L. Harris & C. Molesworth's "Alain L. Locke"

Leonard Harris is professor of philosophy at Purdue University. Charles Molesworth is professor of English at Queens College in New York.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher, and reported the following:

Alain Locke was the first African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship - in 1907, after graduating from Harvard, he went to Oxford to extend his studies in philosophy and there formed his vocation to be a leader of his race. When he came back to America, after three years at Oxford and another in Berlin, he was one of the most educated people of his generation. Page 99 of our biography catches Locke as he prepares his re-entry into America, where he will lead the Harlem Renaissance and become a cultural critic with polymathic skills and interests. At this moment in his life he was hounded by debtors and concerned that his mother not fret needlessly about his prospects. What page 99 doesn't show is how skillful Locke already was as a writer, having produced excellent essays at Oxford on cosmopolitanism and the American temperament. Our biography - the first full length study of this impressive intellectual - expounds on all of Locke's many published works and details his life and achievements in ways that reanimate his claim to be one of the most important African American philosophers of the twentieth century. There are four hundred more pages like page 99 before Locke's story is complete.

Read more about Alain L. Locke at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Nelson's "The War Behind Me"

Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist currently at the University of Maryland College of Journalism as the Carnegie Visiting Professor. Her Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting is for a series that exposed widespread problems in the federal government's Indian Housing Program. She won an AAAS Science Journalism Award for an investigation into the death of a teenager in a gene therapy experiment.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes, and reported the following:

The War Behind Me is based on the Pentagon’s once-secret collection of reports on war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. While not a complete accounting, the declassified archive represents the largest compilation to surface thus far. There are hundreds of substantiated allegations--murders, massacres, torture, rapes, assaults, mutilations and cover-ups. The Army quietly declassified the archive in 1990, but it remained largely unnoticed until recent years, when a handful of scholars and journalists learned of its existence. One of the scholars was Nick Turse of Columbia University, who researched the records for a dissertation and then contacted the Los Angeles Times, where I was the Washington investigative editor. We teamed up to investigate the archive’s origins, contents and fate. We entered the information into a database, tracked down scores of veterans, traveled to Vietnam and published a series on our findings in the Times in 2006. The series focused on the records. But the book goes beyond the documents to reveal what we discovered during our interviews and travels. Indeed, the heart and soul of the book are the conversations with suspects, survivors, whistle-blowers, officers and men up the chain of command to the White House. In that sense, page 99 truly is representative. Nick and I are interviewing Larry Wilkerson at a Starbucks in Northern Virginia about a year after he resigned as chief of staff for then Secretary of State Colin Powell and became a critic of the Iraq War. Wilkerson recalls his experiences with “free-fire zones” in 1969-70 while a helicopter unit commander in Vietnam. Free-fire zones were swaths of countryside declared off-limits to civilians and treated by some soldiers, in Wilkerson’s words, “as a license to shoot anything that moved--wild boar, tigers, elephants and people.” Civilians were supposed to be warned but often didn’t get word or ventured across the invisible line of demarcation to forage for food. If you turn to page 99, you’ll read the first of two anecdotes about Wilkerson’s battles with superiors over their orders to open fire in free-fire zones. All but five lines on the page are in Wilkerson’s distinctive voice. Throughout the book, I tried to give people a respectful space to tell what happened in their own words. One of Wilkerson’s accounts has a happy ending and the other not, illustrating the importance of strong leadership on the front lines and its limits against deleterious policies from above.

Read an excerpt and learn more about the book and author at the official The War Behind Me website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clay Risen's "A Nation on Fire"

Clay Risen, formerly an editor at The New Republic, is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He's also written for Smithsonian, Slate, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, and reported the following:

In a strange coincidence, page 99 is one of the most important in the book. It is the first page of Chapter 7, which details how the rioting that had erupted in Washington the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death on April 4 picked back up a little after noon the next day. The page shows how expectations of rioting differed greatly in official Washington and "black" Washington. By 1968, rioting was a regular occurrence in inner-cities, but experience had taught that they waned during the day. And so tens of thousands of suburbanites pored into downtown that morning, only to flee in panic a few hours later. One of those thousands was my mother, who had fought to get on a bus headed across the Potomac (a story that played an important part in the genesis of this book). At Howard University Stokely Carmichael gave a rousing, some said incendiary speech, while at the White House President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders in a desperate strategy session aimed at avoiding further violence elsewhere. But they wouldn't succeed: Around the same time, civil disorder was erupting in Chicago, and tense standoffs between angry crowds and overwhelmed law enforcement could be found in dozens of other cities across the country. By nightfall, Army units were on patrol in the nation's capital. In Chapter 7 I try to capture this swirl of events, and page 99 drives home how, in the aftermath of a tragedy, official Washington and the streets of inner-city Washington were driving dangerously apart.

Deputy Mayor Tom Fletcher later called the morning of April 5 the "shadow war period." The streets were quiet, and the running assumption among officials--from the local schools to the Pentagon to the White House--was that a riot wouldn't break out until evening; that was how riots had always worked, in Watts, in Newark, in Detroit, and in dozens of other cities over the last four years. And so that morning tens of thousands of school children headed off to class, and almost a hundred thousand suburbanites went to work in downtown Washington.

But the mood was much tenser in black Washington. "There," wrote Ben Gilbert of the Washington Post, "the same ominous tension that had preceded Thursday night's inner-city outbreak was noticeable, not on on the riot-torn 14th Street shopping strip but also on 7th Street and in neighborhoods in the northeast and southeast sections of the city." Many people stayed home from work and idled on sidewalks. Principals were having a hard time keeping students in class; in some places, teenagers were drifting out as they saw fit. By noon, half of the seventeen hundred students at Cardozo High School had vanished.

Read an excerpt from A Nation on Fire, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.T. Ellison's "Judas Kiss"

J.T. Ellison is Murderati's Friday columnist, a short story writer, and a novelist.

She has applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, All the Pretty Girls and both the “Page 99 Test” and the “Page 69 Test” to the sequel, 14.

For Judas Kiss, the third installment in her critically acclaimed Taylor Jackson series, Ellison used the “Page 99 Test”:

Page 99 of Judas Kiss is an internal monologue from homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson as she drives to Forensic Medical for the autopsy of pregnant mother Corinne Wolff. It covers a lot of ground – her father who’s in jail, problems with her city, but most importantly, it shows a crack in Taylor’s code. This is the first time in the series that Taylor thinks about doing something that breaks the rules. Granted, it would be to save one of her team, Lincoln Ross, but it’s a seminal moment in the development of her character. This is a woman who arrested her own father, and she’s wondering what she can do to cover up Lincoln’s transgression. It’s subtle, just a fleeting thought, really, but isn’t that how the slippery slope begins for us all? I hope readers will see that this marks a shift in her core, and wonder what is going to happen. Judas Kiss is all about Taylor being pushed into gray areas, and this particular page sets that up nicely.

She’d been inside Riverbend’s death row cells, with their blue doors and creamy concrete walls. She never wanted to return. The overwhelming sense of malevolence coupled with dread was too much to take. She’d sent more than one of the men housed in that unit to death row and hadn’t lost a moment’s sleep over them, but she didn’t want to experience their last moments firsthand.

Her dad, well, his prison environs were a damn sight cushier than a state penitentiary. The feds were kind to their white collar criminals.

The Interstate 24 split came, and she passed the exit, driving a few more miles to the Dickerson Road access ramp. Off the highway now, into the run down streets. This was a sad part of town. A crack whore strolled by, arms swinging wildly as she walked, a timid black man in his forties following some fifty feet behind. Had they made the deal already? They must have, the hooker had the bright, insistent glow in her eyes of a junkie who knows she’s about to get a fix.

Taylor shook her head. There seemed to be no legal measures that could stop the pervasive sex trades on the back streets of Nashville. For the pros, a night in jail meant either safety or withdrawal, neither an inducement to break free from the life. For the johns, it was just an embarrassment.

She turned on Gass and passed the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations offices on the right. The TBI taskforce would be furious if they knew Lincoln had broken the rules. Even though he had done something that was life preserving, they would still punish him. He’d be kicked off the taskforce at the very least. She wondered if she could keep the situation quiet, then forced the thought from her mind. She was a master at keeping each aspect separate, tackling one thorny issue at a time. It was the only way she could get through the day.

Read an excerpt from Judas Kiss, and learn more about the book and author at J.T. Ellison's website and MySpace page.

--Marshal Zeringue

G. Lock & D. Murray, eds, "The Hearing Eye"

Graham Lock and David Murray are the editors of The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art and Thriving on a Riff: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film.

Lock applied applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Hearing Eye and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Hearing Eye falls in a chapter by Sara Wood on abstract expressionist painter Norman Lewis. In one quote on that page, he airs his concerns about “the limitations which every American Negro who is desirous of a broad kind of development must face, namely, the limitations which come under the names ‘African Idiom,’ ‘Negro Idiom’ or ‘Social Painting.’” Lewis wrote this in 1946, yet as several of the contemporary artists interviewed in The Hearing Eye tell it, a change has yet to come. In chapter 12, for instance, painter Ellen Banks relates how one dealer praised her rigorously abstract work as “beautiful and incredible” before telling her, “but I can’t put your work with you”—a gibe revealing of the racial and gender stereotyping that still hinders a wider appreciation of abstract art.

The book’s focus on jazz and blues influences in African American visual art perhaps risks becoming a kind of stereotyping too; certainly, many of the artists we spoke to emphasised that their work had been inspired by all kinds of music. Yet black music and black art have been engaged in a fruitful dialogue since the early decades of the 20th century, a relationship that has been completely overlooked by most books on music and art. Aiming to illuminate some key aspects of that dialogue, The Hearing Eye features chapters on several remarkable painters, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden and Joe Overstreet, as well as the photographer Roy DeCarava, the quilter Michael Cummings, and the graphic art unique to early advertisements for blues records—a breadth of reference made possible by the cross-genre expertise of contributors such as Paul Oliver, Robert O’Meally and Robert Farris Thompson.

On page 99, Sara Wood also quotes Norman Lewis’s credo that excelling at his art would prove to be “the most effective blow against stereotype”. To date, that excellence has not prevented his exclusion from most formulations of the abstract expressionist canon. But we continue to believe that, over time, artistic excellence will out and racial prejudice will perish, and our hope is that The Hearing Eye will help to accelerate both of these processes.

(Incidentally, two things that page 99 doesn’t reveal is that the book includes over 50 colour reproductions and has a companion web site with nearly 50 more colour reproductions plus a selection of audio recordings by musicians who range from Ma Rainey to Jane Ira Bloom.)

Read more about The Hearing Eye on the Oxford University Press web site.

An excerpt from the book, in which Joe Overstreet discusses his painting Strange Fruit, is available in the December 2008 issue of the online magazine Point of Departure.

The Page 99 Test: Thriving on a Riff.

--Marshal Zeringue

G. Lock & D. Murray, eds, "Thriving on a Riff"

Graham Lock and David Murray are the editors of Thriving on a Riff: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film.

Lock applied applied the “Page 99 Test” to the book and reported the following:

Page 99 of Thriving on a Riff finds poet Michael S. Harper recounting how the phrasing of his poems reflects his lifelong love of jazz, in particular the solos of master saxophonists such as John Coltrane and Dexter Gordon.

MSH: [. . .] So much of it has to do with the sound. And when I say phrasing, I don’t mean only the arrangement of the words; I mean the periodic sentence. Where I want the details.

GL: The cadences?

MSH: It’s not only cadences; it’s also delay. When I say periodic sentence, I mean a sentence that waits until the end to give you the predicate and the subject. It’s like a solo that gives you a certain kind of suspense but is also building toward something. And what the building is, is the theme, the thematic of it. Sometimes it has to be discovered. It’s not only something that you start out with as an idea and just bring it to completion; it’s more than an idea. In fact, it’s the performance of it.

Thriving on a Riff is a collection of essays and interviews on the theme of jazz and blues influences in African American literature and film. So page 99 is both representative, since it addresses this theme, and not representative at all, in that the book features a dozen contributors, who each explore, in very individual ways, a different angle or artist or piece of work. These range from Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The White Boy Shuffle (Bertram D. Ashe) to John Lewis’s score for the late noir Odds Against Tomorrow (David Butler) to a survey of railroad sounds as influence and cultural resource (Michael Jarrett). Some chapters offer close scrutiny of musical presence in a particular work—see, for example, Steven C. Tracy’s detection of the “John Henry” folk ballad in Sterling Brown’s poem “Strange Legacies”—while others adopt a broader cultural perspective, as when Corin Willis argues that early Hollywood musicals revived blackface and minstrel tropes to counter the potency of African American musical performance.

Co-editor David Murray and I believe this diversity of voices and viewpoints is appropriately “jazzistic”—like a series of improvised solos. Actual performances by Michael S. Harper, plus fellow poets Nathaniel Mackey and Jayne Cortez, as well as versions of “John Henry” by Steven C. Tracy (video) and DeFord Bailey (audio) can be enjoyed on the book’s companion web site.

Read more about Thriving on a Riff on the Oxford University Press web site.

An excerpt from the book, in which Krin Gabbard discusses Miles Davis’s autobiography, will appear in the February 2009 issue of the online magazine Point of Departure.

The Page 99 Test: The Hearing Eye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Welland's "Sand"

Michael Welland is a geologist who has worked around the world in the energy industry. He is a fellow of the Geological Societies of America and London and the Royal Society for the Arts and Commerce.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sand: The Never-Ending Story, and reported the following:

When the idea of a post was suggested, I naturally hastened to my page 99, curious about what message it might (or might not) convey. I discovered that it was in the chapter on rivers, in which the long journey of an individual sand grain down the Susquehanna tells the story of most sand grains on such journeys, rivers being the arteries that deliver sediment from the continents to the oceans and sand being, by habit, more or less constantly on the move. Page 99 introduces channel bars to the narrative, those island-forming but ever-shape-shifting buildups of sand in the midst of a river. But the book is not a geological text, nor simply a homage to games sand plays in the landscapes of our planet, and Page 99 includes the theme that threads its way throughout, I hope surprising and entertaining the reader: the intimate encounters and intersections between sand and us, our lives, our history, our imaginations.

Here's the second half of page 99:

Channel bars can be large and take up much of the channel, hindering navigation but aiding river crossing and providing habitable space. They are fragile and unstable, however, constantly shifting size and position, steadily marching down the river, disappearing and reappearing during floods and under the attack of ice. Tropical storm Agnes, for example, completely changed many of the Susquehanna’s islands. Historic maps and paintings of the river, compared to its appearance today, graphically illustrate these changes.

One dramatic result of the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes was the appearance and disappearance of channel bars along the Mississippi. But regardless of seismic events, the naturally peripatetic nature of Mississippi sandbars can cause problems—even legal ones. A channel bar was the subject of a long-running boundary dispute between the states of Mississippi and Louisiana. Stack Island is a large, uninhabited channel bar, sometimes above water and at other times not. In the early nineteenth century....

The problem was that Stack Island and the dynamic nature of a great river have no respect for state boundaries - the island moved on, and accusations of land-grabbing, never mind the location of the state line, led inevitably to litigation, which, after many years, wound its way to the Supreme Court. In a final ruling, having ruminated deeply on sand, mud, channel behavior, and the games that rivers play, the Court decreed that Stack Island belonged to Mississippi.

And another wonderful thing about channel bars is that we don't really understand them - their formation and wanderings are too complex. Which illustrates another of the book's themes: science is too often presented as done and dusted, the storyline being what we know. But what makes science - and our planet, and ourselves - continually inspiring and fascinating is what we don't know, and my hope is that, throughout the book, the reader will find the character of sand a compelling illustration of this.

Learn more about the book and author at Michael Welland's blog, "Through the Sandglass."

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Bart & Laurel Corona's "Until Our Last Breath"

Michael Bart and Laurel Corona are the authors of Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance.

Corona applied the “Page 99 Test” to the book and reported the following:

Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) tells of Jewish resistance efforts during the Nazi occupation of Vilna (Vilnius) Lithuania. The most obvious form of resistance was a small, armed underground movement that took hold in the ghetto, but other efforts involved almost every ghetto resident in one way or another. Maintaining hiding places for vulnerable residents, setting up schools and libraries to keep minds active and alive, and offering medical and social services to keep residents as healthy and well-fed as possible were also ways that Jews refused to give in to their oppressors.

Page 99 shows yet a third way of fighting back--the extensive effort put into recreating in the ghetto as much of pre-war life as possible. The Jewish community of Vilna had enough highly skilled musicians for a symphony orchestra, and concerts were one of the most successful diversions. As I wrote on page 99, “it was a chance to feel normal again, to forget their shabby clothes, and the aches and pains of hard work and hard floors to sleep on, to think about something other than cold, and fear, and hunger.” It is impossible to imagine the horror of those times, but I tried to picture how I might feel and react if I were there, and bring the reader as close to that experience as possible in words.

Frankly, I’m a bit puzzled when I see Until Our Last Breath described as the biography of the parents of Michael Bart (whose research into their lives was the genesis of the project). My intent as the author was to weave Leizer and Zenia Bart’s narrative into a book about thousands of equally quiet heroes caught in a terrible time and place. When I think about the book I wrote, I see it as a broader story of resistance in different ways by many people with whom I’m sure Leizer and Zenia would want to share the spotlight. Wonderful and inspiring as their story is, the book is much bigger in scope than that. As I wrote, I tried to incorporate as many different perspectives as possible—historical, sociological, psychological, religious, and more—into a wide-ranging, multifaceted, and compelling story of the personal courage and resilience of many. That’s how I would like the book to be viewed.

Learn more about Until Our Last Breath at the publisher's website.

Visit Laurel Corona's website and blog, and read the Page 69 Test entry for her novel, The Four Seasons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Wolverton's "A Life in Twilight"

Mark Wolverton is the author of The Depths of Space and The Science of Superman. His articles on science, technology, and history have appeared in Scientific American, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Air & Space Smithsonian, Skeptical Inquirer, Quest, and American History, among other magazines.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Life in Twilight finds the book’s subject, J. Robert Oppenheimer, at something of a point of transition and contemplation. It’s spring 1957, and for the first time since the Atomic Energy Commission stripped him of his security clearance and banished him from government service in 1954, Oppenheimer has decided to discuss his security case directly and publicly. He tells journalist Victor Cohn of the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune that although he’s still persona non grata in some circles of American society, he’s found a refuge as administrator of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, since it was a place where...

...Oppenheimer could feel secure, accepted, and needed, and where, even with his administrative responsibilities, he was still free to do science...

And in a larger sense, Oppenheimer is grateful for “the good sense and good courage of many Americans,” including all those citizens who hasten to defend him in the editorial pages and letters columns and who refuse to believe the many inaccuracies and untruths regarding him peddled by various demagogues and rabble-rousers.

What about his family? How did Oppenheimer’s ordeal affect them? Here, as always when such personal matters came up with the press, Oppenheimer is tight-lipped, but regarding the children, Peter, then sixteen, and Katherine (“Toni”), then thirteen, he offers: “It has not affected their lives. Everyone has treated them very well.” Unfortunately, although no one, including Oppenheimer, fully realized it at the time, the lives of both Peter and Toni would in fact be profoundly affected by their father’s difficulties, even if those effects would not be manifested until much later.

As to the larger effects of his security case? “I know the incident had a disturbing effect on a lot of young people, both in their attitude toward government service and toward the pursuit of science,” says Oppenheimer. “I believe it may have discouraged some scientists from speaking on the disturbing aspects of United States weapons and military planning.”

Here, as he usually did with the press, Oppenheimer was playing it close to the vest. He knew all too well the devastating effects his persecution had had on the willingness of talented scientists to advise and work for the U.S. government, effects which would become all too clear only a few months after this interview appeared in papers across the country. When the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, a stunned and humiliated America would wonder how it had been bested scientifically and technologically by a supposedly backward nation that couldn’t even build a working refrigerator...and realize that the answer might be that, as the Washington Post would observe, “we have driven out of our laboratories a great many preeminent men of science...we have let scientists become targets of suspicion...in the name of security, we have sacrificed security.”

But the public redemption of Oppenheimer himself remained a distant, yet tantalizing prospect.

Watch the video preview of A Life in Twilight and learn more about the author and his work at Mark Wolverton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jan Zalasiewicz's "The Earth After Us"

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, before that working at the British Geological Survey. A field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, he teaches various aspects of geology and Earth history to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and is a researcher into fossil ecosystems and environments across over half a billion years of geological time. He has published over a hundred papers in scientific journals.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, and reported the following:

For over a billion years, between roughly three billion and two billion years ago, rust precipitated on to the ocean floor, interbanded with layers of silica, to form the distinctive strata of the Banded Iron Formations, so ubiquitous in Precambrian terrain that they have their own acronym, the BIFs. We now exploit them for almost all the iron and steel we use, for they dwarf any other iron ore deposit on Earth. When our extraterrestrial explorers also need iron for their expanding colonies, it will be to the BIFs that they will turn; and they will no doubt soon form a conclusion as to how these deposits arose, as by-product and witness of the revolution that led to an oxygenated Earth.

--The Earth After Us, p. 99 (pars)

The sheer excess of it all! Human epics – those of the magnificent Ambersons, and of the urbane Forsytes, and of other such dynasties, may dance to the music of human timescales, measured in decades and centuries. But, in a biography of the Earth, one may casually skip across a billion years in a single paragraph. Encompass, too, the lives of trillions of generations of those organisms, the first photosynthetic microbes, that were, then, bringing about a revolution more profound than any before or since: the creation of that crazy, dangerous, unstable, cosmic rarity: a planet enveloped in free oxygen.

Narrated thus, it’s an absurdly abbreviated story, of course – an utterly minimalist cartoon. It hides, absolutely, a myriad complexities of biology and chemistry. It glosses, unpardonably, over the countless twists and turns and setbacks in turning what was, in effect, an alien planet, into one that that was to become familiar to us. This transformation did happen, though, and rendered possible that us who can then look back on (and, all too rarely, thank) those industrious microbes who first greened this planet.

We, too, are now transforming the Earth. We are not yet having the planet-changing effects of our unimaginably distant, single-celled ancestors. But we are executing our own distinctive changes to the Earth’ surface much, much more quickly. We are doing so, too, now, in full awareness of what we are doing, even if not in full control (some might argue, not in any significant control) of our collective actions.

The unconscious and amoral Precambrian microbes altered the planet for the better, almost unarguably (though with the sacrifice of myriad microbe species to whom oxygen was as poisonous as chlorine is to us). They opened the way for the beauty and complexity of multicellular life: of orchids and velvet worms and octopi and humming-birds. And of us. Now we are the pinnacle (in some interpretations) of that life, with manipulative intelligence and an avowed morality. It may be a brief ascendance, but if our legacy is to smash a good deal of the biosphere’s beauty and complexity, how will we compare, then, morally, with those microbes? Now there’s a point to tax the post-modern philosophers. While there’s still time for debate.

Learn more about The Earth After Us at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue