Lee Phillips's "Einstein's Tutor"

After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics from Dartmouth College and completing his postdoctoral work, Lee Phillips worked for 22 years as a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. For the past decade he has pursued a career as freelance writer, publishing widely in popular science journals. Phillips lives in Honduras, where he writes and conducts research while studying Spanish.

Phillips applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Einstein's Tutor: The Story of Emmy Noether and the Invention of Modern Physics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Einstein’s Tutor happens to be the last page of Chapter 2 (“Gravity”); as it ends a chapter it’s not a full page, but fills about 3/4 of the space.

On this page we see Albert Einstein taking stock of his mood and situation about a year and a half after completing his greatest work, the General Theory of Relativity, the edifice that still stands as our explanation for gravity and all the phenomena related to it, such as black holes and gravitational waves. At this point in the theory’s career it has impressed the community of physicists and mathematicians by virtue of its unique beauty and coherence, and its ability to resolve some existing puzzles—however it has not faced the ultimate test of new physics, the prediction and confirmation of new phenomena. But Einstein is working on this, and hopes that his theory can be put to the test in the near future.

The page ends with a foreshadowing of the astronomical confirmation that would make Einstein a celebrity. It then points out how this fame would indirectly help to keep the central idea of the book, Noether’s Theorem, on life support long enough for it to become the foundation of the next major development in theoretical physics. The reader is informed that the following chapter will explain what this idea is.

Page 99 is not a bad representation of the tone and substance of the book as a whole. It mentions two of its major characters, and ties together several crucial developments. It’s a pivot: an assessment of the past and the present moment in the historical arc of the book, and a turn to the future. If a reader suffers a violent dyspepsia upon reading page 99, he or she should probably put the book down. But if you enjoy this page, there’s a good chance you will enjoy the whole thing.

I began this journey with a desire to describe the beauty and importance of Noether’s Theorem and its travels though the history of ideas. My research into the Theorem led me to the amazing journeys of Emmy Noether and the people around her. Exploration of archival materials uncovered the story of Noether’s time in America, and to a wealth of details about her life and death that told a story that had never been told before. I never imagined that my desire to explain a physics idea would lead to a tale so filled with drama, pain, heroism, hope, and humor. I am excited to share these discoveries with the world.

Visit Lee Phillips's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mel Stanfill's "Fandom Is Ugly"

Media studies scholar Mel Stanfill researches how individuals interact with various media forms, ranging from television to social platforms. Their work explores the intersections of technology, identity, law and economics in shaping cultural access and interpretation.

Stanfill applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Fandom is Ugly, I discuss how fans who engaged in a large-scale Twitter campaign (#LexaDeservedBetter) to protest the killing off of lesbian character Lexa on CW show The 100 did not have the same level of concern for Lincoln, a Black man character who was killed off the following week. In particular, while there were also Twitter campaigns to complain about his death (#LincolnDeservedBetter), and to point to the combination of the two deaths as undermining the show’s inclusion of marginalized people (minorities are not disposable, without a hashtag), most tweets from the supporters of Lexa did not engage substantively with Lincoln’s death, prioritizing the white lesbian and using Lincoln only to support that cause.

Overall, I do think that page 99 provides good insight into what Fandom is Ugly talks about. One of the book’s key interventions is to push back on the longstanding and widespread assumption that fandom is progressive, a view held by both many scholars and many fans. Such arguments are rooted in a sense that fandom is resistant—whether to media industries in particular or norms in general. This resistance is particularly acute around hegemonies of gender and sexuality. This argument isn’t wrong. Fans are progressive and resistant to various hegemonies. But it’s not the entire story—fans are reactionary and shore up hegemony at least as often, and this case of white queer people failing to take racism seriously shows this clearly.

Another key intervention of the book is to resist the ways media and consumption and pleasure continue to be seen as frivolous and unimportant, both unworthy of study and irrelevant to matters of broad social importance. Through thinking of fandom as having three basic characteristics—public, collective affect, or feels; public, collective interpretation of shared text(s); and identity and community formation structured by affective ties and texts—Fandom Is Ugly is able to think about how these factors are at work in many kinds of ugly public culture, from the January 6 riots to the moral panic around Critical Race Theory. The book takes up fandom as both a site of articulation of power and a mode of articulation of power. It asks both about how fandom as traditionally understood reflects and refracts broader relations of power—and, specifically, domination—and how we understand those broader relations of power better when we look at them with the tools of fan studies.

Visit Mel Stanfill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brandon Morgan's "Raid and Reconciliation"

Brandon Morgan is a history instructor and an associate dean in the School of Liberal Arts at Central New Mexico Community College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Raid and Reconciliation: Pancho Villa, Modernization, and Violence in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Raid and Reconciliation contains the second half of the last paragraph of the opening vignette to chapter 4, “Solidifying the Border and Straddling the Line: Development and Resistance.” That page also contains the beginning of a section on Andrew O. Bailey’s efforts to promote the town he founded: Columbus, New Mexico (the small, rural town along the border between New Mexico and Chihuahua that is the geographical focus of the book).

The opening vignette describes a case in which Bailey asserted his influence as the founder of the border town to elevate a personal dispute to the level of international diplomacy. He called on U.S. officials in the State Department to investigate the alleged robbery of $18.50 by the Mexican mail carrier who was stationed in Palomas, Chihuahua, just across the international boundary from Columbus. When Bailey called upon U.S. authorities to support his claims, the local Mexican residents involved found that the border posed an obstacle to their ability to challenge the allegations. Ultimately, the case didn’t come to much due to the small amount in question and the towns’ remote location. Yet, the episode illustrates the ways in which the border could simultaneously be a barrier and a conduit depending on relative power relations, national heritage, racial background, and socioeconomic status.

Although readers would need context that comes on the preceding two pages to make sense of the larger story, the main arguments and issues explored in the chapter are discussed on page 99. These are also major considerations of the book as a whole, so I would say that Raid and Reconciliation passes the Page 99 Test.

Learn more about Raid and Reconciliation at the University of Nebraska Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Walker's "Hitler's Atomic Bomb"

Mark Walker is the John Bigelow Professor of History at Union College, Schenectady, New York. His research interests include twentieth-century science, particularly science and technology under National Socialism. His publications include The Kaiser Wilhelm Society during National Socialism (2009) and The German Physical Society in the Third Reich: Physicists between Autonomy and Accomodation (2012).

Walker applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes part of a rivalry within the wartime German uranium project with regard to designing the best nuclear reactor. The established research group under the direction of the physicist Werner Heisenberg had been working with horizontal and spherical layer designs where uranium oxide or uranium powder and a neutron moderator (a substance that would slow down the neutrons) was arranged in alternating layers. These scientists were challenged by an upstart group of younger, less prestigious scientists who began designing three-dimensional lattices of uranium cubes embedded or immersed in moderator.

My book is a mixture of science and technology on one hand, politics and ideology on the other, and especially how they were intertwined. Page 99 happens to be devoted to the more technical side of this history, which is a necessary, but not sufficient part of the whole story.

Hitler’s Atomic Bomb has two parts, “The Bomb,” which investigates the German work on harnessing nuclear fission for military and economic goals during the war, and “Living with the Bomb,” how these scientists responded to criticism for having worked on such powerful weapons for the Third Reich and eventually managed to rehabilitate themselves by creating legends.

Learn more about Hitler's Atomic Bomb at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Fesmire's "Beyond Moral Fundamentalism"

Steven Fesmire is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Radford University, and 2022-2024 President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. He edited The Oxford Handbook of Dewey (2019), and his books John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (2003) and Dewey (2015) won Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” awards. A 2009 Fulbright Scholar in Japan, Fesmire has previously taught at Middlebury College, Green Mountain College, Siena College, and East Tennessee State University. His public philosophy work has appeared in places such as Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The Humanist.

Fesmire applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Beyond Moral Fundamentalism: Toward a Pragmatic Pluralism, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Especially under current social, economic, and political conditions, non-market-driven values warrant a compensatory emphasis. ...Unfortunately, those socialized to the industrial model [of education] tend to be oblivious to its shrunken framework and its distorting effects.

Page 99 falls in the middle of the third chapter, “Educating for Democracy,” in a section headed by the book’s longest subtitle: “What Do We Lose When We Reduce Education to an Industrial Sector? Cultures of Inquiry, Imagination, Growth, and Fulfillment.” The chapter argues that, by channeling energies toward narrow workforce training, the increasingly dominant industrial model of education conceives service to the private sector as the overriding goal. The chapter explains, updates, and illustrates John Dewey’s alternative, which was to engage occupational callings in a way that contributes to a more humane culture.

Although page 99 doesn’t directly engage the title themes of the book--moral fundamentalism and pragmatic pluralism--it does offer a glimpse of what philosopher Hilary Putnam would have called the book’s “moral image of the world.” The industrial model of formal schooling takes the educative capacity of experience and uses it to reinscribe conventional practices. Yet this capacity is our best hope for growing beyond the reactivity of my-way-or-the-highway moral fundamentalism. In the face of circumstances that overwhelm them, people tend to be reactive—like pinballs ricocheting around a machine. Even at its best, educating worker bees does little to help curb this reactive tendency. But when schooling speaks to living by cultivating moral, intellectual, and aesthetic growth, students can learn to guide changes through inquiry and communication instead of being tossed around or swept away. Educators can simultaneously contribute to wider public comprehension of what is at stake, and to habits that support the public in acting intelligently on that comprehension. So yes, the Page 99 Test works fine to convey the spirit of this book.

More than a synonym for moral absolutism, a moral fundamentalist may be defined, minimally, as someone who acts as if they have access to: (1) the exclusively right way to diagnose moral or political problems and (2) the single approvable practical solution to any particular problem. For a moral fundamentalist, the main moral, social, or political problem is presumed to be that others don’t get the problem, as though events carry their own transparent meanings. We too readily assume that, unlike their concerns, ours are free of interest-driven rationalizations and biases. Moral fundamentalism is a vice because it obstructs communication, constricts deliberation about what’s possible, and underwrites bad decisions. Social inquiry is more honest, collaborative, rigorous, and productive when youths learn to be patient with the suspense of reflection, open to discomfort and dissent, resolute yet distrustful of tunnel-vision, aware of the fallibility and incompleteness of any decision or policy, practiced in listening, and imaginative in pursuing creative leads.

Learn more about Beyond Moral Fundamentalism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Bittmann's "Working for Debt"

Simon Bittmann is a tenured researcher in sociology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the University of Strasbourg.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Working for Debt: Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the opening page of Chapter 4, a part of the book where I delve into cultural history, showing how the “loan shark” problem was framed as an affliction of Northern white breadwinners during the 1910s and 1920s. This is in sharp contrast with the reality of credit experiences (analyzed in the preceding chapters), which rather underline the key role played by “wage loans” for Black households, and Southern Black women specifically. This page actually sums up a core argument of the book, explaining that in the post-abolition era, “whiteness” underpinned many battles for social progress in an industrial, free market society. To quote it in short, in an excerpt that relies on ideas from Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract (1988):

During the 1910s and 1920s, and the advent of consumer capitalism, the loan shark once again tapped into the distant anxiety that “freedom would ultimately bring the end of all domestic order” by replacing ‘organic relations of dependency—between master and slave, husband and wife, the propertied and the unpropertied’ with “the cruel hierarchies of free market relations.” Wage usurers jeopardized the very material and cultural foundations of the postbellum order, as the contractual freedom to build debt collided with the potential enjoyments of free labor.

