Raphael Cormack's "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age"

Raphael Cormack is an award-winning editor, translator, and writer. The author of Midnight in Cairo, Cormack is assistant professor of modern languages and cultures at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult, and reported the following:

From page 98:

By the late 1930s Hamid Bey had become a committed American nationalist: “America is to be the next holy land and it is here that the next Christ consciousness will reincarnate. Preparation must be made for this great event, and that is why the Coptic Fellowship of America has been established.”

This is the beginning of the first paragraph of page 98 of Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age (page 99 is only a couple of lines so I am cheating and taking the facing page). It is also a very good encapsulation of one of the key themes of the book. Hamid Bey is a man who started his career in America as a stage performer, doing a fakir act in which he buried himself alive and withstood pain and mutilation. By the 1930s, though, he had moved on from the entertainment business into the world of mysticism and self-help, attempting to guide the American public on a new spiritual path. One of the central themes of my book is the way that the occult gives one of the clearest views of the anxieties and dreams of a particular time and place. Moving between Europe, America, and the Middle East, it traces several different holy men who offer solutions to the chaos of the twentieth century. Here we see Hamid Bey (originally from Italy) adapting his message to the New World and its concerns. Elsewhere in the book we see the fakir Tahra Bey, who won great fame in the uncertain world of 1920s Paris, and Dr Dahesh, a hypnotist-spiritualist who eventually started his own religious movement in 1940s Beirut.

Learn more about Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Costa's "How Politicians Polarize"

Mia Costa is a social scientist studying political representation, political behavior, and the politics of race and gender in the United States.

She works at Dartmouth College as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Program in Quantitative Social Science.

For Spring 2025, she is a visiting professor of Government at Harvard.

Costa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Politicians Polarize: Political Representation in an Age of Negative Partisanship, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book introduces the method of one of the tests I use in the book –a conjoint experiment– and explains how this design allows researchers to estimate the causal effect of multiple things at once, such as a representative's race, party, gender, and rhetoric. The page explains that a basic survey experiment might lead respondents to make assumptions because they are only given limited information. For example, respondents might assume that a candidate using negative partisanship is also ideologically extreme. The passage provides a technical overview of how the method works and why it is well suited to testing how people evaluate candidates based on specific features.

Would readers get a good idea of the whole book just from this page? Not really! But they would get a peek. The page reflects the book's empirical approach and interest in identifying causal effects. And it hints at, but doesn't quite spell out, the main question for this particular test, which is about how political elites view negative partisan rhetoric as an electoral strategy.

This is only one part of the larger argument and patterns shown in the book, and page 99 doesn't yet cover what I find in this particular experiment! I go on to show that candidates and politicians think that voters do not respond favorably to partisan attacks. This is important: a lot of politicians spend time talking about the other party, but they don't actually think it wins votes. So why do they do it? Turns out there are other incentives for engaging in such partisan attacks. Negative partisan rhetoric boosts a politician's national profile, goes more viral on social media, and rakes in out-of-state fundraising. It might not get more votes, but it gets more attention. This type of language by politicians has consequences too. I show that politicians who make partisan attacks are not as effective at actual lawmaking. The good news: politicians actually talk about policy more than they talk about the other party. But it's just not what we hear about.

Visit Mia Costa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Díaz's "After Spaceship Earth"

Eva Díaz is a professor of contemporary art in the Department of the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions, and reported the following:

After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions is concerned with the legacy of architect-designer Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. It was written following the publication of my book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (2015) that focuses on models of experimental testing—I’m ready for this test!—in the works and teachings of three important Black Mountain College figures in the late 1940s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Fuller. I came down quite hard on Fuller’s anti-political technocratic utilitarianism in that earlier work, suspicious as I am about his unbounded faith in the power of technology. Yet in the period I was writing about Fuller’s years at Black Mountain I was also a full-time curator of contemporary art, and it was in studio visits and discussions with artists that I regularly heard them express delight about “Bucky’s” projects. In particular, many contemporary artists respond enthusiastically to Fuller’s concept of a hybrid artist-scientist role, as well as his arguments for radical equity in design. Fuller maintained that we have the means to feed, house and clothe the world’s population, and tirelessly sought to redistribute global resources to that end. This is a powerful call for ecological and social justice.

Page 99 is uncharacteristic. In a book that takes up nearly fifty living artists, this page sits in the most historical section of the book when I discuss Fuller’s quixotic life: a figure beloved on college campuses and a designer for the U.S. armed forces; both a guru for the 1960s counterculture and an advocate for global telecommunications networks used for corporate and governmental surveillance. On this page is a large illustration—one of 150 in the book—of a sculpture by Black Mountain College student Kenneth Snelson, an artist whom I interviewed a few years before his death, and whose work was the catalyst for Fuller’s development of tensegrity, a principle of continuous tension/discontinuous compression used in geodesic dome designs. Here my analysis of Fuller’s legacy is embedded in a brief history of his work for the U.S. military constructing radomes, geodesic shelters housing radar defense installations, often in remote arctic outposts.

This chapter ends part 1 of my book, titled “Terrestrial,” which considers works of art and design that use geodesic domes in various ways: as ad-hoc architectural projects grappling with climate change, as spaces of exhibition display and communication design, as proposals to solve housing crises, and, as this chapter probes, as critiques of the pervasiveness of surveillance. The book’s second half, “Extraplanetary,” takes up the influence of Fuller and his acolyte Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, in artworks examining outer space exploration and colonization. The four chapters in this second section interject the important corrective of Afrofuturist thinking into Fuller’s and Brand’s space optimism, and investigate artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space: how the space “race” and off-planet colonization are being reformulated as powerful tools to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices.

Visit Eva Díaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Nemec's "Brahmins and Kings"

John Nemec is Professor of Indian Religions and South Asian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. The author of three books and numerous articles and other publications, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, an M.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a B.A. from the University of Rochester. He was an India Fulbright Scholar in 2002-2003, Directeur d'études invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 2016, and the Khaitan Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in 2023.

Nemec applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Brahmins and Kings: Royal Counsel in the Sanskrit Narrative Literatures, and reported the following:

Brahmins and Kings examines the advice given to political leaders. It does so by reading the most well-known and widely circulated of Hindu stories from India's antiquity.

On page 99 of the book, the subject-matter is the famed Hindu epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. It points out that there is something going on in the text. The hero of the epic, Rāma, kills a wayward king, who was an effective but evil political leader. He does so because this enemy king, a half-demon named Rāvaṇa, lacked the kind of personal restraint required to govern wisely. In fact, Rāvaṇa was sexually deviant, and he had kidnapped Rāma's wife for this reason.

The wrinkle in the story that is examined on page 99 is this: Rāvaṇa's family actually has roots in the most well-placed people of society, the Brahmins. These are the ones who are said to be best able to give good advice to political leaders, because they are (supposed) to live it and breathe it.

Simply, on page 99 it is pointed out that the moral of the story is that everyone in society has to take care of their own self-restraint. Each of us must cultivate a measured approach to life—an inner life—, what I refer to in the book as the Virtue Ethic of the narratives. With this ethic comes the self-restraint that allows kings and other political leaders (and all of us) to act in the greater interest, to see the world for what it really is instead of what they want it to be, to act with wisdom and care, and also to succeed in one's goals in life thereby.

If you read page 99, you'll get a good sense of this book. This is a book about learning how to be a just and upright person in the world. The book argues that being "good" in this way leads one to do well in the world—to succeed at one's goals in life. The goals pursued are not just proper action and morality and adherence to the law. They also include the pursuit of power, wealth, and fame, as well as the pursuit of pleasure—that is, pleasure in art, but also personal enjoyment of every kind, so long as engaged properly (example: not in adultery). And, finally, the virtue ethic even helps cultivate spiritual emancipation, heaven or liberation after this life.

The book examines this advice as told in stories, because stories are really good at making their audiences directly feel and imbibe the ideas they embody. Stories can transform their audiences because the medium of storytelling is so engaging.

This is the message of the book in a nutshell. It is, I argue, what the authors of these stories wished to say. So for those who have read or might want to read some of the most fascinating and exciting of any stories ever written—including epic tales, historical accounts of kings in Kashmir, fantasy stories about flying magical beings and the like, animal fables that give parable-like advice, and Sanskrit dramas and poetry that address the good life of the king and his beautiful life in the court—this book can serve as a guide and companion.

Learn more about Brahmins and Kings at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zev Handel's "Chinese Characters across Asia"

Zev Handel is professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. He is author of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script and associate coeditor of Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics.

Handel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book describes the Chinese conquest of the northern part of the Korean peninsula over 2,000 years ago, an area in which writing was previously unknown. It explains how Chinese military control led to the establishment of a Chinese-style government administration and bureaucracy, which introduced Chinese writing to the region. After the Goguryeo kingdom re-conquered the region, wresting control from China, the kingdom continued to administer the region on the Chinese model.

In one respect, a reader browsing to page 99 would get a fairly good idea of the topic of the book, which is focused on the early history of the spread of Chinese writing into the areas of modern-day Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. The information presented on page 99 is important historical context for the way in which writing spread and was adapted beyond the borders of China proper. In another respect, however, page 99 is not typical. Most of the book deals with concepts and examples related to the adaptation and application of Chinese characters to writing non-Chinese languages. The first few chapters explain how Chinese characters were invented and how they function, in comparison with alphabetic writing. In doing so, they dismantle a number of common myths and half-truths about Chinese writing. Following chapters explain how Chinese characters were learned and conceptualized outside of China, before exploring the different ways they were adapted to represent other spoken languages in writing. It is these sections that constitute the heart of the book. For example, pages 108 to 121, building on the historical background on page 99, describe a song in the Old Korean language that was composed well over 1,000 years ago and explain how its words and sounds are represented using adapted Chinese characters.

Later chapters explore how written Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese eventually took on the forms known today, and investigate the question of whether Chinese characters might constitute a kind of universal writing that transcends language differences. (Answer: they don’t.) Because the book is intended for a general readership, all of these concepts are illustrated with thought experiments involving English, and do not presume any knowledge of Chinese characters or the various languages under discussion.

Learn more about Chinese Characters across Asia at the University of Washington Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brendan A. Shanahan's "Disparate Regimes"

Brendan A. Shanahan is a Lecturer in the Department of History and an Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He teaches courses on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. He served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale's Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, earned his PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his BA from McGill University.

Shanahan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965, and reported the following:

Readers who jump ahead to page 99 of Disparate Regimes will read an excerpt that gets to the heart of the major themes, recurring methodologies, representative historical episodes, and chronological hinge points of the book (though they may find themselves thrown in the proverbial deep end without important context developed in the surrounding pages).

Page 99 examines two political and legal disputes in Progressive Era Massachusetts. Both centered on the Bay State constitution’s long-standing anti-alien apportionment provision (a policy which counted noncitizens out of the population for the purposes of redrawing state legislative seats). Much of the page examines efforts in 1916 by James Brennan, then a leading Democratic politician and powerbroker in Boston, to gum up the operation of – if not outright flout – the implementation of the state’s anti-alien apportionment policy. As chairman of the commission responsible for reapportioning state House seats to the various wards of Suffolk County (home to Boston), Brennan offered numerous extraconstitutional reasons for trying to assign extra seats to his own district and wards represented by his political allies. These neighborhoods often had large noncitizen immigrant populations, which were not supposed to be counted for the purposes of state legislative representation. Brennan’s efforts proved unsuccessful, with his political adversaries scoring multiple victories against his plans in court. The page concludes by jumping ahead to 1917. It shows how Brennan tried (and ultimately failed) to convince his fellow lawmakers to repeal the state’s anti-alien apportionment policy as a delegate to the Bay State’s World War I-era constitutional convention.

Though a bit more technical than most of the book’s pages, page 99 offers a representative window into Disparate Regimes as a whole. My book shows how state governments retained significant power and exercised discrete powers to shape the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the United States between the Civil War and the Civil Rights era, a century often portrayed as a time of ascendant federal authority in matters pertaining to immigrants and immigration. It does so by examining how state politicians, jurists, and constituents (from blue-collar nativists and members of professional associations to immigrant workers and their advocates) battled over the passage and implementation of a range of alienage laws (policies governing the rights of noncitizens vis-à-vis citizens).

I argue that debates over state noncitizen voting rights policies, anti-alien apportionment provisions, blue-collar nativist hiring laws, and anti-alien professional licensing measures produced disparate regimes of citizenship rights on a state-by-state basis between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I further contend that continued disputes over the adoption, repeal, and/or enforcement of such policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in the American political economy by the mid-twentieth century in law, politics, and popular perception. Page 99 thus gets to the core of the book’s overarching arguments and illustrates their importance by zooming into two representative historical episodes.

Learn more about Disparate Regimes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Messner's "The High School"

Michael Messner is a professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of such works as Power at Play and Taking the Field.

Messner applied the “Page 99 Test” to The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024, his twentieth book, and reported the following:

When a reader flips to page 99 in The High School, they find two clusters of photos, reproduced from the 1944 Salinas High School yearbook. The seven black and white photos show girls doing calisthenics and modern dance, with captions ranging from the mildly scolding “Up and down! Up and down!” to the promise of feminine attractiveness to be gained through dance: “Grace…poise…and beauty.”

A reader would get a decent hint of the book’s content on page 99—after all, The High School contains 270 photos reproduced from yearbooks from 1903 to 2024, and focuses largely on the shifts and turns in girls’ sports over that time. The middle decades of the 20th century was a time of backlash against girls’ interscholastic sports, when physical activity for girls was largely relegated to non-competitive activities like dance. The few photos of girls actually playing a sport were often accompanied by insulting captions that underscored girls’ apparent athletic incompetence. As such, sports during this time both reflected and reinforced the idea that boys and men were naturally athletic and deserved center-stage attention, while girls were relegated mostly to the sidelines to cheer the boys on. A reader might understand some of this simply by looking at page 99.

But this snapshot in time would not reveal the larger scope of the book’s story. The half-century that included 1944 was bracketed by a wave of feminist-inspired girls’ interscholastic sports in the early 20th century, and of course by a surge of girls’ sports following the 1972 passage of Title IX, which continues today. Nor would page 99 suggest other threads in the book that focus on shifts and changes in high school cheerleading, coaching, and student activities—all contextualized by demographic change, shifts in political economy, wars, and developments in public schools and youth culture.

Visit Michael Messner's website.

The Page 99 Test: Guys Like Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher J. Insole's "Negative Natural Theology"

After teaching at the Universities of London and Cambridge, Christopher J. Insole took up his post at Durham in 2006, where he is Professor of Philosophical Theology and Ethics. He has published on realism and anti-realism, religious epistemology, the relationship between theology, metaphysics, and political philosophy, and on the thought of Immanuel Kant. His books include his two major studies of Kant's relationship to theology. His recent research has moved into a more contemporary and constructive key, engaging with the category of natural theology, as it meets the limits of reason and knowledge.

Insole applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Negative Natural Theology: God and the Limits of Reason, and reported the following:

Looking again at this page, I picture myself sat at the kitchen table with a convinced and ideological humanist, of the ‘believing in God is stupid’ variety. I’m showing the humanist some uncomfortable evidence, perhaps incriminating photos, or documents. It’s not fun for the humanist. But I’m not being mean, and I’m not revelling in it. I’m holding the humanist’s hand, and I’m sharing the pain: because, as I say at the bottom of the page ‘I take it that every variety of worthwhile commitment and worldview has its own weaknesses, pathologies, tensions and paradoxes’, and as I say on the next page, ‘a worldview without problems is probably too simplistic and reductive, and not worth defending or inhabiting’.

Because this is what the book is all about: tensions and fragmentations and limitations in our lives and thinking. I’m interested in these, and how and why some thinkers lean into the concept of God at this point, as an expression of their yearning for a type of wholeness and healing, whilst others resolutely set themselves again the idea of God (or, at least, against the word). I do a lot of hand holding in the book and sympathetic nodding, trying to understand the deep motivations for these different type of reaction.

The chapter on humanism comes after a discussion of absurdism (Albert Camus) and Karl Rahner’s notion of mystery, and before a chapter on William James and modern paganism. What is the ‘incriminating evidence’ I’m showing the humanist? Well, it’s this. There are two core commitments within humanist discourse: first of all, that we only believe things where there is strong empirical evidence, amounting to something like ‘objective knowledge’. Secondly, humanists really believe that studying objective truth ('science') will make us happier and more whole as humans. On page 99 I am gently suggesting that these two commitments don’t obviously sit comfortably with each other. Believing in the palliative goodness of objective truth looks a bit like a ‘religious’ leap of faith; but, we are not permitted to take such leaps, if we are restricted to ‘objectivity’. What if, I ask, ‘in the end truth, perhaps, is sad?’.

And I feel, here, a bit sad for the humanist. Being religious, I don’t mind people making such leaps, and I hope that my humanist companion might embrace a bit of inconsistency and subjectivity, and carry on leaping. If it helps.

Learn more about Negative Natural Theology at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lincoln Mitchell's "Three Years Our Mayor"

Lincoln Mitchell is an instructor in the School of International and Public Affairs and the political science department at Columbia University. He has written numerous books, scholarly articles, and opinion columns on American politics, foreign policy, the history and politics of San Francisco, and baseball. In addition to his academic interests, Mitchell has worked in domestic political campaigns and on foreign policy projects in dozens of countries, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Mitchell earned his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD from Columbia University. He lives in New York and San Francisco.

Mitchell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Three Years our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco focuses on the San Francisco elections of 1963. This was important election for the city because, believe it or not, it was the first time a Democrat was elected mayor in over half a century. Since the election of Jack Shelley, a Democrat who before becoming mayor was a member of the US House of Representatives representing San Francisco, no Republican has served as mayor of that city.

When San Franciscans went to the polls to elect Shelley over Republican candidate Harold Dobbs, they also voted for six members of the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s equivalent of the City Council. Those members were elected citywide, and the race was quite competitive. Four incumbents were elected relatively easily, but the race for the sixth and final spot on the Board was very close. The winner was a 34-year-old lawyer named George Moscone.

Page 99 describes how Moscone drew on his deep roots in San Francisco, natural charisma and good looks, record as an all-city basketball player and the liberal moment to win that election. The page ends with a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle describing Moscone and Leo McCarthy, the two newly elected supervisors as rising stars.

This page describes a critical moment in George Moscone’s life. After winning that election, Moscone would spend the rest of his life in elected office. That 1963 election was also an important turning point in the politics of San Francisco. Shelley and Moscone’s victory kicked off an 18-month period that saw the ascendancy of Phil Burton to Congress and John Burton and Willie Brown to the State Assembly. Brown, Moscone and the Burtons were instrumental in remaking San Francisco politics and pushing it leftward. Their proteges, including, among others Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, were important Democratic Party leaders well over half a century later-and to a great extent it began with that 1963 election.

Visit Lincoln Mitchell's website.

The Page 99 Test: San Francisco Year Zero.

The Page 99 Test: The Giants and Their City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shari Rabin's "The Jewish South"

Shari Rabin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion at Oberlin College. A historian of American religions and modern Judaism, she received her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University in 2015. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America, was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Rabin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Jewish South: An American History, and reported the following:

The only full paragraph on page 99 of my book reads:

In Richmond, Reverend George Jacobs kept a list of the soldiers whose funerals he had performed; they came from Louisiana, Texas, and South Carolina, as well as Virginia. Charleston’s Jewish cemetery records the fates of Isaac D. Valentine, felled in June 1862 during the battle of Sessionville; of Isaac Barrett Cohen, killed in January 1865 at Fort Fisher; and of Marx E. Cohen Jr., killed on March 19, 1865, at age 26, “on the battlefield of Bentonsville, N.C. . . . by volunteering the performance of a service in which he lost his life.” In death these men were cast as heroic Jewish Confederates, although in life those two identities did not always prove so stable or harmonious, in personal experience or in the minds of their fellow white southerners. For them, the war was over, but for the families and communities that survived them it would last much longer, confronting them with important new choices about how to understand the recent past and what kind of future to build.

I think this gives a good sense of the book, although it is the end of a chapter and only a half of a page! It’s also worth noting that the book covers a very broad temporal scope, from the 1660s to the 1960s.

The Civil War is central to understanding the American South and to my study, however. On this page and throughout the book, I tried to present southern Jewish history in all of its complexity. Many have assumed that all southern Jews were supporters of the Confederacy and that wartime antisemitism was limited to the North. My chapters on the Civil War show that Jews – like other southerners – could be ambivalent about secession and war and that they did experience forms of exclusion. And as this page notes, the Civil War would cast a long shadow on the South and the nation for decades to come. Finally, this page highlights my original research, my interest in gravestones as primary sources, and my literary style. I really tried to write a historical study that was based on rigorous research but that would also keep the attention of a broader reading public.

Visit Shari Rabin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Jay Sosa's "Brazil's Sex Wars"

Joseph Jay Sosa is an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Bowdoin College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brazil's Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo, and reported the following:

In the 2000s, São Paulo, Brazil claimed the largest LGBTQ Pride parade in the world, a figure celebrated by queer activists, questioned by local reporters, and challenged by religious conservatives. The parade, and particularly its size, seems like an odd point of contention in debates over gender, sexuality, rights, and identity. But as my book, Brazil’s Sex Wars, elaborates, seemingly trivial disagreements like those over crowd size stood in for larger struggles to define the role of LGBTQ human rights projects in Brazil’s story of modernity, democracy, the rise of the authoritarian right.

Page 99 brings the reader into the thick of the action. In a chapter on the promise and perils of visibility, we are dropped into a scene where queer activists debate what it means to “assume one’s identity” (the Brazilian version of “coming out”) in an urban crowd where one stood little chance of being singled out by journalists’ cameras. This example is one of a coterie of strategies activists used to deploy their bodies in the urban space to aestheticize and transform the meaning of human rights.

Does page 99 convey the central argument to the reader? Probably not in the sense that the reader couldn’t articulate ‘what the book is about’ from that page alone. But it does convey themes that are central to the book. How did urban and media performances actively (re)shape human rights paradigms in a decade of political transition in Brazil? How do activists deploy rights aesthetically, ie. getting the public to see (and think and feel) about rights in the same way they do? Finally, how has the language of rights, once the domain of the left, been taken up across the ideological spectrum?

Learn more about Brazil's Sex Wars at the University Of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alison Brysk's "Abortion Rights Backlash"

Alison Brysk is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a past Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson Fellow and is the author or editor of 18 books on human rights, including The Struggle for Freedom from Fear (2018).

Brysk applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas reveals a key feature of the transnational context that shaped a key case--Argentina--and highlights my book's uniquely global take on the drivers of national reproductive rights policies. But page 99 is not fully representative of the book's larger comparative analysis of the struggle between liberal globalization and ethnonationalism for control of women's bodies that plays out through democracy--and affects democracy's future.

On page 99, I discuss the regional Latin American Green Wave of abortion rights liberalization across Mexico, Colombia, and beyond that both supported and amplified Argentina's peak national movement. Argentina was the first Latin American country to legalize abortion in 2020 and has led the region in connected regional movements against femicide and for LGBTQ rights. Such transnational networking has been a key part of reproductive rights advocacy worldwide--and transnational abortion medication and migration flows help to compensate for backlash in some areas. But transnational ties are only one factor with different levels of influence, often outweighed by patriarchal forms of populism in the backlash cases of Brazil, Poland, and the U.S.

The larger vision of the book--to explain what is happening to our rights--can be best represented on a different page (p. 33-34): "In times of social crisis, deliberalizing the gender regime promises to push women out of the competitive workforce, increase the national population of threatened identity groups, restore religious governmentality to substitute for failing governance, and calm social anxieties about economic displacement and chronic insecurity, with compensatory affirmation of motherhood....The particular potency of populist nationalism is linked to struggles over gender roles, family policy, and reproductive rights worldwide."

In the rest of the pages, the book goes on to offer some lessons on how to defend our rights in an era of backlash. We can learn from the democratic political features and processes that shaped the disparate outcomes across the cases--from courts vs. Congress to the availability of popular referendums to feminist mobilization. The cases also suggest ways to transcend the culture wars triggered by the identity crisis of globalization by building more inclusive national identities and bridging gender justice to community values.

Visit Alison Brysk's website.

The Page 99 Test: Speaking Rights to Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew S. Berish's "Hating Jazz"

Andrew S. Berish is associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s.

Berish applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse, and reported the following:

Opening Hating Jazz to page 99 takes you to first page of chapter four, “The Musicians Suck: Contempt and Disgust in the Historical Reception of Jazz.” This is the penultimate chapter of the book and covers the kinds of jazz hating that happen—perhaps surprisingly—within the jazz community: critics savaging musicians, musicians denouncing critics, and musicians attacking each other. The title comes from an interview with saxophonist Branford Marsalis: in an April 2019 interview with Rachel Olding of the Sydney Morning Herald, Marsalis, reflecting on why the music is so unpopular says, “the answer is simple: the musicians suck.” It is one thing to criticize another musician, but Marsalis offers something much stronger, an expression of contempt toward others in the jazz community. In the rest of the chapter I trace the history of these kinds of responses, responses where jazz friends “fire” on each other. From the battles in the 1930s and 40s between the proponents of New Orleans-style small group jazz and the new sounds of the big bands to the polarizing debates about free jazz in the 1950s and 60s to the more recent discussions of jazz’s relationship to rap and hip-hop, jazz history has been defined by these explosive debates full of aggression, contempt, and disgust. There are many reasons for this, but at its heart, such overheated attacks are rooted in love—only a profound betrayal of values can unleash such negativity. As Freud noted long ago, love and hate are twins.

The opening of chapter four on page 99 lays out the stakes of this love-hate dynamic: jazz musicians play to create and share profound emotional experiences of sound and community. A key foundational argument for the book is the idea that attacks on music—on the specific sounds that musicians make—is only half the story. What also matters are people. Hating (and loving) jazz is a social act. For a music born in the Black American experience, jazz has been, from the beginning, about race, specifically Blackness and whiteness. Loving and hating jazz has always been about the lived Black experience but also the representations and images of that experience. This gives arguments about jazz enormous social significance. We are never arguing only about sounds we find pleasant or unpleasant, uplifting or infuriating, but about the meanings those sounds have for our very sense of self in a society shaped by the distortions of racial thinking. Hating—and loving—jazz exists at the intersection of sound, feeling, and social life. Although my book is focused on the specific history of jazz, these arguments are applicable to all kinds of music: heavy metal, pop, rap and hip-hop, and country. In the study of popular music history, focusing on the negative reception of a style or genre—from statements of mild dislike to tirades filled with contempt and disgust—reveal with great clarity the profound social stakes in our musical tastes.

Visit Andrew S. Berish's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda M. Greenwell's "The Child Gaze"

Amanda M. Greenwell is associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in African American Review; Children’s Literature; Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; The Lion and the Unicorn; Studies in the Novel; Studies in the American Short Story, and other publications.

Greenwell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature, and reported the following:

If readers were to flip to page 99 of the book, they’d learn that the narrative technique I term the transactional child gaze “does not simply locate the child in the ideological environment…[but rather] enmesh[es] the child with the environment in the moment of seeing, binding them together in the ongoing alchemy of subjectivity and perspective.” The page emphasizes the necessity of active, ongoing reflection on the part of the literary child who looks transactionally, which asserts the child as “extant and active” within systems often built to oppress them. Children who look transactionally are depicted as enormously affected by their environments, but not necessarily deterministically; the transactional child gaze, due to the child’s agency, is a potentially destabilizing force.

Page 99 falls on the third page of chapter three, and it hosts a great passage to help readers understand the premise of the chapter, though not the whole book. It captures some of the key introductory concepts that will be explored later in the section through close readings of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Ultimately, the chapter argues that “the transactional child gaze allows an interrogation of the ideological scripts that are brought to bear upon the child as well as the visual methods by which they interpellate the subject” (131).

The page only manages to convey a hint of the larger scope of the project, however. It makes brief reference to the appreciative child gaze and the countersurveillant child gaze, which are discussed in chapters one and two, respectively, but it does not describe those modes of gazing. Readers will have to visit those chapters to learn how and to what effect the appreciative child gaze conjures reactions along a spectrum of celebration to weighty consideration, and to understand the various methods by which a countersurvelliant child gaze creates striking indictments of abusive power on the level of narrative, even when child looking does not effect real change within the storyworld of the text. And nothing on page 99 would point readers to the fourth chapter, which explores the manifestation of these various modes of child gazing on the comics page, including depictions of the direct gaze, which implicates the reader through the fourth wall.

The central premise of the book might be inferred from page 99: that literary texts invoke several modes of child looking to perform social critique. However, it would not make clear how the book draws on work in the cultural history of the American child, children’s literature, rhetorical and critical race narratology, visual culture studies, and several other fields to craft a critical conversation that helps us comprehend the various ways US texts from the 1930s to the 2010s employed nuanced child gazing to talk back to hegemonic US structures of national belonging. And readers would miss out on the call for further work on the child gaze in the future!

Learn more about The Child Gaze at the University Press of Mississippi website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Rose Hejtmanek's "The Cult of CrossFit"

Katie Rose Hejtmanek is Professor of Anthropology and Children and Youth Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop: An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody and co-editor of Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist. She is also a world and national champion in masters weightlifting.

Hejtmanek applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Fitness Phenomenon tells the story of the CrossFit Hero WOD Murph. Hero WODs are very difficult workout of the day (WOD) named for a fallen US soldier usually during the war on terror. Murph is named after Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL, and his favorite workout that he called “body armor.” The page provides granular detail of Murph and how CrossFitters relate to this workout, especially as it is performed on the American holiday of Memorial Day. However, the larger story of CrossFit in the United States I try and examine in the book is not part of page 99.

I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book because page 99 is about Murph, one small piece of the CrossFit puzzle, one (important) tree in a very large unexamined-on-page-99-forest.

So, what’s the forest?

The Cult of CrossFit is a book constructed through my anthropological investigations of and embodied commitment to CrossFit workouts like Murph. But CrossFit isn’t just about the workouts. It’s a whole forest of frameworks, beliefs, devotions, communities, futures, pasts, ideologies, and stories that are lived out and built into a CrossFitter’s body, gym, and community. Based on seven years of anthropological research on six continents, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how American CrossFit organizes, frames, and sells this forest using what I call cultural Christianity. This isn’t the Christianity preached in the church. It is the everyday Christianity that permeates much of the United States: in the holidays we have, sayings we use (bless you), and redemption stories we tell based on hundreds of years of history. Thus, the book is as much about American history and culture as it is about CrossFit. Using the lens of CrossFit, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how violent, militaristic, devotional American culture and nationalism get embodied, one workout at a time. While page 99 goes into detail about one punishing, military-infused workout, Murph, it leaves out the larger context of suffering, devotion, salvation, forms of oracle and garage capitalism, illusions of science, and understandings of the apocalypse that are also part of American CrossFit.

I encourage you to read the rest of the book if you are interested in a detailed history and cultural analysis of how the brand and community of CrossFit, which includes Murph, became the phenomenon that it is.

Visit Katie Rose Hejtmanek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arie W. Kruglanski and Sophia Moskalenko's "The Psychology of the Extreme"

Arie W. Kruglanski is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and a co-founding PI at START, the national center of excellence for the study of terrorism and the response to terrorism.

Sophia Moskalenko is a Research Fellow at Georgia State University and a Program Management Specialist at the UN Office of Counter Terrorism, Behavioral Insights Hub.

Moskalenko applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Psychology of the Extreme, and reported the following:

A reader opening the book to page 99 would read about the violent extremism of two Islamic fundamentalists who conducted mass casualty attacks: one against Israelis in Israel, and the other against Americans in Iraq. The page touches upon the psychology that is needed to overcome the normal human resistance to violence, such as the influence of extremist narratives of terrorist groups, the pain of personal humiliations experienced by the attackers, and the motivation to restore the loss of significance.

This page is perhaps not the best representation of the book. Especially because the book’s message was to broaden the understanding of extremism: from the malicious actions of terrorists to the great deeds of luminaries such as Maria Sklodowska-Curie, humanitarians such as Mahatma Gandhi, artistic geniuses like Van Gogh, and other extremists whose pursuit of their passions positively contributed to culture, technology, arts, and sciences. What’s more, the book makes the case that extremism is far more prevalent than these famous cases. It extends to our friends and neighbors (and maybe ourselves)­­––those who give their best efforts and sacrifice for a hobby, a job, an obsession, a relationship, or an addiction. In other words, the book presents extremism as not rare, and that it’s becoming more frequent with the advent of the internet and social media that encourage comparisons, competition, and as a result, extremism.

It helps to see extremism through this wider lens because we can see its origins. Extremism develops in social isolation, often as a result of rejection, bullying, and ostracism. It is often encouraged by radical groups through narratives that glorify self-sacrifice. Stories of heroes overcoming the odds are riveting and inspire emulation. Extremism is glorified by modern Western culture. What hides behind this façade are the costs of extremism, even the constructive kind: to the extremists themselves, their loved ones, and to societal peace and harmony. Through case studies and psychology research, the book shows that moderation, kindness, and diligence can often succeed where extremism fails miserably. Seeing extremism for what it is allows us to make better, more informed choices in our Age of Extremism.

Learn more about The Psychology of the Extreme at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's "The Politics of Sorrow"

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is a professor of literature and creative writing at Villanova University. She is the author of the poetry collections My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and Rules of the House (2002), as well as the memoir Coming Home to Tibet (2016). Her mother served as a member of parliament in the exile government for three terms.

Dhompa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, and reported the following:

On this page I write about Tenzin Norbu, a monk I interviewed in Bir, India in 2015. Norbu defined the campaign of “unity,” (led by a Tibetan political party in the 1960s) as a responsibility disproportionately placed on new minority populations in exile.

For him, unity had spelled erasure…Tenzin Norbu insisted he desired to be ‘heard’ by the exile government, which I interpreted as his and the Thirteen’s desire to be included in the narrative of the united nation. Separation was most certainly not on his mind.

My first thought on scanning the page (the first half of the page describes a historical event in the seventh century) was that it didn’t provide a good idea of the whole work but on a closer examination I was stunned at how this page indeed gets to the heart of what the book is about: recognition and belonging in exile.

Tenzin Norbu lived in one of the refugee settlements established by the Group of Thirteen and he felt the group had been miscast as antigovernment simply because they were slow to embrace some of the policies enforced by the Tibetan United Party (a powerful organization in the 1960s-70s in the Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal). Norbu felt that the project of unity led by the United Party was exclusionary. He stated that he never got the chance to explain why he was hesitant to follow their call to unity. His understanding of events and experience of events confirmed his fear that unity meant a standardization of Tibetan identity to a homogenous formation. His desire was to be integrated in a meaningful way. He was asking important questions: What is the relationship between the government and the people? Where are we going? Who is included in the story of the nation?

The book focuses on the first two decades of life for Tibetans who had fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and found themselves refugees in India and Nepal. In addition to the difficult task of organizing an anti-colonial national movement, and establishing a government-in-exile, the community had to respond to complex internal tensions over what it meant to be a Tibetan. While it was easy to galvanize Tibetans to identify a shared timeline to the loss of a nation or feel certainty in not being Chinese, building solidarity behind the idea of what made a Tibetan, a Tibetan proved more complex because people had come from diverse regions and from a variety of political and social formations. The story of the Thirteen in The Politics of Sorrow is a glimpse of exile history from the periphery.

Learn more about The Politics of Sorrow at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Crosbie's "The Political Army"

Thomas Crosbie is associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. He is the editor of Berghahn Books’ Military Politics series and Military Politics: New Perspectives (2023), among other books.

Crosbie applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Political Army: How the U.S. Military Learned to Manage the Media and Public Opinion, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of The Political Army will bring you to the beginning of Chapter 4, which is about what I refer to as “the Tet Paradox”. This chapter is essential to the argument of the book, but let us consider the contents of page 99 exclusively. You’ll start the page reading about “black teams” of assassins (members of the US armed services acting without attribution) killing suspected members of the Viet Cong. You will quickly recognize that you’re in the middle of the Vietnam War, looking over the shoulder of US government officials. From the assassins, we make our way over to an awkward exchange between Gen. William Westmoreland, US commander in Vietnam, and Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the chief of the Army back home. And then we get another awkward exchange, this time between Westmoreland and Adm. U.S.G. Sharp. Both Johnson and Sharp were annoyed at Westmoreland’s poor handling of the American journalists reporting on the war. From the exchanges, we learn that far from the press being intractable and out to get the military, there was in fact a high degree of willingness among journalists to work with the Army – but at the same time, a very limited tolerance for Army commanders who wanted to dissemble and mislead. We end the page of another dark note: more public outrage at clumsy efforts to mislead the media, and a nightmarish discover: mass rape and murder at a small hamlet called My Lai.

Readers interested in The Political Army would do well to read page 99, since it does indeed give a feel for the key themes of the work. The Political Army painstakingly reconstructs the U.S. military’s attempts to manage the media in various theaters of operations from World War II to Desert Storm. In some ways, a key theme is repetition: the repeating of mistakes by military leaders like Westmoreland who time and again got their relations with the press wrong; by journalists, who discover the same sorts of stories – of atrocity and mismanagement, and sometimes of human decency amidst the horrors of war; and finally, the Groundhog Day-like experience of public affairs officers, forced to defend again and again the need for an intelligent and democratic attitude toward the press. Page 99 does not quite do justice to the arc of the story, however. The book’s story begins at a time when the media’s own view of its role in war had yet to form. As the Army began to learn about the risks and opportunities represented by the media, Army leaders tended to focus on the potential benefits: the media could help sell the Army’s story to the American public. Optimism gave way to reckless utopian thinking, and the result was a disastrous mismatch between the Army’s expectations and the media’s interests in the beginning of the Vietnam War. Eventually, the Tet Paradox (named for US responses to the North Vietnamese invasion during the festival of Tet in 1968) became apparent to Army leaders: even battlefield victory could appear like a major defeat if journalists presented it that way. What page 99 does not show the reader is the hard battles that followed Vietnam, and which allowed the Army to finally come to terms with the critical role of media management in the success of military operations. Readers are therefore encouraged to read the book in the traditional way: starting with page 1, you will find yourself flicking quickly through the pages until you reach page 216, which ends with some prophetic words about why we cannot afford to ignore the democracies of war and the role of the military in actively supporting democracy. I leave it to readers’ own imaginations to untangle whether such prophecies have merit in the dark days of Trump.

Learn more about The Political Army at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Paul Kelleher's "The Social Cost of Carbon"

J. Paul Kelleher is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His research and teaching explore ethical and other philosophical dimensions of public policy, especially climate policy and health policy.

Kelleher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Social Cost of Carbon: Ethics and the Limits of Climate Change Economics, and reported the following:

If readers opened my book to page 99 they would definitely get a good feel for the thing as a whole. They would quickly see that the book is technical and not an easy read for the layperson. I realize this admission is not going to help me sell books, but I also believe in full disclosure! Still, even the uninitiated reader can get a good sense of the book's motivations and aims by reading its accessible and short stage-setting preface, the preprint version of which is available here.

Page 99 of the book has me discussing an important topic in climate change economics, namely the "pure time discount rate." Evaluative economic models of climate change typically assume that if a benefit or harm will come later in time, it is for that reason less worth caring about than if it would be experienced today. Page 99 considers one of the arguments for holding this view, an argument concerning uncertainty. Later in chapter 5 I provide a much longer discussion of pure time discounting in climate change economics and in welfare economics more generally.

After that discussion of pure time discounting, page 99 also kicks off my explanation and analysis of a very important theorem of welfare economics, John Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem. (Harsanyi won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, but for work done in another area of economics.) Harsanyi's theorem provides an axiomatic basis for broadly utilitarian welfare economics, which is the economic framework that underpins many evaluations of climate change policy. But most climate economists do not draw on Harsanyi's theorem. If they give any consideration at all to the theoretical foundations of their models, they are likely to invoke distinct utilitarian theorems that I analyze elsewhere in the book. The discussion that begins on page 99 ends with my commending Harsanyi's theorem to climate economists. I think it is the proper foundation for evaluative climate change economics, and the book as a whole argues for this.

Visit J. Paul Kelleher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wallace's "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto"

Benjamin Wallace is the author of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, an investigation into the murky origins of cryptocurrency.

Earlier work includes his book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, an instant New York Times bestseller which The Economist called “a great tale, well told” and the Times described as “one of the rare books on wine that transcends the genre.”

Wallace applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto finds me coming to doubt that computer scientist Nick Szabo, a usual suspect in the perennial efforts to figure out the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (in 2015, the New York Times called him the person Silicon Valley insiders believed to be Nakamoto), is in fact Nakamoto. My creeping doubt is both forensic and intuitive. I point out inconsistencies in the details of the case for Szabo as Nakamoto, and also some personality discrepancies.

To the extent that page 99 shows me as the narrator-investigator, in the weeds evaluating a particular candidate and bringing fresh eyes to a stubborn problem, and captures the book's milieu of libertarian computer science, it’s fairly representative. This is a detective story, and there I am detecting. On the other hand, it’s one of the more heady moments in the book, in contrast to plenty of more visceral moments—including a car chase, a visit to a room full of frozen heads and bodies in the Arizona desert, and a bloody incident with a machete—so I wouldn’t say it perfectly captures the experience of reading this book.

One other way in which page 99 Isn’t entirely representative: I wrote this book because I became convinced that the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the efforts, including my own, to crack it, was both a gripping story in its own right and an organic way for a civilian to gain an understanding of the whole crypto phenomenon. It’s a Trojan horse of sorts, which I’m not sure comes through clearly on this particular page.

Learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wallace's website.

Writers Read: Benjamin Wallace (February 2008).

The Page 99 Test: The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Bloom's "Veiled Threats"

Mia Bloom is a Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University and the International Security Fellow at New America. She conducts ethnographic field research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing, with Roy Licklider; (2007), Bombshell: Women and Terror (2011), Small Arms: Children and Terror (2019), and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, with Sophia Moskalenko (2021).

Bloom applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad, and reported the following:

If readers opened Veiled Threats to page 99, they would read both about how ISIS abused and exploited Yazidi sex slaves as well as whether ISIS should be charged with the crime of genocide because it engaged in ethnic cleansing of Yazidi areas, but also the capture of women during combat, requires the implementation of the Geneva accords, that they would be protected from predation. In fact, ISIS did quite the opposite. Page 99 describes the process of selection, where the female prisoners were separated from the men, the combatants separated the old from the young. ISIS terrorists treated the women like chattel, as ISIS evaluated them based on age, eye color, and even breast size.

While the majority of the book is dedicated to the women who exercised agency and joined the jihad, perpetrated acts of terrorism, or recruited others to do so, page 99 explores the ramifications of women’s involvement with Jihadi groups and offers the reader detailed information about the victims.

The book as a whole explores whether women in Jihadi groups were nothing more than victims of men or the patriarchal society. In some instances, the woman have been drugged or manipulated, especially the very young girls who were operatives for Boko Haram. Perhaps the most surprising part of the book, is that what we think we know about women in Boko Haram, or ISIS or Al Qaeda is superficial and stereotypes. The women in these militant groups exercised considerably more agency than the literature has previously allocated them. While women in ISIS did not fight on the front lines, many were as radical if not more radical than their husbands. The lesson patriarchal groups learn is that if you get the women on board, you guarantee the next generation of extremists and make the organization immune to counter terror policies like targeted assassination.

The book also probes how jihadi groups legally differentiate between female hostages (rahina) versus sex slaves (sabayya), drawing on Islamic law and applied to the events of October 7, 2023, in Gaza and Southern Israel. By the Islamic rules of war, what occurred in Southern Israel in 2023 violates multiple hadith and surahs in the Quran. The book presents a theory of why gender-based violence occurs during certain types of ethnic wars in which the ultimate goal is the control of territory, making violence against civilians intentional to force them to abandon their homes and flee. Thus Veiled Threats offers a corrective to the inaccurate stereotypes about veiled women being powerless, voiceless and faceless in the global jihad.

Learn more about Veiled Threats at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.

The Page 99 Test: Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Todd's "Living with Jane Austen"

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Living with Jane Austen, and reported the following:

This is part of page 99 where I look at Jane Austen as a letter writer, mainly to her beloved sister Cassandra , her other self, as she calls her:

I have become a fan of Jane Austen’s letters, mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people – some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment – and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine. The letters are unpredictable, skipping from lace collars to a brace of pheasants, from ale to ailments. Austen displays in herself those little grievances we all have as duty bangs against desire, but she never stays long in irritable mode. Soon, she’s off and away to green shoes or missing gloves.

The letters are captivating, with their spurts of excited or tremulous life. A niece has a ‘purple Pelisse’; it may be a secret but not kept well enough to avoid the snooping of an aunt in the bedroom acting like a naughty, middle-aged Catherine Morland poking around Northanger Abbey. Not much escapes this aunt, not much is unrecorded. She’s eager to share the most enticing trivialities.

Page 99 occurs in the chapter called ‘Poor Nerves’. It is part of the section on Jane Austen and the body, the next chapter being labelled ‘The Unruly Body’. In ‘Poor Nerves’ I describe my joy in reading Jane’s letters meant only for her sister’s eyes—or sometimes the eyes of other close family members and friends—but not for ours in the 21st century. Where the novels are the result of careful revision and rewriting, these letters are spontaneous and undoctored. Jane Austen is thrifty with paper, so there’s little question of her jettisoning first attempts; in one letter she chides herself for not writing a smaller hand so that she could get more on to her single page. Paper and postage are expensive.

In the quotation above, the interweaving of my personal response to Austen’s writing and more distanced critical comment is typical of the book as a whole, although elsewhere I provide more background historical and literary material. This includes detail on Regency houses, on the fashionable way of looking at external nature, on contemporary responses to money and the making of money, on the uneasiness over girls’ education and manners in a changing world--and on the anxiety over ailments that result from a seeming interaction of mind and body.

For this topic I put Jane Austen in the context of other writers worried about physical ailments. In this context, her attitude in novels and letters can often seem bracing, sometimes less than sympathetic! She shows how often headaches and nervous diseases result from emotions like jealousy or self-pity; instead of running to physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions including mercury, would have worsened the problem—she advises exercise and a change of scene. As so often, there’s much useful advice in Jane Austen--though she never presses it on you!

Austen’s ‘global’ fame means that many people know her from the films and many spinoffs and dramatisations rather than her writings. I hope that my book might draw readers back to the wonderful novels—and that they will share my enduring enthusiasm, and be challenged by some of my unorthodox ideas. (Did Cassandra burn most of Jane’s letters?)

Visit Janet Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Rosino's "Democracy Is Awkward"

Michael Rosino is assistant professor of sociology at Molloy College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside American Grassroots Political Organizing, and reported the following:

Democracy is Awkward is a study of grassroots political organizers and how they respond to racial inequality in politics and society. It focuses on a political organization I call the “Grassroots Action Party.” This matter is clearly relevant to our contemporary struggles to protect rights and democracy through the power of multiracial coalitions that take racial justice seriously. Page 99 of Democracy is Awkard lies in the middle of the chapter on how whites participants racial habits shape grassroots political strategies, it specifically tells the stories of participants who regard conversations about race with people of color as inherently stressful and conflict-laden. As an ethnographer, I have many tools in my toolkit for studying the social world of my participants. In this case, I used a vignette during interviews where I presented them with a hypothetical situation where a white person is uncomfortable discussing racial issues with people of color and therefore avoidant. The vignette seemed to resonate with several of them. In particular, a participant that I call Jacqueline connected it to the following story,

“I had a dear friend, and I still consider her a friend, but I haven’t talked to her in many years. We just hit it off, you know, and had a wonderful friendship, and she was having some struggles at a certain point, and we were in a phone conversation, and it just kind of went down this road where, you know, she was really upset, and she just got more and more upset and she ended up screaming at me which I mean she is one of the sweetest people I know she just screamed 'fuck you' at me and hung up. […] I was kind of like, wow, what happened and what is going on, and I couldn’t… I sort of… it is like do I call her back or do I not? […] She called me back, and she was really upset, and she is like, 'you know, I am really sorry,' and I am like “'it is not a problem, it is really not a problem.'”

Jacqueline told me that if she could talk to her estranged friend now, she would say,

“I love you. You are one of the people that I have been closest to in my life, and I know I am a white person with stupid white person stuff, and I am sorry, you know, and, you know, I am responsible for my behavior at the same time, but there is a way that nobody is to blame for growing up, you know, being born into a racist society […] my guess is that she was angry or, you know, she knew, and you know, knows that I have privilege as a white person, as a middle-class person.”

This page illuminates a critical example of the argument in Democracy is Awkward – that our feelings of discomfort, particularly around unwieldy confrontations with the reality of racial injustice, can undermine real strategies for building grassroots democracy amid racial oppression. The book examines the overall situation and the promise of cross-racial coalitions for grassroots organizing, the shared motivations and experiences of organizers, and the distinct awareness, habits, and strategies of white organizers and organizers of color. Documenting and theorizing the stark contrast between participants of different racial backgrounds is a major plank of the book’s contribution. It represents how racial oppression produces social distance and inequalities that shape our everyday lives and underlying assumptions.

White participants avoided situations that took them out of their comfort zones. Their organizing stuck to the neighborhoods they knew well, the people they felt they had commonality with, and the rituals and routines that they’d come to expect. In contrast, in the next chapter, I highlight the many participants of color who recognized and leaned into productive conflict and attempted to rectify the contradictions and limitations of the organization. These participants, for instance, noted that although the party advocates for racial justice and the empowerment of people of color, it remains overwhelmingly white and struggles to actualize its antiracist agenda. In many ways, navigating conflict, awkwardness, and ambiguity was an inherent aspect of their lived experiences. The point of this book is not simply to describe what people in the Grassroots Action Party did or theorize why it happened but to build real and practical insights about how confronting these racialized contradictions, awkwardness, and conflict inherent in building coalitions for democracy can be a catalyst for making grassroots organizing more effective and inclusive.

Visit Michael Rosino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue