Guobin Yang's "The Red Guard Generation"

Guobin Yang is an associate professor of communication and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, and reported the following:

It seems that my book passes the Page 99 Test reasonably well.

The book traces the political activism of the Red Guard generation from the 1960s to the present. As the first cohort socialized in the People’s Republic, the Red Guard generation was cultivated as “flowers of the nation.” People of this generation grew up as true believers of Mao, revolution, and liberation. In their Cold War-imprinted imagination, the world was unequivocally black and white – communism vs. capitalism, east vs west, good vs. evil, oppressors vs liberators. They dreamed of saving the world by carrying out a new revolution, even if the revolution had to be violent and they had to sacrifice their own lives. When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, they saw it as their opportunity to tear down the old world and prove their revolutionary credentials. This mentality of the savior of the world came from their education, but it also had Confucian origins.

The first paragraph on Page 99 discusses this Confucian origin by citing the following words from Kang Youwei, one of the greatest Confucians in modern China:

“The purpose of my creation was to save the masses of living things.... Thus every day the salvation of society was uppermost in my thoughts and every moment the salvation of society was my aim in life, and for this aim I would sacrifice myself.”

Page 99 then quotes the following pledge of the first Red Guard organization in 1966:

“We are the guards of red power. The Party Central and Chairman Mao are our mountain of support. Liberation of all mankind is our righteous responsibility. Mao Zedong Thought is the highest guiding principle for all our actions. We pledge: to protect the Party Central and our great leader Chairman Mao, we are determined to shed our last drop of blood!”

The page continues:

Despite differences in content and context, these pronouncements both effused over a sense of divine power of the kind typical of the neo-Confucian notion of the self. They both exhibited an aspiration to purportedly higher orders of life and an implicit rejection of the values of ordinary life. The Red Guard pledge was characteristic of the identity of the Red Guard generation at the beginning of the Red Guard movement. It was only in the course of the movement and then in the rustication period that this self-understanding began to change. The affirmation of the values of ordinary life in the rustication period constituted a crucial aspect of this change.

The remainder of the page begins my analysis of their experiences in the sent-down period by recounting the history of the policy of the sent-down movement.

Taken as a whole, then, Page 99 of my book discusses a pivotal turning point in the life course of the Red Guard generation – the change of their role from world-saving Red Guards to sent-down youth who came to embrace what they had previously rejected: personal interest and individual happiness. A central objective of the entire book is to try to understand the sources and consequences of this transformation. One of the most important results of this transformation was the Democracy Wall movement in 1978-1980. In articulating the political demands of freedom and democracy, the Democracy Wall movement represented the rejection of the values expressed by Red Guards in 1966. This reversal happened in the span of about ten years. It was one of the biggest ironies in modern Chinese history.

Learn more about The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walter Shapiro's "Hustling Hitler"

Walter Shapiro has covered every presidential campaign since 1980. A columnist at Roll Call, he is also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and a lecturer in political science at Yale. He is the winner of the Sigma Delta Chi Award, given by the Society of Professional Journalists, as the best 2010 online columnist for his work for Politics Daily. In recent years, Shapiro was the Washington bureau chief for Salon, twice weekly political columnist for USA Today and monthly columnist for Esquire. In prior incarnations, he was on the staffs of Time, Newsweek and the Washington Post. He was also a White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter.

For a decade, Shapiro performed standup comedy at clubs in New York and claims that his on-stage career is merely on hiatus. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, writer Meryl Gordon.

Shapiro applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Führer, and reported the following:

I am almost tempted to find my dog-eared edition of The Good Soldier from college to see what Ford Madox Ford put on his Page 99. My book, Hustling Hitler, is the story of my con-man great-uncle Freeman Bernstein, who started as a vaudeville booking agent in the early 20th century. From the beginning, Freeman's show-business exploits were chronicled by a fledgling publication called Variety, which treated him as a Runyon-esque figure at a time when the real Damon Runyon was still a cub reporter in Denver.

On Page 99 of Hustling Hitler, Freeman has just signed on in 1906 as the New York booking agent for John Considine's West Coast vaudeville circuit: "With a shock of white hair and a reputation as a handy man with a gun, Considine was a bighearted sporting man who got his start in Seattle running box houses (whorehouses that featured vaudeville acts instead of a piano player doing the best he can)."

Considine is one of the many compelling minor characters who populate Hustling Hitler. Actually, Considine isn't that minor. After Freeman was arrested leaving Mae West's apartment in Hollywood in 1937 on a charge of bilking the Nazis in a nickel deal, Considine rose from his sickbed to aid with legal fees and bail money. And Considine was by Freeman's side two months later when my great-uncle beat the rap -- thanks, in part, to a Hollywood legal defense fund backed by Al Jolson and Mae West.

The strand linking Freeman and his most loyal friend begins on Page 99. Which goes to show that Ford Madox Ford was onto to something with his Page 99 Test.

Visit the Hustling Hitler website.

My Book, The Movie: Hustling Hitler.

Writers Read: Walter Shapiro.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Westly's "Fastpitch"

Erica Westly is a journalist and author currently based in Tucson, Arizona. She has a MS in neuroscience and a MA in journalism, and has written articles for Popular Science, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications.

Westly applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fastpitch: The Untold History of Softball and the Women Who Made the Game, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book falls near the end of Chapter 7, which is primarily about the economics of fastpitch softball and amateur sports, in general, in the 1950s. This particular page concerns a women's fastpitch team from Fresno, California, called the Rockets. They're not the main team discussed in the book, but they do arguably represent the spirit of the fastpitch story. There were hundreds of thousands of men's and women's fastpitch teams in the '50s. At the time, fastpitch was the dominant form of softball, and every town seemed to have competitive teams. Most were sponsored by local businesses and civic groups, such as the Lions Club.

The best teams tended to be sponsored by large companies, such as Caterpillar and Dow Chemical, which attracted top players by offering them jobs and travel perks, such as flying to long-distance games instead of driving. The Fresno Rockets were an exception to this rule, however. They succeeded at the highest level, winning three national championships, despite having hardly any money or even a consistent sponsor. As chronicled on page 99, the players traveled to long-distance games in their own vehicles, often driving through the night instead of staying at hotels in order to save money. They juggled the often-grueling softball schedule with full-time jobs that weren't always that accommodating. One player became a serial job-leaver, deciding that she'd rather be unemployed than miss a single softball game. Other teams may have won more trophies and received more media coverage, but it was hard to beat the Fresno Rockets when it came to talent, dedication, and grit.

Visit Erica Westly's website.

Writers Read: Erica Westly.

--Marshal Zeringue

Campbell F. Scribner's "The Fight for Local Control"

After graduating from Haverford College, Campbell F. Scribner taught geography and world history for four years in Texas. His graduate work was at the University of Wisconsin, where he was awarded a joint doctorate in history and educational policy studies.

Scribner is now an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland–College Park.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy, and reported the following:

The Fight for Local Control is a helpful book for anyone interested in education, municipal government, or grassroots conservatism in the twentieth century. The book discusses America’s fraught relationship with its school districts, which for much of the nation’s history remained its most politically accessible institutions. Education is technically a state responsibility, and school districts technically exist at the pleasure of state legislatures. Nevertheless, until the 1940s states devolved almost all administrative authority to local school boards. Only in the wake of World War II did state and federal officials begin to assert an active role in school governance, testing the viability of local control.

The most successful assertion of state control came with the consolidation of one-room schoolhouses in rural areas, which almost completely disappeared by the 1960s, replaced by larger, comprehensive schools. However, as policymakers tried use consolidation to equalize education in metropolitan areas they met with sharp resistance from the suburbs. In fact, suburbanites successfully invoked the legacy of the one-room schoolhouse to defend local control and thwart the expansion of state and federal oversight. The book traces that phenomenon across four issues: racial desegregation, teacher unionization, school finance, and curricular reform.

Page 99 discusses the rise of state aid to education over the course of the twentieth century, and it hints at the broader argument of the book:

With dependence on local property values thwarting hopes for equalization and a shift to statewide taxation politically unpopular, liberal policymakers decided to work within existing policy frameworks, particularly school district consolidation. Rather than jeopardizing the principle of local taxation they simply created larger localities, spreading pupils and costs over ever-wider swaths of land…. School consolidation promised economies of scale and a more rational, equitable system of property taxation, but that equity unavoidably came at the expense of small, locally controlled school districts.

The plan to equalize funding through consolidation has never come fully to fruition, of course, as wealthy districts continue to undermine efforts at revenue sharing and continue to benefit from preferential funding plans. On that subject, page 99 also has an image that I like:

By the early 1960s, one study found, seventy percent of state aid in Massachusetts was distributed on the basis of an “‘equalizing formula’…which purports to give more dollars to poor districts than to rich,” but in fact “the correlation between the rate of state support and local ability was so slight that the state could actually have done as well if it had…distributed its largesse in a completely random fashion, as by the State Treasurer throwing checks from an airplane.”

Visit Campbell F. Scribner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katrina Jagodinsky's "Legal Codes and Talking Trees"

Katrina Jagodinsky is the 2015-2017 Harold and Esther Edgerton Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946, and reported the following:

Part of Chapter 4: “Juana Walker’s ‘Legal Right As a Half-Breed’: Arizona, 1864-1916,” page 99 describes the vulnerability of Akimel O’odham and other Arizona Indians denied the rights of citizenship. Barred from making economic contracts to secure title to their lands, denied the sanctity of marriage through miscegenation bans, and ignored by federal agents who failed to protect their interests, Akimel O’odham families used creative, and desperate, means to retain individual and tribal claims to the Gila River on the northern edge of the Sonoran Desert.

Sometime before 1873, Juana’s O’odham mother Churga married John D. Walker, an American who served during the Civil War hauling wheat from O’odham fields to supply the Union Army. Churga left John when their daughter was young, died a few years later, and Juana grew up with Mormon guardians even though her father continued to correspond with her and lived nearby until his death in 1891. Juana’s father had accumulated considerable wealth from a silver mine he acquired through the aid of O’odham friends who themselves were unable to exploit mineral claims on their reserved lands. At the age of eighteen in 1892, Juana sued her American paternal uncles for her father’s estate. Her “Legal Right As a Half-Breed” became the sensational question in the case because Arizona territorial law barred inter-racial marriages, made mixed-race children illegitimate heirs of white fathers, and denied Indian claims to mineral rights. Surprisingly, a jury made up of white men agreed that Juana deserved her father’s wealth even as they acknowledged her mixed-race and illegitimate status, showing that not all white Arizonans agreed that Indigenous contributions and claims to family wealth should be ignored. Juana’s uncles appealed the lower court’s ruling, however, and Arizona’s Supreme Court overturned the finding on Juana’s behalf. Having lost her claim, Juana lived a life of poverty until she died in 1916 despite her family’s rich history.

Page 99 explains some of the conditions that made Juana and her mother dependent on men like John D. Walker, and subject to dispossession in territorial Arizona:

Indian agents Ammi White and Levi Ruggles, charged with defending O’odham lands against unscrupulous whites, actually founded Florence and Adamsville on lands just north of the reservation and helped Americans claim uncultivated O’odham lands to the west. Anglo citizens viewed unimproved lands as public domain and registered their plots despite protests from tribal leaders. While [John D.] Walker and other Americans built homes and irrigated fields in the midst of O’odham territory, some diverted water that had fed O’odham crops and then made claims to the military for Indian depredations that stemmed from tribal crop failures…

When the Gila River began to fail in 1870 due to drought and upstream water demands from white farmers, O’odham families found the lands they had used for seasonal harvests and hunting occupied by settler-colonists, so they began to move north toward the Salt River—an area that had not attracted citizens because of its proximity to Apaches, who were feared by many and misunderstood by all. In his role as intermediary between O’odham and Americans, which he would fulfill for another twenty years, [John D.] Walker knew intimately the frustrations of his Indigenous friends and neighbors. By 1870, Juana’s father established his ranch on O’odham land and married his O’odham wife [Churga] in tribal tradition, demonstrating that his service to [O’odham leader Antonio] Azul profited him personally and politically. With little access to capital or contracts, the O’odham used sex and property to reward the citizens who befriended them. Contemporary observers noted that while the tribe struggled to reestablish self-reliance through agriculture on Salt River lands they claimed without federal sanction, some turned to “stealing, begging, and prostituting their women in efforts to survive” the devastation wrought by starvation and sickness. Although outsiders viewed some O’odham practices as prostitution, it is only because the federal and territorial governments barred the O’odham from citizenship, thus waiving Churga’s right to the marriage contract, that her commitment to Walker lacked legal and moral sanctity. Were she and her parents American citizens, Churga might have commanded more respect from Walker’s [American] friends and relatives, and the tribal land that Walker farmed might have been held in her name…

Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 includes Juana’s story among five other Native women in Arizona and Washington who similarly used a daunting American legal system to make claims for protection and privileges other Americans took for granted. Some sought inheritance rights like Juana, while others lodged child custody petitions, filed sexual assault charges, and fought to preserve land claims. All bore the brunt of settler-colonialism, a process that relied on legal and violent means to ensure Indigenous dispossession, and all challenged their dispossession in creative and critical ways. Collectively, their histories reveal a long yet generally unacknowledged tradition of Indian women’s active critique of the U.S. legal system.

Learn more about Legal Codes and Talking Trees at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Kael Weston's "The Mirror Test"

John Kael Weston represented the United States for more than a decade as a State Department official. Washington acknowledged his multi-year work in Fallujah with Marines by awarding him one of its highest honors, the Secretary of State’s Medal for Heroism.

Weston applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reported the following:

Page 99 happens to be the fulcrum of the book -- a scene that details how policymaking in Washington met reality on the ground in Iraq, resulting in tragedy.

The page sets up a key discussion between senior Marines and me in late 2004. The exchange centered on where to send our troops in support of the first post-invasion Iraqi election scheduled for January 2005. Key phrases include: “Washington wanted to shift public focus to ballots instead of bullets”; “For Sunni politicians, and the Bush administration for that matter, the more ‘purple finger’ Iraqi voters observed by the media the better”; “At Camp Fallujah, decision time had arrived”.

A top Marine general wisely pushed for a narrowly defined and less risky mission for Marines. I argued the opposite, a strategy that led to Marines being sent to remote polling locations in sparsely populated areas in Anbar province. On January 26, 2005, one of two large Marine helicopters carrying election support troops crashed in the middle of the desert while on this expanded mission, leaving 31 service members dead. The accident remains the single largest casualty incident in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

When drafting this chapter, I wished I had been writing a fictional account of war -- able to craft a different ending. Instead, those of us in Iraq and Afghanistan who had to implement war policy were faced with real-time operational decisions. Sometimes our decisions went right. Sometimes our decisions went wrong. In this instance, the outcome of our deliberations meant death.

The content of page 99 reflects the responsibility I believed I had throughout my nonfiction book -- not only to remember these 31 dead, to tell a bit about each of them, but also to convey the stories of Iraqis and Afghans. Themes of wartime accountability and post-war reckoning form the book’s foundation across the 608 pages.

As the drafts progressed, I knew the book would require detours (more chapters than planned) and thereby ask more patience of readers. It would have been easier to end the book in the war zones and not add parts about each of the dead, their hometowns, and the memories of them their families and friends shared online. But I believe it was right to go deeper, adding pages of others’ voices as well in an “After War” section. A long book for two very long wars that go on…

Page 99 frames how war ultimately is about the human costs.

Had I pushed for a different decision that day (leading to no “31 Angels”), I doubt I would have written The Mirror Test. I probably would not have felt the need to try and resurrect, through words, some of the many, many war dead -- Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans.

Visit J. Kael Weston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter J. Holliday's "American Arcadia"

Peter J. Holliday is Professor of the History of Art and Classical Archaeology, California State University, Long Beach. Trained as an historian of classical art and archaeology, Holliday has received awards for his research and writing from the American Academy in Rome, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s contention that the ninety-ninth page is representative of an entire book is indeed valid for American Arcadia, in that it features how Southern Californians considered adapting a classical form – a grand boulevard to link an expansive city – and using classical building types (triumphal arches, statuary groups, fountains) to define it. The key is in the book’s subtitle: California and the Classical Tradition. Classical antiquity could be considered second only to Christianity as a force in modeling America's national identity; this book uses material culture, literature, and architecture to demonstrate how, from the beginning, Californians in particular chose to craft their state visually and culturally using the rhetoric of classical antiquity. In its earliest days, California was touted as the last opportunity for alienated Yankees to establish the refined gentleman-farmer culture envisioned by Jefferson and build new cities free of the filth and corruption of those they left back East. Through architecture and landscape design Californians fashioned an Arcadian setting evocative of ancient Greece and Rome. Later, as that Arcadia gave way to urban sprawl, entire city plans were drafted to conjure classical antiquity, self-styled villas dotted the hills, and utopian communities began to shape the state's social atmosphere.

The specific boulevard discussed on page ninety-nine is Wilshire, which runs 15.83 miles from downtown Los Angeles west to the sea in Santa Monica. In the 1920s a group of powerful oligarchs sought to widen it on principles derived from the City Beautiful Movement, and give the region a classicizing identity by marking its progress with great civic monuments. Opposition from other business interests and property owners thwarted their plans. As indicated by the citations, my discussion rests on the work done by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell for their provocative exhibition and catalogue, Never Built Los Angeles (2013). My goal is to place the Wilshire project within the context of Californians emulating classical models, and make comparisons with existing instances, whereas Goldin and Lubell discuss it as exemplary among an array of other unbuilt projects. As elsewhere in the book, my discussion builds on the important work of others, but whose different perspectives and alternative narratives I encourage readers to explore, too.

Learn more about American Arcadia at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ron E. Hassner's "Religion on the Battlefield"

Ron E. Hassner is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of War on Sacred Grounds and Religion on the Battlefield, and editor of Religion in the Military.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Religion on the Battlefield, and reported the following:

How does religion influence the modern battlefield? The preoccupation with religiously-motivated terrorists has focused our attention on religion as cause of war, motivating suicide bombers or ISIS militants, for example. But we should not forget that religion has been just as influential in conventional wars between professional armies. Soldiers pray too. And not just during the Crusades. In Religion on the Battlefield I look at how religion has constrained and enabled 20th century interstate wars.

For example, a respect for holy places influenced American bombing campaigns during World War II (including the ludicrously impossible task of bombing strategic targets in Rome without hitting any churches). Or, during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, calculations about sacred time affected Egyptian conflict initiation, which is why we know this as the “Yom Kippur War”. These calculations turn out to occur quite often (did you know that the Tet Offensive was timed with the Vietnamese New Year, aka “Tet”)? Even when religion is not a cause of war, as in the World Wars or conflicts during the Cold War, religious sites and the religious calendar tend to “interfere” with battle and have to be taken into account. Shrewd military leaders can learn to exploit these factors, as they would any other environmental factor like the weather or topography. Japanese decision makers timed their attack on Pearl Harbor with Sunday, not because they cared about American religion per se but because they knew that the Navy would not move it ships on a Sunday and because many sailors would be on shore leave.

I dedicate yet another chapter in my book to religious rituals, showing that many of the ceremonies and rites that we attribute to medieval wars characterize armies today: praying together, battlefield baptisms, religious charms and relics, or the blessing of weapons. The picture on the cover of Religion on the Battlefield, for example, shows a priest sprinkling holy water on Ukrainian soldiers in 2004.

Page 99 deals with yet another pervasive religious presence on the battlefield: chaplains. Beyond their pastoral duties, 20th century chaplains were charged with motivating troops but also with acting as a moral check on commanders. They have done a lot of the former but, puzzlingly, none of the latter. Page 99 in Religion on the Battlefield tries to tackle this puzzle:

A 1969 survey of RAF chaplains bolstered these findings. Most chaplains surveyed perceived no moral conflict between their religious and military duties. Those that did, resolved such tensions in favor of their military obligations. The chaplains questioned explained that their moral authority focused on personal, family and sexual issues, such as swearing, drunkenness and prostitution, and not on military matters. When it came to military decision making, they put their full trust in the judgment of military authorities. For example, two thirds of the RAF chaplains interviewed stated that they considered large-scale civilian bombings to be justifiable, or outside their prerogative to judge, or deplorable but something one had to resign oneself to. Those few who did consider protesting against military policy felt that their protest would have no impact and would thus be a waste of time.

Learn more about Religion on the Battlefield at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: War on Sacred Grounds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark G. Hanna's "Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740"

Mark G. Hanna is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, where he is the Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities. His new book, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, recently won the 2016 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American history from the Organization of American Historians as well as the 2016 John Lyman Book Award, and honorable mention for books on U.S. Maritime History from the North American Society of Oceanic History.

Hanna applied the “Page 99 Test” to Pirate Nests and reported the following:

From page 99:

Soon more colonial captains without commissions began to seize Dutch ships and then peaceable French vessels, bringing the prizes back to Rhode Island. The entire Hull family faced charges when John, the mint master, was discovered to have invested his Pine Tree Shillings into the Swallow ‘under the command of Edward Hull, pirate.’ Dutch owners sued the Hull family during the fall of 1653. At the trial, John produced letters proving their attempts to stop Edward from going astray. John was acquitted, and Edward fled to England.

This short excerpt from page 99 encapsulates many of the themes from my book about the support of global piracy on the peripheries of the British Empire from 1590 to 1740. John Hull was a well-known and very well-respected New England Puritan. We do not typically associate Puritans with piracy but many considered attacks upon the Catholic antichrist that reaped Spanish silver a literal godsend in communities without a local medium of exchange. Amid the turmoil of the English Civil War, Hull built a mint where he melted down pieces of eight brought by sea marauders and transformed them into the iconic Pine Tree Shillings, British America’s first coinage. Piracy can not subsist without the active support from communities on land who helped fit out ships, man their crews, buy their plunder, provide legal protection, or present the former pirates the opportunity to settle down with their ill gotten gains. Although John Hull could rest assured that his own community of Puritans supported pirates who preyed upon technically allied Catholics far in the Caribbean, they feared the marauding performed by John’s brother Edward against local Dutch and French shipping might lead to retaliation.

Learn more about Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen J. Greenberg's "Rogue Justice"

Karen J. Greenberg is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University. She is also the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days and coeditor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.

Greenberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, and reported the following:

There is no page 99 in Rogue Justice, as that is the break between the ending of Part I which describes the immediate panicked responses to 9/11, and the beginning of Part II, the discovery of the secret policies and the reactions of officials and the public. Browsers who usually use the 'page 99 test' might flip forward to page 101 where you would find..."The justices of the Supreme Court were not alone in having misgivings about the president’s power grab.”

2004 was a pivotal year in the war on terror – at least at the outset. Early in the year, lawyers in the Department of Justice discovered the secret memos that had been written in 2001 and 2001 by John Yoo, a young lawyer a the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo’s memos authorized unprecedented presidential power when it came to surveillance, detention, and torture. Jack Goldsmith, who came in as head of the Office of Legal Counsel in late 2003, balked at the existence of these memos which stretched the law in some instances, and misrepresented it or violated it outright in others. Along with other lawyers at DoJ, including the current director of the FBI, Jim Comey, Goldsmith tried on the one hand to avoid a policy vacuum and on the other to avoid illegality.

In late spring 2004, the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison set in motion a public airing of the programs that the memos had created. Weekly, documents authorizing torture began to appear in public, including DoJ memos authorizing the use of torture against detainees. While officials scrambled to deny the torture program, the lawyers at DoJ saw the surveillance authorities that had been granted to be even more egregious than the torture memos – and potentially damaging to many more lives and people, including Americans.

That summer, Goldsmith quietly resigned, having revoked one of the torture memos, and having set in motion the process that would eventually remove some control of surveillance from the White House. In the months to come, the push to reform would be largely negated; new memos authorizing torture were written – and, as Snowden would later reveal, unprecedented, broad surveillance practices continued. In November, 2004, President Bush was re-elected despite the revelations of torture, and in a vacuum of public knowledge about surveillance. It was a missed moment in reversing the war on terror’s legal excesses, one that would not come again until the election of President Obama.

This 99 page test definitely works for this book, introducing the question of how hard it would be to fix what was so quickly and thoroughly broken. It is a turning point in the book, standing at the crossroads between the building blocks of rogue justice and the many attempts, from inside government and outside of it, to right what had gone wrong.

Learn more about Rogue Justice at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Least Worst Place.

--Marshal Zeringue