More generally, Working for Debt studies about how U.S. workers began relying on wages, not property to access credit, at the beginning of the twentieth century. While “loan shark” lending has often been reduced to immoral, and profligate debt, the book contends that small payday and chattel loans, backed by future wages, were massively used by working classes as a flexible credit instrument, to adjust other expenses or debts, and finance small investments. These loans were all at once exploitative and key to survival. While the industrial era is usually associated with the reign of wage earning and along, labor exploitation, here I show that debt and labor remained inextricably bound, especially for those who primarily relied only on their bodily labor as collateral; that is non-whites and women borrowers. So far, workers’ debt has remained largely under-documented, as compared to mortgages or instalment credit, primarily because it remains harder to describe, as it was often not recorded in standard credit surveys or macroeconomic data. To remedy this, I collected a large amount of legal archives, along with “loan shark” business documents, local press clippings, and combined those with more commonly philanthropic sources, reformist surveys, and historical statistics.

In the existing research, consumer credit has often been regarded either as a secondary exploitation, or presented as an alternative to direct welfare, with credit expansion being praised for these opportunities it offered, such as access to consumer goods or housing. In this framework, wage loans are often positioned on the wrong side of a resource/liability divide, associating middle-class credit with future opportunities, and working-class debt with financial burdens. Here, I show that many poor workers were long included within formal credit markets, but on more exploitative terms, as segregation proved profitable for many white lenders. Finally, the credit reforms implemented to eradicate these “loan sharks” essentially led to a form financial exclusion, with many contemporary ramifications for the post-war era and what is now called ‘predatory lending’. Theoretically, I used the framework of racial capitalism to show how financial exploitation produced racialized and gendered experiences of debt among lower-class debtors, underlining how race and gender inequalities were long engrained in the politics of credit expansion. Along the “wages of whiteness”, wage credit proved key in structuring social and economic hierarchies within the working-class, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal.

Learn more about Working for Debt at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Reynolds's "Reading Practice"

Melissa Reynolds is Assistant Professor of early modern European history at Texas Christian University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Reading Practice, happens to coincide with the end of the introduction to my fourth chapter, which follows natural knowledge that had once circulated in manuscript into print. On that page, I explain that the first printed medical recipe collections, almanacs, and agricultural manuals in England were filled with texts that were quite old, many of which had circulated in manuscript for centuries. I explain that printers who were working to stay afloat in a competitive, commercial print market developed strategies to sell these old texts and argue that these marketing techniques ended up shaping how readers thought about the authority and validity of natural knowledge.

Amazingly, page 99 is a pretty excellent sampling of what readers can find in my book. It captures a central focus of Reading Practice, which is to track readers’ changing attitudes toward books filled with seemingly mundane knowledge as a means of understanding the broader development of a critical attitude toward authority and a curiosity about nature in early modern England.

If an interested reader were to look beyond page 99, they would find that Reading Practice explores how ordinary people living more than 500 years ago grew to accept the premise that books were useful tools within their daily lives. We take that premise for granted, but when books were expensive and written mostly in Latin, such a thought was impossible for most. I begin my examining the books that changed readers’ minds: “practical manuscripts” that circulated in England in the late 1300s and 1400s, containing medical recipes, agricultural directions, herbal knowledge, and the like, written in English for the first time. I show how readers’ interactions with these manuscripts helped them to trust not only books, but their own expertise, too. Then, I trace what happened when this knowledge was commercialized in print. I show that readers became central to the information economy of early modern England, as printers catered to their interests, and as readers in turn recognized their ability to evaluate knowledge for sale in English bookshops. Reading Practice illustrates how, for people living 500 years ago, engagement and analysis of mundane knowledge in quotidian books generated new attitudes toward authorities and toward the natural world.

Visit Melissa Reynolds's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kerry Brown's "The Great Reversal"

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.

Brown applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400 Year Contest for Power concerns an assessment of the outcome of perhaps the most important single encounter between Britain and China since first contact around 1600 – the Lord Macartney embassy of 1793-4. It carries a quote from John Barrow, one of the participants of the tour, who spoke of his awe at seeing the Chinese landscape as the embassy travelled back from Beijing to southern China after meeting the Qianlong emperor, and then shows how, while in terms of trade very little had been achieved, vast amounts of the key export – tea – continued to be shipped to Britain. By 1808, this had reached half the total sent to the whole of the rest of Europe.

This is a pretty good indicator of the tenor of the book as a whole. At heart, Britain’s chief interest in China was always trade, and the main effort its government made was to improve the terms of business and access to China for its merchants. This group had dominated engagement with China from the establishment of the East India Company in 1600. Commerce had indeed figured as the main subject of the earliest attempt at high level contact – the letters sent by Elizabeth I between the 1580s to 1603. None of these ever actually arrived, however, showing that while the desire was there, the means to achieving it were limited.

Things did not improve dramatically over the ensuing two centuries. While foreigners were allowed limited rights to trade from the port of Canton in the southeast of the country, their sporadic attempts to venture elsewhere in the vast country were almost always frustrated. James Flint, one of the earliest recorded British to be able to speak some Chinese, was sent to Beijing in 1757 to try to get access to the emperor. He was exiled from the country for his effrontery, and the poor local who had helped him translate his plaint executed.

The rebuttal of Macartney’s delegation was not so dramatic, but equally as categorical. It came away empty handed, with no agreement on better direct access to the imperial court, nor the right to set up any other trading posts incountry. But it did create a set of new knowledge about China, and a better way to understand the country. In the delegation were botanists, artists, and scientists, and they were able to be directly exposed to Chinese ways of thinking and knowing for the first time. It was for this reason that one historian in the 20 th century said that the Macartney delegation was the greatest single example of two very different civilisations coming into touch with each other, and trying to work out a way of working together in modern history. That endeavour continued over the following decades and centuries, and, greatly expanded and much more complex, continues to this day.

Learn more about The Great Reversal at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roberta L. Millstein's "The Land Is Our Community"

Roberta L. Millstein is an Emerit Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Davis, retired from teaching but still researching. She is an AAAS Fellow (since election in 2022), and is also affiliated with UCD's Science and Technology Studies (STS) Program and co-runs UCD's PhilBio Lab with Jim Griesemer.

Millstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, is a table (the only table in the book!) entitled, “Comparison of Leopold to contemporary ecologists with respect to topics related to biodiversity and stability.” The points of comparison in the table, elaborated in earlier text, include methodology, species studied, mechanisms, biodiversity, stability (in its broad meaning), and stability (how it manifests and is measured. The table shows in each case that Leopold’s approach is broader or more realistic (i.e., less idealized) than that of most contemporary ecologists. So, for example, with respect to methodology, instead of relying on field experiments or theoretical models, as most contemporary ecologists do, Leopold took a historical, observational, and comparative approach, including “natural experiments”; he was also a hands-on practitioner. And instead of primarily studying plant biodiversity, Leopold studied species at every trophic (i.e., feeding) level.

The Page 99 Test does not really work for my book. Page 99 does not express the main thesis of the book—it’s not directly about the land ethic—and given that it is a table, doesn’t even give a sense of the writing style used in the book. However, it is interesting that page 99 does provide an example of one of the main themes of the book. The theme is this: even though Aldo Leopold was a 20th century ecologist (among other hats he wore during his lifetime), his scientific views are not outdated and in many cases anticipated directions that ecology has—or could—go in. Previous authors criticized Leopold’s concepts of “community” and “stability” for being out of date. But they did so without really doing the legwork to figure out what Leopold meant by those terms. Instead, they assumed that he meant what other ecologists of his time meant. When you look at more of his writings, however, you realize that Leopold was an independent thinker who used scientific terms in distinctive ways.

The table on page 99 appears in Chapter 4 of 6, a chapter entitled “Land Health.” I show that Leopold used the terms “stability” and “land health” essentially interchangeably. A big chunk of the chapter is spent on figuring what Leopold meant by land health, an idea he was still working on at the time of his death in 1948. As the table indicates, Leopold’s understanding of stability/land health was the land’s capacity for self-renewal—its ability to support a diversity of life over time. In the chapter, I also discuss what Leopold thought the causes of land health were; these turn out to be soil health (he said the evidence for this connection is very strong) and what we would today call biodiversity (he thought the evidence here was not as strong, but that it was very suggestive). Contemporary ecologists have spent the last several decades disagreeing over whether biodiversity is a cause of stability, with the consensus having swung back and forth a few times. One of the things I suggest in the chapter is that ecologists might profitably consider studying his conceptions of biodiversity and stability and the underlying mechanism that he proposes for the connection between them, and indeed, a few ecologists are already doing that.

So there is a lot happening on page 99!

Visit Roberta L. Millstein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela D. Toler's "The Dragon from Chicago"

Armed with a PhD in history, Pamela D. Toler translates history for a popular audience, going beyond the familiar boundaries of American history to tell stories from other parts of the world as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the color bar. Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Aramco World, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Ms., and Time.com. Her books of popular history for adults and children include Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War (a nonfiction companion to the PBS historical drama Mercy Street), Through the Minefields, and Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.

Toler applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Dragon From Chicago begins with the opening of the German Reichstag in October, 1930. The Nazi Party now held the second largest number of seats in the Reichstag and their entrance into the chamber was accompanied by riots on the streets and the threat of battle within the Reichstag building.

A significant part of the page describes the broader context of those riots, how Sigrid Schultz reported on political riots in Berlin, and the way those reports were received by the Tribune’s editorial desk in Chicago. Here is what the reader would find:

The violence that accompanied the opening of the Reichstag set the tone for the months to come. Riots on the streets were so routine and yet so bloody, that political parties often arranged for the presence of a Red Cross unit when organizing a demonstration. According to an official report that Schultz shared with her readers, in Prussia alone the police were called out to quell riots 2,494 times in the twelve-month period from March 1930 to March 1931.

Given the wealth of material, Schultz chose which riots she re- ported on with care. She often used them to explain the larger political and social context of Depression-era Germany. Using this technique, she described heckling on the floor of the Reichstag, explained Chancellor Brüning’s coercive and ineffective measures for reducing the costs of living and production, and introduced Tribune readers to the six million men who belonged to paramilitary organizations controlled by political parties, including the Reichsbanner, made up of members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Hitler’s Brownshirts, and the Steel Helmet, an organization of World War I veterans that began as monarchists and nationalists but became aligned with the Nazis over time. (The regular army was limited to one hundred thousand men by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.) She gave equal consideration to violence at the hands of Reds and Fascists. She also gave her readers glimpses of the National Socialist Party’s growth as a political force.

Despite the restraint Schultz showed in choosing which riots to report on, the Tribune’s editorial desk feared Chicago readers had a limited appetite for such stories. In December 1930, George Scharschug, who had replaced Joseph Pierson as cable editor, followed a compliment on her story on riots related to the Berlin showing of All Quiet on the Western Front with the statement: “Berlin riots are becoming almost a joke. They happen so frequently.”

The passage is a critical one in the book and would give the reader a good sense of what the book is about. Together, the rise of the Nazis and the fall of Weimar were the big story of Sigrid Schultz’s career, and much of the book deals with her experiences dealing with and reporting on the Nazis. It was dangerous and challenging work. She had to sift through lies and propaganda to find the truth of a story. She devised ways to get her stories out of Germany despite increasingly stringent controls on foreign correspondents. More than once she was called into Gestapo headquarters because of a story she had written.

Once her stories reached the Tribune’s offices in Chicago, Schultz faced a different type of challenge: no matter how important events were in Berlin they weren’t necessarily the most important news from the perspective of Chicago. Page 99 deals with a moment when the Chicago editorial desk directly questioned whether their readers would care.

Visit Pamela D. Toler's website.

The Page 99 Test: Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dean Jobb's "A Gentleman and a Thief"

Dean Jobb is the author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, winner of the inaugural CrimeCon CLUE Award for true crime book of the year and longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His previous books include Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called “intoxicating and impressively researched” and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Esquire magazine has hailed him as “a master of narrative nonfiction.” Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune and Toronto’s Globe and Mail and his monthly true crime column, “Stranger Than Fiction,” appears in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He is a professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program.

Jobb applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“He was dressed to blend in with the posh surroundings, in a blue suit, pearl-gray tie, and black homburg. A brown leather briefcase completed the businessman-arriving-home look.” Arthur Barry, a clever and prolific Jazz Age crook – Life magazine later proclaimed him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived” – was about to pull off the most audacious heist of his seven-year-reign as the king of New York’s cat burglars.

Page 99 of my latest true crime book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, published by Algonquin Books in the U.S. and by HarperCollins Canada, plunges readers into the heart of the action. It’s 1925 and Barry is about to slip into a suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel and escape with a strand of pearls and other jewelry worth millions. His victim? Heiress Jessie Donahue, daughter of the founder of the Woolworth chain of five-and-dime stores and one of the wealthiest women in the country. For this book, the Page 99 Test works – readers who turn to this page first will catch the master burglar in the act.

Barry pulled off scores of meticulously planned break-ins on Long Island and in Westchester County, targeting the mansions and sprawling estates of New York’s ultra-rich. His victims included Percy Rockefeller, nephew of the founder of Standard Oil, Wall Street investment legend Jesse Livermore, and Oklahoma oil tycoon Joshua Cosden. When the Prince of Wales visited Long Island in 1924, he took the future King Edward VIII on a clandestine tour of Manhattan nightclubs, then stole jewelry from a member of the prince’s entourage, Lady Edwina Mountbatten.

The press dubbed him a “gentlemanly thief.” Barry sometimes donned a tuxedo and crashed parties, passing himself off as an invited guest before slipping upstairs to check out where jewels were likely to be stashed when he returned to break in. If his victims were awakened as he crept into their bedrooms, he assured them he was only there for the jewels and engaged in small talk to calm them down. Dorothea Livermore, wife of the Wall Street investor, convinced him to return two valuable rings he was about to take, claiming they had sentimental value. “I know he’s terrible,” she later told reporters, “but isn’t he charming?”

Barry’s haul of diamonds, pearls and other gems would have been worth at least $60 million today. His arrest in 1927 was not the end of his incredible story. A dramatic prison break, years as a fugitive, and a final shot at redemption lay in the future.

Visit Dean Jobb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William T. Taylor's "Hoof Beats"

William T. Taylor is an Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, whose work explores the domestication of the horse and the ancient relationships between people and animals.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, and reported the following:

The reader flipping to page 99 of Hoof Beats will encounter a two-page map spread showing how horses and horse riding spread out of Inner Asia and into Africa, and the links and trade routes created by the Silk Road, Tea Horse Road, and steppe empires. This moment in the book also marks a key turning point in the human-horse story, as the narrative shifts from an investigation into the origins of horse domestication to an exploration of the dynamic ways that horse riding built steppe empires and forged new links across the ancient world.

Turning past page 99, the reader will find themselves knee-deep in an exposition of ancient archaeological discoveries from Mongolia, the focus of my own work and the core of the book’s new scholarship. The Mongolian steppes served as the staging ground for many of the most important changes to people, horses and the ancient world – from the innovation of the saddle and stirrup to the emergence of pan-Eurasian empires and early global trade routes. I think the Page 99 Test nicely encapsulates the role of visual storytelling in Hoof Beats, and the integrated, global perspective that the book takes to understanding the human-horse relationship.

Visit William T. Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods's "Puppy Kindergarten"

Brian Hare is a professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, where he founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at the Center as well as an award-winning journalist and the author of Bonobo Handshake. Hare and Woods are married and live in North Carolina. They are the authors of Survival of the Friendliest and The Genius of Dogs.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog, and reported the following:

Sadly, page 99 is one of the very few pages that does not have a puppy photo, or even mention a puppy!!

It does distill a hotly debated, poorly understood, and complicated subject into a few paragraphs – how cognition and temperament fit into personality. The most helpful line I read when trying to wrestle with this topic was as psychologist David Rettew described it; if your personality is a symphony, your temperament is the key in which the symphony is played.

If I could, I would make it ‘the page 100 test’ because rapidly on the heels of page 99 comes one of my favorite tests with puppies—how they react to toy robots. Basically, we introduce puppies to various life-sized robots, some of whom dance and sing, and record what happens.

It’s a classic temperament test; psychologists have conducted similar tests with children for decades. Since your temperament is with you from a very young age and remains relatively stable, your reaction to something surprising and new when you are young can predict, to some extent, what you will be like when you get older.

We want to see if the same is true for puppies. Some puppies are friendly and kind to the robot, maybe making a deep play bow and sniffing its bottom. Other puppies are alarmed and confused and quickly ask to leave.

Watching the different puppies react to the robot and pairing this with their cognition emphasizes how each puppy is unique. This is probably one of my favorite lessons in our book - that just like kids, puppies all see the world and solve problems differently.

Visit Brian Hare's website and Vanessa Woods's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Genius of Dogs.

The Page 99 Test: Survival of the Friendliest.

--Marshal Zeringue

On Barak's "Heat, a History"

On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology and Professor of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His books include Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization.

Barak applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet, and reported the following:

Climate scientists dread vicious cycles – biophysical feedback loops that could accelerate climate change and push the Earth's system past critical tipping points. (These include melting ice exposing darker, heat-absorbing surfaces; thawing permafrost releasing greenhouse gases; and deforestation reducing carbon sequestration.) But if climate change is human-caused, what about the social and political dynamics propelling it? My book explores such cycles forming during the twentieth century and page 99 captures one of them quite effectively. It describes newly built all-season asphalt and concrete roads that connected the coastal plain and the interior in Mandatory Palestine. Unlike the old dirt roads that were impassable during winter and raised choking dust in the summer, these new infrastructures supported the expansion of economic sectors like citriculture – allowing oranges to be transported from field to harbor during the winter – and that of beachgoing during the summer. Yet built from heat-absorbing materials, the new roads contributed to the formation of heat sinks and prevented rain absorption. Moreover, they flamed the escalation in heated intercommunal clashed between minimally clothed Jews and Arabs congregating together at the beach.

As the rest of the book shows, such vicious thermo-political cycles play an unrecognized role in the history of the Middle East, a region often labeled a “hotspot” but where heat is seldom considered seriously. For example, I trace the impact of August 1929 heat on the famous riots that some historians argue triggered the conflict over Palestine. One overlooked trigger was tension surrounding fair-skinned Jewish women wearing shorts in ethnically mixed cities like Jaffa – a cooling strategy for some became a provocation for others.

Beyond Palestine, other vicious cycles include the introduction of air conditioning in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1940s. This emblematic vicious cycle relied on fossil-fuel electricity for cooling while enabling oil extraction in hot regions as American oilmen in Arabia depended on their ACs. In turn, combusted oil released greenhouse gases, intensifying global warming and local heating.

The advent of mechanical cooling accelerated the shift in attitudes towards perspiration, the body's natural cooling mechanism. Heat, A History chronicles the transformation of sweat from a desirable, even erotic substance in early modern times to an abject fluid to be suppressed or masked. This shift paralleled and intertwined with the increasing reliance on fossil-fueled cooling technologies. The book posits that breaking our dependence on fossil-fueled technology requires a multi-level reconsideration of our attitudes towards heat and cooling. This reassessment must span from the individual body to the built environment and ultimately to the global scale. By recognizing how our perceptions of sweat and heat have changed over time, as well as the social and political dispositions involved, we can begin to challenge our current reliance on energy-intensive cooling methods.

Visit On Barak's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hatim Rahman's "Inside the Invisible Cage"

Hatim Rahman is an award-winning associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, and reported the following:

From page 99:

TalentFinder also retained the sole right to remove any feedback it deemed as hurting its interests:

In order to protect the integrity of the feedback system and protect Users from abuse, TalentFinder reserves the right (but is under no obligation) to remove posted feedback or information that, in TalentFinder’s sole judgment, violates the Terms of Service or negatively affects our marketplace, diminishes the integrity of the feedback system or otherwise is inconsistent with the business interests of TalentFinder.

According to this statement, TalentFinder was able to simultaneously absolve itself of the responsibility of investigating the accuracy of feedback scores while also monitoring these scores to the point that it could remove any feedback that it felt hurt its business interests. As is common with terms of services, TalentFinder’s polices allowed the platform to “have its cake and eat it too,” especially in regard to asserting control over the rating system.

None of the people I interviewed indicated that they had read any of these agreements, let alone expressed objections to them. Many scholars have commented that online contracts have been designed and implemented in such a way that users are simply conditioned to agree to terms without deliberating or reading the contract. Legal scholar Margaret Radin notes that, broadly speaking, people are subject to two different types of contractual agreements. In “agreement” contracts, either party can negotiate the terms before an agreement is reached and the contract is finalized. Think about negotiating the cost of a used car, the terms when buying a house, or even the price of a product at a flea market. These are variations of agreement contracts because such contracts are not set in stone before the contract is signed or verbally agreed to.

On the other hand, “boilerplate” contracts are standardized take-it-or-leave-it contracts that, in practice, are impossible to

Page 99 of my book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, provides background knowledge about the book’s main argument. That is, the book’s main argument is that organizations, particularly digital platforms, are using algorithms to control high-skilled workers within an “invisible cage”: an environment in which organizations embed the rules and guidelines for how workers should behave in opaque algorithms. It is ‘invisible’ because organizations can use algorithms to change the rules and criteria for success at an unprecedented speed and scale without notice, explanation, or recourse. It is a ‘cage’ because these algorithms increasingly control our opportunities without our say.

Page 99 discusses one important mechanism that enables organizations to create an invisible cage. This page shows an example of how the organization I studied uses its terms of service to accrue power over workers, and enabled the organization to make changes to the platform. Specifically, this page illustrates how the organization established the right to control information and visibility of a workers’ feedback on the platform without workers’ consent or awareness. The power to make such changes is critical because workers rely on their rating feedback to attract new clients and secure additional work. Importantly, by embedding the provision mentioned on page 99 in the terms of service, TalentFinder is creating a “digital boilerplate agreement.” The beginning of the chapter argues that these agreements are shifting terms of service that enable an organization to implement any change that further entrenches its power and information asymmetries over workers. Page 99 is indeed an important page but it does not exactly reveal the quality of the whole book, which begins by laying out the history of online labor markets and ratings, then sharing the stories of real workers on the labor market, and finally discussing the construct of the invisible cage and its ramifications on theory and practice.

The reason I think the Page 99 Test does not, overall, provide an accurate understanding of my book’s quality is because many sections of the book provide greater depth to the book’s core thesis. Without knowing the thesis, which is laid out in the beginning of the book, page 99 does not provide the best illustration of the book’s quality.

Learn more about Inside the Invisible Cage at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica L. Gaston's "Illusions of Control"

Erica L. Gaston is senior policy advisor and head of the Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace Programme at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a nonresident fellow at both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Global Public Policy Institute.

Gaston applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses why the so-called “bargaining environment” in Afghanistan in 2009 was much more diverse, multi-player, and complex than in 2005 in Iraq, when U.S. military leaders in Iraq had much closer to a monopoly on military and political decision-making regarding U.S. initiatives. This page would give a flavor for the type of analysis and subject matter as a whole: it touches on two of the three main arenas for the book (Afghanistan and Iraq in periods of U.S. intervention) and also deals with the idea of bargaining debates influencing policy outcomes, which is one of the central theoretical premises. However, because page 99 offers evidence relevant to understanding only two of nine case studies, and related to a minor theoretical sub-contention, it would not necessarily give a sense of the main themes, features, or overall argument of the book. The larger focus of the book is on how a series of tactical or technical measures adopted by the United States to mitigate risks associated with irregular forces (militias, rebels and other local armed groups) often contributed to these initiatives being authorized or approved, but ultimately did little to address the risks in question. This introduced a degree of moral hazard, potentially leading the US to engage in riskier partnerships than it might have. At a theoretical level, the book tests the most common academic paradigm applied to these proxy relationships, which is principal-agent theory, against the evidence. While principal-agent theory well describes the risks involved when the US tried to delegate security and other policy tasks to these irregular forces, it does not do a good job of explaining why the US imposed such a range of checks and controls, even as they proved increasingly costly and ineffective. Instead the evidence much more closely aligns with the theoretical expectations of bureaucratic policy analysis (BPA), which finds that policy outcomes are more likely to be influenced by political bargaining and organizational inputs as by top-down cost-benefit analyses or other more strategic calculations. The BPA bargaining lens is even more broadly applicable when expanded to include the much wider range of transnational and non-US government players that tend to be involved in these sorts of hybrid political and security environments. Page 99 fits into this by exploring the nature of the bargaining arena, and how this helps explain why so many more checks were imposed on Afghan local forces (the Afghan Local Police) than on the Iraqi forces mobilized only a few years earlier (the sahwa). It’s an important piece of the puzzle but likely not enough of one for the reader to get a sense of the full book on its own.

Learn more about Illusions of Control at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cormac Ó Gráda's "The Hidden Victims"

Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economic historian and professor emeritus at University College Dublin. His many books include Famine: A Short History and Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains part of an account of famine in Moldova, then part of the former Soviet Union, in the wake of World War 2. The first part of the page is a table describing the death rate. The second part contains:

As with all Soviet famines, the underlying causes of the (Moldovan) famine have been disputed. Severe drought in the spring of 1946 in the wake of an occupation that left the economy flattened and twenty million dead is one possibility; official culpability for prioritizing grain exports at the expense of the starving masses is another. In 1946, for the fifth year in a row, grain output in the Soviet Union was less than half its pre-war average. Wiliam P. Forrest believed that in Ukraine it had taken a herculean effort to plant “over 80 percent” of the 1940 harvested area but that the crop yield per acre could not, “at the most optimistic estimate”, have been much more than 40 percent of that of 1940.

If browsers open the book to page 99, would they get a good or a poor idea of the whole work? Yes and No. Page 99 is representative of one important part of a 500-page book, which describes the impact of WW1 and WW2 on civilians in the form of hunger, starvation, and related diseases. It captures the ‘feel’ of the book’s account of the many war-famines that together killed over twenty million civilians. It also reflects the fact that, as the title indicates, civilian deaths are the subject of the book. Page 99 also captures the way the book is written: a mélange of quantification, analysis, and narrative. Famine deaths in the Soviet Union in 1946-7 represented only a small fraction of the sixty million or so deaths of non- combatants during the two wars.

Page 99 also hints at the grim reality that the civilian death toll from both wars continued to mount after 1918 and 1945, respectively. However, it does not capture the fact that the book is about all kinds of civilian casualties. The Hidden Victims also describes and seeks to count civilian casualties by genocide, aerial bombing, and by other means, as well as to document the cost to survivors in terms of forced displacement, trauma, and sexual violence. It also highlights where the likely true figures differ from those most frequently cited, and where the truth will always be difficult to establish. Nor does page 99 contain any of the dozens of black-and-white photographic images employed

Learn more about The Hidden Victims at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosanne Liebermann's "Exile, Incorporated"

Rosanne Liebermann is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Aarhus University in Denmark. She holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Theology from the University of Oxford.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Exile, Incorporated: The Body in the Book of Ezekiel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Exile, Incorporated occurs in the middle of Chapter 4 and begins a new section entitled “The Unfaithful Wife, the Unnatural Mother.” The section begins: “While the woman in Ezekiel 16 is made to look the part of Yhwh’s wife, her behaviour once married is not fitting for her new social role. The text begins to list Yhwh’s accusations against her.” There follows a quote from Ezekiel 16:15-19 in my translation. This part of the Old Testament text shows that the woman, who has married the god Yhwh in Ezekiel’s metaphorical story, immediately begins to behave promiscuously. She uses the clothes, jewellery, perfume, and food Yhwh gave her as wedding gifts to make, adorn, and offer to statues of other gods. The text goes on to accuse her of promiscuity with Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and other foreigners (Ezek 16:25-26, 28-29). Yhwh condemns the woman’s behaviour by saying that she is more sinful than a sex worker. Whereas a sex worker’s activities can be explained by her need for money, Yhwh’s wife pays other men to persuade them to sleep with her.

This page of Exile, Incorporated does not provide an especially good insight into my book. Page 99 is mostly taken up by primary text, the relevance of which for the book’s argument is only unpacked in the following pages. I could imagine that anyone beginning to read the book at this page would find it inaccessible and put it back down again!

However, the initial sentence of page 99 does reflect one of the book’s core premises: that identity is something constantly created and maintained via the practices and experiences of the body. Being ascribed a certain identity, whether at birth or later on, is not enough to maintain that identity unquestionably throughout life. In the case of the metaphor in Ezekiel 16 featured on page 99, a woman becomes a high-status wife through her marriage to a deity, but she loses that status via her sexual promiscuity. My book goes on to discuss how the woman also fails to act as any normal kind of mother, since she slaughters her own children. In Ezekiel’s metaphor, the woman represents Jerusalem, and her promiscuity and child sacrifice represent the people’s worship of gods other than Yhwh and forming of alliances with foreign nations. Ezekiel seeks to demonstrate that, just as a woman loses her identity as a wife because of her unfaithfulness, Jerusalem loses its identity as Yhwh’s special city due to its disloyalty.

This is all part of the main argument of Exile, Incorporated: that the book of Ezekiel seeks to portray the Judeans who went into exile to Babylonia in the sixth century BCE as the continuation of Yhwh’s people. By undermining Jerusalem and the Judeans who remained there, Ezekiel can demonstrate that it is the Judeans in Babylonia who are the true people of Yhwh. But these exiled Judeans cannot rely on their special group identity, either. According to the book of Ezekiel, they must continually enact this identity via their bodies; for example, by conducting circumcision, observing Sabbaths and feast days, and leaving ritual activities up to the priesthood. Ezekiel’s metaphor about the unfaithful wife also acts as a cautionary tale regarding sexual liaisons with foreigners. In these ways, I argue that the book of Ezekiel advocates that the Judeans in Babylonia “incorporate” their specifically exilic Judean identity into their everyday behaviours and experiences.

Learn more about Exile, Incorporated at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott K. Taylor's "Ambivalent Pleasures"

Scott K. Taylor is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain.

Taylor applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ambivalent Conquests does a good job of portraying how this book tries to uncover the deep patterns in the past that set the stage for drug use today. In particular, it shows early modern Europeans wrestling with the soft drugs that were either new to them at the time or newly available in mass quantities – sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, distilled spirits like rum and gin, opium, and on this page, tobacco. Here readers will find Europeans trying to figure out why tobacco, like all the other new drugs, were so hard to quit using once started. Early modern Europeans thought they understood the medicinal properties of all these substances quite well – and all these drugs were used initially as medicines – through the old concepts of Galenic humoral medicine that dated back to ancient Greece. But nothing in their medical heritage helped them understand what we today would call “addiction” or “substance use disorder.” On this page, we find observers from England, France, and Spain wondering if something in the drugs themselves gave them power over their users, and they employed the language of sorcery and slavery to articulate this idea. Other attempts to understand addiction drew on their understanding of gluttony, an individual vice, or on problems that inhered in society as a whole, like luxury and debauchery. Probing the ways that Europeans first tried to grapple with the compulsive use of psychotropic drugs might help us see a way forward when the “brain disease” model of substance abuse is beginning to crumble today.

Learn more about Ambivalent Pleasures at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Yaping Wang's "The Art of State Persuasion"

Frances Yaping Wang is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. She received her PhD in politics from the University of Virginia. She was previously an assistant professor at the Singapore Management University, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame's International Security Center, a Minerva-United State Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar, a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies of the George Washington University, and an editor/analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wang applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes, and reported the following:

Page 99 delves into China’s hardline foreign policy through a detailed case study of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war. Drawing on archival sources and historical data, it provides a concise overview of China’s internal decision-making process leading up to the conflict.

While this page offers a rich, granular analysis of a significant historical event, it is perhaps too specific to serve as an introduction to the broader themes of the book. In fact, any page from the introduction would better capture the book’s overarching ideas than page 99. Page 99 is just one part of a larger theoretical framework, which is illustrated through four distinct case studies. These case studies, each representing different scenarios, are integral to the book’s argument. The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war is the only historical case among them, distinguished by its rich historical context and its exploration of one of the most extensive propaganda campaigns in Chinese history—a campaign that spanned a decade and remains one of the most remarkable feats of the Chinese propaganda machinery.

While page 99 effectively showcases the meticulous use of evidence, including quotes from recently declassified documents, it is but a small window into the book’s broader narrative. Beyond this historical case, the book also employs advanced computerized text analysis to compare various types of propaganda campaigns, drawing insightful comparisons between Chinese propaganda and that of other authoritarian regimes. In sum, while page 99 provides a fascinating and detailed glimpse into a crucial historical case, capturing the depth of analysis and the rigorous use of evidence, it offers only a narrow perspective on the book’s wider argument. For those looking to grasp the full scope and intent of the book, the introduction would provide a far better entry point.

Visit Frances Yaping Wang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue