Elizabeth Rosner's "Survivor Café"

Elizabeth Rosner is the author of three novels and a poetry collection.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first work of nonfiction, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, and reported the following:

From page 99 (footnotes omitted):

In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning the denial of the Armenian genocide, a letter signed by fifty-three Nobel laureates. Wiesel himself repeatedly called Turkey’s campaign to downplay its actions “a double killing.”

It’s already more than a year past the one-hundredth anniversary commemorating the Armenian genocide of 1915. At a ceremony on April 24th, 2015, the Turkish government offered “condolences” for the 1.5 million victims, while pointedly refusing to use the word “genocide.”

*

Inside a former matzo factory in Istanbul, now that Turkey’s Jewish community has found it cheaper to import matzo from Israel, an art installation was created. White pieces of paper, imprinted with images to make the paper look like matzo, hang suspended from wires. They are referred to as “ghost matzo.”

Years ago, while I was wandering aimlessly through the Lower East Side of New York City, my gaze was suddenly drawn upward to a small wire-mesh-covered window through which I could make out the machinery of the once-famous Streit's factory for matzo-making. I watched the baked pieces dangling and drifting in the hot air, slowly drying.

I’ve heard that factory is closed now too.

My friend Lola tells me that among printmakers, the second image printed after a monotype is called a ghost.

*

According to firsthand testimony, the Sonderkommando observed a Passover seder. Matzo, that is, unleavened bread, also translated as “the bread of affliction,” were baked in the oven at Birkenau. One of the men had worked in a bakery before Passover and knew the special requirements.

I’m humbly gratified to see that Page 99 of Survivor Café serves as a compact example of the book’s structure, its interlocking themes, and even its multi-layered voice. First, these three sections, separated by asterisks, represent the braided organization of my book -- its interweaving of research and conversation and personal story. Even though I don’t always oscillate this rapidly among subjects, and even though more often than not the narrative moves rather slowly and elaborately along a single pathway, the book’s overarching messages are revealed through each of the sub-sections on this page: the way genocides connect us to one another; the way art tries and fails and tries again to comment upon or even to embody history; the way truth can be hidden in the abuses and erasures of language; the way stories of war and loss and beauty and resilience echo back and forth across time and place.

Whether or not it’s explicitly clear to the reader at each moment, in my own mind as the writer, everything in the book is both invisibly and visibly interconnected like this. In these passages, I recognize details that refer to the legacy of trauma (Elie Wiesel calling the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian genocide a “double killing”) and also the labyrinth of memory (Istanbul and its closed matzo factory and the making of ghostly art). Last but not least, in moving formally and informally between citations and interpretations, between the globally collective and the individually personal, this one page captures the tone of the book, a voice that is intimate as well as journalistic, emotional as well as scholarly. I love the idea that not only the quality of the book but also the cumulative effect of reading it can, in microcosm, be imagined by way of this single page-long experience.

Visit Elizabeth Rosner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Sahlins's "1668: The Year of the Animal in France"

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, 1668: The Year of the Animal in France, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The conversations about and descriptions of the Royal Menagerie, coming at the end of the Promenade de Versailles [by Madeleine de Scudéry, published in 1669), support this reading. The Promenade is part guidebook, part “gallant description,” part “Story of Célanire,” and part conversation … the discussion at the menagerie discloses an important characteristic of the site: it is less a source of science than of the civilizing process, here expressed in literary terms.

The page 99 test makes my book seem as though it’s for a largely literary crowd – that, in this case, it might be about the infamous French salonnière Scudéry – but it’s not. I draw widely across the disciplines, to capture in my net a hitherto under-documented appearance of a huge array of animals in many different media in and around 1668, from the decorative arts and tapestry, to lectures on physiognomy, to the design of the fabled animals in the Royal Labyrinth, and to pamphlets about medical scandals involving animal blood transfusion.  What did this sudden visibility of animals, this “animal moment,” 450 years ago, mean? Animals, I argue, were good to think (I unapologetically invoke the famous phrase of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss).  In 1668, they were especially good to rethink certain fundamental changes in ideas about governance, about nature, and about animals themselves.  I introduce a neologism  – “Renaissance humanimalism” – to describe the world that was superseded, but never completely, in 1668; and I tell the stories of artists and weavers, courtiers and virtuosi, and others who were opponents and supporters of the two towering figures that dominate the great mutation of 1668: Louis XIV and René Descartes. In the shadow of these giants – representing versions of absolutism and mechanism -- animals were critical agents in the imagining of new world views.

It all started with the Royal Menagerie at Versailles, first conceived in 1664, and largely completed by 1668.  The Menagerie was dominated by graceful avian species. The birds and (fewer) mammals of of Versailles staged  a new model of animal spectatorship, one with deep political and cultural implications. On page 99, I write that “The Menagerie is less a source of science than of the civilizing process, here expressed in literary terms.” The “civilizing process,” adapted from the German sociologist Norbert Elias, could be extended to make sense of the uses of animals in the realm of politics, but also in the  world of literature and other media including media of medical pamphlets, painting, tapestry, sculpture, garden design, and more.

Finally, page 99 contains my core thesis about the Royal Menagerie, itself at the center of the Year of the Animal in 1668, where it all began.  As René Magritte might have put it, “this not a zoo.” Although the dead bodies of the Versailles’ animals quickly found their way onto Claude Perrault’s dissecting table of (as of the spring of 1668, if not earlier), such was not the intentional design of Louis XIV’s menagerie. At its founding, the Royal Menagerie was a work of of splendor rather than of science. It was allegory before it was zoology, and it was literary before it was social.  In the end, page 99 passes the test.

Learn more about 1668: The Year of the Animal in France at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Engelstein's "Russia in Flames"

Laura Engelstein is Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University, where she served as chair of the History Department, and Professor Emerita at Princeton.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Russia in Flames Rasputin is murdered. Even people who know little about the Russian Revolution of 1917 have heard of Grigorii Rasputin, the sinister holy man who allegedly held the Empress Alexandra under his spell and contributed to the downfall of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. The details are lurid: on December 17, 1916, as Russia was struggling under the pressure of World War I, Rasputin was enticed into the basement of the Petrograd palace of the wealthy and highly placed Prince Felix Yusupov. There, Yusupov and two accomplices, one a grand duke and the tsar's cousin, the other a vociferous anti-Semite, first poisoned and then shot their victim, before dumping his body under the ice of the frozen river. The patriotic assassins hoped to restore the tsar to his senses and improve Russia's fortunes in the war. Many Russians at the time believed Nicholas II was in thrall to the occult forces personified by the man in black; people ever since have been fascinated by the healer's gruesome demise.

When my editor first approached me about a project for the centenary of 1917, he proposed I write about Rasputin. Rasputin's influence behind the throne and the public's widespread belief in his demonic powers contributed to the erosion of the tsar's political authority. Rasputin nevertheless had only a bit part in the large-scale drama that was leading Russia to the revolutionary brink, a turning point in world history. Russia in Flames tells the big story: the autocracy's collapse, the heroic attempt of civil society to create a democratic Russia, the defeat of that project by the demands of continuing war, the despair of the popular classes that bore the brunt of the conflict, the bloody Civil War that dismembered the empire, and the machinations of Lenin's Bolsheviks, determined to point Russia in a new, utopian direction. Yet, on page 99, Rasputin comes back to haunt me.

Learn more about Russia in Flames at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Gordon's "The Second Coming of the KKK"

Linda Gordon, winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and the coauthor of Feminism Unfinished. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University and lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Second Coming of the KKK and reported the following:

Page 99 places the reader in the midst of the 1920s Klan’s vigilante attacks on Catholics, Jews, people of color including not only African Americans but also Mexican and Asian Americans, immigrants, Prohibition violators, and people “parking automobiles along our highways …for what is believed to be immoral purposes.”  These categories overlap of course.  What’s more, they are all racialized: in Klan ideology, immigrants are bad unless they are “Nordic” Protestants; only Catholics drink liquor and it’s only Jews who supply it; and the “immoral purposes” are incited by the Jews who use their control of Hollywood in a conspiracy to subvert American values and thereby weaken the nation.

Klansmen and police jointly conducted raids on saloons and bootleggers; sometimes the Klansmen were legally deputized by law enforcement.  One sheriff worked with a civilian “booze squad” of Klansmen.  In southern Illinois such attacks “produced lethal battles in 1924 and 1925, involving gunmen and the deployment of military forces, and ended by forcing the anti-Klan sheriff out of office.”  The victims of these raids then appeared before Klan-sympathizing judges—one a future Klaliff, aka Vice Cyclops aka a regional Klan leader—who always convicted them.  Klansmen, by contrast, were never convicted for their vigilantism.  In Oklahoma, and perhaps elsewhere too, Klan membership was automatically suspended for any man called for jury duty, so that he could deny it and not be excluded for bias.

We also learn on page 99 that a Klan Grand Goblin “modeled his spy network on that of tsarist Russia.”  (This is the northern KKK, with some 3 to 5 million members, founded in 1920.  Unlike the original southern Klan, a secret terrorist gang who lynched African Americans to warn the whole African American population not to dare protesting white supremacy, the northern Klan, not at all secret, extended its campaign of bigotry to target Catholics and Jews.)  Its “spies” worked to catch and discipline Klan members who patronized stores run by Catholics and Jews.

Much of the Klan’s method of intimidation involved threats rather than physical attacks, and the rest of the page recounts some of those.  “If you are the mouthpiece of American labor in this locality and do not endorse the above principles,” an Oregon “Kleagle” warned,  “then you would be a fit subject for a Vigilance Committee.”  Threatening a Vermont journalist:  “Unless “certain newspaper reporters ... stop attacking the Klan, they will be taught the same lesson that some editors in the south have learned.”

The Klan also practiced “black psy war.”  This label derives from the US war in Vietnam, in which the CIA and armed forces distributed leaflets designed to look as if they were issued by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (aka the “Viet Cong).  The goal was to get people to turn against the NLF by attributing malign  plans to it.  The Klan used similar tactics, distributing frightening material allegedly from Catholic sources.

The page concludes thus: “Taken in the aggregate, it seems clear that these threats also constituted terrorism, aimed … “  The sentence continues on the next page: “at sending a message to whole communities of people—intimidating noncomforming groups into submission to Klan `law’,”

Lest we assume that only men were responsible for KKK bigotry, let me point out that the very next chapter is about Klanswomen, who numbered about 1.5 million.

Visit Linda Gordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Halpern's "The Quantum Labyrinth"

Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and the author of fifteen popular science books, including Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Athenaeum Literary Award. Halpern has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including Future Quest, Radio Times, several shows on the History Channel, and The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special. He has contributed opinion pieces for the Philadelphia Inquirer, blogs frequently on Medium, and was a regular contributor to NOVA’s “The Nature of Reality” physics blog.

Halpern applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality, and reported the following:

I think page 99 of The Quantum Labyrinth is emblematic of the book’s depiction of Feynman’s cleverness (in terms of his work at Los Alamos), mischievous nature (his pension for playing pranks and picking locks), love for his first wife Arline who was ill with tuberculosis (she was his creative muse), and overall versatility.  That page does not mention Wheeler, the other protagonist of my book, so it is not fully representative, however.

Visit The Quantum Labyrinth website.

My Book, The Movie: The Quantum Labyrinth.

Writers Read: Paul Halpern.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Parker and Mark Parker's "Sucking Up"

Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia. Mark Parker is Professor of English at James Madison University. They are coauthors of Inferno Revealed: From Dante to Dan Brown.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy, and reported the following:

Our book considers sycophancy from several perspectives—from the earliest types in classical literature, to historical examples, to modern sociology, to famous literary examples, among them Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and Proust.

Page 99 occurs in the book’s final section, “How Low Can You Go?” where we look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The book’s narrator Stevens is an aging butler who served the aristocrat Lord Darlington during the build-up to WWII. As Stevens ponders his life of devoted service, he gradually reveals that Darlington had been a Nazi sympathizer.

Much of the narration is defensive, a kind of anxious special pleading. Stevens’ suppression of self and his complicity in his master’s meddling in foreign policy, weigh heavily upon him. To justify his assent Stevens carefully develops his professional ethos through a series of anecdotes, from which he draws certain lessons that illustrate a “great” butler. A “great” butler will only “abandon the professional being he inhabits” when he pleases. Adherence to this code proves excruciating when a guest at one of Lord Darlington’s banquets wishes to show the limitations of democracy. The guest peppers Stevens with questions about various economic and political issues to expose the butler’s ignorance and Stevens performs his humiliation satisfactorily.

Key to Stevens’ maintenance of dignity here is the illusion of choice. He makes himself small out of professionalism. And with such self-deceptions, Stevens transforms a range of sycophantic roles—from the “yes-man” to the reliable doormat—into something positive. Page 99 is integral to our consideration of the blindness which accompanies some forms of sycophancy. The brilliance of Ishiguro’s novel lies in the narrator’s unreliability, his blinkered recollection of the past. Stevens is always on the verge of unhappy revelations about himself, Lord Darlington, and the nature of his service. Like a word forever on the tip of one’s tongue, this full consciousness never emerges. Flatterers fool themselves.

Learn more about Sucking Up at The University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Callender's "What Makes Time Special?"

Craig Callender earned his PhD with research on the direction of time at Rutgers University. He then worked at the London School of Economics before moving to the University of California, San Diego. He has interests in time and physics, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, philosophy of science, and environmental ethics.

Callender applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, What Makes Time Special?, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a fair representation of the first half of the book. The book can be divided into two parts, one on time and physics followed by one on time and psychology. As we navigate through life, we employ a model of time that is deeply tied to what makes our lives recognizably human. This model of flowing time is connected to personal identity, agency, freedom and more. The first half investigates the fate of this model when confronted by physics. The model doesn’t fare well: current physics judges it to be more or less rubbish. The second half accepts this conclusion and then uses psychology, evolution, and more to explain why the model we use, even if fundamentally flawed, nonetheless makes sense for creatures like us to use.

But what about future physics? Could it possibly save intuitive time? That is the question addressed on page 99. Here I point out that on the horizon we have quantum gravity, a set of research programs aiming to join quantum theory with relativity. Depending upon whether one regards quantum theory or relativity as the more secure foundation, one will either “rescue” time from relativity or further relativity’s attempt to demolish time. Neither task, I show, is so easy. The time of relativity is very resilient. Because it connects up with the central tension running throughout the book — is the flow of time an illusion? — Page 99 is a good indication of what you’ll find throughout.

Learn more about What Makes Time Special? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Forth's "Barbed-Wire Imperialism"

Aidan Forth is Assistant Professor of British imperial history at Loyola University Chicago.

He  applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903, and reported the following:

Camps, throughout history, have served a multitude of functions, from incarcerating political suspects, to rounding up refugees, enemy aliens and military combatants. One thread that connects this global history is the language of disease. Whether in Nazi Germany, where camps detained “carriers of the bacillus of Bolshevism” (218) or at Guantánamo Bay, where barbed-wire incarcerated Haitian refugees suspected of carrying AIDS (227), medicine and social sanitation have proven central metaphors of modern statecraft. Likewise, in the British Empire, medical concerns led to the detention of more than a million colonial subjects during a global pandemic of bubonic plague in 1897. A system of medical quarantine camps, from Hong Kong to South Africa, and especially in India, interned those suspected of carrying the contagion. In the name of “disease control,” camps (like the one pictured on the cover of the book) detained “certain classes of people” who “as a rule are dirty in their habits” (82). Page 99 is the final page of chapter 3, which systematically examines this vast system of detention and lays the groundwork for future chapters on camps for political rather than medical “suspects.”

Ultimately, the chapter concludes that medical quarantine largely failed to stop the spread of plague. In the words of Claude Hill, Private Secretary to the Bombay Governor, plague camps were “not only ineffective,” they “created an undercurrent of discontent” among the native population (99). Yet camps remained popular among colonial officials because they offered an excuse to remove undesirable social and racial elements—“the scum of the Bombay population,” according to one police official (56)—from the center of colonial cities. Urban “cleansing” became racial “cleansing.” British plague camps also provided effective logistical models for the billeting of mass populations in the future. These included the “concentration camps” of the South African War (1899-1901), which interned “verminous” and “extremely dirty” populations during a colonial “dirty war” (167). Interestingly, officials from India with experience managing plague camps were eventually seconded to administer this new system of camps in South Africa.

Learn more about Barbed-Wire Imperialism at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walter S. Judd & Graham A. Judd's "Flora of Middle-Earth"

Walter S. Judd is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology, University of Florida. Graham Judd holds an MFA in Printmaking, and received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Printmakers at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

The forest gate is described as archlike, formed by two gigantic trees leaning against each other, and these trees are ‘strangled with ivy and hung with lichens’ and bear only a few old, damaged leaves. Here we see two distinctive characteristics of Usnea: first, its preference for sickly, dead, or dying trees that have fewer leaves and thus a more open canopy, allowing more sunlight to reach the lichens; and, second, its characteristic epiphytic and hanging habit—that is, it almost always grows on trees or shrubs on which it forms a much-branched system of often pendulous, pale gray to yellowish branchlets (Figure 7.8). This growth form is so characteristic of Usnea, a fruticose lichen (i.e., one that has a branched, miniature, shrubby or treelike form), that the species of this genus are  called beard lichens (or old man’s beards) because their hanging branches look like a graying beard. These common names are alluded to by Tolkien elsewhere, as when Merry and Pippin entered Fangorn forest (Figure 7.8) and saw ‘great trailing beards of lichen hung from’ huge branches (LotR 3: III), and Pippin, picking up on the feeling of the forest, exclaimed—‘Look at all those weeping, trailing, beards and whiskers of lichen!’ (LotR 3: IV). These descriptions perfectly match the appearance of many species of Usnea, which are widespread and diverse in Europe (with more than 30 species occurring there) and thus would have been very familiar to Tolkien. Usnea seems to have been as common in Middle-earth, and it adds to our mental image of—and gives a certain foreboding quality to—the great forests of Mirkwood and Fangorn. This expectation of evil is expressed most clearly in the very similar description of the forest gateway where the orc trail from Thangorodrim entered Taur-nu-Fuin: the Forest-Beneath-Night, so named because it was filled with terror and dark enchantment by Morgoth. We read in The Lay of the Children of Húrin that Beleg and Gwindor saw

[A]n archway opened.        By ancient trunks

It was framed darkly,        that in far-off days

The lightning felled,         now leaning gaunt

Their lichen-leprous        limbs uprooted. (Lays I: lines 936-939)

Again, we see the image of ancient dead trees covered with beard lichens. Their presence is described as ‘leprous’ because of their gray-green to yellow-green color, but this term is also appropriate given that Taur-nu-Fuin itself is diseased and distorted by the evil actions of Morgoth. This forest, located in Dorthonion north of Beleriand in the First Age, was much more perilous than either Fangorn or Mirkwood. Yet it was here that Beleg found Gwindor and rescued Túrin (see SILM 21).

This book is a flora, and like any flora it documents the plants occurring in the geographical area of concern—in this case J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For each of the 141 genera and/or plant species mentioned in Tolkien’s major writings, we include (1) the common and scientific names, along with an indication of the family to which the plant belongs; (2) a brief quote from one of Tolkien’s works in which the plant is referenced; (3) a discussion of the significance of the plant in the context of Tolkien’s legendarium [part of which is quoted above, for Beard Lichens]; (4)  the etymology, relating to both the English common name and the Latin scientific names, and, where relevant, the name in one or more of the languages of Middle-earth; (5) a brief description of the plant’s geographical distribution and ecology; (6) its economic importance; and (7) a morphological description. Most of these are also provided with a woodcut-style illustration (as an aid to identification), along with an inset illustrating one of the events in the history of Middle-earth in which the plant played a role. Tolkien was clear that his Middle-earth is to be viewed as our own world, and his writings, therefore, are meant to reconnect us to important elements of our internal and cultural landscape and also to impact how we interact with other individuals and with the world in which we live—including the landscapes of our natural environment—including plants!  The plants within Tolkien’s legendarium are actually part of the story, showing numerous connections with humans, elves, and hobbits in the myths and history of Middle-earth. We hope that our detailed treatment of these plants will create a visual reference, and legitimacy, for both the plants growing in our forests, meadows, and marshes, as well as those that we have received as gifts from Tolkien’s imagination. Finally, Tolkien viewed the light of the Two Trees of Valinor as “the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically … and imaginatively” – following his guidance, we attempt in our book to integrate both botanical science and artistic imagination

Learn more about Flora of Middle-Earth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory A. Daddis's "Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam"

Gregory A. Daddis is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Chapman University’s MA Program in War and Society. He is author of Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam.

Daddis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Just as important, the increasing role played by the ARVN meant a necessary decline in American influence. Though the “one war” approach envisioned an integrated allied effort, officers still saw deficiencies in the “sequential manner of attacking one critical phase or threat at a time.” If both pacification and Vietnamization relied on a secure environment in which to flourish, then it made sense to defeat the enemy’s military threat. Yet the combined campaign plans continued to place the primary responsibility for pacification on the ARVN’s shoulders. In large sense, the South Vietnamese armed forces were being pulled in two opposite directions….

Yet it seems hard to argue against the idea that South Vietnamese forces, despite all their flaws, indeed were best suited for pacification, always a process of negotiation between the host government, its army, and the people. Realizing the “population had to be provided with more than temporary security,” MACV had always intended the ARVN to work closely with local territorial forces. But with US forces withdrawing, Abrams and his staff grappled with whether the South Vietnamese army should focus on pacification or improving its ability to react to the more conventional NVA threat.

For many Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, their relationship with the South Vietnamese army, popularly known as the ARVN, remained one fraught with tension. The friction seemed inevitable. With President Richard M. Nixon’s 1969 decision to withdraw U.S. forces from South Vietnam, American military leaders felt they were bestowing the war to an ally in which few had much faith. Generals like Creighton Abrams were far from optimistic about a policy that quickly became known as “Vietnamization.” Even after years of US aid and assistance, by the late 1960s, the ARVN was grappling with issues of corruption, low morale, and poor leadership.

True, South Vietnamese soldiers fought hard across much of their homeland. They were instrumental in helping pacify the countryside, defeating local insurgents, and building bridges between the Saigon government and its rural population. An excerpt from page 99, however, illustrates a key paradox that the American military assistance command (MACV) faced as it began to depart from a war not yet concluded. That paradox remains a controversial topic on the U.S. war in Vietnam to this very day.

Learn more about Withdrawal at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Westmoreland's War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Adler-Milstein and John M. Kline's "Sewing Hope"

Sarah Adler-Milstein is a worker-rights advocate and has served as Field Director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Worker Rights Consortium. John M. Kline is Professor of International Business Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is the author of four books, including the textbook Ethics for International Business.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Sewing Hope: How One Factory Challenges the Apparel Industry's Sweatshops, and reported the following:

How do you capture the difference between heaven and earth? Sewing Hope: How One Factory Challenges the Apparel Industry’s Sweatshops tells the story of Alta Gracia, an apparel factory in the Dominican Republic.  Local workers describe the comparison between Alta Gracia and typical apparel industry sweatshops as la diferencia entre el cielo y la tierra (“the difference between heaven and earth”). Alta Gracia is the only apparel factory that pays workers a living wage over three times the legal minimum, maintains excellent health and safety standards, and has signed collective bargaining agreements with a legitimate labor union – all verified by an independent labor rights organization.

Page 99 captures one small aspect of what makes this life-changing model for apparel production so different from a "normal" factory. On top is a photo of two factory administrators reviewing personnel policies. Text on the bottom half relates the administrators’ unusual efforts and equally unusual success altering company policies to improve workers’ health insurance coverage, providing access to quality healthcare clinics and pharmacies. This “slice-of-life” example only hints at the dramatic contrasts in labor-management relations and workplace standards revealed by the full analysis of Alta Gracia’s operations.

Beyond Page 99 you'll find many other crucial aspects of the living wage model and the "big picture" view of how this one small factory could chart a course for larger industry transformation. Most executives and many economists hold a fatalistic view that low wages and dangerous conditions are unfortunate but inherent elements of competition in the global apparel industry. Alta Gracia tells a very different story: that living wages and safe factories are possible and that the cost is minimal – less than a dollar a sweatshirt.

Life-changing stories show the impact a salario digno (wage with dignity) can have on a worker’s family. There can be nutritious meals, needed healthcare and educational opportunities for both children and adults.  Later may come improvements in basic housing, such as running water, and help for relatives in need. Some workers start small businesses or train for a profession.  These other scenes of heaven are revealed if you read beyond the photo and short text on page 99.  There's so much more that Alta Gracia’s anti-sweatshop model offers by creating a kind of "heaven" for only 90¢ more a sweatshirt.

Learn more about Sewing Hope at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Kraig Kelly's "The Crime of Nationalism"

Matthew Kraig Kelly is a historian of the modern Middle East. He has served as a visiting professor at Occidental College and the University of California, Los Angeles, and his work has been published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle East Critique, and other academic journals.

Kelly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire, and reported the following:

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."--the page 99 test, attributed to Ford Madox Ford

This is arguably accurate for my book. Page 99 of The Crime of Nationalism concerns Zionist and Palestinian anxieties in the run-up to the release of the 1937 Peel Report, which – unbeknownst to either group – would recommend the partitioning Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Arab. Why did the British recommend this partition? Because they came to the determination that Arabs and Jews just couldn’t get along. Even with the utterly neutral, entirely objective, scrupulously fair British exerting every sinew to bring about a reconciliation between them.

This British self-image is, in a sense, what my book is all about. The British had a terrible habit in Palestine of overlooking the ways in which their own actions contributed to the political instability they were attempting to manage. If one metaphor captures this mentality, it is the stage. The British conceived of themselves – and particularly of their institutional presence in Palestine – as the stage upon which two actors, the Arab and Jewish communities, performed. On this understanding, the stage merely upheld the actors; it could not script their behavior. It was up to the Arabs and the Jews to put their intercommunal affairs in order. Their failure to do so only illustrated how obstinate and perhaps uncivilized they were. Yet, as my book demonstrates, the British state in Palestine was much more than a stage. To stay with the metaphor, it was a third actor, just as causally dynamic and consequential as Arab and Jewish institutions. Once we appreciate this fact, we can approach the historical materials relating to 1936-39 with the goal of deconstructing the British representation of the rebellion. By returning the British to their rightful place in the causal picture of the revolt, we gain a more complete understanding of this important episode in the history of interwar insurgencies.

Learn more about The Crime of Nationalism at the University of California Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Crime of Nationalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abeer Y. Hoque's "Olive Witch"

Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She has published a book of travel photographs and poems called The Long Way Home, and a book of linked stories, photographs and poems called The Lovers and the Leavers. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has received several other fellowships and grants. Her writing and photography have been published in Guernica, Outlook Traveller, Wasafi ri, ZYZZYVA, India Today, and The Daily Star. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.

Hoque applied the “Page 99 Test” to her book, Olive Witch: A Memoir, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…universities and jobs in Enugu, Ibadan, Jos, Benin, Kano, Zaria, and Lagos, or they will have gone abroad. In another couple of years, even those in Nsukka will have gone. It is a university town, its population bounded by those studying or teaching there.

‘You cannot accept this,’ Abbu says after reading the letter.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, shocked.

‘It’s not for you. This scholarship is for black students.’

‘No, it’s for students who have ties to Africa,’ I protest.

‘They mean blacks. What if you went to their office? What would they think when they saw you? When it was clear that you weren’t black?’

I think about Kunta Kinte, his unthinkable trials repeated a million times over the centuries to where America is today. With less force in my voice, I say, ‘But we need the money.’

‘They need it more.’

In the break room at work, I read the scholarship offer one last time and then pitch it in the trash with the fast food wrappers and coke cans. I shut my book and take out Glenn’s latest letter.

My lovecrush is so overpowering that I don’t perceive the tension mounting in our house. So when my father asks why I must write Glenn so often, I’m not as careful as I usually am with my words.

‘I like writing to him,’ I say, capping and uncapping my inky blue pen as I look out the living room window. ‘Nothing seems real until I’ve told him.’

Outside, the summer heat shimmers on our black tar driveway. I notice the grass has to be cut. Maher is still too young to handle a bulky bladed machine on his own, so it falls to me and Simi to mow the lawn, and we hate it. We have a used lawnmower whose starter is so reluctant that it requires…

My book is split into three very different, chronological geographies of my life and identity: Nigeria (where I was born and lived til I was 13), the States (where my family moved and I’ve lived since high school), and Bangladesh (where my parents are originally from and where I lived as an adult for a few years). Interleaved with those sections are excerpts set in a psychiatric ward.

Page 99 falls in the American bit, just past high school into college, but it mentions my first hometown in the world, Nsukka, in southeastern Nigeria, and alludes to the nostalgia and grief of never really being able to go home after you’ve left. There’s a conflict between my father and me, telling because family dynamics and cross cultural and generational clashes are some of my memoir’s major themes. And the actual conflict is about how I identify myself, as African or otherwise. My first love makes an appearance, a relationship not approved of, par for the course for immigrant families. And there’s suburban America in the backdrop with its sprawling lawns and fast food chains and household chores – alien landscape slowly, resentfully becoming familiar ground.

As a writer, I’m also interested in language as much as story and place, and I think page 99 of Olive Witch gives the reader a thank you taste of much of what I hold dear: an attention to place via description and setting, themes of displacement and identity, and of course, love.

Learn more about the book and author at Abeer Y. Hoque's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

A. James McAdams's "Vanguard of the Revolution"

A. James McAdams is the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs and director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His many books include Judging the Past in Unified Germany and Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Vanguard of the Revolution, I outline the circumstances under which Lenin and other Bolshevik revolutionaries debated whether Russia should withdraw from participation in World War I.  Lenin was angry that his associates should dare to disagree with him at all, but he ultimately got his way.  He argued that they should act according the wishes of the party--i.e., his wishes--because their association was a "comradely family." A few months later, he also secured their agreement to rename their party the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).  Of equal importance, Lenin also embraced the notion that the party needed to be more than a source of inspiration.  It also needed to be the source of clearer lines of commend in order to effect its wishes.

At this point in Vanguard of the Revolution, I am setting up two themes that run throughout the book.  The first is that on this occasion, and on many others, there persisted a culture of debate among the Bolsheviks that frustrated even the party's preeminent leader, Lenin. On these particular issues, he got his way.  But this was not always the case. Later, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin waged war on this "comradely family" by ordering the execution of nearly all of the early Bolsheviks.  The second theme on this page is Lenin's endorsement of the principle that the party should not only be driven by a central idea; it should have the organizational means to put the idea into practice.  This point allows me to set up a juxtaposition that suffuses the book: the tension between the party as a motivating idea and the party as a practical organization.

Learn more about Vanguard of the Revolution at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kieran Setiya's "Midlife: A Philosophical Guide"

Kieran Setiya teaches philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working mainly in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds me in the midst of retrospection, asking how it could make sense to affirm my actual life as a professor when I believe I should been a physician instead. Looking back at my foolish decision, am I condemned to wish for a second chance?

It is not just about me. There is a wider question here, about regret in the face of our mistakes and the misfortunes that befall us. Is there space between the things you should not have done, or should not have had to endure, and what you should want to change about your past?

Turns out there is. What matters is not the bare existence of what you did, or what has happened to you, as if its mere occurrence made it better, but immersion in the subsequent details of your life, the intricate fabric of moments, relationships, and activities that make it good, even though it is not the best. My relationship to life as a philosopher, in living it, is utterly different from my speculative relationship to an imagined life as a physician.

There is a difference between knowing that something is worthwhile and knowing what makes it so, between knowing the existence of reasons for desire and knowing what those reasons are. Just as it is rational to respond less strongly to the abstract knowledge that your life will have deficiencies than to learning which ones, so it is rational to respond more strongly to the definite ways in which a life is good than to the nebulous fact that another life is better.

Hence the advice with which the chapter ends: “Do not weigh alternatives theoretically, but zoom in: let the specifics count against the grand cartoon of lives unlived. In doing so, you may find that you cannot regret that you should have resisted at the time.”

This is from a chapter about dealing with the past. Other chapters confront the relentless grind of necessity, the distortions of nostalgia and the problem of missing out, mortality and fear of death, the tyranny of projects and the challenge of living in the present. A cerebral self-help book, Midlife uses philosophical arguments and ideas as cognitive therapy, speaking to the many midlife crises, and to anyone coping with the irreversibility of time.

Visit Kieran Setiya's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Biespiel's "The Education of a Young Poet"

David Biespiel was born in 1964 and grew up in Houston, Texas.  He is a poet, literary critic, columnist, and contributing writer at The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Politico, New Republic, Partisan, Slate, Poetry, and The New York Times, among other publications.

He is the author of ten books, most recently The Education of a Young Poet, A Long High Whistle, which received the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction, and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Biespiel applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Education of a Young Poet and reported the following:

From page 99:

For a short time the summer before my senior year in college, I had nowhere to go but Houston. So I moved back in with my mother. The last place I wanted to be was in my old neighborhood of Meyerland, even for a few weeks. I had been living in Boston, and I was different now. To return home seemed like a defeat.

I had always seen Meyerland as an idyllic area of southwest Houston with its cozy, mid-century Tudor and colonial ranch houses. In August the wide roads and trim lawns had settled low against a tall sky. Now, after living in Boston, I couldn’t see it at all anymore. Driving down Chimney Rock Road with the bulbous trees heavy under the long, humid skies was like a familiar dream. I did it without looking, without interest. I could only remember my childhood there but could not see who I was even in so familiar a place.

I’m not sure this passes the Page 99 Test. Though, interestingly, it does pass the test for the book I’m currently writing.

Visit David Biespiel's website.

Writers Read: David Biespiel.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Howard's "Chasing Phil"

David Howard's first book, Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic, chronicled the 138-year journey of an original, priceless rendition of the Bill of Rights that was pilfered during the Civil War.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World's Most Charming Con Man, and reported the following:

As it happens, page 99 encapsulates the book nicely. Chasing Phil is a road-trip story, and the three main characters are trying to find their rhythms and routines together. Here, in March 1977, they’re visiting the Fontainebleau Hotel, a massive, ostentatious slab on Miami Beach where in better days Frank Sinatra played the La Ronde Room, entertaining visiting mafioso. The main character, Phil Kitzer, an ingenious, globetrotting high-finance con artist, favors these kinds of vast lodgings—places that are at once grand and anonymous.

The sagging Fontainebleau is now under assault from Kitzer’s swindler associates, who are using fraudulent bank securities to try to wring out the last drops of its lifeblood. The hotel, I write, is “flirting with bankruptcy and sending off the kind of distressed-animal sounds that attracted predators like Andy D’Amato.”

The page introduces one of my favorite scenes—a passage that unpacks some of Phil’s complexities. He sweeps into the gift shop, where he buys every teddy bear on the shelves, then loads them into the arms of his trainees—two young men who are actually undercover FBI agents. The agents are thinking, What is this?

Page 100 spoiler alert: Phil ushers them into the hotel’s Poodle Lounge, where he hands out the stuffed animals to women cradling happy-hour martinis and proceeds to take over the room. He’s hilarious and flirtatious and flamboyant, making sure everyone watches as he peels a couple of hundreds off a massive wad of cash to pay for rounds of drinks.

This scene helps set up readers to wrestle with a central dilemma: Do I root for or against this guy? All you know for sure, as of page 99, is that it’s fun to ride along.

Visit David Howard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Marmysz's "Cinematic Nihilism"

John Marmysz holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from State University of New York at Buffalo. His primary research interests focus on the issue of nihilism and its cultural manifestations.

Marmysz is the author of The Nihilist’s Notebook, Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism, The Path of Philosophy: Truth, Wonder and Distress, The Nihilist: A Philosophical Novel, and Cinematic Nihilism: Encounters, Confrontations, Overcomings. He is coeditor (with Scott Lukas) of Fear, Cultural Anxiety and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films Remade.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Cinematic Nihilism and reported the following:

Page 99 of Cinematic Nihilism is the first page of Chapter 5, “The Lure of the Mob: Cinematic Depictions of Skinhead Authenticity.” On this page appears a still from the 1998 film American History X. It is a picture of a skinhead (the actor Edward Norton) with a swastika tattooed on his chest. The image is followed by these introductory words:

Skinheads are generally viewed, in contemporary Western culture, as symbols of violence, white racism and bigotry. In fact, the term ‘skinhead’ is taken by most academics and mainstream media consumers virtually to be synonymous with the term ‘Nazi’, and it has become almost automatic to associate images of young, white males sporting shaven heads with viciousness and racial intolerance. The media commonly utilise and exploit this iconic image in everything from television programmes and commercials to magazine ads and movies, reinforcing and strengthening its evocative power.

The chapter goes on to examine a somewhat puzzling and controversial genre of film in which neo-Nazi skinheads are portrayed in an understanding light, as misguided yet intelligent and psychologically complicated individuals in search of personal autonomy and self-understanding. The concept of “authenticity,” as articulated by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, is marshaled in order to try and appreciate the reasons why these otherwise reprehensible characters appear so sympathetic to audiences. My argument is that this sympathy is the result of audience identification with the struggles of the film characters as they confront, and authentically come to terms with, their experience of nihilism.

This chapter closes the book’s second division, which is devoted to films that depict struggles to confront nihilism. The book’s first division is devoted to films depicting initial encounters with nihilism while the book’s third, and final, division focuses on films in which characters overcome nihilism. Among the films examined are many that have been condemned by critics and scholars as morally reprehensible: The Wicker Man, Under the Skin, The Human Centipede, Nymphomaniac, Videodrome, Night of the Living Dead, Fight Club, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

The argument I make over the course of analyzing these films is that, contrary to much critical opinion, cinematic nihilism is not essentially negative or destructive, but a potentially constructive phenomenon offering audiences the opportunity to wrestle with an issue of universal human concern: alienation from our highest ideals. This alienation is not an unambiguously bad thing, since in addition to anguish, it also potentially provokes ongoing interpretation, aspiration and ambition. The rush to overcome nihilism (in both film and real life) may in fact result in consequences worse that nihilism itself, such as abjection, fascism and death.  Thus, despite common wisdom, I conclude that the defeat of nihilism (cinematic or otherwise) is not unequivocally good. It may be beneficial to remain within its grips rather than overcoming it once and for all.

Learn more about Cinematic Nihilism at the Edinburgh University Press website and John Marmysz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Fagone's "The Woman Who Smashed Codes"

Jason Fagone's books include Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, the X Prize, and the Race to Revive America and Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, and reported the following:

Opening the book to page 99, this paragraph jumps out at me:

A tiny slip of paper fluttered down to Elizebeth. She was outdoors at Riverbank with William and Mr. Powell, the gentle University of Chicago publicity agent, the three of them working in the grass, the fresh air. She picked up the paper and saw a line of cursive written in light pencil. It was from William. “My dearest, I sit here studying your features. You are perfectly beautiful!! B.B.” Billy Boy. She hid the note so Mr. Powell wouldn’t see it, later pressing it between two pages of her diary. “My heart sang,” she wrote there, “carolling bursts of ecstasy.”

Elizebeth is Elizebeth Smith, the heroine of the book, and William is William Friedman, her coworker at a strange and wondrous scientific laboratory outside of Chicago. At this point in the story, the autumn of 1916, they're only in their twenties, and they're just beginning to fall in love. She's a Quaker poetry scholar, he's a Jewish plant biologist. They're from completely different worlds. But they just click. They're young and they're bright and they're ambitious and they want to leave a mark on the world. And that's what happens next, in their lives and in the book. They teach themselves how to become codebreakers -- to solve secret messages without knowing the key. Over the next 30 years, they use their abilities to shape the American intelligence community and help win the world wars.

For me, this is one of the cool things about learning about American history through the eyes of Elizebeth and William. You realize that, beneath the familiar narratives of the world wars and the growth of American intelligence, there's also this love story.

Visit Jason Fagone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael A. Ross's "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case"

Michael A. Ross is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the prize-winning Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era and The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era.

Ross applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case and reported the following:

Page 99 does indeed reflect what readers can expect from The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case, a true story of a sensational trial in which the key participants were Afro-Creoles. Both the lead detective and the accused women in the famous Digby Kidnapping case were Afro-Creoles, members of an elite class of African Americans who had been free before the Civil War. It was 1870 in Louisiana, the height of Radical Reconstruction.  The state’s Republican governor had just integrated the New Orleans police force and issues of race and class had recently led to wild violence and riots. Startling crimes like the Digby kidnapping quickly became intertwined with the tumultuous politics of the time. And the fact that the accused women in the story came from a class many white people in New Orleans had once trusted created panic amongst those who feared the changes emancipation and Reconstruction had wrought. Page 99 helps explain why many members of Louisiana’s upper class found it so terrifying that they could no longer judge people based on their manners and style. It was one more sign that their world had been turned upside down.

Learn more about The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley's "James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film"

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley was awarded her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2013 after having completed a BA in English and Philosophy and an MA in Twentieth-century Literature at the University of Leeds. Her work is concerned with the interrelations between literature, philosophy, film, culture, and science. She is Founder and Chair of Oxford Phenomenology Network, an international group of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners interested in all aspects of phenomenological thought and practice. She currently works at the University of Oxford in the role of Knowledge Exchange Facilitator and as a tutor at various Oxford colleges.

Hanaway-Oakley applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film, and reported the following:

My book spans three disciplines: literature, philosophy, and film studies. Page 99 of my book focuses only on the latter two. In this sense, the page is not representative of the book as a whole. However, the page contains analyses which are central to my overall argument, to my contention that modern artists – be they writers or film-makers – were supremely interested in the world-as-it-is-lived, the world as it is directly experienced by an always already bodily-and-subjective consciousness.

Interestingly, page 99 of my book features a discussion which is particularly germane to the ‘page 99 test’. I talk about gestalt theory. Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka famously stated that ‘the whole is other than the sum of the parts’; by this, he meant that we do not merely perceive a set of elements added together – when we view an object or a scene we directly and immediately (without any intellectual effort or rationalizing) see it as a unified totality that makes sense to us. For example, when we look at a cube, we do not see a collection of 2-D squares – we see a 3-D cube. Similarly, when we read a book we are not experiencing 350,000 letters, 60,000 words, or 200 pages – we are experiencing a conceptual whole, whether that whole is a story or a thesis. If we were to duplicate the ideas presented on page 99 a further 199 times, we would not end up with the complete book – we would have something rather different.

Conspicuously absent from page 99 of my book is the writer James Joyce. Joyce was a contemporary of Ford Madox Ford, but I have no idea how he felt about Ford’s ‘page 99 test’. Let us give it a go with Joyce’s Ulysses (Gabler Edition). On page 99, we find what appear to be two newspaper articles, denoted by capitalised headlines. Are we to assume, from this, that Ulysses is just one long newspaper? In one sense, this is a fair summation – the book delivers news of various goings-on in and around Dublin on 16 June 1904. But, as my monograph demonstrates, these goings-on are not communicated via a single reporter; Joyce employs multiple perspectives and devices, all of the time conveying the experience of fully-embodied and enworlded conscious beings.

Visit Cleo Hanaway-Oakley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meryl Gordon's "Bunny Mellon"

Meryl Gordon is the author of the New York Times bestselling Mrs. Astor Regrets and Phantom of Fifth Avenue, a Wall Street Journal bestseller. She is an award-winning journalist and a regular contributor to Vanity Fair. She is on the graduate journalism faculty at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She is considered an expert on “elder abuse” and has appeared on NPR, CNN and other outlets whenever there is a high-profile case.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend, and reported the following:

On page 99 I write about Paul Mellon's marriage to his first wife, and there's foreshadowing that they are not the happiest of couples.

I think Ford Madox Ford's test is a great conceit but it is also so arbitrary. That page in my book is fine but there are other pages that I loved reporting and writing so much more.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Johann N. Neem's "Democracy's Schools"

Johann N. Neem is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a professor of history at Western Washington University. He is the author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts.

Neem applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with Hiram Orcutt’s memories of his student days in a New England district school under “incompetent” and “cheap teachers.” Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was a bit more generous. Although teachers relied on “birchen arguments” (the stick), Whittier acknowledged that they at least helped children learn “the mysteries / of those weary A B Cs.”

Antebellum education reformers wanted to transform teaching. They sought teachers who appealed to students’ innate curiosity rather than relying on the external force of “birchen arguments.” Advocates of a more democratic pedagogy, reformers believed that students should learn to think for themselves, not just obey fearful teachers. Page 99 thus opens with critical depictions of antebellum teachers. I appreciate reformers’ hope that great teachers would make classrooms places where children felt alive.
Yet I did not want to limit myself to elite reformers’ perspectives. My goal was also to understand the experience of teachers and students on their own terms. I read teachers’ and students’ diaries, and empathized with their struggles. One schoolmaster was overwhelmed by his one-room classroom. He could not get the kids to cooperate. By late January, he “almost gave up to sobs and tears.” One morning, after starting the fire, he looked around at his charges, walked out, picked up his paycheck, and left. He cared but he just couldn’t do it anymore. As a teacher, I get it.

And students too struggled. While I admit to being inspired by reformers’ dreams, students spent long days in school when they wanted to be elsewhere. Despite education reformers’ hopes, students in their diaries rarely described their time in school as exciting and intellectually stimulating. Instead, they did what their parents and teachers asked, but looked forward to recess and snowball fights. I sympathized with them too.

Ultimately, I wanted to depict how complicated a space classrooms were/are. They are filled with real people with their own dispositions and aspirations. Since the 1960s, some scholars on the left and right have portrayed schools as if they were total institutions capable of “social control.” While schools mattered greatly, teachers struggled to keep their students’ attention, and students struggled to pay attention. Parents, policy makers, and educators sent teachers and students mixed messages. Far from total institutions, public schools competed with all the world’s distractions while trying to cultivate a fragile space where students might learn and grow.

Learn more about Democracy's Schools at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Zheutlin's "Rescued"

Peter Zheutlin is the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride and Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway, a New York Times best seller.

Zheutlin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rescued: What Second Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living With Purpose, Loving With Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In the morning Albie hobbled to the top of the stairway. He was shaking and absolutely refused to come down the stairs… Never since he’d been with us had I seen him in so much pain and, it seemed to me, confused by what he was enduring. As I hugged him and tried to reassure him, I felt tears well up inside me. My empathy for Albie was total. His pain became my own. I could only hope that even if my words made no literal sense to him my closeness, my tone, and my feeling for him would somehow pass directly across the language barrier and into his brain, that he would somehow take comfort in my compassion for him.

Albie was our first rescue dog, a yellow Lab mix, who had been found wandering alone and frightened on a road in rural Deville, Louisiana. He spent five months in a high-kill shelter before joining our family in Massachusetts in 2012.

A couple of years ago while running on the beach he suddenly pulled up lame and was in obvious pain. Though we took him to the vet that day – I carried all eighty pounds of him down the stairs and to the car – it took a few weeks to learn that he was suffering from advanced arthritis though he was still only about four years-old.

If you asked me what Rescued is about and gave me only one word to describe, the word would be “compassion.” So, in this case the page 99 test is 100% accurate.

There are millions of dogs in the U.S. and the Caribbean suffering on the streets or languishing (and dying) in cold, concrete shelters. These dogs just need a second chance at life and a family to call their own. Give them that and the overwhelmingly majority will repay your love a hundred times over.

It took my wife more than 20 years to persuade me to get a dog and when we did we went the rescue route. Rescued is partly about our life with our three rescue dogs, and the lives of many others who have opened their hearts and homes to a second-chance dog. And it’s about the life lessons and emotional rewards of sharing your life with a dog that once was lost but now is found.

Visit Peter Zheutlin's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Peter Zheutlin & Albie.

Writers Read: Peter Zheutlin.

Coffee with a Canine: Peter Zheutlin & Jamba.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Demshuk's "Demolition on Karl Marx Square"

Andrew Demshuk is Assistant Professor of History at American University. His publications include The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory (2012).

Demshuk applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People's State in 1968, and reported the following:

“Cultural historical assets will obviously be kept in mind,” regional communist party boss Paul Fröhlich assured the Leipzig university senate in January 1964. This quote from page 99 of Demolition on Karl Marx Square encapsulates the deceitful rhetoric by which a diverse host of leaders pushed forth their imperative to remake this major East German city’s central Karl Marx Square into a modern campus. Fröhlich was lying when he related the “‘well known’ statistic” to his eminent audience of administrators and academics “‘that the city center was up to about 90% destroyed.’” Any of them could see for themselves that, beside the partially intact and in-use historicist masterpiece of the university’s storied main complex, the fifteenth-century Gothic University Church stood fully intact as a constant venue for concerts, lectures, and multi-confessional services. By demolishing this cherished landmark in 1968, reigning authorities proved their flagrant disregard for an engaged populace that had campaigned for years to preserve what it upheld as one of the city’s dearest “cultural historical assets.”

Page 99 thus offers a snapshot from the steady divergence in regime and public perspectives this book illustrates through a wide array of archival sources. After first unveiling the notion of a purely modern square in 1960, authorities already sought to level the church in 1964 to make way for socialist modernity. Overwhelming public concern expressed in letters and (as page 99 also reveals) active protest from the East German General Conservator and even Cultural Minister helped to stay the dynamite for four years. But then at last, even pitched letter-writing and civil disobedience failed to prevent the destruction of this urban icon in front of stunned crowds on May 30, 1968. Just weeks before the crackdown on Prague Spring, Leipzigers learned that their voices did not matter under real existing socialism. After such a profound gesture of high-level indifference, even hostility to their pleas, they gave upon on “working with” their leaders to build a socialist tomorrow.

Learn more about Demolition on Karl Marx Square at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Lost German East.

--Marshal Zeringue