Jed Z. Buchwald & Diane Greco Josefowicz's "The Zodiac of Paris"

Jed Z. Buchwald is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His books include The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves. Diane Greco Josefowicz teaches in the writing program at Boston University.

Buchwald and Josefowicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science, and reported the following:

The Zodiac of Paris recounts the European fortunes of the Dendera zodiac, an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with symbols of the stars and planets. Now installed at the Louvre, it was discovered by the French during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt and removed, in 1821, by a French archaeological vandal who brought it to Paris. There the zodiac caused a sensation because it seemed to suggest that the Biblical account of creation was wrong—a dangerous proposition at a time when departures from religious orthodoxy were crimes against the state as well.

We stumbled on the zodiac’s story when one of us wandered into a Paris book shop and found a small volume, half-clad in red Morocco, with a single word embossed on the spine: ZODIAQUE. This was a collection of pamphlets, dating from the zodiac’s Paris debut, assembled and elegantly bound by an early enthusiast. It is part of the enduring magic of the subject that, as a result of this discovery, we soon became fascinated by the object’s power to excite scientific, religious, and political passions.

Before 1800, most accounts of the zodiacs discovered in Egypt (of which only one was physically brought to France years later) were written by people who had actually seen it; many were produced during the French occupation. After Napoleon’s return, these stories, accompanied by drawings, began to circulate. On page 99, we shift from eyewitness accounts of the zodiacs to the arguments they provoked, as scientists and scholars became obsessed by the historical, religious and astronomical facts that the objects appeared to encode.

At issue was the age of creation: If the zodiacs pictured the sky at the times when the edifices containing them were constructed , then astronomy, rather than textual sources from the Bible and classical antiquity, could be used to date the temples. Astronomers quickly pointed out that the dates that resulted from their calculations were remote indeed from anything offered by Biblical chronology. Since hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered, and knowledge of ancient Egypt was correspondingly primitive, the zodiac offered fertile ground for flights of abundant speculation along these lines, much of which ultimately concerned whether science or religion was the more authoritative source of knowledge about the past.

Read an excerpt from The Zodiac of Paris, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Greenfield's "Ten Minutes from Home"

Beth Greenfield received her M.A. in journalism from New York University and has since written about travel, entertainment, gay culture, and parenting for publications including the New York Times, Lonely Planet guidebooks, Out, Time Out New York Kids, and Time Out New York, where she is currently a staff editor. She lives in New York City and Provincetown with her partner and their daughter.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newly published memoir, Ten Minutes from Home, and reported the following:

When I opened Ten Minutes from Home to see what was on page 99, I was disappointed: It was only half a page of text, the end of chapter nine. Could it really come close to passing the Ford Madox Ford test? My initial answer was, "No way." But upon further thought, I think it actually comes pretty close.

My book is, most simply, a tale of adolescent grief. It tells the story of what happens in my family in 1982, when I was 12 years old, after our car was hit by a drunk driver, killing my 7-year-old brother and 13-year-old best friend. My narrative explores all sorts of relationships of mine and how they were affected—how I felt anger toward my mother because she was so crushed by her grief, how I hungered for new close friendships and sought them from neighbors I had little in common with, how I turned to many other adults in my life, from teachers to the new young rabbi of our suburban New Jersey synagogue, to become stand-in mother figures for me. It also takes a close look at the role my grandparents played after the accident, how they lived with us for a short time, greeting mourners and trying to make life continue normally for me while my parents were on the emotional mend.

And what appears on page 99 kind of exemplifies all that. It takes place at the end of a house call from my mother's friend and her 13-year-old son, Scott, on whom I had a massive crush at the time. The friends' good-bye wishes prompt me to ruminate on the types of phrases I kept hearing from caring adults—how I, after being forced to mature overnight after the accident, had begun to read into everything that people said to me. And how one of my grandmothers, my father's mother, was here when I needed her most. It is a snapshot of my adolescent self, expressing pain, thankfulness and a new, unfamiliar wisdom.

All that week, I had begun to sense deep meaning in people's basic words. "Take care" meant "What happened to you is unspeakable, so I don't know what to say."

"Take care of Mom" meant, "I know she's a mess. Don't do anything to make it worse." In general, people stuck to their clichés. They let me figure out the rest.

"Later," Scott said, nodding in my direction. "Feel better."

Grandma Lil saw them to the door and then wrapped her arms around me. When she let go I saw that her eyes were wet with tears, and that her lip quivered as she tried to hold herself together.

"That's my granddaughter," she said, gripping each arm. "That's my Beth." She held my face between the palms of her hands, soft and warm, vaguely scented with lemony hand cream and tuna salad, and leaned in to stamp a juicy kiss just under my left eye. I closed it and smiled, thinking of all the times she'd put her lips to my cheeks, so relieved she was there to do it then.

Read an excerpt from Ten Minutes from Home, and learn more about the book and author at Beth Greenfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth"

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy, and determined that "p. 99 is actually not a bad 'sample'." Here is a brief description of the book:

Robert Pippin argues here for the importance of political psychology for any adequate political philosophy, and so encourages a re-animation of a philosophical concern with those dynamics of the human soul relevant to any life in common. Traditionally, such a psychology concerned the core political passions: among others, love, especially love of one’s own, fear (fear of violent death, of suffering and insecurity), desires for ease and luxury and pleasure, and a powerful passion called by many names: thymos, amour-propre, vanity, self-love, the desire for recognition, the need to secure one’s status with others and even to elevate one’s status above and even at the expense of others. Secondly, he argues that while these issues are not in the foreground of much political thought (concerned almost exclusively with the problem of legitimacy), they are treated in subtle and compelling ways in many of the great Hollywood Westerns. For many such films are about the founding of modern bourgeois, law-abiding, property owning, market economy, technologically advanced societies in transition situations of, mostly, lawlessness (or corrupt and ineffective law) that border on classic “state of nature” theories, and so such Westerns adopt a mythic form of narration about founding. The question often raised is the question of how legal order (of a particular modern form, the form of liberal democratic capitalism) is psychologically possible, under what conditions it can be formed and command allegiance, how the bourgeois virtues, especially the domestic virtues, can be said to get a psychological grip in an environment where the heroic and martial virtues are so important. Pippin singles out for special attention three films, Red River, directed by Howard Hawks, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers by John Ford.

Learn more about Hollywood Westerns and American Myth at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cristina Mazzoni's "She-Wolf"

Cristina Mazzoni is a Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Vermont.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Beast (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and reported the following:

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” It is clearly not up to me, the author, to comment on the quality of my own work; to reveal relationships between a particular page and the book as a whole, however, is precisely what my university pays me to do, for much of my workday. Page 99 of She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon discusses the work of Latin poet Propertius; he compares the poet’s verbal task to the maternal work of the Roman she-wolf—who rescued abandoned infants Romulus and Remus by feeding them with her own milk. The poet’s voice, an expression of his chest, celebrates Rome’s greatness much like the she-wolf’s milk, expressed through her teats, allowed for Rome’s very birth. But the she-wolf, as well as generous, is a fierce beast; so also the Romans, according to another author quoted on p.99—ancient historian Justin—“had the disposition of wolves, being insatiable of blood and tyranny.”

Given the book’s title and the time period discussed on this page, the reader of p.99 might conclude that She-Wolf deals with the ancient world; that, however, is only one-third true—the remaining two thirds of the book examine later periods, all the way up to the twenty-first century. Poetry, the subject of p.99, is not the book’s only focus—equally important are artworks as well as literary, historical, and political prose. Conversely, what of p.99 is typical of the book is a close reading of the complexities embodied in the Roman beast: sexual greed tempered by protective maternity, literal beastliness marked by metaphorical significance, selflessness made dangerous by natural ferocity. The texts quoted on p.99 provide just two examples of how the she-wolf, inherently ambiguous, has served to represent, at different times and through a variety of media, a number of disparate issues and ideas—among them, our moral imperatives towards others’ needs, the pervasiveness of misogyny, the status of immigrants, and the meaning and acquisition of a national identity.

Read an excerpt from She-Wolf, and learn more about the book and author at the Cambridge University Press website and Cristina Mazzoni's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Collier's "The Plundered Planet"

Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and a former director of Development Research at the World Bank. In addition to the award-winning The Bottom Billion, he is the author of Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--and How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity, and reported the following:

By good fortune, page 99 really matters.

The Plundered Planet is about the mismanagement of nature’s assets. The romantic environmentalists have seized the high ground, arguing that nature should be preserved. But often we can do better by using up natural assets and converting them into more productive assets such as schools, ports and factories. Our ethical responsibility to future generations is not to preserve, but to pass on at least the equivalent value of any natural assets we use. For the poorest societies – the bottom billion – this distinction is truly important because their natural assets are so valuable. If poor countries have to preserve nature rather than harness it they will lose their main opportunity for prosperity. We are the custodians of value, not the curators of artifacts. This is the key ethical proposition of the book and page 99 has a clear statement of it.

But more happens on page 99: are the governments of the bottom billion behaving ethically in their use of natural assets? Are they handing on to the future the equivalent value of the natural assets they deplete? If not they are living unsustainably. The punch line of the page is that most of them fall far short of this ethical standard. They save and invest very little of the revenues generated by natural resource extraction.

So much for page 99: what goes on it the rest of the book? A lot in a short space, I think. I try to show that the same ethical challenge arises across a range of superficially different issues concerning nature, such as climate change and fishing, as well as resource extraction. Yet nature has been moralized before it has been analyzed. It arouses deep passions, but the underlying economics is badly misunderstood. I wrote the book to help build a critical mass of informed opinion. I think it is my best book. Please read it.

Listen to The Plundered Planet podcasts, and learn more about the book and author at Paul Collier's website.

Read J. Tyler Dickovick's interview with Collier about his award-winning book, The Bottom Billion.

The Page 99 Test: The Bottom Billion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elaine Tyler May's "America and the Pill"

Elaine Tyler May is Regents Professor in the Departments of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of several books, including Homeward Bound and Barren in the Promised Land. She has contributed to Ms., the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and more. May is the 2009–2010 President of the Organization of American Historians.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, and reported the following:

Fifty years ago, in May of 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced its approval of the oral contraceptive, which quickly came to be known simply as “the pill.” At the time, its proponents believed it would bring about an end to overpopulation, poverty, unwanted and unwed pregnancy, ensure sexually satisfied married couples who would raise well-adjusted well-planned children and bring down the divorce rate. At the same time, its opponents feared it would unleash sexual chaos. It turned out that the pill fulfilled none of these expectations. But it did many things that were not anticipated at the time. Most importantly, it allowed women to control their fertility with almost 100 percent certainty, without the participation or even the knowledge of their sex partners. America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation tells the story of the pill over the last 50 years. One intriguing aspect of the pill is that it was the first of many contraceptive products developed for women over the last half century. Over those same years, not one new contraceptive was developed for men. Why not? Page 99 hints at some of the reasons. The page begins with a woman in 1970 complaining to a doctor. The doctor quotes her in his column in the Boston Globe:

“It’s the same old story, male domination.... Why not let the ever-loving husband take his turn and allow a few experiments performed on him for a change?” Dr. Curtis responded by explaining that there were male contraceptives in the works, but that more time was needed to test their safety and effectiveness. He also noted that men do not have the same stake in contraception: “What it boils down to is this: Women can get pregnant; men can’t.” There were also psychological effects. “Generally speaking, a man equates his ability to impregnate a woman with masculinity. And all too often the loss of such ability really deflates his ego.” Helen replied, “Might be just what a lot of egotistical males need.” Needed or not, the male libido seemed to be the primary preoccupation in any discussion of a pill for men. Although there was evidence that the oral contraceptive could negatively affect women’s sex drive, that particular side effect was dismissed as unimportant.

As early as 1965, Gregory Pincus articulated the problem: “Male volunteers for fertility control studies may be numbered in the low hundreds, whereas women have volunteered for similar studies by the thousands.... He [the human male] has psychological aversions to experimenting with sexual functions....

Perhaps experimental studies of fertility control in men should be preceded by a thorough investigation of male attitudes.” In the 1970s, sexuality remained a central concern in the male contraceptive trials. A 1974 report to the World Health Organization urged researchers to develop a reversible male contraceptive that would not compromise libido or potency.

Learn more about the book and author, and read an excerpt, at the America and the Pill website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Larry Wolff's "The Idea of Galicia"

Larry Wolff is professor of European history at NYU, and director of the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. His research focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, and his books include Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, and Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 is actually one of my favorite pages in The Idea of Galicia. It describes Alexander Fredro, the greatest comic dramatist in Polish literature (sometimes called the Polish Molière), sending a live captured bear from the Carpathian Mountains in 1826 as a welcoming gift to the new governor of Galicia (the province was part of the Habsburg monarchy and ruled by the Habsburg emperor from Vienna with a governor named by the emperor). Fredro writes a comical letter to present the bear to the governor, and I quote the letter on page 99:

“My Prince! I hasten to send to Your Highness a bear from the Beskidy mountains [a range of the Carpathians]... The pious and loyal physiognomy promises much, and it is to be supposed that cubs will find in him a worthy preceptor. I believe that it would be well to be reassured for the future by the Italian manner of his sweetness and of his good conduct; there may also exist among his numerous talents that of singing.”

I then discuss the ways in which this letter is not simply comical, but suggests an imperial-provincial dynamic: the wildness of Galicia represented by the bear from the mountains, and the loyalty of the Galicians to the governor and the emperor implicit in the “pious and loyal physiognomy” that Fredro claimed to see in the face of the bear (as well as Italianate sweetness, “good conduct,” and even musical talent). Still, Fredro and the governor both knew that a wild bear was a wild bear, and might take you by surprise.

The purpose of the book is to explore the whole history of Galicia, from its creation in the 18th century to its abolition after World War I, through a study of the “idea” of the place: how people who lived there, or governed there, thought about the province (for instance, its supposed wildness). This becomes a kind of labor of historical archaelogy, since Galicia has been gone from the map since 1918, and only exists today as a memory or phantom. Still, it’s a meaningful memory for the people who live in that territory today (southern Poland and western Ukraine), and even for the great number of Polish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, and Jewish-Americans, whose families emigrated from Galicia. Jewish ethnography still often makes use of the category of the Galitzianer.

The other thing I like about page 99 is the discussion of Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, the younger son of the great Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Franz Xaver was a musician like his father, but, alas, not nearly as talented, and he left Vienna to try to make his career in the provinces, that is, in the province of Galicia. He initially approached Galicia with a very condescending Viennese attitude, but he came to regard it as a kind of home and formed connections with Polish musicians and noble families (he gave piano lessons to their children). Franz Xaver fell in love with the wife of a Habsburg bureaucrat who worked for the governor, and that kept bringing the musician back to Galicia even though he meant to move on. In 1826 (on page 99), Franz Xaver was leading a performance of his father’s Requiem in the Ukrainian church of St. George in Lviv, marking the 35th anniversary of his father’s tragically early death.

Read more about The Idea of Galicia at the publisher's website and visit Larry Wolff's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Claude S. Fischer's "Made in America"

Claude S. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of many books, including Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years and America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, and reported the following:

The context here is a discussion of how Americans are not really individualists, but community “voluntarists,” taking as a key example the evangelical Protestant congregation. Page 99:

gotta go there by yourself.”) Crucially, however, the believer finds salvation not in a hermitage, a desert, or a lonesome valley, but in a church, together with others of the faithful, testifying to his or her rebirth. This theology and this form of church, as political scientist James Block well argues, shaped American culture: the “new idiom of religion—combining individualism with elective community—becomes the American character.” A modern, mundane parallel is the gated community. Virtually anyone with the money can join or leave, but residents must accept strict limitations on what color they paint their homes, where they park their cars, and so forth in order to enjoy the benefits of the association. A third, more complex example is contemporary marriage. Easier to enter and easier to leave than it was generations ago, marriage remains to almost all Americans central to personal fulfillment. As Emersonian as Americans sometimes seem, they are committing themselves to churches, neighborhoods, and marriages—but only insofar as they choose those groups and are not shackled to them. The individualism remains in the insistence on free entry and exit.

“Contractualism” or “covenantalism” is central to American voluntarism. Individuals make this implicit contract by joining the group: I am free to stay or leave, but while belonging I owe fealty to the group. One might also call this the “love it or leave it” rule. Modern American marriage has this character: Americans believe that a person should be free to choose to marry or not and should be free to choose to leave an unhappy marriage or not, but so long as a marriage continues, the spouse must be faithful. (Americans have little taste for discreet adultery à la française.) Similarly, many Americans switch religions or denominations, but those who do are at least as devoted to their newly chosen faiths as are those who stay in their parents’ churches. This is also how local activists in the San Diego area understood their commitments to their towns, as explained by sociologist Richard Madsen:

To be a member of a community means to fulfill the social dimensions of one’s humanity through interaction with others. Belonging to a community does not, though, entail the sacrifice of oneself for the good of the group.... [A]n individual must resist the twin temptations of submerging oneself in the group and of denying one’s responsibilities toward the group.

Such activists do not feel obligated, for example, to stay forever—that would be to sacrifice the self—but when they move, they feel obliged to become activists in their new towns. This implicit contract helps explain the conformism that many observers have historically charged to Americans: conformity is part of the deal. It also helps explain why Americans are neither anarchists nor free lovers—positions one would expect of true libertarians—and why they more often defer to groups and group leaders than other Westerners do.

The page 99 test is fair enough for me. It reveals some of the key ideas of the book. What it does not show is that most of the book's roughly 250pp of text are devoted to concretely recounting the lives, relationships, and thinking of ordinary Americans from the colonial to the modern era -- such as men striving for success in the new cities, women trying to establish church and civility on the frontier, parents coping in different ways with the deaths of infants, farmers dealing with the decline of farming, and young adults trying to fashion their own characters to be both boldly confident and emotionally sensitive.

Read an excerpt from Made in America and visit the book's official website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Wasserstrom's "China in the 21st Century"

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Global Shanghai, China's Brave New World, and Twentieth-Century China.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a typical part of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know in that it is devoted to answering a question. This is because, like nearly all the contributions to Oxford’s new “What Everyone Needs to Know” series, mine is structured in a brisk Q & A format. Here’s the question addressed on page 99: “What does China have in common with other countries?” This query is a direct follow-up to the previous one (posed on page 96): “Is contemporary China utterly unique?”

My aim in responding to these two questions is simple. I want to show that, while there are certainly specific ways in which China’s recent trajectory has been unlike that of any other country (e.g., never before have so many cities swelled so rapidly in a nation), we shouldn’t treat the PRC as being in every way a nation that is in a class by itself—or assume that, if it does have things in common with other countries, these will only be places ruled by Communist Party regimes or shaped by “Confucian” traditions.

Toward the end of the book, I argue that China and the United States share many traits, something that goes against the grain of much commentary in both countries that highlights only the contrasts between them. On page 99, though, my concern is with the similarities between China and India. These are also two countries that are more often contrasted with one another, due to the former’s authoritarian and the latter’s democratic political system, than placed in the same category.

I set up my discussion of China-India comparisons on page 98. I emphasize that, while we shouldn’t forget the degree to which Asia’s two largest countries are dissimilar, we should note that each is a political entity that “took its modern form as a nation-state in the 1940s” and each is a place where “in the 1950s economic five-year plans were the order of the day.” I also note that by “the 1960s, Cold War visions of a clear Communist/Free World binary notwithstanding, Chinese and Indian leaders were each trying to find a place for their country that kept it out of both the shadow of the United States and the shadow of the Soviet Union,” and all of them were eager “to discover a developmental path that was unique,” something that led them to become “fascinated by the Singapore model.”

The first paragraph on page 99, building on this groundwork, begins as follows:

Once China and India are thought of as sharing important characteristics, in addition to having many distinctive features, developments in one country can be used to illuminate those in another. The Chinese interest in using mega-events to show that the PRC is now a “modern” rather than a “backward” country, for example, has an Indian parallel. New Delhi is making the most of its hosting the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an Olympic-like spectacle, with an ambitious urban redevelopment drive that, while not as costly and over-the- top as that which preceded the Beijing Games, brings to mind the lead-up to 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremonies. There was a great deal of hand-wringing in the Indian press at the time of China’s Olympic success because Indians feared it would be difficult for India to put on as polished a show. But this only underlines the similar ambitions within each country to use dramatic acts to shed the sense of backwardness they have carried from a time when Western empires dominated the world.

Another thing that page 99 shares with many others in the book is that it doesn’t have a single footnote. I do, however, stress in my treatment of China-India similarities that I am not alone in this divergence from the conventional wisdom. A look at my “further readings” section reveals this. So, too, does the last part of page 99 and first part of page 100 where, after moving from international spectacles to patterns of communal violence, I quote at length from the writings of Pallavi Aiyar, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Hindu newspaper, who is now based in Brussels but continues periodically to shed light on things that, in my mind, “everyone needs to know” about how the two most populous countries on earth resemble as well as differ from one other.

Read an excerpt from China in the 21st Century, and learn more about the book at the Oxford University Press website.

Wasserstrom is the co-founder and consulting editor of The China Beat.

The Page 69 Test: Jeffrey Wasserstrom's China's Brave New World.

The Page 99 Test: Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Global Shanghai, 1850–2010.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sujatha Fernandes' "Who Can Stop the Drums?"

Sujatha Fernandes is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela, and reported the following:

When you turn to page 99 of my book, Who Can Stop the Drums?, you will find yourself in the middle of the life history of Yajaira Hernandez, a middle aged black woman from the shantytowns of Caracas. The first line on that page quotes Yajaira, as she talks about her work with street children and those with mental disabilities in the barrios:

I generally think that the most beautiful thing that one can have as a human being is to enjoy life with those around you, with the people, to do things that are insignificant to you but valuable to others. I won’t become a millionaire with this, although many times I need money, but these are the things that fulfill you as a human being and person and they make you live with happiness.

This is one of my favorite lines in the book. Although it doesn’t necessarily represent the whole book, during that interview with Yajaira I realized something important. The kind of service to others that Yajaira talks about was a strong part of the ethos of urban movements. While the last few decades of Venezuelan history were dedicated to entrenching a model of neoliberal economic reform that prioritized the individual and the profit motive above all else, there was still a strong sense of humanity and collective solidarity among ordinary people that ran counter to this.

It is this spirit of urban social movements that emerges over and over throughout the book – in the barrio assembly high in a hillside shanty, in the handmade broadsheet, on the airwaves of a small low power radio, or in the drums of the festival of San Juan. The radical leftist leader Hugo Chávez who came to power in 1998 promising to reverse neoliberal policies drew on this spirit, but at times his institutions also reinforced neoliberal rationalities.

People always say that your field work changes you, and I personally felt uplifted by Yajaira’s narrative. We live in a society that is very dominated by consumption and money and worrying about how to pay bills. Whenever I find myself getting too stressed out by all this, I just turn to page 99 of my book and Yajaira reminds me again about the things that are really important in life.

Learn more about Who Can Stop the Drums? at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue