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