Hugh B. Urban's "The Path of Desire"

Hugh B. Urban is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books including Secrecy: Silence, Power and Religion and Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Path of Desire: Living Tantra in Northeast India, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes the practice of animal sacrifice at Kāmākhyā temple in Assam, northeast India. One of the oldest and most important Hindu Tantric sites in South Asia, this temple is believed to be the locus of the goddess’ yoni or sexual organ. Each morning, the goddess Kāmākhyā is honored with a goat sacrifice, though on various occasions, she may also be offered sacrifices of buffaloes, sheep, fish, pigeons, and ducks. The larger chapter in which page 99 occurs is entitled “The Politics of Sacrifice” and explores the complex religious, cultural, and legal debates surrounding animal sacrifice in modern India. Sacrifice has a very long history in India, as both a ritual practice and a symbolic trope, and it is a central part of many Tantric traditions, particularly the Śākta (goddess-centered) traditions of Assam and Bengal. Yet it has also become intensely politicized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP, which generally regard blood sacrifice as a corrupt, barbaric, and fundamentally “non-Hindu” practice.

Readers opening to page 99 will get a fairly good insight into the main arguments of the book. The Path of Desire is a study of living Tantric traditions in contemporary India, exploring the ways in which Tantra has survived and yet also adapted to the shifting dynamics of nationalism, globalization, tourism, and neoliberalism. Debates over animal sacrifice have been a critical part of the complex transformations of Tantra in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There have been various efforts to ban animal sacrifice in many Indian states, while in others, temples have been forced to conceal animal sacrifice behind screens to keep it from public view. In Assam, animal sacrifice remains a thriving practice, but it has also come under intense criticism from religious groups, animal rights activists, and Hindu nationalist politicians.

The debate over sacrifice is just one of many examples of the complex status of Tantra in modern India that I explore in the book. I also discuss the ambivalent role of sexual practices in left-hand Tantra; the role of magic and witchcraft in popular or “folk” forms of Tantra; the role of spirit possession in public festivals; and the representation of Tantra in film. Overall, The Path of Desire hopes to illuminate the dynamic role of Tantra as a vibrant, living tradition that is also entangled in complex ways with the messy realities of nationalism, capitalism, tourism, and globalization.

Learn more about The Path of Desire at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Zorba the Buddha.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Harris's "Being Single in Georgian England"

Amy Harris is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University and an accredited genealogist. Her research interests focus on families, women, and gender in early modern Britain. She is particularly interested in the way family and social relationships inform one another. Harris has written about siblinghood, genealogical practices, childhood, and singleness. She teaches British and European history, introductory and advanced genealogy courses, English paleography, and women's studies. She currently serves as the coordinator of the Family History BA Program at BYU.

Harris applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, and reported the following:

From page 99:

No sibling began householding at the time they married; all who managed households did so, at least initially, as a single person. Running a household as a single person or in conjunction with married kin could be complicated. Single sisters often lived with married kin, or each other, and often acted as housekeepers for brothers with varying degrees of harmony and success. . . . The marriages of Elizabeth, James, and William and the turmoil over Thomas’s marriage and the attendant household reshuffling signals that even a family so exceptionally friendly and affectionate as the Sharps recognized how power structures of household governance could be tricky. Ultimately, the Sharps not only successfully navigated those tricky waters, but they flourished, expanding their households and social networks to encompass the highest members of London society.

Sharp households were never truly independent and were not axiomatically hierarchical. The Sharps laid the foundation for their extraordinary domestic felicity in the 1750s, when all but John were single, and when they first began establishing households and buying sailing vessels as conveyances for river music-making. In some ways the sailing vessels were the siblings’ first collective home. In the 1750s, while aboard their boats, the siblings established socializing patterns, which were echoed in the witty common letters they exchanged. Both sailing and the common letters were recreational, but they also required careful management of resources and, in the case of the sailing vessels, servants. Those management patterns transferred to their permanent households in the later 1750s and 1760s. Because the siblings were not married when they established households they acted as if they inhabited joint households instead households managed by a married couple with a dependent sibling residing there. The connections they shared—financial, social, and material—made a flexible and durable family structure that could respond to illness, loss, and death without collapsing or disintegrating. The Sharps who were unmarried and childless not only participated fully with their married kin but were also essential to how married family members constructed their domestic and social lives.

Remarkably, page 99 touches on the key biographical and analytical foundations of Being Single in Georgian England. The Sharps were fourteen siblings, eight of whom survived to adulthood, born in the 1720s and 1730s. Raised in a prosperous household, related to various high-ranking clergymen, they enjoyed educational, emotional, and material abundance. All Sharps played at least one musical instrument, enjoyed concerts, good company, and humor. They also married later in life if they married at all. They used their abundance to craft a family life centered more on horizontal relationships than on the hierarchies of marriage and child-rearing. Their experience gives a unique insight into the ways unmarried people experienced and influenced Georgian home life. Most eighteenth-century people spent many of their adult years unmarried. Whether from not yet being married, never marrying, or being widowed, unmarried adults were present in most families. Their contributions are not always visible in contemporary records, but the Sharps’ rich archive illuminates the various ways unmarried and married kin managed households, provided for children, and prepared for the future.

What’s missing in this excerpt is the importance of childhood to shaping family expectations and patterns in adulthood; the contours of aunting and uncling on their own terms and not as watered-down versions of parenting; the siblings’ involvement in philanthropy and social reform; and the ways marital status and gender shaped the Sharps approach to their legacy and genealogy.

Learn more about Being Single in Georgian England at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tanisha M. Fazal's "Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War"

Tanisha M. Fazal is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. She is the author of two award-winning books, Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict and State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation and numerous articles in academic and policy journals. She is also a frequent commentator on international security issues. From 2021-2023, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Fazal applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops us in the middle of a discussion of US military medicine during its most recent counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Focusing on the military’s Tactical Combat Casualty Care guidelines developed in the 2000s, page 99 follows one of the main threads of the book, on improvements in military medicine broadly and, specifically, on advances in stemming blood loss.

As with any book that follows an historical arc though, page 99 reveals only part of the story. Hemorrhage was the major cause of preventable battle death for the US military after 1950. But it wasn’t always so. During the US Civil War, more soldiers died from illness than injury. The US military only began to use whole blood for transfusion in the field at scale during World War II. But military doctors stopped using whole blood some time in between the Korean War and the US’ intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s. Whole blood transfusions in forward settings came back, though, during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and are today considered crucial to the practice of trauma medicine both on and off the battlefield.

The use of whole blood for transfusion, alongside new kinds of tourniquets, better data collection practices, and the implementation of the “golden hour” policy – where military personnel must receive medical care within an hour of sustaining an injury – has saved thousands of lives. We often hear about the positive spillover effects, into the civilian world, of military medical advances. But while no one would argue that we should roll back these advances, they have generated long-term costs that have gone underappreciated.

Better medicine means that more people are surviving injuries that they would not have survived in the past. Better medicine has also evolved alongside an expansion of the US veterans’ benefits system since WWII. The combination of these trends, in medicine and benefits, translates into increased long-term costs of war. Indeed, these costs today constitute the bulk of the bill for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.

When the US government costs out wars ahead of time, however, these longer-term costs tend not to be included. Thus, we have been systematically underestimating the costs of war. Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War calls for correcting this error. We cannot afford to ignore the wounded in our understanding of the costs of war.

Visit Tanisha M. Fazal's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Gillin's "An Empire of Magnetism"

Since completing his DPhil in History at the University of Oxford in 2015, Edward J. Gillin has worked at the universities of Cambridge and Leeds, and is now Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology at the University College London. A cultural historian of modern science and architecture, he won the 2016 Usher Prize from the Society for the History Technology, the SAHGB's 2015 Hawksmoor Essay Medal, and was named proxime accessit for the Royal Historical Society's 2018 Whitfield Prize. In 2020, he circumnavigated Africa with a genuine 1840s' Fox-type dipping needle.

Gillin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Empire of Magnetism: Global Science and the British Magnetic Survey in the Age of Imperialism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of An Empire of Magnetism situates the nineteenth-century study of terrestrial magnetism within a long history of scientific examination. For a book focusing on how the British government transformed this science into a truly global investigation, it is important to note that there had been voyages of magnetic research as far back as Edmond Halley’s efforts during the 1680s and 1690s. Likewise, page 99 identifies the significance of Alexander von Humboldt’s magnetic inquiries in South America and Paris during the 1790s and 1800s as a significant historical context to the British magnetic enterprise of the 1830s and 1840s, or what historian John Cawood later termed the Magnetic Crusade”. It is clear that, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the escalation in global trade and oceanic navigation stimulated a growing awareness of the erratic character of the Earth’s magnetic phenomena.

Page 99 does not reveal much of the book’s central claims: namely, that the British magnetic enterprise of the nineteenth century represented a significant moment in the relationship between the state and the natural sciences, nor that the magnetic survey was historically important in terms of its global ambition. However, the account of the three magnetic phenomena that were surveyed is critical to understanding the problem that terrestrial magnetism presented nineteenth-century scientific and political elites. Page 99’s description of magnetic “dip” (the angle at which a magnetic needle dips when pointed to the magnetic north), “intensity” (the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field), and “declination” (the difference between magnetic and geographic north) raises the threat that terrestrial magnetism presented to navigation. Without knowledge of the planet’s magnetic properties, which change over time and space, Britain’s politicians, natural philosophers, and navy authorities all feared that the rising use of iron in ship construction might undermine the accurate navigation on which the empire’s oceanic commerce and naval power depended.

Follow Edward Gillin on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Sound Authorities.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Rocha's "The Sinful Maternal"

Lauren Rocha is assistant professor of practice of English and first-year writing coordinator at Merrimack College. Her work has appeared in such publications as Journal of Gender Studies and Journal of International Women's Studies. Her research interests are horror, gender, and popular culture.

Rocha applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Sinful Maternal: Motherhood in Possession Films, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Sinful Maternal: Motherhood in Possession Films is part of the chapter discussing motherhood in The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring 2 (2016). Specifically, it examines the exorcism scene towards the end of The Conjuring in which Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are attempting to banish the possessing spirit of Bathsheba from Carolyn’s (Lili Taylor) body.

If readers turn to page 99, then they will definitely get a glimpse into the larger topic of the book. I look at the details involved in Carolyn’s exorcism, such as Carolyn attempting to murder her youngest daughter to severe the connection between Carolyn and her motherhood, and how they draw on Carolyn’s maternal bond with her family to fully expel Bathsheba from her. I also begin to write about Lorraine as a motherly exorcist, something that is the opposite of traditionally depicted exorcists in horror. In the end, it is Lorraine who is able to successfully exorcise the evil spirit by reminding Carolyn of her motherly role to have her draw on that familial bond. Both of these examples highlight certain parts of motherhood that are developed in more detail throughout the book: mother/child relationships and maternal agency.

Page 99 also has one of my favorite images in the entire book. It shows a fully possessed Carolyn, transformed with inhuman eyes, ripping her way out of a white sheet that was placed over her. Her mouth and cheeks are stained with blood, as is the surrounding sheet. Only half of her face is shown, which adds to the terror of the image. The image conveys a sense of birth, of a possessed Carolyn emerging to spread chaos and destruction. To me, it is an image that embodies the book’s themes of possession, birth, and motherhood.

Learn more about The Sinful Maternal at the University Press of Mississippi website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas P. Money's "Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines"

Nicholas P. Money is Professor of Biology and Western Program Director at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is an international expert on fungal biology and author of popular science books that celebrate the microbial world.

Money applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: Our Lifelong Relationship with Fungi, and reported the following:

Page 99 concerns the microbiological nature of cheese, which is highlighted by the fact that ten billion microbes can grow in a gram of it. Complex interactions between fungi and bacteria control the taste, smell, color, and texture of a maturing cheese. In some cheeses, the bacteria use fungal filaments as physical guides, like miniature railroad lines, for zipping through the rind. Page 99 also introduces the deep history of cheesemaking, which seems to have begun as a way to preserve the nutritional value of raw milk in northern latitudes when fresh meat and vegetables were scarce. Cheese is, as American author Clifton Fadiman wrote, “milk’s leap toward immortality.”

Does page 99 effectively provide readers with an accurate snapshot of the book?

The subject of cheese, featured on page 99, is an example of the extended relationship between humans and fungi, and is a relatively poor reflection of the great sweep of the book. Page 99 would probably fail the casual browser. Cheese is an interesting topic, particularly from the perspective of the ancient partnerships between humans and fungi, but it does not get at the richness of our conscious and unconscious interactions. It is one story within the book that celebrates the human-fungus symbiosis near and far, from our dependence on the yeasts of the gut microbiome, or mycobiome, to the ecological activities of mushrooms that support plants and spin the carbon cycle. Between these bookends, readers are introduced to the uses of wild and cultivated fungi as sources food and medicines, which is where cheese appears, and onward to fungal toxins that have shaped human history, and magic mushrooms that open the doors of perception.

Until quite recently, the fungi that grow on the body were viewed as relatively unimportant to our health. They were eclipsed by the more numerous bacteria: trillions of bacteria live in the gut versus billions of fungi. But the fungal cells are enormous compared with bacteria and their combined surface area is equivalent to an eight-person dining table. This means that the fungi offer a lot of real estate for chemical interactions with the immune system and goes a long way toward explaining how such tiny organisms can have such a profound effect on our health. Fungi are important as agents of disease too, and Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines features fungal infections ranging from toenail disintegration to the foulest flesh-melting diseases ever pictured in a pathology textbook. But most of our onboard fungi help to keep us alive: “For a more enlightened sense of self, we have to close our eyes to picture the body as a galaxy of cells, to say, and to believe, ‘I am a trinity, born from one cell, copied in trillions, and filled with other forms of life.’”

Visit Nik Money's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Hanlon Rubio's "Can You Be a Catholic and a Feminist?"

Julie Hanlon Rubio is Shea-Heusaman Professor Christian Social Ethics at Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley, California, and previously served on the faculty at St. Louis University for nearly two decades. Her research and writing focus on family, sexuality, feminism, and politics. She is the author or editor of six books, including Hope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church (2016).

Rubio applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Can You Be a Catholic and a Feminist?, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Can You Be a Catholic and a Feminist? deals with the contested issue of abortion. It is in the middle of chapter four, “Life.” The top part of page contains the end of a section titled, “Unresolvable Tensions” in which I outline divisions between Catholics and feminists and describe earlier attempts to move past them. “The lines first drawn in the 1970s have hardened, so that those who disagree rarely engage, and all of this makes Catholic feminism seem all but impossible.” The bottom of the page is the beginning of a section titled, “Starting in a Different Place,” in which I offer a constructive response to the impasse in the form of a “turn to narratives of pregnancy, pregnancy loss [including both miscarriage and abortion], and birth.” As I turn to women’s experience, “I attempt to take seriously Catholic concerns about the humanity of unborn children and feminist commitments to women’s bodily autonomy.” The last sentence reminds readers that here “as in earlier chapters” I am trying to get at the depth and complexity of Catholicism and feminism in order to forge a path toward authentic Catholic feminist belonging.

Page 99 reveals a lot about my book. Here I describe both the feminist movement for reproductive justice and the prolife movement which includes many committed Catholics. I say that I will describe a range of women’s life experiences. Many readers will be skeptical of my plan to read these different experiences together. Liberal feminist readers may worry that my use of the term “unborn children” signals a lack of commitment to feminism. Conservative Catholic readers may wonder if my use of the term “bodily autonomy” signals a lack of commitment to Catholic faith. In fact, I am trying to honor the wisdom of both traditions and bring them together.

My approach in the book is complicated. I argue that being Catholic and feminist is possible, but only by acknowledging tensions, understanding commonalities, and finding creative paths of belonging. In chapters on sex, work, marriage, life, gender, power, and prayer, the book explores possible paths of “conscious belonging.” In the early chapters, I am able to show that belonging is not so difficult. The chapter on life marks the transition to harder cases where lots of tension remains and creative adaptation is necessary.

On the issue of abortion, tensions between the feminist commitment to respecting bodily autonomy and the Catholic commitment to valuing unborn children run deep. But feminists and Catholics both value experience as a source of moral wisdom. In this chapter I step back from the politics of abortion and listen to women’s stories. Viewing these stories through Catholic and feminist lenses, I see common threads emerging. Catholics and feminists are both trying to respect important values. A Catholic feminist can see both tensions and commonality. She can commit to a practice of encounter and accompaniment.

The strategy offered in this chapter requires the hard work of listening to different voices and balancing conflicting values. It demonstrates that the more you know about Catholicism and feminism, the deeper the problem of being Catholic and feminist becomes.

But I try to show in my book that the reverse is also true. Knowing more reveals more of the wisdom of both traditions and more of what they share. With the best of feminism, a credible way of being Catholic, and of living a meaningful life in a broken world, emerges. I hope readers come away believing that the difficult path of conscious belonging is worth taking.

Learn more about Can You Be a Catholic and a Feminist? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Shea Terrell's "A Nation Fermented"

Robert Shea Terrell is an assistant professor of history at Syracuse University, where he specializes in Modern Germany and Europe, with a research focus on commodity and food history. His research has been funded by the J. William Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., among other institutions. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California San Diego.

Terrell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Nation Fermented: Beer, Bavaria, and the Making of Modern Germany, and reported the following:

Opening my book to page 99 drops you a few pages into the fourth chapter, which analyzes regional and national cultures of beer in the 1950s and 1960s. The page details the formation of Bierwerbe G.m.b.H.—a nationwide community advertising entity in West Germany—and the development of its flagship advertisement, the so-called Blue Medallion. The page goes into the origins and design considerations behind the ad which was intended to promote beer regardless of brand. By the end of 1951, the image “was plastered across West Germany; upwards of 300,000 signs and posters were produced, paid for with a communal budget of 900,000DM, generated by collecting 10 Pfennigs per hectoliter from member breweries.” The page ends by noting that in addition to the Blue Medallion, Bierwerbe G.m.b.H. went on to develop myriad “advertising initiatives ranging from posters to ads in magazines and newspapers, and eventually, on radio and television.”

Those seeking to pull the core ideas of the book out of page 99 will find it difficult. The page does not capture a great deal of the book including some of the main content areas, analytic themes, and overarching arguments. Indeed, even within the chapter, this page only speaks to a national-level advertising initiative, while the rest of the chapter looks at similar developments in the southeastern state of Bavaria as well as national, regional, and gendered consumer practices and social norms.

To further undermine the usefulness of the Page 99 Test in the case of my book, the chapter in question is—for all that I like about it—perhaps the least integral to my bigger arguments. As a whole, A Nation Fermented argues that Bavarian industrial and political interests transformed national cultures of production and consumption throughout the twentieth century. I emphasize how this is the case in everything from tax law to consumer culture to international stereotypes. But page 99 constitutes part of a chapter that retains the most tension between regional and national histories. By the end of the chapter I argue that while provincialism in consumer practices remained, they became less divisive as beer, stripped of brand or locality, became emblematic of an emerging West German consumer culture.

Learn more about A Nation Fermented at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Stefan Doddington's "Old Age and American Slavery"

David Stefan Doddington is Senior Lecturer in American History at Cardiff University. He is the author of Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South.

Doddington applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Old Age and American Slavery, and reported the following:

If readers (please may there be some…) opened page 99 of Old Age and American Slavery, they would get a clear sense of the broader arguments in part one of the book. In these opening chapters I emphasize the rapacious character of American slavery, and the calculated abuse of enslavers, by showing how Black elders were exploited as much as possible, or neglected, sold, and abandoned where not. Page 99 offers one of the most well-known examples of such behavior, highlighting the famed Black activist and fugitive author Frederick Douglass’s recollections of the treatment of his grandmother, Betsey, by her enslaver:

“Finding that she was of but little value; that her frame was already racked with the pains of old age and that complete helplessness was fast stealing over her once active limbs – [her enslaver] took her to the woods, built her a little hut with a mud chimney and then gave her the bounteous pleasure of there supporting herself in utter loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die.”

This section of Douglass’s narrative is well-known. However, the book complicates and extends the discussion by noting how in later versions of his life-story Douglass notes that Betsey was saved from this fate by Captain Auld, his own former slaver. As Douglass puts it: “The fact is, that, after writing my narrative describing the condition of my grandmother, Capt. Auld’s attention being thus called to it, he rescued her from her destitution.”

Douglass condemned the individuals who exploited his grandmother for as long as they could, and then cynically abandoned her, and he insisted that such treatment was the logical conclusion in a society built on exploitation. Readers who opened page 99 would thus get a stark indicator of the broader arguments in my book about the violence and tragedies of American slavery; they would have a clear sense of the significance of age to slavers, and to enslaved people, and how aging factored into the broader dynamics of slavery at an institutional and individual level. Notwithstanding her “rescue,” the treatment of Betsey reveals the systemic violence of enslavers who sought profit from the bodies and labor of enslaved people. Douglass could not save every elder.

Learn more about Old Age and American Slavery at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil Gong's "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics"

Neil M. Gong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego, where he researches psychiatric services, homelessness, and how communities seek to maintain social order.

His book, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric programs to better understand inequality in mental health care.

Gong applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics and reported the following:

Page 99 reveals some of the core themes of my book: how material resources, class culture, and visions of the future shape the treatment of serious mental illness. In this section I’m interviewing an owner of a psychiatric group home, who is explaining why there are lots of flophouses but almost no high-quality long-term residences in Los Angeles—even for the rich. Some of the difficulty in making elite care homes stems from zoning restrictions, neighborhood opposition, and less immediate profit in comparison with intensive, short-term programs. But some of it is also about consumer expectations and dreams. Wealthy families might be willing to spend $30k a month on a short-term program by the beach that promises to “fix” their loved one. But they don’t want to hear that their adult child will have to live in a care home forever. As I put it on page 99, “[Families] envisioned the creation of a respectable, middle- or upper-class life for the patient, not a life of safety and basic management.” In other words, elite treatment providers are selling the (sometimes unrealistic) dream of a full recovery.

In the rest of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, readers will learn about care for the poor and formerly homeless client. There is no such promise of rehabilitation--much less the promise of a future middle class life-- in the flophouse or the subsidized apartment unit. On the contrary, it is expected that people will continue to be symptomatic, use drugs, and otherwise behave bizarrely. One could call these patients “free,” or call them abandoned. Without enough staff and therapeutic resources for such rehabilitation, most poor patients are left to their own devices.

In sharp contrast to the neglect of the poor, the privileged may feel hemmed in and dominated by expensive care and parents who have unrealistic expectations. Poor and rich patients are both harmed, then, but often in different ways. Part of the book discusses what this means for social theory (e.g., it contradicts theories predicting the local state will “discipline” the poor social deviant) and the rest addresses workable policy solutions to create a better psychiatric system for everyone.

Visit Neil Gong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue