study in religious seminaries, and years of missionary work. The idea of an efficient religious sacrifice is (economist Laurence) Iannaccone's second great insight into religious sects. He must share some credit, though with the great Jewish rationalist scholar Moses Maimonides. As the epigraph at the beginning of the previous chapter indicates, Maimonides hinted at a similar conclusion some eight centuries earlier, in Egypt.

(I was unaware of the Ford Madox Ford's "Page 99 Test," but luckily enough 99 is a great page!)

What does all this have to do with terrorism? The key to understanding terrorist organizations is to realize that they are incredibly sensitive to defection, which is why so few remain viable once governments start bribing members into defection and squealing. The book goes on to explain that religious communities which provide social services have the potential to assemble terrorist organizations that can successfully resist defection -- since shirkers were not allowed to join the community in the first place, as the example illustrates. That may sound alarming; fortunately most radical religious communities which provide social services never engage in violence.

The book lays out the evidence for those arguments. It also explains the strong implication for Afghanistan and other conflicts: provision of basic social services by governments adds a critical, nonviolent component to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies -- competent, honest governance -- undermine the violent potential of religious radicals without disturbing free religious practice or endangering civilians.

Read sample chapters from Radical, Religious, and Violent, and learn more about the book at the official website and twitter.com/clubmodel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Cox's "The Fight to Survive"

Caroline Cox is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. She is the author of A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army. She has also written numerous articles for history publications and has appeared as a commentator on the History Channel.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Fight to Survive: A Young Girl, Diabetes, and the Discovery of Insulin, and reported the following:

In 1919, when Elizabeth Evans Hughes was eleven years old, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. At that time, before the discovery of insulin, it was a death sentence. Three years later, she had wasted away to only forty five pounds and lay near death. But in the summer of 1922, insulin was discovered. She became one of the first recipients and her life was saved. During these critical years, her parents, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Antoinette Carter Hughes sent Elizabeth away from Washington DC with her nurse. My book about her life during this time is based on her letters home.

Hers is a more complicated story than courage in the face of adversity. After her diagnosis, Elizabeth lived a Spartan life, keeping herself alive by so-called starvation therapy. The theory of this treatment was that if the body was not processing carbohydrate properly, you simply should not eat any! Thus, she lived on less than 800 calories a day. You would expect someone in that circumstance to languish in miserable isolation but she was continually and enthusiastically engaged with the world around her.

Page 99 doesn’t reveal much about her story, but it does capture her personality. It contains her only real expression of complaint. She wanted to be in charge of her life and was frustrated when she could not be. But neither she nor her family tolerated whining and whatever annoyances came her way, she quickly found ways to deal with them.

I wanted to know where this self-discipline came from. I recreated her family life, found out about her friends, the places she went, and the people she talked about. I discovered that she lost herself in books and took solace from nature. But she also sought out friends and joined them at meals she could not eat and watched them at games she could not play, more comforted by their companionship than she was tortured by the sight of things she could no longer do. She was a dying child who rarely wrote about her illness and who was determined in the face of enormous odds to live well. I found her story of hopefulness inspiring and I hope readers do too.

Video: Caroline Cox discusses The Fight to Survive.

Read more about The Fight to Survive at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue