Kasia Boddy's "Boxing: A Cultural History"

Kasia Boddy teaches in the English Department at University College London and has published widely on British and American literature and film.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Boxing: A Cultural History, and reported the following:

As its title suggests, Boxing: A Cultural History explores the interface between boxing and culture in a broad sense, from classical Greece to present-day America.

Boxing, it seems, has been around forever. The first evidence of the sport can be found in Mesopotamian stone reliefs from the end of the 4th millennium. Since then there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or ungloved fists to one other. Throughout this history, potters, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to make sense of the bruising, bloody confrontation and to create complex icons. From Daniel Mendoza to Jack Dempsey to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

This is not just a study of the usual suspects (Hemingway, Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates); Boxing ranges from neo-classical poetry to hip-hop, exploring the history of mass media (from cinema to radio to pay-per-view), and offers new interpretations of figures such as James Joyce and Philip Roth who are not usually associated with sport.

Page 99 comes from the chapter on boxing in Victorian culture. Although the golden age of English boxing was over by 1830, the sport continued to hold sway over the popular imagination throughout the nineteenth century. The chapter considers the divide between (dangerous, illegal) prize fighting and (honourable, Muscular Christian) sparring in the Victorian era. The shift in the cultural meanings of boxing during this time is nowhere better reflected than in a body of work which began in the 1830s and ended in the 1870s - the novels of Charles Dickens. What Dickens terms ‘fistic phraseology’ proves remarkably versatile, and his relish in its use is palpable.

Page 99:

Dickens enjoyed the language of boxing as much as he did boxers, and nowhere more than in Dombey and Son (1846-8); indeed he stole the name (but little else) of a real prize-fighter, ‘The Game Chicken’ (Henry - ‘Hen’ - Pearce) for one of its characters. After coming into his inheritance, Mr Toots, a Corinathian past his sell-by-date, devotes himself to learning ‘those gentle arts which refine and humanise existence, his chief instructor in which was an interesting character called the Game Chicken, who was always heard of at the bar of the Black Badger, wore a shaggy great-coat in the warmest weather, and knocked Mr. Toots about the head three times a week, for the small consideration of ten and six per visit.’ We learn about the Game Chickens’s past exploits, his glory against the Nobby Shropshire One, and his defeat (‘he was severely fibbed . . . heavily grassed’) by the Larkey Boy. When Mr Toots despairs of winning the love of Florence Dombey against the wishes of her father, the Chicken reassures him that ‘it is within the resources of Science to double him up, with one blow in the waistcoat.’

When, in Bleak House (1852-3), Mr Snagsby comments that ‘when a time is named for tea, it’s better to come up to it’, his wife is appalled.

‘To come up to it!’ Mrs Snasgby repeats with severity. ‘Up to it! As if Mr Snagsby was a fighter!’

‘Not at all, my dear,’ says Mr. Snagsby.

Mrs Snagsby views the use of boxing jargon as a sign of vulgarity, which must be avoided at all costs. Dickens, though, had no such qualms. A boxing pun may even be intended in the title of the opening chapter of Bleak House, ‘In Chancery’. The O.E.D. gives as the slang meaning of the term, ‘the position of the head when held under the opponent’s left arm to be pommelled severely, the victim meanwhile being unable to retaliate effectively.’ The meaning derives, the Dictionary adds, ‘from the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything.’ This legal metaphor was frequently used in boxing slang, and, with the new meaning attached, occasionally reapplied to law. In August 1841, Punch enjoyed a typical joke on ‘legal pugilism’:

The Chancery bar has been lately occupied with a question relating to a patent for pins’ heads. . . The lawyers are the best boxers, after all. Only let them get a head in chancery, even a pin’s, and see how they make the proprietor bleed.

Dickens used the phrase himself in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) when the Reverend Crisparkle affectionately takes on his mother and ‘wound up by getting the old lady’s head into Chancery, a technical term used in scientific circles, with a lightness of touch that hardly stirred the lightest lavender or cherry riband in it’. In Bleak House, he may have wanted the phrase’s additional meaning to reinforce the novel’s emphasis on deadlock of various kinds.

Learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website and Kasia Boddy's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Day's "Conquest"

David Day has written widely on Australian history and the history of the Second World War. His recent books include The Politics of War, the prize-winning biographies Chifley and John Curtin: A Life, and the best-selling history of Australia, Claiming a Continent.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others, and reported the following:

In writing Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others, I wanted to explore the methods that societies use when they try to claim territory that is already occupied by others. I put forward the notion of 'supplanting societies' as a new and fruitful way of understanding the history of the world, and contrasting it with traditional ideas about colonialism. I particularly wanted to emphasise the very long-term and multi-layered nature of this process, as the supplanting society tries to establish a territorial claim that will be superior to the claim of the pre-existing people. A moment's thought will reveal that most, if not all, societies have experienced this process and have had their histories shaped by it. The United States is just one of many societies whose history continues to be shaped by this centuries-long process.

Page 99 explores the way in which the notion of conquest is used to buttress the claim of the supplanting society. I describe how the Spanish in America and the Dutch in southern Africa pointed to their conquest of the native people as giving them the right to claim those land as their own. I contrast this with Thomas Jefferson, who used arguments about conquest as a means of denying Britain's control of the north American colonies. In Jefferson's view, it was the colonists, rather than the British government, who had done the conquering and who therefore deserved to control the colonies.

While Jefferson deployed arguments about conquest to justify the colonists' push for independence from Britain, I go on to show how he was more reticent about using such arguments to justify the dispossession of native Americans. Instead, he preferred to argue that native Americans had mostly given up their lands of their own free will, rather than having had the lands taken forcibly from them. In other chapters, I explore the various other means, from map-making to massacres and story-telling to immigration, that societies have used to buttress their claims of ownership.

Learn more about Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others and the author at the Oxford University Press website and David Day's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

T. McGarity & W. Wagner's "Bending Science"

Thomas O. McGarity & Wendy E. Wagner are professors at the University of Texas School of Law.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, and reported the following:

In a 400 page book teeming with reports of the misappropriation of science by corporations, attorneys, interest groups, and even the federal government, it is not terribly surprising to find that page 99 cuts right to the center of one of the more expanded illustrations of these battles over regulatory research. Unlike many of the other examples in the book, however, the account on page 99 is both more familiar (the scientist’s travails formed the basis for John le Carre’s book, The Constant Gardener) and also more complex than most of its companions in this and other chapters.

Here, the researcher – Dr. Olivieri – discovers that a drug used to treat a terrible childrens’ disease, thalassemia, may not be effective. When she communicates the preliminary results to some of her patients, the drug company sponsoring the research pulls their funding and threatens to sue her. After publishing additional preliminary research that suggests that the drug might also be causing liver scarring in patients, Olivieri is dismissed as “nuts” by some scientists and revered as a hero by others.

Ultimately, Dr. Olivieri’s story reveals the power that the sponsors can have over research, the contentious nature of applied regulatory research, and the high stakes involved for scientists who decide they “will not be bullied” and proceed to conduct research that is unwelcome by sponsors. But, unlike some other examples of regulatory science, this story doesn’t have a clear ending. Dr. Olivieri feels victimized and is certain that the drug makes patients worse off. However, the truth about the drug remains shrouded in mystery to this day, even while doctors in twenty-five countries prescribe it (the drug is not approved for use in the U.S. or Canada).

A reader that continues past page 99 will find that the Olivieri case is only the tip of the iceberg. The types of pressures – both legal and economic – that sponsors and others place on research used for regulation are immense and surely have an impact on the types of scientific findings that emerge, as well as on the researchers themselves. Yet, these problems that afflict regulatory research are not necessarily intractable. The last three chapters of Bending Science offer a range of proposals for legal reform, building in part on the approaches developed informally from within the scientific community. These reforms are only a start, but at least they will limit the role that sponsors can play in controlling regulatory research and should help bring respected scientists to the government table to assist regulators in sorting out reliable studies from the rest.

Read an excerpt from Bending Science, and learn more about the book and its authors at the Harvard University Press website and the book's University of Texas School of Law website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sam Gosling's "Snoop"

Sam Gosling is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Snoop cuts to the core of what the book is about but at the same time it is grossly misleading about what a super snooper should do. The book, which is largely based on my research, examines what we can learn about others and ourselves from the environments we craft and inhabit. I use a very broad definition of environment, going well beyond physical spaces (like bedrooms and offices) to aural spaces (like music collections), virtual spaces (like facebook profiles), and even extending to the clothes we wear. On p. 99 I present one my of snooping field guides--in this case looking at the features of appearance that people use when they form impressions of others and the features that are actually valid indicators of what someone is like. The guide shows that people who look disorganized, messy, and unconventional are perceived to be high on the trait of openness and actually are high on this trait. The guide also shows that people who appear attractive, neat, relaxed, and conventional are thought to be high on the trait of conscientiousness but in this case the cues are misleading, causing people to form false impressions. In showing how our personalities are (and are not) manifested in appearance, these guides do touch on an important element of Snoop. However, just looking at page 99 alone might lead the reader to thinking snooping is a straightforward affair where clues can act as simple keys to traits. But Snoop shows that things are more complex than that. Instead of drawing on single clues, the expert snooper constructs a case on what someone is like; the snooper completes a personality puzzle by drawing pieces from a broad array of sources, like the way someone shakes your hand, or signs off their email, or walks down the street. Thus the very exercise of looking at the contents of page 99 confirms one of the core snooping lessons--that drawing on a single snapshot to get a read on something as multifaceted as a book (or a person) can be both revealing and misleading.

Read an excerpt from Snoop, and learn more about the book and author at Sam Gosling's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Lytton's "Holding Bishops Accountable"

Timothy D. Lytton is Albert and Angela Farone Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse, and reported the following:

Holding Bishops Accountable tells the story of how lawsuits uncovered the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Litigation focused attention on the need for institutional reform, and it spurred Church officials, law enforcement, and state governments into action. Lawsuits were an effective means of addressing the crisis because they dramatized the issue in a way that attracted media attention.

On page 99, I discuss two ways in which this dramatization occurred. First, the litigation itself was a dramatic contest—often compared to a battle—between victims and Church officials. I point out that media “coverage…played up the drama of litigation. CNN anchor Bonnie Anderson characterized the filing of a countersuit for defamation against a plaintiff as ‘just the start of the Archdiocese counterattack.’” Second, the ongoing litigation that engulfed the Church starting in 1984 gave media coverage continuity, which made news stories about the crisis especially attractive to media audiences. Clergy sexual abuse litigation became a recurrent “news theme” that drew in media audiences, much like a soap opera or a serialized television program.

Looking beyond page 99, the book recounts the dramatic highlights of several high profile cases involving serial child molesters and the Church officials who covered up their crimes. The book also explains how these cases helped the Church ultimately confront the problem, and it examines the broader implications of the crisis for addressing child sexual abuse in other institutional settings, like schools and youth programs.

Read an excerpt from Holding Bishops Accountable, and learn more about the book at the official website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elvin T. Lim's "The Anti-intellectual Presidency"

Elvin T. Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Anti-intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, and reported the following:

Excerpt:

Democrats have harped about how Bush allegedly misled the nation with his 2003 State of the Union address, but what is interesting for our purposes is why their criticisms have had little traction. Legitimate or not, contemporary presidents, operating in a thicker and delegated speechwriting environment, are no longer held fully responsible for their public utterances—not even for a misstatement in the most important speech a president gives every year. Thus, the merry-go-round of blame shifting allowed fellow partisans to dismiss Bush’s infraction. House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) described the misstatement as “one little flaw.” The error was trivial because it was a result of human error, not malicious intent. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) described the issue as “nothing but an absurd, media-driven, diversionary tactic.” These partisan defenses of the president appeared plausible only because it is now public knowledge that presidential speeches are collaboratively drafted and the president cannot be wholly accountable for his public (mis)statements.

On page 98 of the book (page 99 consists of a single concluding paragraph to Chapter 5), I probe the institutional basis of presidential “dumbing down,” pinning the blame on the delegated speechwriting environment which has allowed presidents to pass the buck down the writing and vetting chain when they utter something untoward. Such was, notoriously, the case when President Bush made misleading clams about Iraq obtaining uranium from Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address. Incredibly, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet took the fall for his failure to vet the speech even though barely anyone in Washington doubted that President Bush and his Vice President knew exactly what they were doing: craft a statement ambiguous enough to mislead but not erroneous enough to be accused of lying. Bush got away with this rhetorical sleight of hand only because the pre-existing institutional arrangement gave him an out: in an era when delegated speechwriting has become a matter of course, it is not the president but his minions who are to be blamed for his rhetorical infractions.

The page 98 test passes muster in my case because the page fortuitously addresses a central contemporary instantiation of the serious costs assumed by a republic that treats words with cynicism and disrespect. In 2003, no one took on the president for disingenuously passing blame on to Tenet precisely because public address in our nation and in our time has become “mere rhetoric.” Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had to go through the circuitous and ultimately fruitless route that ended with the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence when in a different, perhaps ideal, but certainly simpler world, a president would simply be taken to task for his words.

Read an excerpt from The Anti-intellectual Presidency, and learn more about the book and author at Elvin Lim's website and his blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Edwards' "Waterloo Sunset"

The first of Martin Edwards' eight Liverpool novels, All the Lonely People, introduced lawyer Harry Devlin. It went on to be nominated for the CWA's John Creasey Memorial Dagger.

Edwards applied the “Page 99 Test” to the eighth and latest novel in the series, Waterloo Sunset, and reported the following:

On page 99 of the US edition of Waterloo Sunset, published by Poisoned Pen Press, lawyer Harry Devlin is talking to Carmel Sutcliffe about the murders of two young women in Liverpool. Carmel works for the Liverpool Police Authority and has plenty of contacts in the local police force. Harry wants to find out what she knows about the case. His curiosity is insatiable anyway, but he has met a friend of one of the murder victims, and knowing a little about the dead girl, Lee Welch, makes him all the more desperate to understand what is going on.

On page 99, Harry learns a crucial fact about the victims, and also figures out the murder method, which the police have been keeping secret. The clue was given to him by an enigmatic character called Barney Eagleson, who embalmed the body of one of the dead girls.

So page 99 advances the plot considerably – but it is not the main plot of the book. That involves a series of warnings that Harry has received, suggesting that he will die suddenly in a few days’ time, on Midsummer’s Eve. The main plot and the sub-plot are closely interwoven and reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have commented on the complexity of the story-line. This was deliberate; my aim was to offer whodunit fans a couple of elaborate mysteries to solve, but to add to the mix a range of interesting characters, plenty of humour, and an up-to-the-minute portrayal of a city which is in the throes of change, just as Harry’s own life is in a state of transition. There’s more about Liverpool’s status as European Capital of Culture 2008 on my blog, 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?'.

Waterloo Sunset is the eighth book in the Devlin series, but the first to have been published for nine years. Returning to the character after such a long break was enormous fun. And, although the book has a dark and serious side, I like to think that the light, jokey dialogue on page 99 is in tune with the book’s purpose – to provide rewarding entertainment for lovers of the complex contemporary mystery.

Learn more about the author and his books at Martin Edwards' website and his blog, 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?'.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nan Mooney's "(Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents"

Nan Mooney is the author of I Can’t Believe She Did That: Why Women Betray Other Women at Work and My Racing Heart: The Passionate World of Thoroughbreds and the Track. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, The Daily News, Utne Reader, and other publications.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Class, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book broaches one of the many financial pressures faced by today’s professional middle class — the rising cost of child care.

“’It’s been a nightmare,’ says Allegra, a freelance copy editor earning $30,000 a year, about finding decent, affordable care for her two children both of whom have been in day care since they were a few months old.”

Child care today costs between $4,000 and $14,000 a year. Add that to the escalating costs of student loans, health care, and housing and the fact that middle class wages have remained stagnant for the past five years, and you understand why so many of us are struggling. It’s no longer enough to have gone to college or even graduate school, to have worked hard in a career that we hope has some meaning beyond just a paycheck.

With raising kids, as with most everything else, the government — despite trumpeting its support for family values — doesn’t lend much help. Back to page 99:

“Though they’ve certainly created this middle-class time and money crunch, neither the government nor private employers have stepped in to help relieve it. For the most part today’s families still have the same social support and protection designed for single-income, dual-parent households of the ‘50s, programs that assume one parent is at home to tend to illnesses or other emergency situations or to jump into the workplace in a pinch.”

Unlike nearly every other industrialized country, the United States guarantees no paid parental leave. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act grants 12 week unpaid leave to those who working at companies with fifty or more employees. If there are pregnancy complications or health complications with the baby, if childcare arrangements fall through, we risk losing our jobs – and health benefits – in order to protect our families. Surely that’s not a choice any civilized country asks its citizens to make.

In writing (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Class I spoke to over a hundred individuals and families. Many of them feared they wouldn’t be as financially comfortable as their middle class and even working class parents. They knew any unexpected financial blow, from job loss to a medical crisis, could tip them over the edge. They were confused and scared.

To them and to everyone else in a similar position, I have two messages. First, you’re not alone. And second, you have a choice. Start pressing for change. Vote, campaign, teach your children about money and teach them to value other things more. We have a right to reject this value system that has embraced our country, the one that says the rich get richer and everyone else is left to tough it out on their own.

Learn more about the book and author at Nan Mooney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Turney's "Ice, Mud and Blood"

Chris Turney is a Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter and author of Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past, and reported the following:

In Ice, Mud and Blood I'm looking at what lessons we can learn from the past for future climate change. On page 99, I'm showing how large sea level changes can get. During the last ice age (yesterday, geologically speaking) there was a vast ice sheet over North America that would periodically collapse and fall into the North Atlantic, driving up the world's sea levels. Known as Heinrich events, these unsettling occurrences give us a real insight into what we can expect if the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets do disintegrate in a warming world.

From page 99:

Probably one of the best known places for ancient coral reefs is the Huon Peninsula on the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. These fringing reefs have been worked on since the 1960s, most prominently by John Chappell at the Australian National University in Canberra. The Huon Peninsula is in one of those rather special parts of the world where the conditions are ideal for tropical coral reefs to grow, but at the same time is on the edge of a plate boundary. Stretching back at least 250,000 years, the Huon Peninsula has been rising to the tune of 3 metres per thousand years. The result is that any corals that grow on the submerged shoreline of the Peninsula eventually get thrust up into the air where they’re saved for a scientist to come fossicking about. Seen from above, the Peninsula look like an enormous set of vegetated steps; the fossil coral terraces appear to stretch away forever, preserving ancient lagoons and barriers that formed during rises in sea level.

John has undertaken a vast amount of work on the Huon Peninsula. Over the years, he has led a team that has measured, prodded and analyzed most of this ancient seascape. In 2002, he reported a study which showed that when a correction had been made for the rising land, the large reef terraces grew in sea levels that jumped 10 to 15 metres during Heinrich events; the deepening water gave the corals head-space to grow at pace with the rate of rise. After the sea level had shot up, the Huon Peninsula continued its inexorable rise, preserving a record of the big changes that had taken place. As the ice sheets subsequently reformed, the water was sucked back out of the ocean and the tide fell. Intriguingly, no sea level jumps were detected at the Huon Peninsula for the smaller stadials that happened between the Heinrich events. The collapse of the smaller ice sheets might have caused sea level changes of less than 3 metres; probably beyond what the coral reefs on the Huon Peninsula can detect. Worryingly, more recent reconstructions imply these estimates may be conservative. Work in the Red Sea suggests that sea level changes of up to 35 metres might have taken place during the Heinrich events. These are gargantuan changes.

Learn more about Ice, Mud and Blood and its author at Chris Turney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter D. Norton's "Fighting Traffic"

Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, and reported the following:

Ford's doctrine is a species of bibliomancy that is new to me. Testing it on my own book, Fighting Traffic, I am tempted to declare him a minor prophet. Then I recall something I once heard about sample sizes.

My case is that the automotive city was not the product of highway engineers or city planners, but of an earlier redefinition of what a street is for. A hundred years ago a city street was something like a city park: open to all comers on condition that no one needlessly obstruct or endanger others. This definition made cars and their drivers unwelcome intruders. Page 99 captures the moment when champions of the automobile first perceived that the traditional conception of the street was a threat to the car's urban future, and began to work together to reinvent the street as a motor thoroughfare.

In 1923, when the people of Cincinnati were distressed by the number of pedestrians (especially children) who were struck by cars, their response was NOT like ours would be today. Living in the motor age, we would discourage jaywalking and increase safety education in schools. But in 1923 all blame was directed at motorists, and the result was a petition--signed by 42,000 people--to install speed governors on all cars in the city. The governor would shut the engine off if the car reached 25 mph. This solution was logical to those who defined streets as public spaces, but it would also have deprived motorists of their cars' chief advantage--their speed. So it was in Cincinnati in 1923--and exactly on p. 99 of the book--that automobile dealers, clubs and manufacturers first organized to redefine streets as motor thoroughfares, where pedestrians (and especially children) do not belong.

Read an excerpt from Fighting Traffic, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Visit Peter D. Norton's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue