Robert Thompson's "After Belsen"

Robert Thompson is a historian and Deputy Director for Public Programmes at Westminster Abbey Institute.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, After Belsen: Christian Encounters with Holocaust Survivors, and reported the following:

Page 99 of After Belsen jumps into a discussion of the Christian motivations underpinning the operations of Quaker relief workers in the aftermath of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It quotes the General-Secretary of the Friends Relief Service, who, after the Second World War, summarised the theology that had inspired their work. It applies these comments to the words of relief workers at Belsen, who related the everyday examples of how their Christianity found expression in the midst of their relief work. Eryl Hall Williams described in his diary the daily meetings where the team would meet at 9 o'clock every evening for their silent service. Page 99 ends with his colleague Beth Clarkson's comment that she was so exhausted from a day's work at liberated Belsen that in these meetings she would often fall asleep.

The first sentence of page 99 of After Belsen suggests why the test is not completely helpful for this book: the use of an abbreviation which has been explained on a previous page! A reader picking up the book at this point would have to flick to earlier in this chapter to discover that "FRS" stands for the Friends Relief Service, the team under discussion on this page. Another potential stumbling block is that this page makes a simplified reference to a subject by their surname, when their full name has been introduced earlier. Page 99 can therefore raise further questions than answers.

However, from absorbing the detail of page 99 I think the reader would get a good sense of the book's broader themes. In discussing the Christian motivations of the FRS and how they materialised at liberated Belsen, it shines a light on one example of Christian action in the context of the Holocaust. After Belsen aims to uncover the personal stories of Christians who encountered survivors, and explore what motivates someone to act in the ways they do. Here on page 99 we find one such example.

Clarkson's final, very human comments about falling asleep in a Christian service illustrate further the multilayered ways in which these individuals began to respond to what they witnessed through their encounters with survivors after Belsen. Their responses were complex, surprising, and they speak of the realities of human interaction in the face of suffering. They often reveal further questions then they do simple answers. As a consequence, I hope a reader who turns to page 99 would be intrigued enough to start again from page 1.

Learn more about After Belsen at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cathryn J. Prince's "For the Love of Labor"

Cathryn J. Prince is an adjunct professor of journalism at Fordham University. Her books include Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman and American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer.

Prince applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman, with the following results:

From page 99:

Newman’s portfolio continued expanding. By now she had been working as an inspector with New York’s Joint Board of Sanitary Control for four years. The work was demanding, she told her readers in “An Inspector’s Point of View”… It could be tiresome and tedious and of course Newman lacked legal power. She approached each visit with the eye of someone who knew what it was like to toil in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. She knew where to look for violations, whether it was the windows sealed shut or gas jets leaking (which impaired many people’s eyesight). She knew where to look for rodent droppings, which signified an infestation, and whether the washrooms were clean enough.

Were a reader to immediately open For the Love of Labor: the Life of Pauline Newman to page 99 they would find that while it might not be the best single page to introduce my book–(primarily because readers won’t have read the carefully laid out backstory of how Newman got to where she was by this point, from her arrival to the U.S. from Lithuania as a child, to becoming one of the youngest activists in U.S. history to her, to her great skill in uniting people across socio-economic and cultural lines) it does a very solid job of capturing it’s essence and giving an idea of what the book is about.

Nevertheless, it’s a deeply researched page chock full of details and atmosphere that would give someone a strong sense of who Pauline Newman was: someone who spoke from authority because of her experience as a child laborer working in a hairbrush factory, a cigar rolling factory, then a shirtwaist factory. They will see Newman’s grit and gumption and the way she understood that real change is incremental, hard-won, and collective. The page clearly shows Newman’s perseverance and dedication to improving the lives of others.

Visit Cathryn J. Prince's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Cathryn J. Prince & Hershey and Juno.

The Page 99 Test: Death in the Baltic.

The Page 99 Test: American Daredevil.

The Page 99 Test: Queen of the Mountaineers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Mikaberidze's "The Louisiana Purchase"

Alexander Mikaberidze is The Boyd Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. He is an award-winning author and editor of over two dozen books that have appeared in over half a dozen languages. His books Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (2022) and The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (2020) received critical acclaim and won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Awards and the Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize. He served as an editor for the multi-volume Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars (2023).

Mikaberidze applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds Louisiana in the uneasy aftermath of its transfer from France to Spain. Antonio de Ulloa, the colony’s first Spanish governor, arrived in 1766 hoping to manage that transition without unnecessarily antagonizing the French population. He avoided a formal handover, declined to raise the Spanish flag over the Place d’Armes, and retained French officials in positions of authority. Rather than smoothing the transition, however, this caution left a fundamental question of sovereignty (and identity) unresolved.

For my book, the Page 99 Test is somewhat successful. Although the page does not directly discuss the Louisiana Purchase itself, the uncertainty described on this page goes to the heart of the larger story I tell about Louisiana and, ultimately, the Louisiana Purchase. I am interested not simply in the diplomatic transactions by which Louisiana passed from one sovereign to another, but in what such transfers meant on the ground. Empires could exchange territories by treaty, but making those transfers real was another matter. Sovereignty depended upon institutions, commerce, local loyalties, and the willingness - or ability - of imperial governments to enforce their authority. That larger problem becomes especially visible in the second half of page 99. Ulloa attempted to impose Spain’s mercantilist regulations on a colony whose survival depended upon commercial connections extending far beyond official imperial boundaries. Louisiana merchants traded through a web of networks reaching across the Caribbean, linking French, British, and Spanish possessions. Spanish restrictions therefore threatened not merely profits but an established way of life. These tensions are crucial to understanding the Louisiana Purchase. Long before 1803, Louisiana occupied an ambiguous position between empires. Its inhabitants learned to navigate shifting sovereignties while maintaining economic and cultural connections that governments struggled to control. The Purchase was therefore not an isolated transaction suddenly conceived by Jefferson or Napoleon. It was another dramatic turn in a much longer contest over who would possess Louisiana, how that possession could be made effective, and why control of this enormous territory mattered within the interconnected worlds of North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic.

Learn more about The Louisiana Purchase at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Earle's "He Has the People"

Jonathan Earle teaches history and politics at Louisiana State University, where he has been Dean of the Ogden Honors College since 2014.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works uncannily well in He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860. The book is intended to be a gripping narrative history for a general audience about a particularly consequential election – one that often gets short shrift in the numerous works about Lincoln, the sectional crisis, and the coming of the Civil War. The main reason, I argue, is the tendency to ignore historical contingency and present some outcomes as inevitable. Of course, that fully self-realized boy born in that Kentucky log cabin would make it to the White House during the nation’s severest crisis. Against considerable odds, he would prevail in a civil war and prevent government “of the people, by the people, for the people” from perishing from the earth.

But what if we took the contingency of the past more seriously? I hope the book makes a strong case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance and the very real sense that things could all have gone very, very differently.

A reader alighting on page 99 would be thrown into the excitement and chaos of the Chicago Republican convention that wound up nominating Lincoln, whose political resume to that point amounted to one single term in Congress in the 1840s and a spirited but losing Senatorial campaign in Illinois a decade later. The overwhelming frontrunner in the battle for the nomination was the venerable New York senator William Seward, whose campaign rolled into the city with trunkloads of money, powerful advocates, and promises to dole out to potential office-seekers. “The consensus remained that Seward’s best chance at the nomination was a clean win on the first ballot,” reads the first sentence on the page. On the other hand, “Lincoln and his managers were hoping that their candidate would clear 100 votes on that same ballot, which, with other ‘favorite son’ votes, would guarantee at least two rounds of balloting, denying Seward a quick victory.” Further down the page we see a Lincoln man, the German-born editor Gustave Koerner, pull a fast one on the Seward juggernaut by giving local spectators tickets for the convention floor before anyone else. “While the friends of the other candidates held processions and marched around, we had made arrangements that the Wigwam (the cavernous hall built for the convention] should be at the earliest opening every morning filled with Illinoisians” cheering for Lincoln.”

Learn more about He Has the People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Gregory's "The Real Domestic Product"

Elizabeth Gregory directs the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Houston, where she is a professor of English and the Taylor Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Apparition of Splendor and Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood. She writes for The Nation and other magazines.

Gregory applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Real Domestic Product: How Birth Control Built Equality (and Why the Future of the Economy and the Planet Depends on It), with the following results:

Yes! Page 99, at the book’s center, represents it well – props to Ford Madox Ford (the inspiration behind the Page 99 Test)!

Part of a chapter called “Accounting for Harm,” page 99 focuses on domestic violence during COVID. Two framing sentences provide context.

At the top:

Wage equity and a childcare infrastructure that allowed women to work and earn consistently could lower vulnerability and abuse.

At the bottom:

Whatever their social rank, women who depend on their spouse—for support, status, and other needs—are at risk.

In-between are quotes from interviews with women in a DV shelter, documenting how gendered pay inequities played out globally during the pandemic. Here’s one:

…she told of being locked in her apartment with her abuser and hearing her neighbors being beaten too: “It's like, everybody was having the same issues. And that was even more traumatizing. I would sometimes hear—‘cause there was one couple that lived right next door to me, and he would tell his wife that, ‘It’s a pandemic; the cops aren’t coming.’ And that, that's heartbreaking to hear.”

Women who can afford to leave abuse and keep their kids from homelessness are less vulnerable to it, because their partners know they can leave and because the partners are often less stressed too—since they aren’t the family’s sole provider.

Page 99 emblematizes the wider range of harms done to society overall by women’s economic dependency that this book argues Reliable Birth Control has begun to address—by enabling women and men to finish their educations and establish at work before starting their families. For ages prior, the need to feed unplanned babies would have pushed one or both into low-wage jobs, often for whole lifetimes, and the woman into a lifetime of unpaid care work producing the employees of the future, “for free.” Already, the class system is being transformed.

Earning their own wages has given women a new civic voice, and a platform for challenging regnant social and economic systems—by building a national care economy (yes, it involves taxes), that pays a fair wage for care and adds that value directly to GDP, so everyone benefits. Upsetting the status quo and spurring the current backlash. Women and their allies can use that voice in this use-it-or-lose it moment. The Real Domestic Product forwards that dialog.

Learn more about The Real Domestic Product at The MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jehanne Dubrow's "Frivolity: A Defense"

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of over one dozen books, including The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma (2025). Her new book of creative nonfiction is Frivolity: A Defense. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including New England Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas.

Dubrow applied the “Page 99 Test” to Frivolity: A Defense and shared the following:

From page 99:

Despite the lightness of Le nozze di Figaro, I’ve always struggled with the end of the opera: that compulsory joy, the melody tripping over itself in a rush toward resolution. It’s hard for me to forget that the Countess must trap her husband. He begs her for forgiveness, perdono, perdono, he pleads, but only after being caught in near-adultery. The Countess must force his love to grow in her direction again, the way a gardener trains a vine with a trellis, the stem of the plant bound or clipped firmly in place. She is often played by some magnificent diva like Kiri Te Kanawa or Renée Fleming, and I hate that a woman with sublime timbre and technique is brought so low that she must trick her spouse back into devotion.

I think page 99 is characteristic of Frivolity. It's a book that slides between high culture and low, between lightness and heaviness, between joy and grief. Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro certainly embodies many of the qualities that make frivolity so difficult to understand and explain. Here is an opera that took enormous skill and sensitivity to craft. It's provocative and subversive. It ruffles feathers. But it also delights and entertains and offers listeners enormous pleasure.

In Frivolity, I explore a wide range of frivolous pursuits, objects, and even people. The trick in writing the book was to use a delicate touch; the prose couldn't be ponderous. The 101 sections of the book needed to flit from subject to subject, in a way that would mirror frivolity itself. Finding a voice and a form for engaging with the frivolous was perhaps the biggest challenge of writing Frivolity. I had to figure out how to treat the subject thoughtfully, all without sounding as if I were overly serious!

Visit Jehanne Dubrow's website.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow & Lola and Bandit.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (August 2022).

The Page 99 Test: Taste: A Book of Small Bites.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jack Dudley's "The New Believers"

Jack Dudley is Associate Professor of English at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he teaches and researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. His scholarship explores the intersections of religion and literature across genres and media, with a particular interest in visual culture and film. His teaching spans a broad range of modern and contemporary literatures—including British, American, Canadian, Irish, global, and postcolonial—and he is especially known for his popular course on horror, one of his longstanding personal interests. He also works extensively with students on their writing and creative projects.

Dudley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The New Believers drops you into a sugarcane field, which is an easy place to get very lost in. It’s a few pages into the third chapter of the book, which examines the numinous powers in Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). On this page, I compare Díaz’s description of wind as a spiritual sign of rescue in a sugarcane field with similar imagery from the writer Jean Toomer (1894-1967) and his work Cane (1923). Both writers engage in what’s called religious syncretism, which is where different religious traditions are mixed together to produce new kinds of belief and new practices. Crucially, both Díaz and Toomer treat these spiritual powers as real rather than as metaphors or uncertainties.

This page captures the book’s whole argument: our leading contemporary novelists want to imagine how belief in spiritual powers can transform the way we care for others and the world. Page 99 describes in detail Oscar’s rescue from that cane field by a remarkable, talking, supernatural-seeming golden mongoose—and then by Clives, a good Samaritan who was passing by. I next take the reader through how the passage from Díaz blends religious traditions, mixing Western Christianity with Dominican obeah (also known as voodoo).

That represents another key claim of The New Believers: what we’re seeing in these writers isn’t an uncritical return to traditional forms of religion but a new willingness to mix among beliefs and practices. As they sort through religious ideas—and invent new ones—these writers are guided by what can best help us materially care for the world and other beings.

Page 99 ends by setting up a challenge to contemporary critical practices, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and now decolonial ways of thinking. These tend to overwhelmingly be negative modes of critiquing past and present cultural and political practices and their ways of making art, including the novel. Because they tend to focus less on their positive projects—that is, what they want to bring about and how they’ll do it—postmodernism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism have often lacked legitimation and had trouble motivating change. I call them “dismantling” projects in the book (99).

The top of page 100 outlines a claim about Díaz that applies to the whole book and that seeks to help empower these projects: believing in the reality of spiritual beings and forces can powerfully motivate what I call “projects of building and affirmation” (100), ones that can energize postmodern, postcolonial, and decolonial practices by providing them with a positive grounding in spirituality. These include better care for migrants, non-human animals, and other beings across differences.

That’s perhaps a surprising claim of The New Believers: that spiritual and religious practices and beliefs (which often get read as “conservative”) can be important sources of motivation, resilience, and community building for causes that are thought of as leftist and/or liberal.

Visit Jack Dudley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chin Jou's "Captive Consumers"

Chin Jou is Associate Professor of History at Rice University. She is the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help (2017).

Jou applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book falls in a chapter (3) titled, “The Institution Is Our Customer, Not the Prisoner.” This chapter title is derived from a quote that a prison food services company’s director of operations told the New York Times Magazine in 2013. Chapter 3 itself is about how jails and prisons in localities and states across the country have outsourced feeding incarcerated people to private companies in the last three decades or so, and the effects of this privatization. Page 99 is fourteen pages into this chapter, and focuses on what has happened to prison food as a result of this privatization, according to myriad sources.

Page 99 homes in on Aramark, the leading company in “correctional” food services and a name that readers may already be familiar with because of the company’s large footprint on college campuses and in office buildings, hospitals, stadiums, and numerous other arenas across the United States. This page cites news reports, a Kentucky state audit, and academic research on how prison meals changed once Aramark took over provisioning. These changes included smaller portion sizes, adding margarine to meet meals’ calorie requirements, and using less meat in recipes. (Additional changes are detailed in other pages of the book.) Sloppy joes, for instance, would include less ground beef and be diluted with more ketchup and tomato paste. University of Michigan researcher Roland Zullo, who interviewed prison guards in Michigan, found that it was not unusual for Aramark to run out of food before all incarcerated people had been served.

Page 99 provides readers with a glimpse of some of the problems with U.S. jail and prison food in the mass incarceration era (roughly the 1970s to the present), but it is incomplete. It is incomplete because the argument of this book is that prison food is a source of, and exacerbates, hunger, violence, and inequality in American carceral institutions (hence the subtitle of this book). Page 99 gives some, though not all, of the explanations for why prison food leaves incarcerated people hungry, and does not at all explain how it relates to violence and inequality in our jail and prison systems. For more on these topics, readers will just have to pick up the book…

Learn more about Captive Consumers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Supersizing Urban America.

--Marshal Zeringue

R. Douglas Hurt's "The Country People"

R. Douglas Hurt is an emeritus professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. He is a past president of the Agricultural History Society, a former editor of Agricultural History, and a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society. He has received the Gladys L. Baker Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Agricultural History Society. He is the author of Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, which won the Missouri Book Award from the State Historical Society and Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900, which won the Jon Gjerde Book Prize presented by the Midwestern History Association.

Hurt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution conveys subtle but ultimately profound ways that the American Revolution changed agriculture. It builds on previously discussed agricultural policy and the effects of the War for Independence to show the ways both shaped farming in South Carolina during the American Revolution. By so doing, it is thematically representative of the whole book.

Page 99 emphasizes three major agricultural changes that resulted from the War for Independence. First, the Continental Congress and Parliament closed British markets to rice farmers. Rice had been an enumerated product with a guaranteed market and sales that brought considerable income to the farmers and planters. Rice producers lost a reliable income which they only replaced, in part, by finding new markets in the non-British West Indies and beyond. Second, the war ended the production of indigo for British textile manufactures. Farmers could no longer export this dye, and the British stopped paying a bounty to farmers for its production. As a result, the war ruined this form of agriculture in the South, and it never recovered.

Third, page 99 builds on earlier discussions of American and British policy intended to gain economic advantage over the other through trade impositions. In 1774 the Continental Congress prohibited British imports including cloth and clothing. Britain retaliated by refusing to ship textiles to American ports that it did not control. As a result, South Carolina farmers and planters sought to meet this need by raising more cotton, particularly a new variety. During the war farmers began settling in the upcountry and raising a short-staple cotton. In contrast to the long-staple Sea Island Cotton, which they could not raise in sufficient quantity to meet their clothing needs, short-staple cotton produced abundantly in the upland environment. But it required considerable labor to extract the seeds from the lint. Mechanical gins were not yet available. Consequently, farmers who raised short-staple cotton had to meet their labor needs with family members or enslaved workers. As short-staple cotton production moved inland the institution of slavery moved with it. The war, then, caused a change in trade policy that resulted in an expanded agricultural labor practice that would have enormous implications for the American economy and race relations in the years ahead.

Learn more about The Country People at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eranda Jayawickreme's "Is There Always Value to Adversity?"

Eranda Jayawickreme is the Harold W. Tribble Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow at the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of moral and intellectual character, personality change in the wake of adversity, and flourishing. His awards include the 2023 Early Career Contributions Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology, the 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from Wake Forest, and the 2015 Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science. He is currently editor-in-chief of Personality and Social Psychological Review.

Jayawickreme applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Is There Always Value to Adversity?: Looking Beyond "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger", and reported the following:

Page 99 falls in Chapter 6, "Distilling the ‘Real Benefits’ of Adversity,” as I transition from a discussion of musician Nick Cave’s reflections on grief after his son Arthur’s death to a section examining whether adversity can reshape personality in measurable ways. The page opens:

Cave’s music and personal testimony together illustrate that confronting adversity and being spurred to change by it is messy, often incomplete, and not completely positive. As we will see, there is some evidence that other people can be similarly transformed by adversity to become more sensitive and compassionate toward the suffering of others.

It then transitions into a section titled “Post-Traumatic Growth as Personality Change,” which argues that changes people report after adversity should show up in stable patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in order to count as measurable change.

I’d say that the Page 99 Test works pretty well for this book. The summary of the Cave discussion captures the main tension I work through across the eight chapters of the book: our investment in the possibility that adversity can change people for the better, set against the recognition that our evidence for this is not particularly strong, and the fact that the reality of facing up to adversity is more complicated than we’d like to think. In this context, the phrase “messy, often incomplete, and not completely positive” is a good summary of my argument. I grew up in Sri Lanka in the 80s and 90s during a civil war and insurrection, and I have long been skeptical of the familiar cultural refrain, especially prevalent in the United States, that suffering can and should produce positive change. My book traces the idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (a famous paraphrase of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker” from Twilight of the Idols) through philosophy, religious traditions, cultural narratives, and several decades of psychological research, and finds that much of the scientific evidence for post-traumatic growth lacks credibility, as it rests on measures that conflate how people talk about their experiences with how they actually change.

However, my book is not purely skeptical of the possibility of growth, and page 99 sits at the point where I shift from critique to asking what genuine growth from adversity might look like if we study it more carefully. One of my goals in discussing Cave's unsentimental reflections on grief alongside the more technical question of valid assessment is to wrestle with a hard question: how do we accurately capture the complexity of human thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the wake of hardship, adversity, and trauma? In other words, growth may be possible in the wake of adversity, but likely not the type of simplistic, triumphant change that Nietzsche’s maxim implies, and our assessments need to be sensitive to this fact.

Learn more about Is There Always Value to Adversity? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yuri Pines's "China’s Aristocratic Age"

Yuri Pines is the Michael W. Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy, The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China, Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography, and other books.

Pines applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period, with the following results:

Page 99 of my China’s Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period focuses on ebbs and flows of foreign policy of Chu—a dominant power in the southern part of the Zhou (Chinese) realm—during the final decades of the Springs-and-Autumns period (770–453 BCE). Having overthrown his brother, the ruthlessly expansionist King Ling (r. 540–529 BCE), the new ruler, King Ping (r. 528–516 BCE), opted for retrenchment and eased the pressure on Chu’s dependencies. This mildness backfired, however; several dependencies and allies interpreted it as a sign of weakness and opted to shift allegiance to Chu’s major southeastern rival, the state of Wu. In 506 BCE, Wu delivered a crushing defeat on Chu, even briefly occupying its capital. Once it recovered, Chu abandoned its erstwhile caution and began systematically annexing its former dependencies and allies, marking a new stage in its territorial expansion.

These policy fluctuations reflect a certain feature of Springs-and-Autumns politics: it was an era of constant political experimentation. Is it better to annex weaker neighbors or to maintain a smaller, more manageable polity? How should outlying territories be governed—by delegating power to indigenous elites, to autonomous appointees from the center, or implementing tighter centralized control? How can a rules-based interstate order be preserved amid routine infractions by major powers? How can effective governance be maintained in an age when many rulers ascend the throne as inexperienced youngsters—or even toddlers? How can domestic stability be preserved amid perennial competition among powerful ministerial lineages? What matters more the battlefield: securing victory or preserving one’s honor? Under what circumstances should the ruler consult the capital-dwellers? These questions—none of which had simple answers—continually preoccupied contemporary statesmen. Some offered solutions that were viable for years or even decades, but ultimately, no enduring remedies to these interstate and intrastate problems emerged.

China’s Aristocratic Age analyzes why—despite several temporary successes—the aristocrats of the Springs-and-Autumns period failed to design a viable polycentric political system. This failure doomed the aristocratic polycentric order. Statesmen of subsequent centuries sought stability instead in a unified, centralized, and bureaucratized empire. As I argue in the book’s conclusion, “After three centuries of the Springs-and-Autumns, China became immunized against polycentric rule. This may be the most surprising contribution of the aristocratic age to China’s eventual endorsement of the unified empire as the normative civilizational orientation.”

Visit Yuri Pines's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Everlasting Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott Logan's "Over and Over"

Elliott Logan is a lecturer in film and screen studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Breaking Bad and Dignity.

Logan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Over and Over: Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama, and shared the following:

On the one hand, page 99 of Over and Over is (I hope) not characteristic of what one would find and perhaps be most rewarded by across the book's length. Early in writing the book, I set myself a rule: no claims or lines of argument, no questions that propelled my inquiry forward, could be set out unless they emerged from a specific moment of television drama. So it's perhaps unusual that page 99 features nothing in the way of close reading to which so much of the book is devoted! Instead, fully two-thirds of the page is a rather abstract discursus on the affinity between the conditions of human friendship and the seriality of television drama. This is, happily, a core theme of the book's focus on television performance, and it is characteristic of the book that in this passage I am devoted to turning over the darker, less frequently considered face of this relationship between long-form television drama and long-term human relationships. Building on the work of the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, I note that while two good friends may each help the other to become who they are, "There is a dark side [...] to this promise of creation," one that also echoes the conditions of seriality. "[O]nce we feel there is nothing more in ourselves and in our friend to discover, 'once our interaction promises nothing new, freezes what has already happened ... our friendship is effectively over'. How do two people sustain their bonds and keep their promises if one or the other (or both) can no longer be seen as the person they were, or as able to be the person they wish to become?"

This is the core problem of interpersonal life that I identify at the heart of the moments I discuss in the book, one that serial drama is exquisitely poised to express and explore through its tensions between accrual and transience, the building of history between people and its gradual erosion or fading or deformation and development (for better or for worse) over time. If there is anything to which the book brings new attention, it is the positive valence of the provisional and transient as qualities that might limit the extent to which our lives and relationships become exhausted, trapped in sediment, "[frozen by] what has already happened".

Learn more about Over and Over at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunneva Gilmore's "Redressing Rape in War"

Sunneva Gilmore is a medical doctor specialising in sexual and reproductive healthcare in Northern Ireland. A member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists since 2018, she has forensic medicine experience and completed a PhD in law at Queen's University Belfast on reparations for conflict-related sexual violence. She has extensive expertise in reparations policy at national and international levels and serves as a Medical Member of the Victims' Payments Board for Northern Ireland. In 2020, she was appointed an expert on reparations at the International Criminal Court, focusing on rape, sexual slavery, and attacks on healthcare.

Gilmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Redressing Rape in War: A Medico-Legal Approach to Sexual Violence, and reported the following:

Page 99 immerses readers in one of the less recognised consequences of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV): the long-term harms that challenge conventional understandings of injury and, in turn, what meaningful redress should look like. At the heart of the book are the lived experiences of victims and survivors, alongside the perspectives of practitioners working in the field. Fittingly, this page draws on powerful firsthand accounts that may be uncomfortable to read, but are essential to understanding the cascading and interconnected consequences of CRSV.

As the book adopts a medico-legal approach, page 99 captures a central tension that runs throughout the text: the gap between existing legal conceptions of redress and the complex realities of lived harm. It highlights overlooked physical, psychosexual and stigmatising consequences of CRSV, the uneven development of care and treatment, and the ways in which gendered investment in health shapes available forms of redress. The discussion also considers reproductive implications, male victims and survivors of sexual violence, and the compounding effects of disability, illustrating how biological, psychological, social and legal factors intersect. Although the term itself does not appear on this page, it exemplifies the book's argument for a biopsychosocial-legal approach to understanding and responding to CRSV.

While page 99 offers a strong introduction to many of the book's central themes, it cannot fully represent its scope. A browser would gain a good sense of how victims and survivors navigate recovery for themselves and their families, and how sexual violence can profoundly disrupt identity, relationships, social roles and life goals. However, the book applies its medico-legal framework across the entire continuum of redress. It examines the evolution of reparations, critiques current approaches, and proposes a broader framework that brings together formal reparations, healthcare, self-repair and informal forms of redress. Ultimately, it argues that transformative redress requires an interdisciplinary understanding of both vulnerability and resilience, greater emphasis on rehabilitation and new ways of measuring what successful redress truly means.

Learn more about Redressing Rape in War at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret K. Nelson's "Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers"

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology Emerita, Middlebury College. Her books include, among others, Sociology Meets Memoir (2024), Farm and Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the 20th Century, with Emily K. Abel (2023), Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (2022), and Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (2012).

Nelson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont, with the following results:

The very top of page 99 ties up an account of why Abraham Cohen remained in Vergennes, Vermont when his wife moved to the nearby city of Burlington. The middle section, about Minne and Aaron Cohen is more complete:

Minnie Shuchman Cohen and seven children … arrived in New York City in 1913 and traveled directly to Burlington, where Aaron had bought them a house at 265 North Winooski Avenue (a five-minute walk from the house Abraham subsequently bought for his family). … Aaron settled his family in Burlington while he continued to live and work in Vergennes for four more years.

The bottom paragraph begins to tell the story of yet another couple, Rose and Alec Jacob Abramoff who remained married but lived separately.

Is page 99 representative of this book? Well, yes and no. On the “yes” side, the page offers detailed information including the names of both men and women, the years in which these people immigrated to the United States, the places they lived, the occupations of the men, and the domestic arrangements within their families. The level of thoroughness – drawn from newspapers, public records, and interviews with descendants – is characteristic of the book as a whole. But on the “no” side, the page gives no indication that the people were Jewish and that the place Aaron lived was a very small town. Indeed, this page focuses on the women who left their husbands (and the reasons for their leaving) while even as they continued to be married, rather than revealing anything about the generations of Jewish people who stayed and built their lives in the small towns of New England.

By the time the name of Abraham Cohen appears on page 99, the reader will know him well as a Jewish immigrant who was a junk dealer for over forty years. The reader will also know Abraham Cohen’s brother-in-law, Max Fishman, another Jewish immigrant who, by way of contrast, spent his life first as an itinerant peddler and then as the owner of a successful dry goods store that remained in business for almost 100 years. Both men lived, and worked in the same small town of Vergennes, Vermont. In subsequent chapters their relatives – including their wives, children, and grandchildren – will also come alive through my discussion of how Jewish people were integrated into places in which they constituted but a tiny minority. The conclusion compares the trajectories of Jews who settled in small-town Vermont at the dawn on the twentieth century with those who arrived three-quarters of a century later.

Learn more about Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew B. Kennedy's "Rebellious Follower"

Andrew B. Kennedy is Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University, and B.S. in Psychology from Duke University. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a consultant, journalist, and teacher in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.

Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation, and shared the following:

Page 99 may be found in the middle of Chapter 5, “The Balancing Act.” The chapter explores how China’s reformist leaders started experimenting with a more balanced approach to science and technology in the 1980s, chipping away at state planning and allowing more room societal initiative. Page 99 notes how challenging and problematic these changes were. “While the creation of a foundation system created new opportunities for scientists,” it notes, “the liberalization of prices and salary disparities made careers in basic science unappealing.” While small startup firms emerged, “the private sector was still nascent and remained vulnerable to discrimination.” The program to create China’s own technology clusters along the lines of Silicon Valley “suffered from considerable ‘mission drift’ over time.” The passage concludes by putting these challenges in perspective: “expanding society-led S&T in a Leninist political system accustomed to central planning was bound to be fraught.” More encouragingly, it adds that it was “striking how much change China’s leaders introduced in a relatively short period of time.”

Overall, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Rebellious Follower. Readers opening the book to this page would quickly understand that the book is a deep dive into how China’s policies toward science, technology, and innovation have evolved over time. In fact, page 99 highlights a number of key changes at an important moment. Readers would also perceive that the book is concerned both with China’s changing approach and with the challenges and contradictions these changes have wrought.

One page can only say so much, of course, and readers would need to start with Chapter 1 to appreciate the full scope of the book and its argument. The story really starts in the 19th century, when imperialist incursions brought the concept of science to China in the first place. Debates over how to respond have animated Chinese policymaking ever since. In the 1950s, China embraced state-led science planning, inspired by the Soviet Union, but Chairman Mao Zedong soon tired of this approach. In the 1960s, therefore, Mao’s Cultural Revolution touted “mass science” as the path to salvation – a remarkable challenge to more traditional elitist conceptions of what science was. Following Mao’s death, a more elitist approach returned, but departures from state-led planning soon followed. In the 1990s, China began to embrace not only science and technology, but also innovation, and the country’s “innovation system” became a new focal point for policymaking. In the 21st century, China’s leaders have developed an “innovation system with Chinese characteristics,” one in which a resurgent party-state plays a critical guiding role.

Throughout this winding history, Chinese leaders have shown a deep and abiding interest in foreign ideas about how science, technology, and innovation work. Yet they have also repeatedly challenged these ideas, either resisting them or adapting them as they have sought to reconcile imported belief systems with local ideologies. Simply put, China’s leaders have followed foreign ideas closely, but they have been remarkably rebellious followers.

Learn more about Rebellious Follower at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terra Ziporyn and Amy R. Wolfson's "Educating the Exhausted"

Terra Ziporyn is the Executive Director and cofounder of Start School Later and author of numerous books on health and medicine, including The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health. Amy R. Wolfson is a professor of psychology at Loyola University Maryland and a leading scholar of adolescent sleep health.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later Start, gives a compelling example of the challenges sleep researchers, like one of the authors, Amy R. Wolfson, ran into when they tried to convince school districts (translate adolescent sleep research into policy to benefit teens), in this case Worcester, MA (where the author was from at the time), and Seekonk, MA to set developmentally appropriate middle and high school start times. We note on page 99,

From the 1990s through 2019 they worked tirelessly to delay Worcester’s school start times. The school committee was still actively discussing potential plans as recently as 2021. Neighboring Shrewsbury at last voted to delay school start times for the 2023-24 school year…as have several other school districts…. Nonetheless, Worcester’s high schools still start at 7:20am.

As you will come to appreciate in our book, as captured on page 99, we learned early on that this was going to be an uphill battle – translating clear science on adolescent sleep and circadian health into meaningful school start times for youth. While the school district stories discussed in chapter 5, “Early Efforts to Delay School Start Times,” took place towards the 1990s and the early years of the 21st C, our book will draw you into understanding why research evidence on its own does not ensure that all school districts set school start times that allow for sufficient and regular sleep needed for optimal health and mental health. Our book both reviews the science of adolescent sleep health, historic disconnect between school start times and sleep research, early and ongoing efforts to set guardrails for age-appropriate school start times, perceived and actual hurdles, significance of the founding of the non-profit, Start School Later, and ultimately what it will take to sunset the start school later movement? Hence, Educating the Exhausted, not only captures the consequences of exhaustion for our teens and our society, but also how we have contributed to that exhaustion in decisions we’ve made about our schools and how we can address that exhaustion and its consequences by ensuring that strong science informs healthy public policy. Readers will come to understand exactly why our colleagues, friends, students, and communities have been tirelessly working to “educate the exhausted” for over three decades.

Visit Terra Ziporyn's website and Amy R. Wolfson's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tad Tuleja's "Skirmishes with Patriotism"

Tad Tuleja is a folklorist, songwriter, and former college writing instructor. The author of thirty books and numerous scholarly papers on American folk and popular traditions, he is also the editor of Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents and, with Eric A. Eliason, of Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore.

Tuleja applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam, with the following results:

Sixty years ago, at 24, I declined my government’s invitation to fight in Vietnam. I did so for what I believed were moral reasons, yet saying “the right No” to the war was a decision that had me asking myself for decades not only “Did I do the right thing?” but also “What if I had gone there?” Skirmishes with Patriotism began as an attempt to answer those questions. But the tale grew in the telling, and the book became a meditation that tries to work out more generally how manhood and nationalism come together around the noble infatuation we call patriotism. Ultimately it grapples with the question “What does it mean to say you love your country?”

The story begins in the Eisenhower 1950s, when I was a Boy Scout and the son of a U.S. naval officer. The book’s first half tracks my journey from that trusting childhood to the late 1960s when, having escaped the war, I spent some time in Paris and London. When I came home in 1971, I wrote an essay for Chicago Review entitled “Notes on a Homecoming.” On page 99 of Skirmishes, I reflect on that essay. It’s an appropriate glance at the book, for it shows an old man critiquing the certainties of his youth—the same critique that drives the book overall. Here’s the text of page 99:

On the facing page of my [Homecoming] essay, a French news photo shows an old Vietnamese woman aiming a rifle while a young woman corrects her technique. Are these the freedom-loving peasants we are there to protect, or a pair of VC irregulars with GIs in their sights? There is no way to tell from the picture, and that tells us something dreadful about the war: It erased the line between our friends and our enemies.

Yet this fact seems barely visible to the young radical-in-exile. He is talking of the war as a political evil, not as a place where people point rifles at each other. He is aware, fleetingly, that there are people involved. Not the Vietnamese: They are never mentioned in this diatribe on the war. But there are Americans there, in those “rows of dead soldiers.” In the first pages of the piece, as he sits in the sun playing Hemingway, he is aware of these men. “Comfortable in my cafes, wined, dined, and anodyned,” he imagines the faces of “young men like me who, unlike me, will not return.” It’s a small but telling moment of awareness. Even while riding the winds of smug outrage, he is able to recall, for a second, the break he’s been given.

I am speaking of this young man now as if he is alive, and as if, even stranger, he is not me. That is a way of creating a salutary distance, of owning and yet not owning these decades- old words. Yet it was some version of “I” who set them down. And they spoke some truth to the reality I saw then, to the power and the abuse of power that embroiled my world. I wish I could say I was more concerned with our soldiers than is suggested by the hint of “young men like me.” But that was a mission failed which has taken me most of my life to come back around to. It is part of why my “right No” is still a weight to be borne.

Saigon fell on the last day of April 1975. Within hours, American TV screens aired film of the victors’ tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital—soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City—and of civilians scrambling for space on the Air America helicopters that were spiriting people away from an anticipated bloodbath. The war that had torn us apart was over. We watched its final twitches in sick satisfaction.

In the second half of Skirmishes, I track my engagement with Vietnam and with patriotism from that grim April day to the present. In trying to understand what the war I hated felt like to the young Americans who fought it, I drew on the memoirs of fine writers like Philip Caputo, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Karl Marlantes. And I came to see that it was not impossible to reconcile a hatred of war with respect for soldiers. Respect especially for the sacrifices that they make “for God and country.”

The final chapters of Skirmishes move beyond the battlefield to the home front, where as I said in a song written decades after the war, “Elders write the contracts while children close the deal.” Writing this memoir eased the burden I’d carried for decades while convincing me that George Orwell had it right when he said the worst of war propaganda, “all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” Something to remember the next time somebody with a flag pin and no uniform tells you our latest “patriotic” adventure is worth service members’ lives.

Visit Tad Tuleja's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ankita Pandey's "Becoming Allies"

Ankita Pandey is Associate Professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, India, and Research Associate at St Antony's College, the University of Oxford.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Becoming Allies opens onto one of the book's central concerns: the quiet, painstaking work of fact-finding by civil liberties activists. The practice is about independent investigations into police violence and abuse of power by state officials. But more broadly this practice is part of the larger ongoing contestation over who gets to tell the story of injustice? This page is in a chapter that explores activist fact-finding as a political act.

The page notes that the work of civil liberties teams was to uncover facts, and to unsettle official truths. Their reports showed how ordinary legal procedures could become instruments of injustice. Words such as "and others", in a police complaint could leave several unnamed people vulnerable to future arrest. Fact finding revealed that official records failed to match eyewitness accounts. Procedures were ignored, rewritten, or invented after the event. The fact-finding reports by civil liberties activists asked: why were people arrested who had never been at the scene? Why was live ammunition used before less violent measures were exhausted? The struggle, the page suggests, was over who possessed the authority to say what had happened.

Would a reader who stumbled upon page 99 grasp the essence of the book?

In many ways, yes. They would encounter one of its recurring themes: democracy depends on those who patiently investigate, document, and amplify the voices of others. Fact-finding is one of the principal ways the allies in this book practised politics. Yet page 99 might make a casual reader assume the book is about human rights investigations alone. It is not. It is about the practices of people who undertake such work, and the distinctive political role they play. Becoming Allies asks: why do some people raise awareness around injustices that they do not have a direct stake in? It follows the practices of lawyers, judges, journalists, academics and other concerned citizens who defended political prisoners, documented communal violence, supported labourers, and stood beside marginalised communities.

Seeing these people as allies shifts our attention from a bi-polar conflict between movements and the state to the relationships that connect them. The book develops the ideas of ally activism and the politics of amplification to show how local struggles become public causes, and how voices travel beyond the places where they first emerged.

If page 99 offers a glimpse of one practice, the book asks readers to notice the invisible labour of those who gather the testimonies, preserve the evidence, carry stories across institutions and refuse to let injustice disappear into silence.

Learn more about Becoming Allies at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Ganson's "Lady Daredevils"

Barbara Ganson is a professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. She is a guest curator at the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum and a private pilot. Her books include Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State.

Ganson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lady Daredevils: American Women and Early Aviation, and reported the following:

On the half page numbered 99, there is an illustration of altitude record setter Ruth Blaney Alexander in San Diego, in 1929. She is smiling while sitting in the cockpit of her airplane with a stuffed animal dog mascot and a bouquet of beautiful flowers. Below the image, I quote her endearing letter she wrote to her third husband, which sheds light on her emotional state before her departure to return home to Kansas. She left behind her wedding ring and might have been considering leaving him. Another letter she left for her parents to be opened only in case of death, asking them "not to wish her back," because she has gone on to a happier life and will wait for them there. She then mentions that the "way of life is hilly" and right then she was at the bottom of one of the hills and the next one looked tough to her. Ruth Blaney Alexander mentions "she had the promise of a ship, gas, and an engine but no money to back her flights," but somehow, “she would manage.”

The letters she left behind for her loved ones allow the reader to understand how aviators dealt with the realty of flying at a time when things could and often went terribly wrong during the early years of flight.

Overall, page 99 well represents the book which aims to describe and analyze the experiences of lesser-known (and well known) women aviators. It illustrates well the depth of my research, as these are rare letters.

Learn more about Lady Daredevils at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Blair's "In the Scholar’s Workshop"

Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History.

Blair applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship, with the following results:

Page 99 plunges us into chapter 2 (“Invisible and visible”) and a central theme of the book: the general invisibility but occasional visibility of the “little people” on whose help authors and scholars often relied in composing texts and preparing them for publication. I focus here on examples from Renaissance Europe 1500-1650, but I expect that these patterns apply to other contexts too.

In the Renaissance the conventions of authorship in print and in iconography emphasized the author as a single name on a title page and a solitary figure working with his papers and books. Learned books often included a number of paratexts (e.g. preface, dedicatory epistle, table of contents, index) but there was no equivalent to the acknowledgments section that we expect today. In fact authors and scholars typically relied on the help of young men they hired or on live-in students or even family members to help them by taking dictation, reading, finding references, making copies of texts, among other tasks. But these amanuenses (singular: amanuensis, for “hand-servant”) remain hidden from view in the final printed product that they helped to create. The main exception to this pattern of invisibility occurred when authors sought to pin the blame on their helpers for errors or shortcomings that the reader might encounter. The author did not name the helpers, but acknowledged their existence by asking the reader to “please excuse the errors of my amanuenses.” A more elaborate version invoked a thieving servant who would seek to publish the stolen text, thus forcing the author to rush into print with his text in order to forestall a dishonest and inaccurate edition by the servant. I argue that these two tropes were an innovation of the age of print, which I call the “servant function.” Why did they originate in Renaissance Europe?

As I explain on page 99, printing was a source of anxiety for the author:

The attraction of getting one’s work into print was precisely to spread one’s reputation far across space and time, but the risk of an unfavorable reception was also heightened by the prospect of broad distribution beyond the author’s control. The context of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century further raised the stakes of a negative reception, since there were constant tensions and shifting distributions of power not only among the main rival confessions but also within each of them as factions within the Catholic and the several Protestant churches vied for power. Authors who miscalculated the impact of their book could face devastating consequences, hence the virtues of the servant function to relieve the author of some of this anxiety and responsibility.

This early modern move is the opposite of today’s acknowledgments in which authors thank those who helped by name and take responsibility for any errors as their own.

The book investigates the relationships between amanuensis and principal in other historical contexts (ch. 1) along other thematics axes too—mechanical vs intellectual work (ch. 3), attribution of authorship (ch. 4), and the management of posthumous papers (ch. 5).

Learn more about In the Scholar’s Workshop at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Too Much to Know.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sergey Gavrilets's "Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action"

Sergey Gavrilets is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He is the author of Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species.

Gavrilets applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action, and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in the chapter “Dynamics of Social Influence.” It begins with a figure showing adoption curves in the classic Bass model of innovation diffusion, which combines influence from external authorities with influence from peers. The page emphasizes that “even a relatively weak effect of external influence ... can significantly speed up the spread of the innovation.” It then notes how the model can incorporate individual differences and network interactions before turning to the classic Daley-Kendall model of rumor spread, which adapts ideas from epidemic models.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for my book, although it works better as a sample of the book’s approach than as a summary of its full argument. The page captures one of its central concerns: how individual behavior spreads through a population under the combined influence of authorities and peers. It also illustrates the book’s typical strategy: begin with a simple formal model, explain its intuition, visualize its consequences, and then connect it to related models and possible extensions.

At the same time, a browser reading only this page might conclude that the book is mainly about the diffusion of innovations and rumors. Its larger subject is collective action: why groups sometimes solve shared problems and sometimes fail, even when cooperation would benefit everyone. The book asks who contributes and who free-rides, why people punish violators or follow leaders, how norms emerge and change, and when small behavioral shifts can produce large social transformations.

My central argument is that no single mechanism can adequately explain collective action. Material incentives matter, but so do personal attitudes and moral values, beliefs about what others will do, social norms, peer influence, cultural authorities, cognition, learning, and individual differences. The book brings insights from game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary theory, psychology, and cultural evolution into a common framework. This framework shows how actions, attitudes, and beliefs can coevolve and reinforce one another, sustaining cooperation but also trapping groups in persistent collective failure. It also helps identify tipping points, explain why apparently ineffective institutions endure, and clarify when interventions by leaders, authorities, or committed minorities can redirect a group’s trajectory.

Page 99 therefore reveals an important engine of the book - social influence operating through nonlinear population dynamics - but not the full machine. It gives a good taste of how the book thinks, but only a partial map of what it explains.

Visit Sergey Gavrilets's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Garrett's "White Lies"

Greg Garrett is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture at Baylor University and Canon Theologian for the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, France. He has published over thirty books, including The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity (2023) and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (2020).

Garrett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, White Lies: Dismantling Ten Cultural Myths About Race, and reported the following:

Page 99 of White Lies is a virtual cornucopia of themes and ideas about the power of racial myths to create a caste system and to diminish those who are not white Christian males. On that page, I wrestle with the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admission decision striking down race-based admissions to institutions of higher ed, and with the hypocritical suggestion from Supreme Court justices including Clarence Thomas that racial discrimination is a thing of the past.

In the process, I dig into the truth that since we are a multi-cultural multi-racial nation we will have to reckon with these differences. I use James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village” as a way to address how America must confront race and difference, since the Black American is “not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him.”

The page—which is also the concluding page in a chapter about the myth of white Americans celebrating that at least they aren’t Black—ends with how white americans have created myths to keep Black people in their place, to enforce white supremacy, including the simple idea that race can differentiate between two people in identical economic situations by race. “Systems that were created to make people miserable make people miserable,” I write, “and thus has the racial caste system functioned in America.”

Page 99 of my White Lies is a remarkable confirmation of the book’s larger thesis that racial myths shape the way we think, live, and believe. This page 99 offers an incredibly dense summation of the creation of a racial caste system in America and cites Isabel Wilkerson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, James Baldwin, and theologian Maria Power, and presents a call to action on the myth that we can and should use race to set up who in America matters and who does not.

The largest section of page 99 is a discussion of James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village,” which appeared in his first book, Notes of a Native Son. I have argued in a previous book on Baldwin (The Gospel according to James Baldwin) that his experience visiting a Swiss alpine village that had never seen a Black man helped him formulate many of his most important understandings about race. The villagers saw him as exotic. The children wanted to touch his nappy hair. But as he notes, white men in the West (Baldwin divided his time between France and the United States) do not have the luxury of looking upon him as a stranger.

Baldwin—and the villagers of Leukerbad—knew that eventually he would go back down the mountain, and they did not have to deal with him. But for those in the Western democracies, for those in his native United States, the question of the Black person could not be ignored. Either white people would have to acknowledge the shared humanity of the Black person, or everything might fall apart.

I’m particularly happy with my closing paragraph, which is not only the last paragraph on page 99, but the last paragraph of my chapter “At Least We’re Not Black.” It notes how our history has leaned into this harmful myth (often at the detriment of poor whites, who might have more in common with Black Americans than with wealthy whites), and makes an explicit connection to white Christian nationalism, which I write about at length in the book, which has taken and is daily leaning into the idea of a racist caste system that enthrones them to the detriment of everyone else.

Well done, Page 99 Challenge. With White Lies, you absolutely nailed it!

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook and Substack.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue