David L. Weddle's "Miracles"

David L. Weddle is the David and Lucile Packard Professor at Colorado College and the author of The Law as Gospel: Revival and Reform in the Theology of Charles G. Finney.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions, and reported the following:

Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions retells stories of wondrous events in five religious traditions and reflects on the meanings assigned to them. Accounts of levitation, healing, resurrection, and clairvoyance appear in these traditions as expressions of the refusal to accept human existence as determined by a closed system of pitiless material forces. Belief in miracles persists in all these traditions, despite scientific claims and philosophical criticisms to the contrary. In fact, belief in supernatural (or “transcendent”) events is on the rise among resurgent forms of religion across the globe. My thesis is that hope for miracles is everywhere sustained by popular enthusiasm, restrained by official regulation (like the rigorous tests for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church), and—here is the distinctive emphasis of the book demonstrated on page 99—opposed by faithful dissenters within each tradition who object to reliance on miracles as undercutting moral responsibility and the order of nature.

Within Jewish tradition one of the most powerful critics of miracles was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), whose challenge to the literal reading of the Bible earned him excommunication from his synagogue in Amsterdam. Spinoza insisted that God created the world as a seamless unity according to his unchanging will. Thus, a miracle would be a symptom of divine dissociation, an internal contradiction that would violate God’s covenant to maintain the world in “fixed and immutable order.” On page 99 of the book you will find my assessment of Spinoza’s religious objection to miracles and his own love for God:

Spinoza was unusual among modern thinkers in retaining his love of God while accepting the hard fact that God would not reciprocate his interest with any personal gesture. The God who is Nature exists in supreme indifference to human need. In its practical effects, Spinoza’s theology required adult believers willing to assume responsibility for seeking justice and charity for their own sake without promises of supernatural intervention now or reward beyond the grave. In short, Spinoza offered theism without supernaturalism, ethics without transcendence, and love of God without emotion. To worship Spinoza’s God is consistently and exclusively to pursue moral virtue, unaided by supernatural assistance. For Spinoza the claim to miraculous power by religious leaders was a dishonest attempt to control uneducated believers, while the popular desire for miracles was the result of scientific ignorance and religious immaturity.

Spinoza belonged to the age of European Enlightenment, but a more recent critic also appears on page 99: Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan taught that Judaism is a “civilization” that must take its place in the modern world by accepting the primacy of science and abandoning claims of supernatural intervention. He was a faithful dissenter.

Kaplan believed his conception of God would inspire modern Jews to pursue traditional values—justice, mercy, and peace—that enhance the world as a whole. The evidence that the human spirit is not determined by blind material forces is our capacity to rise above the demands of natural order by answering brutality with compassion and nurturing hope that the world can be different than it is. The catalog of horrors created by authoritarian regimes—war, persecution, genocide—were not inevitable. The problem is that supernaturalism requires loyalty to a fictional being and its abstract ideals for which humans are moved to kill each other. Kaplan insisted that the ennobling values symbolized by his reconstructed idea of God could motivate humans to surpass selfish interests and pretensions of absolute authority.

Read the introduction to Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ilana Gershon's "The Breakup 2.0"

Ilana Gershon is Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media, and reported the following:

I opened my book to page 99, and my heart sank a little bit – no good breakup stories. My book is filled with funny, quirky breakup stories, none here. Instead I am introducing a theoretical framework to address an issue that came up in almost all of my interviews. I interviewed 72 people at Indiana University about how they use new media to break up, primarily undergraduates. I was asking people about their media ideologies, about their beliefs about how a medium affects a message, especially when it is a series of messages about ending a relationship. But someone’s media ideology about texting is also always informed by their media ideology about Facebook or instant messaging (even if they aren’t on Facebook or don’t use instant messaging all that often).

One of the interesting things I noticed in all my interviews is that these breakup stories were all collections of conversations that took place in a number of different media. Very few people only broke up by email or by text message, even if The Breakup Conversation only took place in one medium. Breakups often involve many conversations, and people will use a wide range of media as they disentangle.

In addition, when you are breaking up by Gmail chat, you are also not breaking up by phone, in person, or by texting. Every breakup conversation is a choice of one medium, and a decision against other possible media. So how should one analyze the ways in which all these different understandings of media are interconnected (what media scholars call remediation)?

On page 99, I discuss how two scholars, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, discuss remediation. They talk about the ways in which all media are interconnected in terms of media ideologies about immediacy and hypermediation. For these authors, different media lie on a continuum of mediation: how much a medium can seem to alter an image or text or scene from the imagined original moment. But this isn’t necessarily what people care about when they are breaking up with each other. They might care more about how formal or informal a medium seems to be. How do you decide whether texting is more formal than instant messaging? And once you decide, how does this affect the way you will respond if your lover sends you a text message “it’s over?” Do you call them? Do you say: "who behaves this badly?" and refuse all further contact?

Read more about The Breakup 2.0 at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald Stoker's "The Grand Design"

Donald Stoker is Professor of Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Naval War College's program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War, and reported the following:

One of the things differentiating my book from the rest of the Civil War literature is its examination of strategic issues rarely (or never) discussed anywhere else. Page 99 is indicative of this because it is part of the discussion of a strategic topic not normally touched upon: Confederate naval strategy. It is probably safe to say that the average reader does not even know there was such as thing. But the reality is that the Confederates had some very developed ideas in regard to naval strategy and it is not a far stretch to say that their naval thinking was superior to that guiding their land war.

Confederate naval strategy took as its starting point an effort to get a technological edge over the Union and thus break Northern naval power by building a small number of technically superior vessels. These were to take two primary forms: high-speed, steam and sail powered raiders armed with a small number of rifled cannon that would attack Union shipping, and ironclad coastal vessels to secure Southern ports and break the Union blockade. A third tier was coastal defense. This took the form of fortifications (page 99 shows Robert E. Lee’s involvement in this), and undersea mines, known as “torpedoes” during the Civil War. Confederate undersea warfare also saw experiments with submarines, such as the famous Hunley (see page 99).

The South’s ideas though, were more advanced than its industry. It could never build or buy abroad the ships it needed to put its ideas into practice.

Read more about The Grand Design at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elise DeVido's "Taiwan's Buddhist Nuns"

Elise Anne DeVido is Assistant Professor of History at St. Bonaventure University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Taiwan's Buddhist Nuns, and reported the following:

I suspect that Ford Madox Ford originally meant his test to be applied to a work of fiction, which, as drama, has a different structure, trajectory, and emotional world than do works of non-fiction. At least, his test might work better on books far longer than my short monograph! But when I turn to page 99, lo and behold I do find a core passage on “Buddhism for the human realm,” one of the overarching themes of this book.

Before I turn to that passage, let’s look at page 93. There I wrote: “Every chapter of this book has mentioned “Buddhism for the human realm,” renjian fojiao, the modernized form of Buddhism first formulated in early twentieth-century China and promulgated in Taiwan by a number of Buddhist groups.” My book explores how Buddhist women and men in Taiwan, both monastics and laypeople, interpret and practice this “modernized” form of Chinese Buddhism. Why Taiwan, not China? Because in modern times until very recently, war and political struggles in mainland China disrupted and suppressed the practice of Chinese Buddhism, a rich tradition with two thousand years of history, and the tradition which over time spread to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and, wherever the Chinese emigrated. This may all be new to many readers more familiar with Japanese Zen Buddhism (In fact, “Zen” originated in China) or the Westernized forms of Tibetan Buddhism.

So on page 99 we find a famous quotation by the pre-eminent reformer of Chinese Buddhism, the monk Taixu, from his essay “How to establish Buddhism for the human realm (1933):”

“[Buddhism for the human realm] is not a Buddhism in which you leave the human realm and become a god or ghost, or for everyone to take monastic vows, go to a temple, or become an eremite in the forest. It’s a Buddhism which, in accordance with Buddhist teachings, reforms society, helps humankind to progress, and improves the whole world.”

World affirming, fully engaged in today’s society, technologically savvy, a Buddhism entered into life and the human realm…but the heart of the book is that in Taiwan, most Buddhist monastics and laypeople are women, a situation not found in other Buddhist countries. Read the book to find out why!

Read an excerpt from Taiwan's Buddhist Nuns, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Kessner's "The Flight of the Century"

Thomas Kessner is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of many books, including Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America's Rise to Dominance, 1860-1900, and Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York, which was a New York Times Notable Book.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation, and reported the following:

Page 99:

When news began filtering through that the Spirit of St. Louis had been seen over Ireland, thirty thousand people crowded the Place de l’Opera and Square du Havre to follow the latest bulletins. Not since the Armistice had Paris buzzed with such joy and excitement. Le Matin’s posting of a sighting over Cherbourg set off choruses of “Vive Lindbergh! Vive l’Américain!” on the streets. “Every one in Paris who had a car, or could get one,” commented Edwin James, the New York Times Paris bureau chief, “conceived the bright idea of going out to Le Bourget ... [to] shake hands” with Lindbergh. Raymond Orteig too rushed to Paris, from the south of France, only to miss the landing by about fifteen minutes because of the traffic. His words of praise for “the modesty of this hero, who in silence prepared for his magnificent effort,” were delivered hours after the landing, later that night. 1

Lindbergh’s landing awakened sympathies submerged by years of bickering. Even the most nationalist of the French papers, Liberté, was caught up in the fever of excitement: “Paris, always impassioned by courage; Paris, which has not forgotten its emotion of joy, when in 1917, it saw the first American regiments in the streets, will unite this evening in one fervent thought, the names of Lindbergh, Nungesser and Coli.” Minister of War Paul Painleve, calling Lindbergh “this daring human bird,” celebrated the flight as a “magnificent human triumph ... a stimulant for invention.” News of his landing touched off the “mightiest pro-American demonstration seen in France since the days of the war.”2

Beyond trying to delay it, the American Embassy had given little thought to the flight. On the chance that Lindbergh might be successful the staff had prepared a small reception, inviting a few French officials and prominent figures from the American colony in Paris. Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, however, was worried that a severely overtired Lindbergh might say something that could exacerbate the already tense relationship between the two countries. Prudent diplomats do not leave such possibilities to chance. Elegant, discreet, and above all extremely careful, Herrick was a fine example of old school diplomacy. In his autobiography he wrote that he did not go to Le Bourget with any notion of taking Lindbergh under his wing: “But ... when I looked at this boy and realized all at once what he had done and what he had been through, it naturally came into my head to take him home with me.” It was a stroke of diplomatic genius. And it was not as unplanned as Herrick let on. 3

vive lindbergh! vive l’américain! 99

Page 99 is early into a chapter describing reaction to Lindbergh’s historic flight and the little known role of the diplomat who molded the unlettered Lindbergh into a 20th century icon.

Lindbergh (whose father was a congressman) was the child of a broken home who flunked out of college and looked forward to an unpromising future before realizing that he had a special gift for piloting the primitive airships of the time. He toured with barnstormers, did some wingwalking, and delivered the air mail before entering the competition for a $25,000 purse promised to the first plane to fly nonstop between New York and Paris.

Six other fliers, far more experienced than the 25 year old Lindbergh, had taken off in massive multiple- engine machines and either perished or vanished. So unorthodox was Lindbergh’s plan for the 3600 mile crossing that top line manufacturers refused to sell him a plane, fearful of being associated with certain disaster. The fact that of all the competitors he insisted on doing it alone made it seem even more lunatic.

Finally an obscure West Coast company agreed to build him the plane he wanted: a silver tone, single-engine aircraft stripped to its bare essentials (lacking even a radio), and in the early dawn of May 20th 1927 Lindbergh took off. More than 33 perilous hours later he arrived over Paris’ Le Bourget airport. Airfields were lonely places then and when he glimpsed the huge crowd gathered there, Lindbergh was certain that he had lost his way. But this was indeed Le Bourget and the crowd of 100,000 that soon trampled police barriers in a frenzied charge to “touch the new Christ,” was there to witness the dawn of a new air age.

Why did this sporting stunt so capture the imagination of the world and turn Lindbergh into the most celebrated individual in history? And in an era when fame spoiled sooner than warm milk why did his endure, propelling the U.S. into aviation leadership; until it curdled into a loathing for democracy and a disastrous flirtation with Nazism? These questions shape the succeeding pages of the book.

Learn more about The Flight of the Century at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark W. Geiger's "Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War"

Mark W. Geiger is a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War, 1861-1865, and reported the following:

From page 99:

By late 1863 the banks and the defendants were, in different ways, trapped. To survive, the banks had to collect their bad debts. Lawsuits filed by the banks clogged the dockets of the state’s civil courts in the final two years of the war, but eventually all cases were settled. Missouri’s southern men could only use this interval to play a rigged game in the enemy’s courts and legislature. When it was all over, most of the defendants had no property left. Not everyone was willing to accept this brand of justice, however. Political repression, the bitterness of military defeat, and, finally, the forced land sales all made further violence certain.

This book explores a previously unknown financial conspiracy that occurred at the start of the American Civil War. In 1861, a small group of pro-secession politicians, bankers, and wealthy men in Missouri conspired to divert money from the state’s banks to equip rebel military forces. The scheme backfired and created mass indebtedness among Missouri’s pro-southern population, especially the wealthy slaveholders. Court judgments eventually forced the sale of a hundred and forty thousand hectares of farmland, creating a revolution in landownership that decapitated the state’s southern society. Today a subaltern southern culture survives in Missouri, but little remains of a traditional southern aristocracy, unlike in other former border slave states like Kentucky and Maryland. Many of these newly landless families emigrated. Most went west and south, but some scattered as far as Brazil and Mexico.

As a further turn in this story, the indebtedness intensified the guerrilla war that raged in Missouri from mid-1862 on. This was the worst period of terrorist violence ever to occur on American soil, and it is an aberration in American history that has never been fully explained. A disproportionate number of the young men from these dispossessed families joined the guerrillas, making common cause with desperate and violent men from the bottom of society. Many guerrillas later turned to banditry, most famously the gang led by Jesse James. The violence so disrupted civil society that conditions did not settle down for nearly two decades after the war. In the 1870s eastern newspapers called Missouri “the robber state,” and depicted the continuing violence as something that set Missouri apart from the rest of the country.

Looking beyond this melodramatic story, the records of the failed conspiracy show an archaic form of military mobilization used throughout the U.S. in 1861 that historians have not previously studied. In 1861, governments North and South lacked the money, the legal authority, and the administrative capacity necessary for military mobilization. Without private financing, the shooting war could not have started until months later. The U.S. had relied on private financing for all its earlier military mobilizations, and the system was of ancient pedigree in Europe. This was the last time the country mobilized for war in this way, marking a turning point in the centralization of federal power and the formation of a modern administrative state.

View a video trailer for Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War, 1861-1865, and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Loveman's "No Higher Law"

Brian Loveman is professor emeritus of political science at San Diego State University and author or editor of more than twenty books on Latin American history and politics, inter-American relations, and U.S. foreign policy.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776, and reported the following:

P. 99 of begins with a summary of American foreign policy and the Western Hemisphere from the 1820s until the 1860s and ends with an introduction of American policy toward Cuba, the first of five cases (Cuba, the Caribbean islands, Central America, Colombia [Panama], Mexico) considered in the rest of Chapter 4. The chapter is titled “The Good Neighbor” – an ironic characterization of U.S. regional policy, and especially of President James Buchanan’s call for American military intervention in Mexico as a “good neighbor” to lend a “helping hand.” Buchanan told Congress that Mexico was a “wreck upon the Ocean” and that the U.S. should lend a helping hand, lest “some other nation undertake the task, and thus force us to interfere at last, …for the maintenance of our established policy.” Buchanan meant to uphold his version of the Monroe Doctrine, protect American property and business in Mexico, and control isthmian transit from the Pacific to Atlantic oceans after the California gold rush of 1849, and after the U.S. annexed approximately half of Mexico. He also sought to expand slave territory. Buchanan told Congress: “Only thus can we fulfill our high destinies, and run the race of greatness for which we are ordained …. The Anglo-Saxon blood could never be subdued by anything that claimed Mexican origin” (p. 115).

The summary paragraph at the beginning of p. 99 captures some of the central themes of No Higher Law regarding the formulation, implementation, and impact of American foreign policy toward Latin America, the way these policies have fit historically (to the present) into U.S. global strategy, and the responses of Latin Americans to the U.S. quest for hegemony in the Western hemisphere. Latin Americans found their interests and aspirations sacrificed to U.S. and European powers; both U.S. and European governments premised their policies on the “inferiority” of Latin American peoples and cultures. Racism and belief in American exceptionalism “justified” the “contempt and cynicism demonstrated by American and European governments alike toward Spanish America and Brazil.”

Colombian poet José María Torres Caicedo, living in Paris, responded to U.S. policy in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America with Las dos Americas (The Two Americas), a bitter denunciation of the betrayal by the United States of its own revolutionary past and its aggression against the poet’s América Latina (p. 111):

The Latin American race
Is confronted by the Saxon Race
Mortal Enemy who now threatens
To destroy its liberty and its banner

Thus the p.99 test catches the 1776-2010 story told by No Higher Law fifty years after U.S. independence and takes it into the 1860s. A reader who picks up the book and opens to p.99 will find a partial synthesis of the central themes of the story in the paragraph at the top of the page, and a beginning of the Cuban case study in the last half of the page. Chapter 4 ends with the advent of the American Civil War and notes that “in the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century, Latin Americans would rarely have an opportunity to experience or imagine the United States as the Good Neighbor” (p.119).

Learn more about No Higher Law at the publisher's website.

Visit Brian Loveman's website for access to key documents and bibliographical sources mentioned in No Higher Law.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas L. Carson's "Lying and Deception"

Thomas L. Carson is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Value and the Good Life, The Status of Morality, and the newly released Lying and Deception, and is the co-editor of Morality and the Good Life and Moral Relativism.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Lying and Deception and reported the following:

Page 99 includes the conclusion to Chapter 4 and some of the endnotes for this chapter. Here is the conclusion to Chapter 4 (which includes a few lines from p. 98):

Conclusion and Transition to Chapter 5

Act-utilitarianism supports the view that there is a strong moral presumption against lying and deception. It also seems more reasonable than Kant’s absolutism, to the extent that it permits people to lie to save someone’s life. However, even if we grant all of Mill’s arguments and the additional arguments I have proposed in this chapter, there remains a serious objection to the act-utilitarian view about the morality of lying. Act-utilitarianism views lying as morally neutral or indifferent, other things equal (apart from its consequences). Speaking with reference to moral rules such as the rule against killing, Frankena writes: “Even though I think that no such rules are absolute... I do still believe... that some kinds of actions are intrinsically wrong, for example, killing people and lying to them.” Ross give the classic statement of this argument. Ross's theory is an important alternative to both act-utilitarianism and Kant's absolutism; it is arguably closer to our commonsense moral beliefs than either act-utilitarianism or Kant’s absolutism.

Is this representative of the book as whole? This is a summary of one of 14 chapters. This chapter is one of five chapters that address questions in ethical theory. The book also includes 2 chapters that deal with conceptual questions issues and give definitions of lying, deception, and related concepts and 5 chapters that address with actual cases of lying and deception and questions of professional ethics.

See Thomas L. Carson's Loyola University webpage for more information about him and to see a list of some of his favorite books.

Learn more about Lying and Deception at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Hartigan Jr.'s "What Can You Say?"

John Hartigan Jr. is Director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (2005) and Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (1999).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, What Can You Say?: America's National Conversation on Race, and reported the following:

What Can You Say? is about how we decide when a remark or an incident is racial. We make these judgments via implicit, unconscious cultural conventions; we are so culture-bound by these conventions that we worry more about violating racial etiquette than fashioning new ways to think and talk about why race matters. The more nuanced, ambiguous, and complicated race relations become, the more we fall back on reflexive, anxious judgments about race. Page 99 of this book offers an excellent example of this because it features the heated exchange between the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in early 2008 as they traded accusations over which side was “playing the race card.”

What Can You Say? covers a year’s worth of race stories in the news—from Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2007 to the next one in 2008. Rather than analyzing these stories in terms of what they reflect about our relative progress on dealing with race, I use these media spectacles to examine the cultural forms that shape our sensibilities about race. The preeminent story in this time frame was the battle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, as both sides tried to construe their opponent as nefariously manipulating race. My take on this protracted battle is that it shows how unruly and unstable racial meanings are today. Obama and Clinton could exchange counter-charges over race—with journalists becoming increasingly perplexed over which politician’s claims were accurate—because the volatile meanings of race are so hard to pin down.

In this chapter, I use the image of sumo wrestlers to convey how Obama and Clinton vied to push their opponent across the “dohyo” or ring of public decorum around race. Neither had to assert how or why race matters; rather, they each only strove to suggest that the other was acting or being “racial” with their comments or suggestions. Page 99, then, talks about how this particular contest upended the conventional wisdom that journalists relied upon to evaluate and adjudicate such contradictory accusations. For all the clarity that race possessed when it was skillfully manipulated by presidential candidates in the past, the novelty of an African-American male contesting a white female for the presidency overturned these certainties. In the process, Americans were offered a scintillating (though confusing) view of how the relevance and meaning of race is changing rapidly.

Learn more about What Can You Say? at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miliann Kang's "The Managed Hand"

Miliann Kang is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls in Chapter Three: “Hooked on Nails,” which profiles six different nail salon customers. Alexandra and Jamilla seem to represent polar opposites, one with demure French nails and the other with long, hand-painted acrylics, but in actuality they both conform to the feminine norms of their respective communities. Theresa’s and Brianna’s nails are layered over their conflicted identities as mothers, while Ella and Cheryl manicure their nails to fit into their positions in the workplace. Yet all of them insist that they do their nails for themselves, denying especially that men's approval is a factor. The chapter frames these women’s manicuring practices through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s work in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, which argues that our aesthetics are not simply personal tastes but are conditioned by our social positions. I apply his work to show that women’s nails are not simply superfluous markers but are key signifiers of gender, race and class identities.

The book as a whole, however, does not only look at customers but also examines the experiences of manicurists (focusing on Asian immigrant women in New York City), interactions across the manicuring table, and developments in the nail salon industry writ large. I analyze the distinct kinds of work involved in these sites, particularly “emotional labor” and “body labor,” which reveal how intimate exchanges are increasingly commercialized and enacted between virtual strangers for a price.

The book concludes by asking, “What is a manicure worth?” and explores ways that this exchange can be more humanizing and equal for all parties involved. Rather than dismissing them as isolated, inconsequential services, the book regards manicures as an illuminating slice of social life in global cities.

I love the idea of this test and promptly flipped through the 99th page of a number of my favorite books to see how it applied. As for my book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work, the test does not fully capture the content of the book but does highlight some key themes.

Learn more about The Managed Hand at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue