Oswald Schmitz's "The New Ecology"

Oswald Schmitz is Professor of Population and Community Ecology at Yale University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene, and reported the following:

There is this new, rather difficult-to-pronounce-term—Athropocence—being bandied around these days. Scientists coined it to describe a new epoch in the Earth’s history. Literally meaning the “Age of Humans”, it describes our new future, in which humans are the dominant force of nature that stands to determine our ecology and therefore the fate of all species on planet Earth. To many, Anthropocence foreshadows a gloomy apocalyptic destiny. This view is borne of a conventional wisdom that all living beings on Earth today are a heritage of slow evolutionary processes that occurred over millennia, and so many species are sadly doomed because they will be incapable of coping with the fast paced-changes that humans will surely cause.

But, Page 99 begins to tell an altogether different story.

Anolis lizards are a group of species that inhabit countless tiny islands in the Caribbean. As a clear example of evolution leading to [a diversity of ecological roles] …….. these species occupy many different locations within their habitat: some are ground-dwelling; others live on trunks of bushes; and others yet live on branches. One can readily discern which habitat locations each species uses based on body and limb morphology. But, experimentation has shown that these traits can be quite malleable as the environment changes.

The experiment involved …… [introducing onto some small islands] an exclusively ground dwelling species of lizard that was an effective predator of the Anolis. The predatory lizard did two things. It quickly dispatched those individual Anoles that were poorly capable of escaping by climbing on trunks and in branches. Over the season, it also caused developmental changes in limb morphology of the survivors, which allowed them to more nimbly walk on thin branches and catch prey in the higher vegetation. Such developmental change during the course of an individual’s lifetime is termed phenotypic plasticity. The propensity to undergo plastic changes is however, genetically determined. So, some individuals are better able to undergo plastic changes than others. The ones with poorer abilities to change have poorer survival on thin branches in the canopy. They must either try to eke out a living in the vegetation or move down toward the ground where they are better able to catch prey. But moving lower down risks being caught by the predatory lizard. Either way, those individuals will have lower survival than the more plastic individuals. Moreover, the plastic individuals, being the ones mostly remaining in the population, will tend to interbreed with one another. They will thus produce generations of offspring that are more and more likely to develop the morphology that allows them to live on branches in the vegetation. Thus, phenotypic plasticity has enabled individuals to improve their immediate survival in response to a rapid environmental change. This plasticity has further set in motion longer-term adaptive evolutionary change in which individuals that develop the morphology to thrive in the upper vegetation dominate the genetic make-up of the population. Such changes were not at all observed on the unmanipulated control islands. This experiment thus provides strong evidence that in very short order, evolutionary processes are causing a once exclusively ground-dwelling species to become locally adapted to the new and unique island conditions.

This narrative shows how species have remarkable capacities to rapidly adapt—and even evolve within a mere span of a couple of human generations—to cope with some pretty significant, rapid environmental changes. These, and other remarkable scientific discoveries, are causing ecologists to rethink their conventional theories about how nature works, and humankind’s role within it.

Given its power to usurp resources from other species and change nature to suit its own needs, humankind has, now more than ever, an important ethical responsibility to care for all of life on Earth and preserve evolutionary processes. The book shows why it is in our own self-interest. Species do not merely exist for humankind’s passing enjoyment: they—animals, plants and microbes alike—are critical to sustaining the many ecological functions and services that support life on Earth. This book reveals the amazing ways that nature functions and the changes that human agency can instigate. But those changes can also come back to influence humankind’s fate and wellbeing. This dispels another conventional wisdom: that humans and nature exist apart as a human/nature divide. Humans and nature are entwined as a grand socio-ecological system. This book offers new ecological knowhow, and ethical and practical insights about human and nature entwinement in the interest of sustaining all of life on Earth.

Learn more about The New Ecology at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Monaghan's "The New Politics of Russia"

Andrew Monaghan is a researcher and analyst in the field of international politics. He is a Russianist in the area studies style, with a preference for old-fashioned Kremlinology. His particular interests are Russian domestic politics, strategy and biography.

A Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House, he is also a Visiting Fellow at the Changing Character of War Programme at Pembroke College, Oxford and an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford. NATO, the Defence Academy of the UK and King’s College, London have all employed him at different times over the last decade. He founded the Russia Research Network in 2006, and continues as its Director.

Monaghan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Politics of Russia: Interpreting Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The New Politics of Russia illustrates well the book’s argument and its attempt to refocus our interpretation of developments in Russia.

The book explores why Russia so often surprises the West and how developments in Russia might be better interpreted. There are three threads to the argument. The first examines Western views of Russia, noting that resources dedicated to Russia watching have been significantly reduced since the 1980s, and that the dominant theme in analysis has been Russia’s transition towards – or away from – democracy.

The second thread explores the relationship between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia since the 1990s, providing an overview of the increasingly systemic sense of strategic dissonance between Western capitals and Moscow. Not only are there numerous policy disagreements, but each party draws different conclusions from the same body of evidence. Furthermore, Moscow defines important questions, such as how to deal with terrorism, in different ways to the Euro-Atlantic community. Taken together, this has created a sense of “differing worlds” that highlights this dissonance. The ongoing emergency in Ukraine and war in Syria are two important illustrations of this dissonance.

The third thread concerns Russian domestic politics, arguing that evidence is selected to emphasis transition to democracy – the nature of the protest demonstrations in 2011-2012 and the often hoped for “end of the Putin era”. Yet much important evidence is overlooked, both in terms of the wider political landscape and “who is who”, and, for want of a better phrase, how Russian “political culture” might be understood.

This returns us to page 99. It is an important page for the argument of the book, coming in the chapter that explores party politics and the opposition. Here is a critique of the reflexive nature of much Western analysis, the laundered imprecision in Western estimates, with an emphasis on the need for greater precision. There is also a reminder of the monetisation protests in 2005 – a significant event in Russian post-Soviet political history, but one that is often forgotten by western observers and how it has had long-lasting consequences.

We are entering a new era of relations with Russia. To better understand these changes, we need to reframe our questions about Russia towards a more nuanced interpretation of Russian state power, particularly the economic and military elements.

Visit Andrew Monaghan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Drew Leder's "The Distressed Body"

Drew Leder has blended an unusual array of interests and accomplishments. He has an M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is currently a full professor teaching Western and Eastern Philosophy at Loyola College in Maryland.

Leder applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing, and reported the following:

Bodily pain and distress come in many forms—we've all experienced our share. They can well up from within at times of serious illness and pain. The body can also be subjected to harsh treatment from outside. The medical system is often cold and depersonalized, and much worse are conditions experienced by prisoners in our age of mass incarceration, and by animals trapped in our factory farms. In this book I try to rethink how we create and treat distress, clearing the way for more humane social practices.

I draw on my own training as a philosopher and a physician, my own struggles with chronic pain, and on over twenty years teaching in prison settings. In fact, the book has collaborative authors and conversation partners ranging from an internationally known cardiologist, to a man just released after 33 years in prison. It turns to many different topics: the experience of chronic pain; our cultural fascination with pills, and with organ transplantation; alternative healing practices and settings; the experience of space and time when serving a life-sentence; the historical/philosophical foundations of our cruel "factory farms"; human-animal "shape-shifting" in indigenous cultures, but also in our own world--think Spiderman, or the Denver Broncos; etc., etc.

Page 99 is pretty representative of the first (slightly more than) half of the book that focuses on illness and modern medicine. I here investigate the divergence between the suffering experienced by the sick person, and the depersonalizing gaze and speech characteristic of the modern physician. But let me quote a bit to give you that flavor:

The patient continues to suffer the illness from within, which the doctor objectifies from outside. This divergence has as a positive dimension. The very reason the patient seeks out the physician is for this “different point of view,” more dispassionate and informed than his own. However, this divergence can also widen into an abyss if patient and doctor fail to communicate effectively. This problem can surface from the first moments of the encounter. The doctor strides in, and may seem rushed or inattentive. It is well documented that physicians frequently interrupt patients as they try to tell the story of the illness in order to make history-taking shorter or more efficient.[i] In such conditions the patient may never feel heard.

Such dialogic breakdown can have very practical consequences. The physician who cannot participate in the patient’s interpretive universe may miss crucial features of the case; fail to communicate empathy; squash the larger narrative structure which sustains the patient; or choose a treatment that is inappropriate for the person’s mindset or lifestyle.

Learn more about The Distressed Body at the University of Chicago Press website, and visit Drew Leder's webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vanishing Streets"

J. M. Tyree is Distinguished Visiting Professor at VCUarts and Nonfiction Editor of New England Review. He is the author of BFI Film Classics: "Salesman" and the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff) and BFI Film Classics: "The Big Lebowski" (with Ben Walters).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London, and reported the following:

I found out that there was a hoax film attributed to John Ford – nobody seemed to know much about it. This eight-minute film was called So Alone and contained “the relationship between (and incidents in the lives of) two men as they wander through Wapping on a cold winter day.” It was supposedly shot in London for the British Film Institute in 1958, when Ford was on location for 1959’s Gideon of Scotland Yard.

Little is known about who perpetrated the hoax or why - Lindsay Anderson and/or Polly Platt may have been involved. I decided to take a more creative approach to my material in Vanishing Streets by attempting to recreate this fake film. I recorded my friends and family extemporizing on what might have happened in the movie, or simply asked them about their own lives. I found out that the people I know don’t like to be filmed very much and that I am not a very good cameraperson.

In my book, I included my own speculative storylines for Ford’s film. My decision to blend creative writing into Vanishing Streets makes the book a hybrid and highly personal work that includes travel, autobiography, and cinema criticism. Originally I set out to write a series of essays about the Free Cinema movement of British documentary in the 1950s. But I soon realized that I was emulating its style of wandering all over London rather than treating my subjects as dead specimens pinned down for academic study. If I accepted Free Cinema on its own terms, I didn’t think it would be honest to leave out my own story or to pretend that anything but subjectivity guided my path.

On page 99 of my book, I’m walking with my friend Ben Walters along the Ornamental Canal connecting St. Katharine Docks with Wapping when we’re interrupted by a group of good-natured South Asian boys shouting, “London, London!” They want us to turn the camera back on them. Later, at Shadwell Basin, we watch another group of kids bravely diving into the Thames. Ben explains that he’s never been to this spot before, despite having lived in London his whole life, and I’m pleased to show him something new. I doubt John Ford could have used any of our material even for an eight-minute narrative. But these are the ordinary moments of serendipity that make London feel like an endless film in which everybody stars.

Learn more about Vanishing Streets at the Stanford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Vanishing Streets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Pincus's "The Heart of the Declaration"

Steve Pincus is the Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of several books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British history.

Pincus applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Patriots on both sides of the Atlantic advanced a very different kind of economic analysis. Patriots gave voice to and elaborated the same political economic arguments they had been advancing since the 1730s. Where the ministerialists insisted that the value of colonies lay in production, the Patriots emphasized the centrality of colonial consumption. They readily accepted responsibility for paying down a share of the British debt. “The question is not whether the Americans shall contribute but how they shall contribute,” was how the Virginian Arthur Lee put it in 1776. The Patriots argued that Americans made significant and growing contributions to British state revenue, but they did so indirectly. “The advantages derived from America in the circle of commerce are not so evident to a vulgar understanding, as so much palpable cash paid into the exchequer” the Patriot former governor of West Florida George Johnstone had condescended to explain to his fellows in the House of Commons in 1775.

This passage well captures the heart of my radical reinterpretation of the causes of the American Revolution and the nature of America’s Founding document. For generations scholars have debated whether the Revolution was the consequence of the economic self-interest of America’s Founders or as a consequence of their radical ideas. Both groups agree that America’s founders sought to create a weak government. By placing America’s Founders in the context of a transatlantic Patriot party, I insist that economic ideas were at the heart of the Revolution. I share with those who emphasize radical ideas the notion that ideas were at the heart of the American Revolution. But unlike many of those scholars who highlight moral language and rights talk, I highlight the ubiquitous discussion of the proper relationship between state and economy.

This paragraph on page 99 highlights the central arguments advanced by the transatlantic Patriot party. Whereas the British ministry of Lord North and its supporters argued that the value of colonies lay in the production of raw materials, the Patriots argued that true economic prosperity lay in the creative interplay between production and consumption. So the greatest value in the colonies lay in their dynamically growing demand for British manufactured goods. The Patriots insisted that the best way to pay down the burgeoning British sovereign debt was not by taxing the colonies thereby suppressing their demand, but by stimulating growth in the colonies.

This consumption-driven political economy led the Patriots to create a new kind of state in the Declaration of Independence. They complained that the British state, since the accession of George III, had done too little to promote immigration to the colonies. Patriots supported immigration because new immigrants would necessarily become consumers. Similarly the Patriots wanted to restrict slavery and the slave trade because slave societies were not consuming societies. They were furious that George III and the Board of Trade had systematically vetoed colonial legislation that would have placed prohibitive duties on the slave trade or in some cases outlawed sales of slaves altogether. Above all the Patriots wanted a government that could “levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce,” in short, “do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.” Because of their commitment to a political economy in which consumers were as important as producers, the Patriots issued a clarion call for an activist government.

Learn more about The Heart of the Declaration at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: 1688: The First Modern Revolution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin K. Bergen's "What the F"

Benjamin K. Bergen is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the Language and Cognition Laboratory. He writes for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today and appears on NPR's Morning Edition, the Brain Science Podcast, and elsewhere.

Bergen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, and reported the following:

What the F is a book about the science of swearing, and the heart of the book explains fundamental facts about the brain that we have only been able to discover through profanity. Page 99 happens to fall precisely at the beginning of a chapter about speech errors—slips of the tongue, Freudian slips, and the like.

Considering how hard it is to produce language, people make relatively few errors in speech. And profanity provides a unique window into why. It turns out, and this is a spoiler, that we have an internal monitor in our heads. Milliseconds before we actually articulate a word, this monitor “hears” that planned word in our mind’s ear and if a mistake is in the making, the assembly line screeches to a halt, and the error is avoided. This is all unconscious, but we know it’s happening specifically from profanity. Statistically speaking, the times when we most successfully avoid errors in fluent speech are when those errors would in fact produce taboo words. This means that when the stakes are highest, the internal censors do their most fastidious work.

The chapter and indeed the page begin with the case of a surprising speech error—one that produced profanity from a most unexpected source. It starts like this:

5  — The Day the Pope Dropped the C-Bomb

By any account, Pope Francis has made interesting choices. He has foregone the traditional, opulent Papal Apartments, electing to reside in a small, modest bedroom in a Vatican guesthouse instead. He wears a silver ring instead of the traditional gold. And he has made a practice of washing feet each Easter—not the feet of priests as his predecessors did but those of patients at a home for the elderly and disabled, non-Catholics, and women. In aggregate, these many small acts of modesty have helped him build up a public image as the pope of the vulgar people.

Still, no one expected him to be quite this vulgar. On March 2, 2014, while delivering his weekly Vatican address, he slipped in a word that caught the world by surprise. He was speaking in Italian, and this is what he said: in questo cazzo. This translates literally as “in this dick,” but since the offending word cazzo is used in Italian roughly as fuck or fucking are in English, in colloquial terms, he said something roughly equivalent to “in this fucking...” I’m no papal scholar, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and proffer that this is an uncommon turn of phrase for a pope, even one fresh off an appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Learn more about What the F at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keally McBride's "Mr. Mothercountry"

Keally McBride is Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. Her books include Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community, Punishment and Political Order, and with Margaret Kohn, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations.

McBride applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The Governor Eyre controversy provoked a national discussion about British colonial governance, and whether it would infect British rule of law more broadly… The honor of the Empire was at stake, but so was the position of the rule of law in the colonies and at home. Who is at fault when regulation of a population becomes force, brute force? The governor who ordered suppression of foment by all means, or those who burned the courthouse down? Should the law be used to protect the citizens against the rulers, or the rulers against unruly citizens? Remarkably, the position of the angry colonial mob was given credence; sometimes the governors were in the wrong and the governed were in the right.

Page 99 of Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law examines the aftermath of a brutal repression of an uprising in Jamaica in 1865, ordered by British colonial agent, Governor Eyre. The bloodbath caused a surprising moment of collective examination about whether the British were truly serving as a civilizing force in their colonies. This passage is a pivotal moment in the book, describing the ascension of a son, James Fitzjames Stephen, to a position of power and influence in creating a new legal system that was implanted throughout the British Empire through his participation in the trial of Governor Eyre.

His father, James Stephen, was called Mr. Mothercountry by his enemies, and he almost single-handedly ran the British Empire for 30 years until 1847. He truly believed that the law should be a force for good, serving the interests of the less powerful and protecting the most dispossessed subjects of the British Crown. An ardent abolitionist, he wrote the bill ending slavery in the Empire. All laws instituted in the colonies passed over his desk and were subject to his review, and he used his position to curb the power of British settlers whenever possible. Mr. Mothercountry was a critic of colonialism, and upon his retirement expressed the hope that he had contributed to mitigating “the cruel wrongs inflicted by his countrymen on the rest of the world.”

His son, James Fitzjames Stephen, took over the mantle of colonial law, and his codes survive today in places as diverse as Nigeria, Canada and India. But he saw the law in a very different way, and sought to create order and exact obedience, instead of aiming for justice. Mr. Mothercountry reveals the family that was at the origins of international law, the tragic fall of a father, the rise of his son, and the lasting implications of their lives and work in the legal order we have today.

Learn more about Mr. Mothercountry at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Murray Pittock's "Culloden"

Murray Pittock is Bradley Professor and Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading scholars of Jacobitism and Romanticism globally. His books include The Myth of the Jacobite Clans, Material Culture and Sedition, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, Jacobitism, Inventing and Resisting Britain, The Invention of Scotland, and many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Historical Society and has won or been nominated or shortlisted for fifteen literary prizes internationally.

Pittock applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Culloden, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Culloden is the first page of Chapter 4, 'Aftermath and Occupation'. It addresses some of the central themes of the book: the lack of prisoners taken at Culloden, the scale of atrocities after the battle, the proposals for ethnic cleansing. The book's combination of a detailed examination of the engagement as it was fought using the cutting edge of both battlefield archaeology and archival research, is complemented by an exploration of the systematic misrepresentation of Culloden both by historians and in British cultural memory. This foundational battle in the development of the British Empire was not regarded at the time as an easy victory against a cause foredoomed to defeat: but that is what it became in the imperial narrative, the inevitable triumph of modernity over backward tribalism and its outdated politics. Yet the hugely expensive building of Fort George to contain the Jacobite threat tells another story, as do Cumberland's words in July 1746 on p99, 'I tremble for fear that this vile spot [Scotland, particularly Highland Scotland] may still be the ruin of this island and our family'. How would the Jacobites have ruined these? Not just by replacing the Hanoverians by the Stuarts, but by ending the constitutional settlement of the 1707 Union which underpinned British military power from that time onwards, and restoring England, Scotland and possibly Ireland to a looser political confederation. In the aftermath of Culloden, redoubled efforts were made to incorporate Scottish troops in the British Army, while the very British military policies that had been trialled in Scotland in the late 1740s were used in the Acadian deportations in Nova Scotia from 1755. Just as British memory and historiography portrayed the Jacobites as tribal, backward and savage, so their taming into the British military machine became a model for the incorporation of native peoples in the decades to come, while the actions taken to disrupt political identities in Scotland and Canada was also a lesson learnt in the policies adopted with respect to potential opponents of British power across the world. Page 99 of Culloden is the moment where history becomes memory: the point where a relatively small scale battle started to transmute itself into a story about the foundational moment of Britain's consolidation at home and the projection of its power abroad.

Learn more aboutCulloden at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gísli Pálsson's "The Man Who Stole Himself"

Gísli Pálsson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan, and reported the following:

Every biography emphasizes some life-changing moments that redefine the road ahead for the person in question, the life course that follows. One of the key dramatic moments in the case of Hans Jonathan, the enslaved man who stole himself, the son of a West African house slave, was the verdict of the legal case of 1802 at the Copenhagen court which sentenced him to remain someone’s property, liable to be sent back to the plantations in the West Indies to be sold to the highest bidder. During the court proceedings, the lawyer representing the slave-owner Henriette Schimmelmann, who owned several sugar plantations on the island of St. Croix in the West Indies, spent some time on establishing Hans Jonathan’s background and identity. Knowing that Hans Jonathan was the son of a white man since he was classified as a “mulatto” in court documents, the defendant used the opportunity to complicate the case by asking an obvious and tricky question: Who was the father of Hans Jonathan? The drama begins on p. 99:

The question that cannot be asked

When the advocates had made their arguments, witnesses were called. ... On Monday 1 March 1802, court officers met with Hans Jonathan .... He appears to have been present at some of the proceedings. ... The two lawyears took turns, Bierring posing the first set of questions: he wanted to know when Hans Jonathan was born....

The paternity question may have served the purpose of appealing to parts of the white community in Copenhagen, the biological relatives of the Hans Jonathan. However, it was repeatedly dismissed by the court. While the legal proceedings were detailed and formal and the defendant had the right to speak, one gets the impression that the case had been decided before the court began its work. The case has for long illuminated the legal debate on rights in humans in Denmark. Had the proceedings taken place a year later, the conclusion would have been different as slavery was becoming illegal in Denmark. And the fate of Hans Jonathan would have been very different. Following the verdict, Hans Jonathan escaped to East Iceland where he would live as a free man for the rest if his life, marrying a local woman, Katrin Antoniusdottir, and having two children.

Learn more about The Man Who Stole Himself at the University of Chicago Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Man Who Stole Himself.

--Marshal Zeringue

Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer's "Unclear Physics"

Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons, and reported the following:

From page 99:

When Jafar presented a quarterly progress report to the IAEC [Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission] in April 1987, however, he seemed nervous. This report went into far more detail than previous quarterly reports, and the conclusion was bleak: it would be impossible to make the major leap forward within the deadline promised to Saddam two years earlier. Having put massive resources into the EMIS research program, they were still not seeing reliable results during pilot trials. Because other approaches had been marginalized in order to pour resources into the EMIS project, little progress was forthcoming elsewhere.

The reactions were strong and immediate. The first commissioner commenting was al-Kittal, who asked whether this finding would be reported to Saddam - it was not. [.] Senior participants later described the discussion, which lasted for hours, as the most stressful meeting of the weapons program.

The events described on page 99 are among the most dramatic turning points in the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Having promised Saddam Hussein to make a major breakthrough only two years earlier, the scientific leader of the program is now telling his senior colleagues that they are going to miss the deadline. They will all be held accountable if Saddam finds out. So they make sure he doesn't.

This incident reflects two of the main findings of Unclear Physics. Scientists in personalist dictatorships (such as Saddam's Iraq and Libya under Muammar Gaddafi) report selectively to the state leader. They get away with this because the state apparatus - essential for monitoring specialized programs - has been undermined by the dictator's efforts to concentrate power in his own hands. This means that the state leader does not have the resources to verify what his scientists are telling him. Both Saddam and Gaddafi were aware of these problems, and tried to compensate by placing additional controls on their scientists, with mixed results.

As this page, and book, demonstrates, everyday lives of scientists and officials in personalist regimes do not always look like what we might expect. Faced with unimaginable pressures, individuals came up with various coping strategies in order to survive. While dictators such as Gaddafi and Saddam wanted to come across as omniscient, the history of their nuclear weapons programs tells a different story.

Learn more about Unclear Physics at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Cockayne's "Hidden Power"

James Cockayne is an Australian strategist, writer and international lawyer who works at the United Nations.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organized Crime, and reported the following:

A hundred years ago, New York was what we would today call a ‘fragile city’. It stank, in more ways than one. The sewerage and sanitation systems were patchy, and refrigeration next to non-existent. The police were corrupt and easily bought. Banks were tied to political cliques. Tens of thousands of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and beyond were crammed into the tenements of the Lower East Side. And elections were rigged.

Using first hand mafia accounts, government records and subsequent research, page 99 of Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organized Crime explains how the Italian-American mafia emerged as a governing force in this chaotic environment. ‘Their power’, it argues, ‘stemmed particularly from their ability to govern’ illicit markets and transactions, drawing on the ‘shared operational culture and system of governmentality’ imported from the southern Italian mafias – the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta.

Breaking with tradition in existing criminological and political science literature, Hidden Power argues that the mafias are not just business organizations – but often also political ones. In New York, early mafia entrepreneurs used their governmental power in Manhattan’s underworld to conquer and harness the upperworld political networks earlier pioneered by Tammany Hall, the Democratic political organization that controlled New York politics from the mid-nineteenth century. Page 99 helps to explain the sources of this governmental power.

Nor did the mafia stop at the water’s edge. Subsequent chapters, drawing on detailed archival research, show how the mafia strategically developed governmental power through collaboration with the US Navy during World War Two, cooperation with the CIA in Cuba, and joint ventures with governing elites in Cuba, The Bahamas and southern Italy.

Along the way, we see criminal groups deliberately influencing elections, changing constitutions, fomenting terrorism, waging war, negotiating peace deals and working behind the scenes in pivotal historical moments such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Through these episodes, Hidden Power identifies a range of criminal strategies that armed groups and political organizations use to this day – in venues as diverse as Afghanistan, Mexico, Myanmar and the Sahel. Forcing us to rethink our distinctions between politics, conflict and crime, Hidden Power reveals a world in which states and mafias compete — and collaborate — in a ‘market for government’, and not only states, but also some criminal groups, make war.

Visit James Cockayne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard C. Schragger's "City Power"

Richard C. Schragger is the Perre Bowen Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he has taught for almost fifteen years. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and local government law, federalism, urban policy and the constitutional and economic status of cities.

Schragger applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age, and reported the following:

City Power is a book about the possibilities of the exercise of city power and the potential for cities to affect social and economic change. Page 99 is quite representative of the book, for it discusses how progressive reformers in the beginning of the twentieth century championed the city as an ideal site for democratic governance. For some early progressive reformers, city power was an antidote to state legislative corruption, a means to achieve important social ends, and the embodiment of participatory government. On page 99, I discuss Frederic Howe’s 1905 book, The City: The Hope of Democracy. Howe served in the Ohio Senate and on the Cleveland city council, and later in the Roosevelt administration. His book was directed at those urban reformers who viewed the city as a problem of management, to be governed by businessmen and so-called “expert” boards and commissions. Howe argued that urban reformers were suppressing urban democracy and that they “had voted democracy a failure.” As he argued, in a quote that serves as an epigraph for City Power: “Distrust of democracy has inspired much of the literature on the city.” Howe’s quote captures the current skeptical approach to city power, both in the politics and economics literatures. Those literatures tend to assume that cities are relatively powerless to affect their economic and regulatory fates. Footloose capital and mobile residents call the shots and cities sing the tune. City Power describes why this is not so. The book’s other epigraph looks toward the future. It is a 1967 quote from political scientist Robert Dahl: “Is it too much to hope that we might be on the verge of the age of the democratic city within the democratic nation-state?” The urban resurgence of the last decades and cities’ aggressive adoption of progressive social welfare legislation portends a coming urban renaissance—culturally, politically, and economically.

Learn more about City Power at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandra Chasin's "Assassin of Youth"

Alexandra Chasin is associate professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, the New School. She is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction.

Chasin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs, and reported the following:

Oddly enough, on page 99 of this book about the history of the war on drugs, Harry Houdini makes a brief appearance. Houdini pops up at the end of a chapter about the rampant prosecution of physicians in the late 1910s and 20s, following the passage of the Harrison Act in 1915. The Harrison Act was a stamp act that required physicians to pay a licensing fee for, and to report, prescriptions of narcotics to patients. But the Act was used to prosecute many thousands of doctors – some of whom were dealing drugs and some of whom were prescribing “maintenance” levels of drugs to addicted patients, in order to prevent them from going through withdrawals. Maintenance prescriptions began to take the moral taint of dealing.

Many cases of both kinds went to the Supreme Court. In another chapter, the book treats the case of Dr. Linder, a Spokane doctor who was busted, with the aid of a stool pigeon, for prescribing four grams of morphine. But on page 99, Harry Houdini concludes a chapter about the case of Jin Fuey Moy, who went to the Supreme Court twice, once for maintenance prescriptions in 1916, and a second time for dealing large quantities of drugs and charging money for them, in 1922. Moy is an interesting example of the rampant prosecution, but he also serves as a good figure for the connections forged between drugs and racial and immigrant social groups.

In the Jin Fuey Moy decision, the majority opinions states that

Only words from which there is no escape could warrant the conclusion that Congress meant to strain its powers almost if not quite to the breaking point in order to make the probably very large proportion of citizens who have some preparation of opium in their possession criminal.

Thus the chapter ends with an escape, with Houdini standing in for swarthy immigrants, who were also objects of suspicion:

After he had taken a train from his childhood home in Milwaukee to Kansas, and from there to worldwide fame, the foreign little Houdini could be seen in several states contorting himself into and out of a “Chinese water torture cell.” … Places that had no water, Houdini could sink himself in it anyway, and stay trapped below, while so many citizens waited breathless above the surface for him to perform the impossible escape.

This passage also demonstrates that the book takes poetic license, performs linguistic contortions to match the trickster Houdini, and otherwise offers lyricism as a set of moves leading to a rhetorical escape from the discipline and punish of the war on drugs.

Visit Alexandra Chasin's website.

My Book, The Movie: Assassin of Youth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emrys Westacott's "The Wisdom of Frugality"

Emrys Westacott is professor of philosophy at Alfred University in Western New York. He is the author of The Virtues of our Vices (Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), and numerous articles in both scholarly and popular publications.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less, and reported the following:

The Wisdom of Frugality is a philosophical reflection on why so many sages, from Socrates to Thoreau have claimed that the good life is the simple life, and why so many people ignore them. It examines both moral and prudential arguments in favor of frugal simplicity, considers counterarguments in defense of luxury and extravagance, and concludes by arguing that we could use a good dose of the ancient wisdom today to deal with contemporary economic and environmental problems.

Page 99 of the book is fairly representative. The claim under examination is Epicurus’ thesis that all we need to be happy is to have our basic needs satisfied–i.e. such things as food, clothing, shelter, friendship, and liberty. Today, in prosperous societies like the US, most people’s basic needs of this sort are met. Indeed, on most counts even the poor today enjoy a higher material standard of living than ever before. So why aren’t we all wallowing in Epicurean contentment?

One problem that interferes with our ability to embrace Epicurus’ teaching is that it’s difficult to maintain our self-respect if we find ourselves at the bottom of the socio-economic heap. In pre-modern societies this problem was less acute, both because the great majority was poor, and also because one’s social standing was viewed as something largely outside one’s control. The idea that we now live in a meritocratic society may be a myth; but if people believe it, that is likely to make them more dissatisfied with occupying the position of “losers.”

I’m not saying that everyone living under capitalism is hopelessly caught up in a materialistic rat race. Most people have no desperate burning desire to be rich or powerful or famous. But to live with nothing but the bare essentials invites pity or contempt. Hardly anyone enjoys being looked down on, and being continually subjected to this continually will usually affect our sense of self-worth.

But Epicurus isn’t completely wrong. His argument prods us into reflecting on the way we live with an eye to identifying wants and habits that are foolish, wasteful, unnecessary, or inauthentic. And he’s right to suggest that the key ingredients for happiness are usually within easy reach for those of us not mired in awful circumstances. When we fail to realize this, we assume that happiness lies in the acquisition of what we currently lack. This is the mistake that leads us to step off the path toward contentment and onto the hedonic treadmill.

Learn about Westacott's five best books about bad habits and five top books on philosophy & everyday living.

The Page 99 Test: The Virtues of Our Vices.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vincent W. Lloyd's "Black Natural Law"

Vincent W. Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University and the author of The Problem with Grace.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Natural Law, and reported the following:

The piece of writing by Martin Luther King, Jr., that most people are familiar with is his letter from Birmingham City Jail. In that text, King invokes natural law, placing himself in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also invokes many other religious and secular ideas to justify his civil disobedience, including the ideas of Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and Jewish thinker Martin Buber. Because King refers to so many and so diverse authorities, it might seem as if he is just using natural law rhetorically, to add extra oomph to his argument.

In Black Natural Law I demonstrate that King was part of a longstanding tradition of natural law reflection among Black Americans, and I show that he developed his own natural law theory. On page 99, I begin to take the reader from King’s rhetoric to King’s ideas, show how King puts forward two distinctive accounts of natural law, one “philosophical” and one “practical.” The latter came about after King was unpersuasive in a live television debate, and a political science student at the University of Minnesota wrote him a letter suggesting a more convincing way of speaking about natural law. King responded enthusiastically and began incorporating the student’s phrasing into his speeches.

The other point that I make on page 99, which also runs throughout the book, is that King thinks Blacks have privileged access to natural law. His point could be called the epistemic privilege of the oppressed: marginalized individuals are particularly aware of the ways the powers that be distort moral truths. Instead of just adding one more perspective on natural law, I argue that the Black natural law tradition offers greater insights into natural law than abstract theorizing in the European tradition because of this lived experience of oppression.

Learn more about Black Natural Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendy Gamber's "The Notorious Mrs. Clem"

Wendy Gamber is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her books include The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 and The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America.

Gamber applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age, and reported the following:

The Notorious Mrs. Clem chronicles the life of a fascinating protagonist—a confidence woman who supposedly invented the Ponzi scheme and allegedly orchestrated a double murder. As if that weren’t enough, she also sold patent medicines while masquerading as a female physician. Nancy Clem reveals much about nineteenth-century American society and culture. I’m especially interested in what she tells us about competing conceptions of women’s economic place and shifting notions of social class.

Page 99 concludes a chapter about the first of Clem’s four trials for the gruesome murders of her business partner, Jacob Young, and Young’s wife, Nancy Jane. Antone Wiese is the hero of this brief paragraph (and the one that precedes it on page 98). Wiese was one of twelve jurors, all of them white, all of them men, all of them farmers from the rural townships that surrounded Indianapolis. But the Prussian-born Wiese was the odd man out. He was the only juror who favored conviction. He was thus responsible for the trial’s outcome: a hung jury.

Wiese’s eleven colleagues—who, like the defendant, were southerners by birth or heritage—didn’t necessarily believe Clem innocent. But they didn’t want to “hang a woman.” And Clem’s attorneys evidently convinced them that there were too many holes in the prosecution’s largely circumstantial case. They also offered gendered arguments that would have resonated with these gentlemen of the jury. While prosecutors termed Clem a “faithless wife” for doing business without her husband’s knowledge—in fact for doing business at all—defense attorneys portrayed her as a thrifty household manager, a reliable contributor to family coffers, a “faithful wife,” and a “model woman”—just the sort of woman a right-thinking farmer might have married. Clem’s lead counsel, John Hanna, moved jurors to tears when he invoked the rural community where he and Clem’s husband had been raised and “the church yard [where] their parents were sleeping.”

Antone Wiese lived in this very locality, Warren Township. So did Nancy Clem’s brother-in-law, also a Prussian immigrant. Perhaps Wiese didn’t share his colleagues’ attachment to Indiana home places or fondness for industrious helpmates. Or perhaps “the stubborn Dutchman” simply believed in justice. His refusal to acquit was a courageous act, one that guaranteed the notorious Mrs. Clem would stand trial a second time.

Learn more about The Notorious Mrs. Clem at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue