Darius Ornston's "Good Governance Gone Bad"

Darius Ornston is Assistant Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, where he specializes in comparative political economy and innovation policy. He is the author of When Small States Make Big Leaps.

Ornston applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess, and reported the following:

By describing the startup scene in Finland, page 99 poses a puzzle: Why has Finland (and Sweden) emerged as a center for technology-based entrepreneurship, rivaling Silicon Valley in the (per capita adjusted) creation of billion dollar companies? In sharp contrast to Silicon Valley, postwar economic history was dominated by large, established companies. Even during the 1980s and 1990s, when Finland (and Sweden) pivoted from forestry and heavy industry to information technology, restructuring was driven by century-old conglomerates such as Nokia (and Ericsson) rather than new enterprises.

The startup boom not only illustrates the enduring ability of the Nordic countries to reinvent themselves, but it also speaks to the underlying mechanisms behind this dynamism. Like the main case studies, the rise of heavy industry in postwar Sweden, Finland’s movement into mobile communications, and the financialization of Iceland, restructuring was not imposed by the state, but rather reflected the rapid diffusion of new business models within tight-knit social circles. In Finland, motivated students, inspired by a handful of high-profile successes such as Rovio and Supercell, used bottom-up initiatives such as the Aalto Entrepreneurial Society and the Slush conference, to capture the imagination of policymakers and institutional investors and transform Finnish society.

Page 99 misleads in one sense, though. In highlighting the success of these young entrepreneurs and the dynamism of the Nordic region, it obscures how these dense networks get societies into trouble. For example, the Nordic startup scene is currently supported by low interest rates and abundant risk capital. While more sustainable than the short-lived dot com boom of the past, it is unclear how it would weather a shift in financial markets. This is a recurring theme in the region. As my book title suggests, adaptability is an asset, but the rapid mobilization of resources around new business models can also lead to policy overshooting, overinvestment, and deep economic crises. If this darker and more vulnerable side of the Nordic model interests you, I encourage you to read further.

Learn more about Good Governance Gone Bad at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary R. Bunt's "Hashtag Islam"

Gary R. Bunt is professor of Islamic studies at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Hashtag Islam is actually the first page of chapter 5, entitled "Smartphone Jihad". This introduces the section of the book about so-called electronic jihad (e-jihad), and discusses issues associated with concepts of jihad, and the way in which the term has been interpreted and misinterpreted over time. The chapter distinguishes between the militaristic ‘lesser jihad’, and contrasts this with the spiritual and religious striving associated with the ‘greater jihad’. The chapter goes on to discuss the ways in which e-jihad has been articulated by al-Qaeda within diverse contexts, utilising a variety of media forms. A subsequent chapter then looks at the way in which so-called 'Islamic State' drew on e-jihad principles as part of its strategy to mobilise, recruit, finance and attempt to justify its activities to diverse audiences in Muslim and other contexts. While the latter part of the book looks at jihad, this can be contrasted with the earlier section (and majority) of the book, which looks extensively at ideas of religious authority within diverse religious and cultural contexts, and the ways in which these have been expressed online through social media, apps, websites, magazines and other online frameworks.

Hashtag Islam is framed within what I define as 'cyber-Islamic environments', an umbrella term relating to diverse forms of Muslim online expression. Ideas of spirituality and religious identity have been articulated through a variety of digital channels, and have been incredibly influential in terms of shaping how Muslims relate to religious authorities and practices to fulfil spiritual, mystical and legalistic agendas. Muslims are increasingly turning to cyberspace for advice on a variety of important religious questions, and cyber-Islamic environments have challenged traditional modes of authority. This is led to the rise of digitally literate religious scholars and authorities whose influence and impact goes beyond traditional boundaries of imams, mullahs, and shaykhs. Page 99 of Hashtag Islam represents a central discussion on a significant theme associated with Islam and cyberspace, but it is not the dominant conversation for the majority of Muslims online, given the enormous amount of online material on other aspects of religious interpretation and identity.

Learn more about Hashtag Islam at the publishers website, Gary Bunt's Virtually Islamic research website and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne E. Parsons's "From Asylum to Prison"

Anne Parsons is an Assistant Professor and Director of Public History in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945, and reported the following:

In 1976, Acel Moore and Wendell Rawls Jr., two Philadelphia Inquirer reporters, won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the rampant corruption at the Farview State Hospital near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Page 99 of my book discusses how Moore and Rawls “reported that the institution covered up the violence [there] such as when the staff wrote off a murder as a heart attack.” To Moore, “the fact that the staff was predominantly white while so many people were black made the situation particularly dangerous.” Moore and Rawls’s series of articles led activists to call for the closure of Farview, which the state eventually did.

The campaign to shutter Farview occurred at the very moment that states around the country decreased the size of their mental hospitals, a process called deinstitutionalization. From Asylum to Prison focuses on Pennsylvania as its case study and traces how activism, changes in psychiatry, and new mental health laws coalesced to dramatically shrink mental hospitals in the United States. Not only was deinstitutionalization about mental health, however; it was also about “race, class, and caring about people whom society had discarded.”

From Asylum to Prison charts how at the very moment that mental hospitals like Farview came under fire, the rates of incarceration in the United States began to rise because of harsher sentencing laws, the criminalization of drugs, and the growth of community policing. The expanding criminal legal system absorbed many functions of the diminishing mental hospital system. In this context, Farview closed as a hospital and re-opened as a prison that served people with mental health conditions. Deinstitutionalization had not brought about the system of equitable care that activists and policymakers had envisioned. Instead, mental health became increasingly criminalized and states put their money into police and prisons rather than psychiatric care and social welfare.

Page 99 is particularly important in the book because it reminds us of the power of people to make change. Moore and Rawls pierced the veil of Farview in 1976 and brought to light the ways that institutions dehumanized and mistreated people. Today, as we face a crisis of mass imprisonment, they offer a model of how to shine a light on the ways that people with mental health conditions remain out of sight and out of mind. The book offers us this lesson and a number of others to help address mass incarceration today.

Learn more about From Asylum to Prison at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ted Powell's "King Edward VIII: An American Life"

Ted Powell spent the early part of his career as Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Downing College, Cambridge. Later he qualified as a solicitor, and spent many years as a partner of national law firm Mills & Reeve. He is now a full-time writer and lecturer, and lives in Cambridge.

Powell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, King Edward VIII: An American Life, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford was not wrong. Page ninety-nine captures an important moment in Edward VIII’s American life. It finds him, as Prince of Wales, crossing the Atlantic aboard the Cunard liner SS Berengaria in the summer of 1924 for a vacation in the USA and Canada. Edward had already visited the USA twice before: once on an official trip in 1919 at the end of a tour of Canada, and again in 1920, when the battleship HMS Renown, taking the Prince to Australia, stopped off to refuel in the Panama Canal Zone, San Diego California and Hawaii. On a holiday trip it was inappropriate for the Prince to make use of a Royal Navy battleship, as he did on his official tours. Instead Edward and his entourage booked a scheduled passage. As soon as the Prince’s reservations were announced there was a frantic scramble for tickets on the same crossing. Cunard’s office in London was besieged by American tourists trying to secure tickets for the homeward trip aboard the Berengaria.

Here is a paragraph from page 99:

The Berengaria sailed on 23 August, “filled with women and marriageable daughters”, and with a sizeable contingent of American reporters. Cunard provided the Prince and his staff with a large suite of rooms, and it would have been easy for Edward to stay in seclusion for the whole of the six-day voyage to New York. But he was in holiday mood, and eager for diversion. He threw himself into life on board, taking walks on deck and appearing frequently in the public rooms. He took his meals in the first class dining room, and characteristically rejected the high table in favour of an inconspicuous side table. There were other friends on board, including Lord Louis Mountbatten and the politician Duff Cooper and his wife Lady Diana Cooper. They became his main companions on the voyage, walking, chatting, and listening to jazz records on his portable gramophone. Mountbatten organized a tug-o’-war team from amongst the Prince’s staff, but it was soundly beaten by a beefy squad of American college boys. Duff Cooper, who took part, recorded in his diary that the Americans pulled them over so easily that they thought the rope must have broken. Edward was no more successful in the individual sports, losing to another American in the pillow-fight and suffering disqualification in the potato race. His run of bad form continued when he was awarded the booby prize in the fancy dress contest for his Apache dancer costume.

The voyage on the Berengaria saw the Prince in a relaxed holiday mood. It was the prelude to a wildly enjoyable American vacation for Edward, during which his reputation as the party-loving playboy Prince was truly sealed. There was no shortage of entertainment – the elite of Long Island’s ‘Gold Coast’ fought for the honour of inviting him to their mansions. He regularly attended several parties in one night, prompting headlines in the US Press such as ‘Prince Gets In With The Milkman’. He even found time for a whirlwind holiday romance with a Hollywood star, the silent movie actress Pinna Nesbit Cruger.

The summer of 1924 was a crucial stage in the development of Edward’s deep cultural and personal affinity with all things American. In America he caught a tantalising taste of a life of freedom, opportunity and modernity which was denied to him by the accident of his birth. As he wrote in his memoirs, “America meant to me a country in which nothing is impossible”. By contrast, Britain was a place where many things were impossible for Edward VIII not least his wish to marry the woman he loved. His encounter with America was one of the formative experiences of his life, shaped his destiny and ultimately led to his Abdication.

Learn more about King Edward VIII at the Oxford University Press website and follow Ted Powell on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece's "The Optical Vacuum"

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Optical Vacuum contains something uncharacteristic of my typical verbosity: besides three lines of text, a footnote, and a caption, over ¾ of the page is taken up by an illustration republished from the June 1952 issue of International Projectionist. The advertisement is for Ben Schlanger and William Hoffberg’s RCA Synchro-Screen, “the perfect stage setting for motion pictures,” which promised a softer projection image, enhanced beauty and realism, the illusion of a bigger picture, and the elimination of eye strain and fatigue. That’s a tall order for a piece of equipment – but those kinds of misplaced, even bizarre hopes were common in American film exhibition at midcentury. What they tell us expands past the boundaries of the screen into a story of how theatrical architecture, Hollywood and the industry, patterns of American transportation, and even the ways in which we understand citizenship bind together via one of our favorite pastimes: going to the movies.

While most of the Synchro-Screen’s professed appeals are fascinating avenues for considering changes in movie theater design, the spectrum of comfort and pain was an obsession for Schlanger and other industry professionals. The balance between the two – a spectator who is neither so uncomfortable that she blames the movies nor so at rest that she falls asleep – was a sweet spot for midcentury exhibitors, who sought to construct a perfect setting for a perfect stilled viewer. And it’s this combination of utopian thinking, hubris, and futility that I find so intriguing in twentieth-century movie theater designs.

Ben Schlanger, a New York-based architect, designer, and writer, worked on modernized movie theaters from the mid-1920s until his death in 1971. He was witness to and instigator of massive changes in the industry, from the ornamented movie palace to the streamlined “neutralized” theater, and urged a new relationship between spectator and screen that could be delivered by minimal and directional design. One of his (countless) fixations was seating and its relationship to viewing. For Schlanger, all spectators should have an unblocked image of the screen requiring minimal head movement, while chairs should maintain postural alignment and immobility. If a proper bodily balance could be struck, then viewers might achieve a great cinematic…. something.

We’ll never know what that something might be, of course, because Schlanger’s ideal spectator never really existed. Like many great modernists, Schlanger placed an impossible burden on technological design and discounted audiences’ heterogeneity. But his continual efforts to construct a transcendental subject via space and screen are a mesmerizing decades-long narrative of effort and failure that has silently shaped our contemporary relationship to film. Such a dream of relaxing the body to release the mind is, to me, an illustration of the historical limits of transcendence, and a story of the American romance with the movies that tells us about where we came from as well as who we are now.

Learn more about The Optical Vacuum at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Heidler & Jeanne Heidler's "The Rise of Andrew Jackson"

David S. Heidler is an author and retired professor. Jeanne T. Heidler is professor emerita of history at the United States Air Force Academy. They have collaborated on numerous books, including the critically acclaimed Henry Clay: The Essential American and the award-winning Washington’s Circle: The Creation of the President.

The Heidlers applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics provides an overview of Jackson's 1818 invasion of Spanish Florida. While the event forms part of the background in the discussion of Jackson’s political viability, in a way, it defines an important facet of Jackson's quest for the presidency. A strange circumstance that recurs throughout the book is that of negatives — events that would have sunk any other candidate at any other time — becoming positives that burnish Jackson’s luster rather than tarnishing his reputation. His Florida foray was unconstitutional (he made war on a foreign power without congressional authorization) and could have been diplomatically disastrous, but the political establishment confronted in Jackson a man of enormous popularity and decided to let the matter pass. Meanwhile, those who did criticize Jackson came off as quibbling ankle biters and were a stark contrast in the public’s perception of Jackson as a man of action and an unabashed patriot. Widespread approval of Jackson’s invasion of Florida went far in convincing important political operatives that his national appeal was durable, and that realization urged on their redoubled and persistent efforts to put him in the White House, a goal finally achieved in 1828.

Learn more about the book and authors at David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Rise of Andrew Jackson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zachary J. Lechner's "The South of the Mind"

Zachary J. Lechner is a historian of post-World War II southern and US history. He is an assistant professor of history at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980, and reported the following:

My book investigates Americans’ fantasies about the white South during a particularly tumultuous time in US history: the 1960s and the 1970s. Even during the civil rights era, as news media accounts and nonfiction travelogues like John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley pilloried white southerners as distinctively un-American due to their backwardness and racial bigotry, alternative visions of the white South proliferated in popular and political culture. Such views often presented the white South not as an albatross that the rest of the country must claw from its neck, but, rather, as the possessor of lost values that non-southerners desperately needed to embrace.

One of the most fascinating of these positive imaginings, which I dub the Masculine South, appeared in the presidential campaign rhetoric of George Wallace in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the motion picture Walking Tall (1973), and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) and its 1972 film adaptation. The Masculine South addressed palpable concerns about the state of American manhood in the late sixties and early seventies, as the counterculture, the New Left, and women’s liberationists undermined societal gender norms. The Masculine South, then, functioned as a backlash against these challenges, appealing instead to the ideal of manly exertion. The mantra of the Masculine South could have been “When in doubt, kick ass,” a line overheard by rock critic Lester Bangs in a Macon, Georgia, bar in 1974.

Page 99 of The South of the Mind begins by noting how a failed assassination attempt on George Wallace in 1972, one that left him paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, made his “go-to presentation of himself as a virile man, willing to use violence to rescue white society . . . no longer tenable.” But I also argue that Wallace’s message of redemptive violence—deployed, in part, as a way to shore up what he perceived as the nation’s flagging masculinity—seeped into the era’s pop culture, mostly notably, in Walking Tall. The production, made on the cheap, nevertheless thrilled audiences on the drive-in circuit and elsewhere, with its “based on a true story” rendering of the life of Buford T. Pusser, a sheriff in 1960s McNairy County, Tennessee. The movie glorifies the former wrestler as a vigilante with a badge, who “wields an oversized hickory stick that he uses to beat on bootleggers and other lowlifes.” The Pusser character is essentially Wallace’s dream of state-sponsored violence come to life, in the form of a hulking, bear of a southern white man. The lame cries of effete federal officials, who might prattle on about an offender’s civil rights or the social conditions that could have caused him to pursue a life of crime, were silenced by the sharp crack of Pusser’s mighty club. In short, Walking Tall’s “rendering of the politics of violence in the rural South and the coverage it received in the national press reinforced the popular tendency to identify the region as a uniquely antimodern space where the use of force against unruly elements fortified the vitality supposedly necessary to ensure social control” in a nation that seemed to be falling apart.

Learn more about The South of the Mind at the University of Georgia Press website.

Writers Read: Zachary J. Lechner.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Beal's "The Book of Revelation"

Timothy Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University. His many books include The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book and Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know.

Beal applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Book of Revelation: A Biography, and reported the following:

Page 99 has me deep within the "forests of histories" envisioned by a medieval Italian monk known as Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Much as Ford Madox Ford believed that the whole of a book is revealed in one of its pages, so Joachim believed that the whole of sacred history is revealed in one of the Bible's books, Revelation.

A saint to some and a heretic to others, Joachim was a "picture thinker" whose thick descriptions of his visions were often accompanied by lavish illustrations (see examples from his Book of Figures here).

For Joachim, history was not only linear, moving in one direction from beginning to end; it was also spatial, a landscape of interrelated patterns in which beginnings, middles, and ends interacted with and folded onto one another. Revelation, with its wild descriptions of angels, gods, and monsters was for him the interpretive key to understanding these interrelated forests of histories, a kaleidoscopic lens through which to see God's plan for creation. What Joachim believed he saw was that he was standing at the very edge of the world, moments before its ultimate consummation and rebirth. The end/beginning was near.

In my book I suggest that, for Joachim, Revelation was something like a medieval codec. The first modern-day codecs were hardware devices like CD recorders that encoded analog data into digital form for storage and decoded that data back into analog for users to access (the term itself is a portmanteau of the words “code” and “decode”). Later the term was adopted for computer programs like Quicktime and MPEG. In Joachim’s hands, Revelation works similarly, as a kind of machine for encoding and decoding information about the past, present, and future. Those with eyes to see could discover that information encoded and stored within it, and then watch as it decoded itself into the full meaning of the entirety of sacred history.

My book is about the many different lives of Revelation. Some are fascinating; others are incredibly disturbing. Joachim of Fiore gave Revelation a new lease on life, as the means to seeing and understanding, well, everything. His influence to this day on the visual culture of Revelation is undeniable (run an image search for "revelation" and "diagram" or "chart" for some examples). Yet none of Joachim's theological heirs live up to the stunningly rich intellectual and aesthetic elegance, symmetry, and complexity of his writings and illustrations.

Visit Timothy Beal's website.

Learn more about The Book of Revelation at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregg L. Frazer's "God Against the Revolution"

Gregg L. Frazer is professor of history and political studies and Dean of the School of Humanities at The Master’s University. He is the author of The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution.

Frazer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, God Against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy's Case against the American Revolution, and reported the following:

God Against the Revolution is a study of the arguments made by prominent clergymen who remained loyal to Great Britain during the American Revolution. Those arguments had a significant influence in some parts of America until the revolutionaries or “Patriots” mounted a very successful campaign to silence their opposition and suppress their message. Their case has largely been unknown since then because the victors write the history.

God Against the Revolution relies heavily on the actual words and phrasing of the pamphlets and sermons of the Loyalist ministers. Ideally, the reader can assume the role of a typical American in 1776-1783, set aside hindsight, and decide whether or not to support the American Revolution based on the evidence available at the time. The contest of ideas that was cut short by Patriot censorship resumes two hundred years later; and, as Mark Noll notes on the book jacket, the Loyalists receive “the hearing they were for the most part denied two centuries ago.”

There is a sense in which page 99 is noteworthy. One might wonder why this study centers on the work of clergymen. The five clergymen highlighted here are generally recognized as leading spokesmen for the Loyalist cause (along with a lawyer or two), but previous surveys have omitted the biblical arguments against revolution in general and this revolution in particular that many found compelling. Page 99 marks a sort of demarcation between the biblical and theoretical arguments of those ministers and their “facts on the ground” arguments. Specifically, page 99 is the first page of the chapter on legal arguments. From this point on, the emphasis is on British law, the relationship between the colonies and the mother country, the colonial charters, and the actions taken by the Patriots.

In eighteenth-century America, clergymen were leaders of their communities, well-educated and respected scholars, and public opinion pacesetters. They were equipped to address issues from a broad-ranging perspective and effective at doing so. Had they been allowed to compete in the battle of ideas, the American Revolution might well have failed to materialize.

The question for the reader is: do they persuade you?

Learn more about God Against the Revolution at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott J. Gorn's "Let the People See"

Elliott J. Gorn is Joseph A. Gagliano Chair in American Urban History at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of several books, including Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One.

Gorn applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till, defense attorney Sidney Carlton questions Moses Wright, trying to shake his testimony.

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came down to the Mississippi Delta from Chicago to spend time with his extended family in August, 1955. At a crossroads store in the town of Money, he whistled at the young woman behind the counter. A few days later, her husband and his brother—Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam—kidnapped Till, beat him until his skull cracked and his eye popped out of its socket, shot him in the head, weighted his body down, and threw it in the Tallahatchie River.

Less than a month later, to everyone’s surprise, including their own, the brothers were tried for murder. Called to the witness stand and asked to identify the men who forced their way into his home and kidnapped Emmett Till at gunpoint, Moses Wright, a sharecropper and preacher, respected throughout his community, rose, pointed to each of his nephew’s abductors, and said twice in a loud clear voice, “there he is.” The all white jury sat dead silent.

No one could remember when if ever in Mississippi, white men stood trial for murdering an African American. And certainly a black man rising from the witness stand and identifying white criminals was unheard of. Renowned New York City journalist Murray Kempton covered the Mississippi trial, and he concluded that Moses Wright, unbowed, had just endured, “the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States.”

Wright’s testimony did not matter. The all-white, all-male jury took an hour to find the brothers innocent (for a few thousand dollars, they confessed to Look magazine four months later). But news of the verdict spread, made headlines across America and around the world. The “Emmett Till generation” of black activists carried his memory into the coming Civil Rights struggles. And in our own day, the story of Emmett Till is better known than at any time since 1955, an exemplum of white supremacist brutality, of the failures of the criminal justice system, but also of the hope that racism is exposed, named, called-out and resisted.

Learn more about Let the People See at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fernando Santos-Granero's "Slavery and Utopia"

Fernando Santos-Granero is a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, Panama, and a specialist on the Yanesha of Peruvian Amazonia. His books include Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life.

Santos-Granero applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Slavery and Utopia: The Wars and Dreams of an Amazonian World Transformer, and reported the following:

I was not sure whether Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test would apply to a scholarly historical work like Slavery & Utopia. But when, for fun’s sake, I tried it, I found that page 99 indeed contained what I consider the crux of the story of José Carlos Amaringo Chico, aka Tasorentsi, the indigenous shaman-chief, whose followers hailed as a divine messenger and world transformer after the collapse of the Amazonian rubber economy in the 1910s. In that page, I discuss one of the central elements of Tasorentsi’s first reported speech to his Ashaninka followers. The message was short and uncompromising: “expel white people from their properties, burn their bones, and seize their children as servants”. For years, throughout the rubber boom era, white and mestizo extractors had been capturing indigenous children and young women to raise as concubines and future “civilized” servants. Slavers violently extricated hundreds of children from their families every year and sent them far away to rubber camps and riverine towns to serve their new masters. This human traffic was conducted mostly by the wealthiest rubber extractors, but also by their local partners, indigenous warriors who raided their own people for their own benefit. It also involved river merchants, ship owners, and even corrupt local authorities. Constant slave raids were a permanent drain on indigenous populations, for raiders not only abducted women and children but also killed all adult men who opposed them. Armed with rifles against bows and arrows, slavers usually won. In page 99, I argue that this system subsisted through much of the rubber boom era because the loss of children and women was somewhat compensated by the wealth in industrial goods obtained by working for rubber extractors. When the rubber economy collapsed, in 1910, and rubber extractors could no longer pay their peons, the system was revealed in all its crudeness. Chief Tasorentsi’s call to seize the white people’s children as servants must be seen as an attempt to recover the vitality stolen by rubber extractors and slavers in previous years. This is Slavery and Utopia’s leitmotif, to wit, Tasorentsi’s permanent struggle through different means –warfare, shamanic rituals and Christian preaching– to redress the unbalanced flowed of vitality between white and native Amazonian people.

Learn more about Slavery and Utopia at the University of Texas Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Slavery and Utopia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Braddick's "The Common Freedom of the People"

Michael Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, and has held academic positions and visiting Fellowships in the USA, France, and Germany. He has published widely on the social, political, and economic history of British and American society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His books include The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution and God's Fury, England's Fire.

Braddick applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution, and reported the following:

“It was easy to believe this was scant reward for his sufferings”.

On page 99 we find Lilburne in prison in Newgate, while a London congregation prays for him, a petition is mobilised on his behalf on the streets and in the taverns, and fellow travellers write pamphlets in support of his cause. It is his fifth imprisonment of the year, all of them imposed for what he has published rather than anything he has actually done. It is the parliamentary regime which does this, although Lilburne is supposedly on their side in the civil war being fought against the King. In fact, until the previous year, he had been active in the parliamentary army, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He is released from Newgate in October, after three months, without any charge having been laid against him.

Five years earlier parliament had granted him compensation and reparations for his sufferings under Charles I—sufferings that epitomised the misgovernment that eventually led parliament to war against the King. Lilburne had gone to war without hesitation and fought bravely. Now though he finds he still has no reparations (and is in fact owed further arrears of pay and damages for his military service), and that the parliamentary regime is seemingly as ready to lock him up as Charles I had been. In fact, it uses some of the same legal officers to do it.

This is his Animal Farm moment—the realisation that the parliamentary pigs are just as capable of tyranny as the royalist humans had been. He now sees that the war is not really between King and Parliament, but between the people and tyranny. A radical new politics is about to be born, supported by citizen mobilisation in the churches, taverns, streets and presses of revolutionary London. Arguments will be made that resonate far beyond the politics of England in the 1640s.

Learn more about The Common Freedom of the People at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Common Freedom of the People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Pollin-Galay's "Ecologies of Witnessing"

Hannah Pollin-Galay is senior lecturer in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches on Yiddish, oral narrative, and memory.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The witness goes on to tell that his grandfather, a representative of an even older generation, also supports his leap: “And my grandfather got involved and said that when I’m in Israel I should remember that [his] son is there, your uncle.” Next and last, Kalman’s father helps him execute the escape.

Then my father, quietly, in his calm manner, said, “Yes. Come, I’ll lift you up.” I tried to pack myself in like my cousin with my head first. This I remember very well. He said, “No, Kalmanke, not with your head, with your legs.” Today, I understand that…He lifted up my legs and at the moment I looked around. I wanted to get support. Nobody cried. A kiss or a hug or something? I don’t know what I was expecting.

Kalman’s father gives him the proper physical instructions that allow him to survive the jump, showing the kind of bodily aptitude so valued in the Zionist ethos. He gives Kalman permission to both literally and figuratively leave the family and move on. The family resists embracing Kalman at this moment, redefining filial love as calm, tactical support.

Kalman’s daring leap from the window closely fits one version of Zionist historical progress: a transfer of agency from older Eastern European Jewish society, which is sadly going to the extermination camp, to the young and the brave who are going to remake Jewish society in Eretz Yisrael. Most important to our discussion here is the manner in which Kalman uses family relations to dramatize the march of history and conversely, employs broader ideological frameworks to remember his intimate family. It is precisely the kind of parental love that Kalman receives that allows him to make his escape successful. Likewise, his family’s supportive behavior demonstrates the integrity in his survival and aliyah to Israel, proof that this shift, no matter how drastic, is nonetheless in confluence with the Jewish past.

This moment marks a clear transition in Kalman’s testimony. After this scene, he ceases to remember himself as a member of the previous polity, the “we” that includes the ghetto, the family, and his school friends, and begins to speak of an independent struggle for survival.

Page 99 of Ecologies of Witnessing presses on several tough questions: What is the connection between the experience of Holocaust victimhood and Zionism? What is the connection between politics and personal emotions?

Here, Israeli Hebrew-speaking Holocaust survivor Kalman Perk recollects the last moment he ever spent with his family. The Perks are in a cattle car, among the last Jews to be expelled from their beloved hometown of Kovna, Lithuania. Though they are unaware at the time, they are on their way to Dachau. Perk is the only one in the car who manages to jump out of a high, narrow window. As Perk recalls it, jumping out the window not only meant saying goodbye to his dearest ones, but starting Jewish history all over again.

Perk depicts his jump in way that is both monumental and intimate: The political and the familial are inseparable for him. As a last show of love, his family instructs him in the proper jumping technique and tells him whom to greet when he arrives in Palestine. Clearly, this story tightly correlates with a Zionist approach to history. But, this framework is completely spontaneous and necessary for Perk; He cannot remember without it.

Other parts of the book show how survivors from different places recall parallel moments of family separation with different lessons in mind. Yiddish speakers who stayed in Lithuania, for instance, speak more about maintaining a low profile in order to survive. Rather than narrating heroic leaps, solo journeys into the unknown, they focus on the distant relatives or neighbors who adopt them. Their stories are about reintegration, rather than reinvention.

We are accustomed to talking about memory “constructs,” as if they are purposeful distortions. This book does not. No witness is whitewashing or distorting her past; She is making honest use of the normative and conceptual resources in her ecology.

Interestingly, some lecture audiences have understood this passage about Kalman Perk to be a harsh critique of Zionist historical imagination, while others see it as a vindication of the same. Many audience members have trouble locating this page on their ideological spectrum. That is precisely the uncomfortable space that I want people to enter when they read this page, and when they read this book. The stories should pull readers so deeply into the logic of each ecology of memory, that they cannot help but suspend their typical modes of judgement.

Learn more about Ecologies of Witnessing at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Darryl Jones's "Sleeping with the Lights On"

Darryl Jones is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and popular fiction. His books include Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film, the Oxford World's Classics editions of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories, and Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson.

Jones applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror, and reported the following:

What’s happening on page 99? This page is towards the end of a chapter entitled ‘Horror and the Body’, and it’s part of a discussion of the very troubling post-millennial subgenre known as ‘torture porn’, exemplified by films such as Martyrs, The Human Centipede, Hostel, or Funny Games. Throughout the book, I’m concerned with defending horror against the generally ill-informed reactions of those who do not understand it, or who fear it, who think it is a dangerous genre because they believe that a tendency to watch violent acts leads inexorably to a tendency to commit violent acts. ‘The history of horror is also the history of outraged responses to horror’, I suggest. Torture porn, I think, comes closest to realizing the fears of censors and moral majoritarians that horror is simply empty sadism.

More specifically, page 99 begins by contextualizing torture porn within the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’, in a post-millennial culture of the normalization of torture, taking in, for example, photographs of abused prisoners from Abu Ghraib, the continuing extrajudicial use of Guantanamo Bay, media discussions about the ethics and utility of waterboarding, and the popularity of counter-terrorist entertainment thrillers such as 24. I initially thought 24 was a superbly-made series, with a brilliant real-time conceit, and a revelatory central performance by Kiefer Sutherland. But at some point I just stopped watching, as Jack Bauer increasingly relied on torture as a first resort, to be used immediately on whoever got in his way, including members of his own family. This struck me as deranged.

The page closes with a meditation on pain and the human body. Studies by, for example, Bob Brecher or Shane O’Mara have demonstrated that arguments for torture are philosophically empty, and that torture has no efficacy as a means of information gathering. But that’s not the point. The point is to demonstrate that the torturer has no moral limits, and thus to spread fear. The page closes with these words, which sum things up for me:

Our pain is inexpressible. Having no straightforward linguistic object, it lies beyond the limits of language, articulable only through imprecise similes (it is like burning, it is like torture, it is like death, it is worse than death), or else non-verbally (we scream, we howl, we cry). In our pain, we are uniquely alone and vulnerable. To exploit this vulnerability, knowingly to inflict extreme pain on others, is to place oneself beyond the boundaries of humanity.

Learn more about Sleeping with the Lights On at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eiko Maruko Siniawer's "Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan"

Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Professor of History at Williams College, specializes in the history of modern Japan. Her first book (Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists) examines issues of political violence and democracy through a focus on violence specialists, or the professionally violent. The book explores the ways in which ruffianism became embedded and institutionalized in the practice of modern Japanese politics and argues that for much of Japan’s modern history, political violence was so systemic and enduring that Japan can be considered a violent democracy.

Her new book, Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan, is about conceptions of waste and wastefulness in Japan from the 1940s through the present. By considering shifts in what was considered to be waste and wasteful (be it resources, time, or material objects), her work explores people’s struggles to find value, meaning, and happiness in a post-industrialist, capitalist, consumerist, and affluent Japan.

Siniawer applied the “Page 99 Test” to Waste and reported the following:

On page 99 of Waste, we are thrust into the middle of a war. The combatants were the residents of two different wards in Tokyo that were at odds about who should be responsible for making garbage go away, for shouldering the burdens of waste disposal. At this point in the early 1970s, Kōtō ward decided that it no longer wanted to serve as the literal dumping ground for the rubbish produced by the more wealthy Suginami: “the confrontation between citizens of Kōtō and Suginami wards ... heightened the visibility of the garbage problem even as it was about who should be obliged to render garbage invisible. In late May 1973, when Kōtō again refused to accept garbage from a Suginami that had not yet agreed to house its own incinerator, people opened their newspapers and turned on their televisions to witness members of the Kōtō ward assembly in helmets, physically barring entrance to Landfill Number Fifteen. And for at least the few days when collection was suspended, denizens of Suginami ward encountered piles of garbage spreading across their sidewalks.” This conflict between Kōtō and Suginami wards was part of a larger Garbage War—a battle against “the sheer volume and unceasing accumulation of garbage” launched by Tokyo Governor Minobe Ryōkichi in 1971.

Captured on this page is a pivotal moment in the history of thinking about waste in postwar Japan. Through the Garbage War, rubbish came to be understood as a problem of postwar modernity, as a consequence not of civilizational inadequacy but of rapid economic growth and the recent achievement of relatively affluent, mass-consuming lifestyles. Sanitation experts began to view garbage as a product of civilizational excess and their industry as one of environmental protection. And for the residents of Tokyo, waste was rendered visible.

Yet there is much about the book that is not revealed by page 99. Waste is not centrally concerned with garbage so much as it is the idea of waste—about what was considered to be waste and to be wasteful in Japan from the mid-1940s to the present day. It considers waste in terms of stuff, money, possessions, resources, and time. Page 99 does hint at the ways in which ideas of waste shifted and how they were bound up with understandings of wealth, consumption, and environmentalism. But to read the book as a whole is to see more keenly the deep embeddedness of waste in the decisions, values, aspirations, and disappointments of everyday life in postwar Japan.

Learn more about Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue