James McHugh's "An Unholy Brew"

James McHugh studies the history and religions of early India, working with texts in Sanskrit and related languages. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2008, and is now Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His book Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture explored the significance of odors, perfumes, and aromatics in India.

McHugh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts half way through my translation of a short episode from a Buddhist text where some rogues are trying to get hold of money for buying a drink called surā, which is probably here some sort of grain-brewed drink, though not exactly like modern beer. They are waiting until a certain wealthy man passes by, hoping to tempt him to have some drugged surā-drink so they can steal his rings and robes, sell them, and buy more booze. But the canny rich man does not fall for it, of course. This is in a section of the book where I discuss what we can discover about common drinking houses, pubs as it were, in ancient India, and so on page 99 I also discuss whether people sat or stood – probably both – and whether there was a bar like in modern pubs – and there most likely was not. This is all based on quite rare, stray references in various texts from ancient India, many of which are rather stylized and moralizing so, of course, it is hard to know how much they tell us about how things actually were.

As for whether this passes the Page 99 Test, I think it does pretty well. The book as whole is extremely eclectic, almost an encyclopedia loosely connected by a narrative, but this gives a solid feel for one of the many diverse topics covered, and as such page 99 is quite representative of the whole. Also, I tend to focus a good bit on more practical matters such as recipes for drinks and the material culture of brewing, and that practical aspect of the book is very much in evidence here. The constant uncertainty of how we might relate textual artifice in the sources with social history is also a theme throughout the book. Are these texts just giving hyper-stylized accounts of drinks and drinking, relying on pure convention, or can we glimpse some of what really went on? At the very least we get a great sense of how certain groups of people chose to represent alcohol cultures.

Also, as in the rest of the book, we can see here the tension between moralizing tendencies and the touch of charming humor you find in many early Indian descriptions of drinking; the men with the devious plan here are most definitely said to be rogues from the Buddhist point of view, but the story is also entertaining. I am certain many a premodern hearer of this story might have identified more with the rogues. I know that in many such stories I by no means identify with the virtuous characters.

And finally, this page deals with drinks, drinking patterns, as well as religion—the translation is from a Buddhist text—and the book deals with all those aspects of alcohol (and other substances such as betel and cannabis) in ancient and medieval India.

Learn more about An Unholy Brew at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Guy MacLean Rogers's "For the Freedom of Zion"

Guy MacLean Rogers is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and History at Wellesley College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CE, and reported the following:

I am not sure whether the quality of my book For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66-74 CE, will be revealed to a reader who opens it up to page 99, but the subject will be. For on page 99 I begin to tell the story of the breakdown of relations between the Jews of Judaea and the Roman government in 44 CE, leading to the revolt of Jews against Romans that broke out in 66. From the time the Romans began to send governors out to Judaea in 6 CE, and then during the brief reign of the client king Agrippa I – the last Jewish King of Judaea – relations between the Romans and the Jews were volatile, but manageable for the most part.

After Agrippa’s death, when the Romans sent out new governors called procurators, a downward spiral began and ultimately led to the outbreak of fighting in 66. So on page 99 readers will begin to understand how and why the greatest revolt against Rome during the early Roman empire broke out. What they would not find on page 99 is much about the fighting during the war itself and its outcome, including the destruction of the Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem. To understand how and why the Jewish Temple was destroyed – spoiler alert here, I argue that the future Roman emperor Titus was indeed responsible for destroying the Temple, despite what the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus claimed – and why the Romans won the war of weapons, but the Jews have won the longer peace of words, readers would have to read on, and I hope that they do so. I suppose therefore that my book passes the Page 99 Test, though with a couple of authorial asterisks.

Learn more about For the Freedom of Zion at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman's "The New Female Antihero"

Sarah Hagelin is associate professor of English and director of women’s and gender studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television. Gillian Silverman is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television, and reported the following:

The first words on page 99 of The New Female Antihero concern the hysteric. Specifically, on this page we make the point that, in her emotional outbursts, Carrie Mathison of Homeland echoes the behaviors of the nineteenth-century hysterical woman. This woman represented “a rejection of traditional womanhood, insofar as her labile and erratic behavior meant that she couldn’t carry out her expected duties as selfless provider.” Something similar, we argue can be said about Carrie, whose bouts of mental instability are linked to her squalid apartment, her failure to get married, and her rejection of motherhood. While Carrie’s single state and less-than-pristine home are “logical consequences of long hours on a job important to national security, [her male colleagues] consistently treat them as signs of disordered gender.”

These page 99 claims are an apt representation of the book as a whole. The New Female Antihero examines four dramas—Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, Homeland—and four comedies—Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF—to make the case that the female protagonists of twenty-first century television are profoundly different from their predecessors. Earlier female-centered dramas like Cagney and Lacey and Ally McBeal, showcased women with strong moral compasses who were exceedingly good at their jobs. But in the antihero fare of the last ten years, women like Carrie Mathison engage in deeply unethical acts (killing innocents, sleeping with underaged men) and still find that the success they hope to gain eludes them. These women, we argue, reflect the victories and failures of liberal feminism. They are powerful figures deeply confident in their own abilities. And yet, one could hardly speak of theirs as feminist success stories given that they remain frustrated and mired in failure.

Having attempted and failed to achieve empowerment in the liberal feminist tradition—through striving, confidence, ambition, and physical strength—antiheroes like Carrie make room for the women of television comedy, who reject these values altogether (the subject of the second half of our book). Figures like Hannah Horvath of Girls, the broads of Broad City and Issa Dee of Insecure renounce aspirational goals, preferring to focus on indulgence and pleasure often in the company of female friends. Interestingly, page 99 contains a small commentary on this comedic figure. At the top of the page is an image of Anne Hathaway parodying Carrie Mathison for an episode of Saturday Night Live. It’s as if this page can already anticipate the direction the book is going: from women who strive and fail to women who stop striving and just make us laugh.

Learn more about The New Female Antihero at the University of Chicago Press website.

Marshal Zeringue

Michael W. Hankins's "Flying Camelot"

Michael W. Hankins is the Curator for US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps post-World War II Aviation at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. He is also an Assistant Editor of From Balloons to Drones, a scholarly web journal for the study of air power, and host of the From Balloons to Drones Podcast. He is a former Assistant Professor of Strategy at the USAF Air Command and Staff College eSchool of Graduate PME, and a former instructor of military history at the USAF Academy.

Hankins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Flying Camelot includes one of my favorite anecdotes from the book. One of the fiercest and most extreme advocates for a lightweight air-to-air fighter aircraft wrote a proposal of what his ideal plane would look like. The Navy not only rejected it but wrote a series of internal memos that brutally attacked the proposal and its author, concluding that the idea “approaches the absurd,” and argued against the proposal’s key claims in the harshest terms available to official bureaucratic documents.

The Page 99 Test works rather well in this case. Although most readers will likely be lost in many of the specifics without the surrounding context, page 99 gets at most of the central themes of the book. What readers will see here is a small group of very passionate people that are informed by their unique culture—a culture largely informed by their particular interpretation of the past. That culture and that vision influenced what types of technology they wanted to create. That vision was much narrower than the institutions these men worked for (the US military services) were willing to accept. Although page 99 is a very specific single case, the elements of the book’s core arguments are there: technologies do not appear out of nowhere, they are made by people—people with cultural beliefs and world views that inform the technologies they create. Sometimes conflicting cultures collide, pushing technological development into interesting directions.

Although the core idea is there, looking only at page 99 might miss the wider arc of the book. I try to trace the evolution of fighter pilot culture from its inception during World War I, through to the Vietnam War era. Then, I zoom in on a small group of activists calling themselves the “fighter mafia,” who embodied that culture in a rather extreme sense and had a large influence on fighter aircraft development in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The story does not end there, as that group of advocates became frustrated with the compromises they had to make while working with large institutions, and instead became political activists in the 1980s, referring to themselves as “The Reformers.” In the post-Vietnam War era, this group gathered a large following through their harsh critiques of US defense policy and technology. The arguments they made then—rooted in the origins of fighter pilot culture—are still with us today in many ways.

Visit Michael W. Hankins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph W. Ho's "Developing Mission"

Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Albion College and a Center Associate at the University of Michigan's Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Developing Mission describes how visual presentations – lantern slides and movies (the latter the primary subject of the chapter in which the page is found) – motivated future American missionaries and Chinese intellectuals to pursue higher callings. In some cases, images of violence shocked viewers into life-changing responses. As this page relates, Lu Xun, one of China’s most famous political writers, “gave up a potential medical career after witnessing a graphic anti-Chinese lantern slide presentation while a student in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War.” Similarly (in visual engagement but not ideological outcome), a Catholic schoolboy in Iowa, Joseph Henkels, realized his vocation to the priesthood and missions (later spending over twenty years in China) after seeing a lantern slide – its impact heightened by red color tinting – showing the blood-soaked garments of missionary “martyrs” slain in events that prefigured the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Such experiences highlight how films' and lantern slides’ spectacle-based visual qualities spurred personal conversions to larger causes: revolutionary, religious, or a mix of the two.

As a test, page 99 reveals important themes and characters at the heart of the book. Visual technologies and encounters with modern images and worldviews intersected with evolving Christian missions across twentieth-century China and parallel developments in Chinese nation-building. Some individuals referenced on the page have colorful experiences (photographic or not) with repercussions discussed at greater length in other parts of the book. Henkels, for example, will weather the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, jump-start the religious life of a future archbishop of Taipei, and inadvertently cross paths with a certain John Birch in death and photography (I won’t tell you how – it’s in chapter four!)

The page also points to broader questions raised and answered throughout the volume. How did missionaries create experimental films in and beyond China, building on earlier experiences with still photography and transnational identities? What happened when missionary filmmakers turned their lenses on military atrocities and regime change, with results that subsequently escaped the mission enterprise entirely? What did such image-making experiences say about modern China and embedded missionary presence in peace and war? Readers of Developing Mission who arrive at page 99 – and pass it – will see for themselves.

Visit Joseph W. Ho's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson's "The Border Within"

Tara Watson is professor of economics at Williams College and a coeditor of the Journal of Human Resources, the leading academic journal in labor economics. Kalee Thompson is a journalist and senior editor at Wirecutter. She is the author of Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History.

Watson and Thompson applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear, we’re discussing the 2015 shooting death of a young woman in San Francisco, Kathryn Steinle. The man who discharged the gun, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, was an unauthorized Mexican immigrant who had been deported multiple times and was released from jail a few months before the killing. It was a prominent tragedy that took on outsized significance in the ongoing debates over undocumented immigration in the US.

From page 99 of The Border Within:

Steinle’s death coincided with the early days of the primaries for the 2016 presidential election, and the tragedy quickly became a rallying cry for Republican candidates convinced that immigrants were driving up crime rates—or, more cynically, calculating that saying so would be a winning argument with certain voters. … Donald Trump, then considered a wild-card candidate, had announced his presidential bid on June 16, 2015. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower in New York City. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

In the weeks after Steinle’s killing, Trump repeatedly used her death as an argument in favor of his proposed border wall and mass deportations of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States. He didn’t change his tune when Zarate was acquitted by a jury in 2017, tweeting “The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!”

As it turned out, the pistol used in Kathryn Steinle’s killing had been stolen from the vehicle of a Bureau of Land Management ranger a few days before the shooting. There was no evidence that Zarate had anything to do with that theft; instead, Zarate, who had seemingly been homeless since his release from San Francisco jail, spending his days collecting bottles and cans for recycling, randomly found the gun wrapped in a T-shirt under a bench on a San Francisco pier. Though his defense argued that the gun discharged accidentally without Zarate even unwrapping it, even if Zarate had intentionally pulled the trigger, he shot at random; ballistic evidence determined that the gun was discharged from close to the ground; the bullet ricocheted off the concrete pier, traveling another seventy-eight feet before hitting Steinle. The jury found no evidence that Zarate, who had no history of violence in his criminal record, had any intent to kill anyone.…

Does our book pass the Page 99 Test? Arguably, yes. Most of The Border Within is focused on immigration and the American economy and the lives of everyday undocumented Americans, as opposed to extreme and high-profile events like the San Francisco pier shooting. Still, this passage “reveals the quality of the whole” by illustrating how politicized and polarizing the immigration issue has become, a theme that runs through the book.

The account on page 99 opens a discussion of so-called “sanctuary cities” and the inconsistent enforcement of immigration law across cities and states. We devote many pages later in the book to immigration and crime—and the well-established fact that, contrary to popular belief, immigrants do not have an adverse impact on crime rates. But right here, we’re more focused on rhetoric and politics. In the months that followed the shooting, dozens of state and federal bills were introduced aimed at punishing so-called sanctuary cities that shield immigrants from federal authorities. The deeply tragic yet arbitrary death of a beautiful young white woman ended up being a powerful, if somewhat misleading, bit of storytelling for those in favor of harsher enforcement of immigration laws.

Learn more about The Border Within at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric G. Wilson's "Dream-Child"

Eric G. Wilson is Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is the author of several books, including Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck and Against Happiness.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb, and reported the following:

My page 99 is one of the most important in the book. It describes one of the three events that inspired my obsession with Lamb.

This event occurred in 1796, when Lamb—twenty-one, lonely, exhausted by his London accounting job, and recovering from an unspeakable family tragedy—was frequently exchanging letters with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge had befriended Lamb at Christ’s Hospital, a boarding school of Dickensian cruelty. The two had remained close after leaving, Coleridge on scholarship to Cambridge, Lamb—whose stutter exiled him from the oratory required for a university scholarship—to his ledgers. During December of 1794, Coleridge lived in London, and he nightly lifted Lamb from his drudgery by joining him at the Salutation and Cat to talk poetry. Then, in January, Coleridge was gone, to Bristol and marriage, and Lamb soon went insane and spent six months in an asylum.

Returned to sanity, Lamb became Coleridge’s most valued correspondent. The poet especially prized his friend’s literary criticism. On my page 99 appears Lamb’s most essential comment, from a letter of November 1796: “Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.” Coleridge took this seriously. He developed a new kind of verse, the “conversation” poem, in which a speaker talks to an interlocutor in relaxed blank verse. The lyrical chit-chat lifts things quotidian—like the FOMO of missing a hike—into meditations on redemption and loss.

Encouraging Coleridge toward this poetics of the everyday, Lamb pre-dated by four years Wordsworth’s ur-text of British Romanticism, the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. When I came across this largely forgotten fact of literary history, I realized that Lamb had secretly shaped a kind of Romantic poetry I really love.

What are the other two events that originated my biography? One is the unspeakable family tragedy mentioned above. On September 22 of 1796, Lamb came home and saw his beloved sister Mary standing with a knife in her hand above their bloodied and dead mother, and he bravely contrived to save her--clearly insane when she plunged the blade--from the gallows. He cared for her the rest of his life and found her, as did Coleridge, delightful when sane.

The other involves how Lamb wrote his way through his trauma. In 1820 he created a persona, “Elia,” under which he composed bizarrely charming and mirthfully melancholy essays, such as “A Chapter on Ears,” which begins, “I have no ear.”

Learn more about Dream-Child at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Eric G. Wilson's Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Anderson's "The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain"

Peter Anderson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century European History in the School of History at the University of Leeds. His books include Friend or Foe? Occupation, Collaboration and Selective Violence in the Spanish Civil War (2016) and The Francoist Military Trials: terror and complicity, 1939-1945 (2010).

Anderson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain: Taking, Losing, and Fighting for Children, 1926-1945, and reported the following:

Page ninety-nine of my book explores poverty in 1920s Madrid and looks at issues such as overcrowding and the exposure of children to adult intimacy or to adult criminal behavior. It also considers issues such as the prevalence of TB and shows how conditions in Madrid echoed those found in other major urban centers at the time.

The page reveals important aspects of the book’s central arguments. I argue that child-removal in Madrid offers a window onto the wider age of child removal: a time characterized by the growth efficient removal systems in the wake of the founding of juvenile courts from the late nineteenth century. The removal of children from poor parents formed one aspect of this age and the social conditions described on this page help explain the attitudes of officials who presented poor parents not as victims of their circumstances but as moral failures who stood out as a danger to their offspring. The ease with which disease, unemployment or bereavement could push families into extreme poverty also meant large numbers of people became vulnerable to removal (only around 5% of children were removed on the grounds of abuse).

The page also misses some of the book’s other central points. I contend that the age of mass child removal enveloped three groups of youngsters: the offspring of the poor, children displaced by war and children removed from political opponents. The Spanish case illustrates all three phenomena and the records of the Madrid juvenile court allow historians to study each aspect of the age of mass child removal. Other chapters explore how children evacuated in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 became vulnerable to removal and discuss the way opponents of the regime established by General Franco came to lose children to juvenile court officials. In all three cases, this was never simply a top-down process based on simple categories of coercion and victimhood. Instead, the book analyses how poor parents, parents of the displaced and political opponents (and their children) all helped drive and resist the removal process. In this way, the book gives voice and agency to both parents and children. It also attempts to overcome the privileging in the literature of the removal of children from political opponents and to recover the history of the poverty-stricken parents and children whose stories have remained untold for too long.

Learn more about The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zeynep Pamuk's "Politics and Expertise"

Zeynep Pamuk is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book describes a proposal for a science court, which was put forward in the 1960s and 1970s by physicist Arthur Kantrowitz. The court was intended to examine controversial scientific issues in policy making and resolve disputes. It had an adversarial structure, with scientists defending rival positions and cross-examining each other in front of a panel of scientist judges. The proposal was highly popular and enjoyed the support of President Ford as well as twenty-eight prominent scientific organizations. An opportunity to test the court came up during a controversy over the construction of a new power line in Minnesota, which I go on to describe in the next pages.

This page is a crucial one for the book because it tells the origin story of an institution that I revive and reimagine in order to improve our use of scientific advice in policy making today. While earlier chapters of the book diagnose the sources of tension in the relationship between science and democracy — focusing on how the uncertainty, incompleteness and biases in scientific research shape political debate, and how scientific advisers face a nearly impossible challenge of trying to be useful without making overtly political judgments — page 99 is the beginning of my own solution to these issues. It gives a good sense of the institutional upshot of the theoretical discussions in earlier chapters.

The key aspect of my proposal, which I take from Kantrowitz, is the adversarial setup, which is designed to examine the uncertainty and weaknesses of each view in front of a public audience. One of the main arguments of the book is the need for democratic scrutiny of the limits of science and an understanding of how scientific findings are shaped by the values of scientists. The science court is one way to realize this. But I also change some key features of the original proposal. The original science court was an elitist and technocratic institution, whose participants were professional scientists and whose aim was to settle factual disputes for policy purposes. It was based on a strict fact-value distinction. I argue against these and suggest that the facts and values involved in a policy issue should be taken up together and the court should involve a citizen jury rather scientist judges. These modifications are intended to make it a more democratic and participatory institution.

Learn more about Politics and Expertise at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Heise's "The Gentrification Plot"

Thomas Heise is an assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, Abington. He is the author of Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (2011), as well as the novel Moth; or how I came to be with you again (2013) and Horror Vacui: Poems (2006).

Heise applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel, and reported the following:

Page ninety-nine takes one to the book’s second chapter that analyzes the recent transformations of Manhattan’s Chinatown and the corresponding transformations of the neighborhood’s crime literature. There one finds the following:

The reductive idea that cities change and that change just kind of happens obscures the questions of who or what causes them to change and who benefits from the changes. These are profoundly political questions that go to the heart of issues over power and representation that lay bare the truth that nothing about the redevelopment and gentrification of neighborhoods is natural. The urban ecosystem is itself, of course, not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a highly gendered and racialized capitalistic structure maintained in place by political and legal choices that have been made by humans and can be remade by them.

One of those choices is the kind of policing that is implemented, another the kind of development that is permitted.

The “page 99 test” captures one of The Gentrification Plot’s central arguments about urban political economy. I argue that the two main drivers of the post-1990s transformation of New York City was the punitive “broken windows” policing implemented by the Giuliani Administration and the neoliberal real-estate development policies that followed under Bloomberg once formerly “unruly” areas of the city, such as Chinatown, were pacified for investment. Page ninety-nine is one of the places in the book where I restate that claim. The remainder of the page begins to dive into the Museum of Chinese in America’s oral histories of crime and gentrification in which residents reflect on buildings that have been central to Chinatown’s history. The chapter then turns to how Chinese-American crime writers have sought to preserve the old Chinatown textually as its fades from memory with the relentless gentrification of the neighborhood in the early 2000s.

The argument on page ninety-nine is framed by the foundational question that I try to answer in The Gentrification Plot. That’s the question of what contemporary crime novelists write about when there seemingly isn’t much crime to write about anymore. What story do they tell when the narrative of the city as a site of decay and danger has been replaced by a boosterish narrative of postindustrial urban revitalization. The answer to that question is what I call “the gentrification plot,” crime fiction’s new stories of urban displacement, community erosion, and cultural erasure, stories traceable in one form or another to the socioeconomic transformations of the city. The Gentrification Plot is about changes to a genre, but it understands these changes as inseparable from the material changes to the city. Each of its chapters is dedicated to a city neighborhood—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant—that has been of historical importance to New York’s diverse communities. It is at the neighborhood level that abstract economic processes become visible. It’s there that we espy the layered histories of a city, its demographic turnover, its modes of production becoming outmoded, the nuts-and-bolts factory that shuts down and reopens as live-work condos or a hive of WeWorkers clicking away at desks rented by the hour. To see neoliberal urbanism in action, look at the neighborhood. That’s where contemporary crime writers look.

Visit Thomas Heise's website and follow him on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Leonard's "The Lords of Easy Money"

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy, The Meat Racket, and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

Leonard applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Lords of Easy Money and reported the following:

If readers were to flip to page 99 of The Lords of Easy Money, they would read a story that illuminates one of the most important themes of the whole book. They would see how leaders of the Federal Reserve bank project an aura of infallibility, even as they make colossal mistakes.

Page 99 recounts an episode in March of 2007, when the U.S. was on the precipice of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, was called before Congress and asked to explain what was going on. Bernanke was assumed to be not just intelligent, but almost oracular in his powers of observation. He spoke in the rarified and expert language of an economic high priest. It carried a lot of weight, then, when he told the nation that there was nothing to see here. The Fed had been stoking the housing market for many years with easy money policies that kept interest rates extraordinarily low, and the money was sloshing into cheap loans for expensive houses and pumping up risky debt like “subprime” mortgages that were beginning to default in large numbers. But Bernanke assured lawmakers that the Fed had everything under control.

“The principal source of the slowdown in economic growth that began last spring has been the substantial correction in the housing market,” Bernanke calmly explained. “At this juncture, however, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained.”

Needless to say, the problems were not contained. Within a matter of months, the global financial system started to short-circuit under the weight of unsustainable debt and speculative derivatives investments.

Bernanke’s testimony on that day was not an isolated incident. It tells a bigger story about the power of the Federal Reserve bank. The institution has become increasingly important to American economic life, expanding its interventions and its powers. And as this has happened, the Fed’s leaders, like Ben Bernanke, have increasingly cocooned their decision making behind a thick wall of incomprehensible jargon and exaggerated complexity, a language that has come to be known as “Fed Speak.”

The first goal of Fed Speak is to make ordinary citizens believe that the politics of money creation is so sophisticated that it can only be handled by a small group of PhD-educated economists. The second goal is to make the Fed’s leadership team appear to be infallible, as if they are simply solving math equations rather than making policy decisions based on hunches.

The record in support of Fed infallibility is not encouraging. A review of internal transcripts and interviews with senior Fed policy makers show that the central bank has been repeatedly wrong in forecasting the effects of its own interventions. An internal 2012 Fed forecast used to justify $1.6 trillion in new money printing, called “quantitative easing,” was catastrophically wrong in predicting such important measures as future interest rates and inflation. In an internal meeting, Bernanke admitted that more quantitative easing was “a shot in the proverbial dark,” a view that was contrary to his public statements extolling the soundness of the plan.

The Fed is once again assuring the public that it has things firmly under control as inflation burns hot and newly inflated debt instruments, such as corporate junk bonds, reach sky-high levels. The record shows that we should be deeply skeptical.

Visit Christopher Leonard's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Meat Racket.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Juergensmeyer's "When God Stops Fighting"

Mark Juergensmeyer is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. He is author or editor of thirty books, including the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God and the recent God at War.

Juergensmeyer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends, and reported the following:

If readers randomly opened my book to page 99 they might indeed get a pretty good sense of what the book is about. The book tries to understand how religious-related violent movements come to an end, viewed from those inside the movements. The book looks at three case studies—ISIS in Iraq, the Moro movement for Muslim separatism in the Philippines, and the Sikh Khalistan movement in India. On page 99, I’m describing how support for the Sikh uprising began to erode among the Indian villagers who previously had tolerated it:

Accompanying the increase in violence was a general collapse of law and order, especially in rural areas near the Pakistani border. The young activists had intimidated the older Sikh leaders, who became virtual pawns of the militants. The only authority in some areas came from those who ruled by gun at night. This was due in part to the erosion of idealism in the Sikh movement and in part to the movement’s exploitation by what amounted to street gangs and roving bands of thugs. In time, the Sikh movement had failed to achieve whatever political goals it might have espoused, including the dream of an independent Khalistan, leaving a cynical and demoralized public in its wake.

As I go on to explain in the book, the loss of support from the public was one of several critical factors in bringing violent movements to a close. Another factor was in-fighting and loss of confidence in the leadership. Outside factors made a difference as well. Prominent among these was a sense of hope, alternatives to fighting that provided careers for the militants and some concessions to the movements’ demands that would allow the leaders to save face and convince their followers it was all worth while.

The role of police and military was ambivalent. On one hand, it was necessary to have an authoritative show of force so that violent people could be restricted in what they could do and were brought to justice when they committed crimes. On the other hand, all-out attempts to crush the movements through military force often backfired and made the militants more defensive. Sometimes a military victory over a movement was in fact a coup de grace for a movement that had already essentially destroyed itself from within. The military destruction of ISIS quarters in Raqqa and Mosul, for example, may have been the final blow to a movement that was already badly weakened by infighting and demoralization, according to some of the old militants whom I met. Many of them continued to believe in the ideals of a Muslim caliphate and would join the movement if it rose again. But for now, they capitulated to the reality that their war was over and the movement had ended.

Visit Mark Juergensmeyer's website.

The Page 99 Test: Buddhist Warfare by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Harvey's "A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy"

Katherine Harvey is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is also on the Board of Advisors at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from King's College London. Previously, she served as an intelligence officer in the US Navy, with tours in the Middle East, in Europe and at sea.

Harvey applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq, and reported the following:

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq explores the Saudi leadership’s response to the political ascendance of the Iraqi Shi’a following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Page 99 of the book looks at Arab reactions to the results of Iraq’s first free elections in January 2005. In the 20th century, a narrative had become predominant among Sunni Arabs – both inside and outside Iraq – that Iraqi Sunnis constituted a majority of the Iraqi people. Thus, when Iraqi Shi’a took a majority of parliamentary seats in the January 2005 elections, many Sunnis (including, for instance, elites in Saudi Arabia and Jordan) claimed that the elections had been fraudulent – they refused to believe that the Shi’a constituted Iraq’s true majority. From there, page 99 concludes by highlighting the stark change that occurred in Iraq’s political order at this time. From 2005 on, the Iraqi Shi’a consolidated a position of power in the new Iraq. But “[f]or many Arabs, both inside and outside the country, this new Iraq appeared alien, and despite the fact that the Iraqi Shi’a are mostly Arab, it seemed less Arab – even anti-Arab.”

Page 99 gives readers a pretty good idea of what the book is about. The 2005 elections constituted a huge shock to many Sunnis in the Arab world. Sunnis had been in charge of Iraq throughout the 20th century, and many were astonished when the Shi’a “won” the January 2005 elections. Many could only explain the election result by claiming fraud had taken place. (The Iraqi Shi’a constitute roughly 60 percent of the Iraqi population.) It seems that the Saudi leadership, adhering to a view that Sunnis should be in power in the Arab world, believed the fraud narrative. The book as a whole is about how the Saudi leadership, and the late King Abdullah in particular, struggled to come to terms with the new Shi’a-led Iraq that emerged after the invasion, and this page provides a window onto their confusion in the aftermath of Iraq’s first free elections.

Page 99 actually contains one of my favorite paragraphs of the book! It’s hard to overstate the momentousness of the shift Iraq experienced with the rise of the Iraqi Shi’a from 2003 on, and the second paragraph on this page captures that huge shift, as well as the bewilderment of many Sunni Arabs witnessing and experiencing it. For many Arabs, including Saudi leaders, the new Iraq really did seem “alien.” The Saudis, for their part, chose to isolate the new Iraq as a result, but in doing so I argue that they paradoxically pushed Iraq into the arms of their regional rival, Iran. That is the self-fulfilling prophecy alluded to in the title!

Follow Katherine Harvey on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

James C. Oleson and Ronald Kramer's "Contesting Crime Science"

Ronald Kramer is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Auckland. His books include The Rise of Legal Graffiti Writing in New York and Beyond and Culture, Crime and Punishment. James C. Oleson is Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Auckland. His books include Criminal Genius: A Portrait of High-IQ Offenders and Fifty Years of Causes of Delinquency: The Criminology of Travis Hirschi.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Contesting Crime Science: Our Misplaced Faith in Crime Prevention Technology, and reported the following:

Readers turning to page 99 of Contesting Crime Science will land at a subsection in the chapter on prediction in criminal justice. The section focuses on the relationship between techniques of prediction and sacrifice. Several scholars suggest that forecasting represents a mathematical abandonment of reforming individuals; others posit that punishment increasingly hybridizes prediction and reform. We suggest that prediction is underpinned by sacrifice: it is a way to “kill with impunity.”

Readers would not get a complete idea of Contesting Crime Science on the basis of page 99. They would, however, get a fairly accurate impression of one of its central themes. Throughout the book, we focus on particular manifestations of crime science – biological forms of evidence, prediction, security technologies, and environmental design. We show how these branches of crime science are often antithetical to important legal principles, recast some everyday behaviors as deviant, and cannot control crime in the ways they typically promise. In some respects, crime science can be understood as reckless. When it comes to the freedom and wellbeing of some, especially those at the margins of society, crime science adopts a cavalier attitude. Page 99, or the theme of sacrifice, is ultimately a way to explore how the recklessness of crime science is manifest in prediction. We describe prediction as cavalier with the freedom of others for a number of reasons. Perhaps most obvious (although not necessarily common knowledge) forecasting future events is plagued by error. But even if prediction were perfectly accurate, it would still entail imposing or extending punishment on the basis of events that have not happened. In this sense, any action grounded by prediction amounts to a “leap of faith.” It is the story of Abraham and Isaac, minus the angel of God that intervenes to avert the tragedy.

Learn more about Contesting Crime Science at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: James C. Oleson's Criminal Genius: A Portrait of High-IQ Offenders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Akshaya Kumar's "Provincializing Bollywood"

Akshaya Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Indore.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Provincializing Bollywood discusses the emergence of Bhojpuri action-melodramas, which “altered the visual language of Bhojpuri films.” The chapter to which the page belongs focuses on the pre-eminent material cache – Bhojpuri cinema – which is elaborated and periodized for a thorough cultural analysis. On page 99, we foreground the process of privileging individual desire and the recession of the visual motifs of community life, which prepares the ground for the fantasy of traditional rural life and robust masculinity. We also learn about the visual routines by which this brooding masculinity is appeased by the “amorous offerings of the female counterpart,” who mediates the “intersecting worlds of private desire and public decency”. The politics of sexual difference, then, ensures that “violence becomes, as a result, a bounden duty, a moral bandwidth, a barometer for the capacity to feel outraged and defend one’s territory.”

While page 99 may not represent the book’s compound structure, it still suitably lands the browsers at a convenient entry-point into the core cultural process by which Bhojpuri cinema acquires its libidinal appetite. Quirky as the method may be, the page 99 test appears to be a partial success.

Provincializing Bollywood situates Bhojpuri cinema within the comparative media crucible, performing an analytical equivalent of extractive metallurgy, to identify the substances, processes and the vessel which have incubated the libidinal intensity of Bhojpuri popular culture. It argues that the scandalously out-of-turn and desperately out-of-tune libidinal belligerence of Bhojpuri media revels in the violation of an imagined language of command, which effectively challenges the poor social intelligence of control systems, all the while joyriding on the newly laid asphalt of digital media. In doing so, the book rehabilitates the research object of classical film studies in the new media ecology, particularly at the low-budget end.

Follow Akshaya Kumar on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Boria Sax's "Avian Illuminations"

Boria Sax teaches at Sing Sing Prison and online in the graduate literature program at Mercy College. He is the author of many books.

Sax applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Avian Illuminations: A Cultural History of Birds, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99 of Avian Illuminations is a picture in color of a young Arctic tern engaged in its epic migration between Antarctica, where it spends winters, and Iceland, where it breeds. The bird, entirely white except for a dark area on its head and an orange beak. The sunlight flashes from the edges of its extended wings, which stand out against the dark, undulating waves below. The viewer will probably linger on the picture a short while before reading the text.

That begins in the middle of a sentence: “...to ‘The free, wild winds, and the songs of the birds’, he remembers his childhood home.” Who remembers? No, it is not just the bird. Even without the previous page, it is probably not hard to guess that this is from a maritime ballad. The book goes on to tell how sailors observed birds for many purposes from ascertaining the distance of their ship from land to predicting weather and even relieving the loneliness of the sea. In folklore, people have thought that gulls and many other birds were souls of drowned mariners.

Then, at the bottom of the page, comes a subtitle: “Migration or Hibernation?”: “People have always been amazed at the precision with which birds arrive at fixed times of the year, which was so reliable that people could tell the time....” That’s all there is, at least if one doesn’t turn the page.

Were somebody to spot this book in a library, open it at random, and find this page, these would be fragments. She would put them together in a personal way. He might identify with the Artic tern. She might identify with the loneliness of sailors. He might think about vacations, sleep, schedules, or many other things. The book becomes less of an exposition and more of a poem, but the major themes at least are much the same.

But the reader may do these things anyhow in time. She may read the book cover to cover, and look at every picture, but will probably remember images, whether visual or mental, better than complicated arguments. He will then rearrange these at least a bit, like a bird rebuilding a nest after a migratory journey. I’d say the test works pretty well.

Follow Boria Sax on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.'s "Eaters of the Dead"

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is professor at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author or editor of many books, including Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema and Uncovering “Stranger Things.” He lives in Los Angeles.

Wetmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Eaters of the Dead consists of a summary and close reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-7) and how it constructs ghouls. It is part of a chapter that examines the origins of the Arabic ghūl, its translation into the ghoul in the west, and then how various horror authors have used the monster and its cadaver diet to inspire horror in the reader/viewer. The analysis points out that one of Lovecraft’s innovations of the ghoul is that unlike in Arabian mythology or early modern western tellings, his ghouls can be helpful, friendly, and even funny. Lovecraft transformed the ghoul from just a hideous, terrifying, desert-dwelling, dog-like corpse-devourer into a hideous, terrifying, desert-dwelling, dog-like corpse-devourer with an entire society, ethos, and culture of their own, encompassing humor, play, and interactions with humans.

Thus opening the book to page 99 doesn’t quite give the reader a thorough sense of the volume, which deals with a wide variety of cannibals, corpse-eaters, and means of body-disposal through ingestion, but it does model what the book does with many of those “monsters” – having just considered the corpse-eater in its original context, the book then considers how artists and authors have used the creature(s) and further shaped our understandings of them. So what page 99 does for ghūls/ghouls, other pages do for wendigo, aswang, jinkiniki, cyclops, Grendel, ogres, cannibals (real and imagined), sky burials, and many, many others.

Perhaps as fun, facing page 99 (on page 98) is an illustration Lovecraft himself drew of a ghoul for “Pickman’s Model” in 1934, demonstrating both what he thought a ghoul looked like and why he is a writer and not a visual artist (no disrespect to H.P.L., but his drawing skills are not exactly on point). So read page 99, look at page 98, and then go back and start at the beginning, as pages 1-97 will illuminate the entire world of corpse-eating monsters, and why we fear them and fear becoming them.

Learn more about Eaters of the Dead at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Annie Berke's "Their Own Best Creations"

Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Camera Obscura, Public Books, Feminist Media Histories, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.

Berke applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television, and reported the following:

Let’s call “the 99 Test” my personal assistant, because it works for me!

Page 99 of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar America falls in the middle of my third chapter. Chapter Three centers on Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs) and Peg Lynch (Ethel & Albert), two writer-performers whose shows successfully made the jump from radio to television. Berg and Lynch played housewives on-screen and spoke as accomplished career women in the fan magazines – sometimes, at least. Other times, they did the opposite: their characters, Molly Goldberg and Ethel Arbuckle, revealed themselves as shrewd operators and innovative (domestic) professionals, while Berg and Lynch posed for press photos with their families, flowery teacups in hand, inhabiting the postwar contradiction of the stay-at-home television showrunner.

How did these women insist upon their own relevance and value to a nascent television industry, and in whose voice were they best able to make the case? As we see on page 99, Gertrude Berg argued for television realism – with a mother’s touch – in an episode about sending a recording of the family dinner to her son in the army. Berg was more amenable to being confused with her character than Peg Lynch, who once proclaimed, “Ethel is more like me than I am like her.” A characteristically playful remark from Lynch, who, like Berg, used her show to mock male ego, advocate for egalitarian marriage, and slyly comment on television craft.

(For what it’s worth, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Peg’s house for lunch before her passing in 2015, and she was as funny and gracious as her on-screen persona. She even served the same “watermelon pickles” that the Arbuckles regularly enjoy!)

Their Own Best Creations looks at how women wrote across genre – comedy-variety, family serial, soap opera, anthology drama – in the first ten years of commercial television, keenly aware of how they themselves played a part in the unfolding drama of a new commercial art-form. How did these women writers circulate as public personalities in a pre-second wave feminist context? What were they able to say as themselves, and what could they only express through the characters they wrote? And who better to show that the personal is professional than Berg, Lynch, Madelyn Pugh (I Love Lucy), Joan Harrison (Alfred Hitchcock Presents), Irna Phillips (Guiding Light), and many more?

Visit Annie Berke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza's "A Strategic Nature"

Melissa Aronczyk is an associate professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication & Information. She is the author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (2013). Maria I. Espinoza is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Rutgers University.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Strategic Nature lays the ground for the surge of corporate political power in the 1980s and the special role of public relations in coordinating that power. In the early 1970s, corporations were at a low point in terms of public perception. Civil society and government concern over environmental hazards had gathered steam throughout the 1960s, and business was targeted as a major culprit. Federal regulations and national organizations to protect the environment multiplied. Companies needed a new strategy to boost their sinking reputation. They would find it by creating campaigns in the name of the public interest, with the help of their public relations advisers.

Page 99 is a nice summary of the chapter it appears in (chapter 4: PR for the Public Interest). One could say it gives a sense of the larger work in that some key dynamics are present here, especially those of public relations counselors as masterminds of business and political strategy around environmental issues.

One of the most important arguments we want to put forward in this book is that our media and communication systems play outsized roles in how we understand public problems. When it comes to such a complex and abstract idea as “the environment,” we rely on the information provided to us to grasp it and to make sense of what is at stake in protecting it. By showing how PR experts and other professional communicators influence the provision of information as well as the political and social contexts in which this information appears, we reveal how powerful this kind of communication can be – especially considering the environmental crisis we’re now facing.

Each chapter in the book brings to light a particular historical moment in American life (from the early 1900s up to today) where ideas about publics, information, and the environment come together. These historical moments are organized around periods of political contention, where corporate, civic or professional groups saw the need to transform the rules governing American society. As these actions came into the public eye and contentious collectives emerged to demand change, the need for information to regain control of public narratives became more evident. What this book does to contribute to the conversation around information, publics and environmentalism is to highlight the role of the PR industry in making the environment into a matter of concern. We show the historical co-evolution of environmentalism and the PR industry and document how this co-evolution impacts our contemporary thinking about environmental change.

Learn more about A Strategic Nature at the Oxford University Press website and visit Melissa Aronczyk's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dane A. Morrison's "Eastward of Good Hope"

Dane A. Morrison is a professor of early American history at Salem State University. He is the author of True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity and the coeditor of Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Old hands adapted, learning the gales and currents driven by the seasonal monsoons of the South China Sea, following ancient routes pioneered by Chinese, Indian, and even Arab traders to Malacca and beyond. Chinese traders, likewise, used these winds to send their trading junks to Taiwan and to the Philippines, where, Nathaniel Bowditch reported, one could find the "great numbers” of Chinese junks dominating the indigo trade at Manila the beginning of the year. In March, dry monsoon winds blew out of the northeast, and in the 1780s Yankee captains began to take advantage of these to venture out of Canton into the Indian Ocean. By midsummer, the winds of the southeast monsoon rose out of the Indian Ocean, bringing drenching rains—as much as 30 inches of precipitation over two months--and propelling the sails that would carry ships back to China. Ambitious traders such as William Elting frequently weathered these late autumn winds, taking his chances to squeeze out more profit--“In the trade on the Malay coast requires you to stay as long as possible.” Elting had mastered the tactic of sheltering under the lee side of Sunting Island if the seas grew too rough. Others learned to simply comply with the monsoon winds, as the Cordelia did in the straits east of Java, “which made our passage longer, which was a little over one hundred days,” sailor Charles Tyng conceded. Many would not take the risk. As one captain’s clerk observed in 1852, it was an “unlucky cruise” that was “timed with the autumnal change of monsoon.” In his voyage to Japan in 1853, the flagship Mississippi under Commodore Matthew Perry followed a circuitous course to keep the ship away from hurricanes that swept Indian Ocean in the early part of the year.

This passage epitomizes several of the themes that I explore in my recent book, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World. It describes the kinds of challenges that confronted early American mariners as they explored the sea routes that led them out of the Atlantic and to reach what were for them the exotic ports of the wider world. The book’s title recalls the emotional costs of a voyage as American travelers sailed the unfamiliar and dangerous seas of the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and Oceana, and beyond. The title, Eastward of Good Hope, is taken from the writings of Amasa Delano, for whom the geography of a voyage to China, India, and the Pacific in the 1790s was a statement of liberation after Americans won their independence from Great Britain in 1783. For Delano and countless other Yankee voyagers, the phrase also measured the psychological and emotional costs of learning to navigate through the baffling shoals and reefs, daunting pirates and buccaneers, disconcerting monsoons and typhoons of a strange and dangerous world.

Eastward of Good Hope recounts the struggles and tribulations of William Elting, Charles Tyng, and many more—whose accounts linger in archives, but rarely appear in the popular treatments alongside the celebrated Matthew Perry or Nathaniel Bowditch. We learn more about the dangers of these ‘new worlds’ from the tattered, dusty letters and journals of forgotten mariners like Elting and Tyng, or merchant William Appleton in Canton, missionary Harriet Newell in India, or Biblical Scholar Edward Robinson in the Ottoman realm. Similarly, I wanted to embed these travels, so frequently and so inaccurately depicted as examples of a mythical American exceptionalism, within a global maritime experience in which generations of countless Chinese, Indian, and even Arab traders pioneered the routes later followed by Yankee mariners.

Dangerous voyages set the stage for what comes later in each chapter. Encounters between Yankee mariners, merchants, missionaries--emotionally taxed, exhausted, homesick, and vulnerable, carrying conceits of their own superiority and other peoples’ inferiority--and Ottoman, Chinese, Indian, and Oceanic peoples--welcoming but wary, carrying the experience of 300 years of European conflict and conquest.

Learn more about Eastward of Good Hope at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Glenda Sluga's "The Invention of International Order"

Glenda Sluga is professor of international history and capitalism at the European University Institute, Florence, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and professor of international history at the University of Sydney. Her books include Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism and Women, Diplomacy, and International Politics since 1500.

Sluga applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Invention of International Order a significant shift in the narrative takes place: The story moves from a minor moment in the Allied campaign against Napoleon, to the apogee of its victory in 1814. As fragmented as the presentation of this narrative shift is here, it can serve a purpose, hinting at two of the book’s main themes, and, as importantly the anomalies that are its focus. First, there is the evidence of women’s presence in what is a military and political history. Second, there is the fact of Russian Tsar Alexander’s leadership of a liberal, liberated Europe. These same (here limited) examples invoke the substantial core of the argument of The Invention of International Order, namely that 200 years ago women were there, and that the politics between states encompassed ambitions that have since been forgotten.

The transformations that took place in European politics from 1812, as a result of the Allied campaign, and the processes of peacemaking that followed in 1814 and after, breathed life into new ways of doing politics between states, as women and men, bourgeois and aristocratic, non-state and state “actors” engaged political possibilities in unprecedented ways, to diverse political ends. When we include their histories, the narrative of how an international order was invented becomes the story of not only the ideas, practices and institutions that remained influential, but also long forgotten expectations of what an international politics might be.

At least that’s one side of the history; the other side is the sum of the processes of ‘ordering’—whether gender roles and relations or the differentiation of classes and civilizations. It is not inconsequential that, at the beginning of the 19th century, Russia led the European coalition against Napoleon, and even espoused a liberal political agenda for the international order, and by the mid 19th century it had the status of a pariah state, or that women missed out in a new international order based on the professionalisation of diplomacy, despite their traditional importance to the shaping of foreign policy and processes of negotiation.

With all its paradoxes, the point of The Invention of International Order is to illustrate that the longer 200-year history of diplomacy and its politics matters. The enlargement of political ambition, and of political engagement, among women as well as men, the imagining of an international order that impacted individual lives and deserved to be taken seriously as a site of politics—these characteristics tended to surface at critical century moments of disruption, not least in 1919 and 1945. Then as in 1814, a window briefly opened was soon closed; the world was repeatedly left with the shell of ambition and expectation, and the skeletons of bravely imagined institutions and practices.

Learn more about The Invention of International Order at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Lander's "The King's Harvest"

Brian Lander is assistant professor of history at Brown University and a fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The King’s Harvest covers several of the key themes of the book. The main argument of the book is that the growth of more powerful political systems increased the ability of human societies to transform their environments, particularly by transforming natural ecosystems into agricultural ones. The page begins in the middle of a paragraph which argues that the Western Zhou (pronounced “Joe”; 1046-771 BCE) political system was highly decentralized: the king did not receive tribute from the lords who were officially his subordinates, but instead was expected to give them gifts. It was more an alliance of economically independent city states than a centralized kingdom. The Zhou kings only really controlled their own family estates and had no power to decide how most land was exploited. I emphasize this to make clear that the subsequent development of bureaucratic governance, a key theme of the rest of the book, vastly increased the ability of governments to transform environments. The final paragraph of page 99 does argue, however, that just by maintaining peace for almost three centuries the Western Zhou created the perfect conditions for agricultural societies to expand at the expense of wildlife.

A central theme of the book is the relationships between humans and domesticated plants and animals, and this is demonstrated in the second paragraph, which concerns horses. Horses were the tanks and sports cars of the ancient world. They gave their wealthy owners substantial power over commoners and were also beautiful things that became powerful symbols of masculinity. And they move fast, increasing the space that states could administer. The state of Qin, which founded China’s first empire, and is the topic of the two final chapters of the book, began as a horse-breeding fief of the Western Zhou kings.

The next paragraph discusses hunting parks. The book begins thousands of years ago at the dawn of agriculture, when the valleys of the central Yellow River valley were home to a great diversity of wildlife. By the time the book ends around 200 BCE those valleys were full of farms and livestock, leaving little space for deer and other animals. Rulers who liked hunting increasingly had to set land aside to preserve wildlife. As in many other times and places, people’s love of hunting wild animals has been one of the main forces pushing them to preserve them.

Since the book is arranged chronologically, page 99 only covers one time period, but it gives readers a taste of the main themes of the book.

Learn more about The King's Harvest at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Bell's "Crusoe's Books"

Bill Bell is Professor of Bibliography at Cardiff University and Research Fellow at the University of Munich.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800-1918, and reported the following:

Page 99 lands the reader right in the middle of chapter 3 on the reading practices of nineteenth-century convicts, ‘The Indiscipline of Reading’. Over half of the page is dedicated to the following poem:

For Library books, I give my voice
When thus selected—here’s my choice;
Our Irish Rogues and Rapparees,
The Scottish, Welsh, and English thieves:
These would I read, with great delight,
When from the truck I get respite.
On Humphrey Davy, and his science,
The boys of Spike have no reliance.
Or give us some more fearful tale,
Of convict life, or city jail:
This is the theme, that would please me,
And bring to mind some former spree.
Or Robin Hood, and Little John;
The life of Turpin I could con;
Freney, O’Hanlon, and the like,
Would make me merry while in Spike.
Your humble servant J. M’C.
Fit subject for Reformatry.

The 1863 transcriber called it ‘a specimen of true convict poetry’. The author was probably the Irish political prisoner, John McCullagh, who was sentenced to seven years transportation for eight convictions and appears to have written it while he was incarcerated on Spike Island in 1856. The chapter as a whole is about the way that the penal authorities in the period sought to regulate reading habits among the prison population, prescribing pious texts and closely monitoring their use. This poem lays out the writer’s preference for adventure tales about notorious criminals rather than the improving stories of the Great and Good provided by the authorities.

In this instance, the Page 99 Test seems to have worked admirably well. Crusoe’s Books traces the reading practices of five constituencies in the long nineteenth century (emigrants, Scottish settlers, convicts, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War). What emerges, time and again, is the tendency for disenfranchised readers to respond in unpredictable ways. Page 99 follows on immediately from an argument by Michel de Certeau where tactical resistance is evident among the most common practices of everyday life. Consequently, Certeau’s ideal reader is not held in the thrall of a regulatory world, a passive recipient, but famously a ‘poacher’ operating on the territory of others. One of the major themes of the book is how, in the face of official directives and prescriptive literacies, readers in the long nineteenth century, from the most literate to the most meagrely educated, were to use a range of cultural practices for their own ends.

Visit the Crusoe's Books blog.

--Marshal Zeringue