Alison Stone's "Being Born"

Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. Her books include: Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel's Philosophy (2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (2006), An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (2007), Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (2011) and The Value of Popular Music (2016). She is also editor of The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2011) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy (2017).

Stone applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Being Born: Birth and Philosophy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 3 of the book. The page moves – swiftly! – through Hegel’s, then Marx’s, then Heidegger’s views of human social relationships and human sociality. Then I assess them:

Hegel, Marx and Heidegger all offer insights here, but those insights can be enriched by taking account of the formative impact of our early relationships. Whether we belong to a shared community spirit or set of social production relations or world of practical involvements, we come to belong to and participate in them from birth onwards. We do not spring into existence as full-fledged adults but enter into shared ways of life through a temporal and developmental process. Through this process we receive and inherit from others, and learn to participate with others in, a pre-existing communal spirit, or set of production relations, or network of shared involvements—or something of all these.

The page 99 test works here reasonably well, if not perfectly. In the book overall, I argue that philosophers haven’t paid much attention to the fact that we are born, and I explore some ways that human existence looks different once we take being born into account. Page 99 fits in, since I’m pointing out that Hegel, Marx and Heidegger’s views of sociality omit birth and could have benefited from taking account of it.

Also, I explain Heidegger’s view of shared networks of meaning surrounding practical tasks and objects with an example about building a run for my rabbits – nice to see them getting centre stage!

I think the reader can get a sense from page 99 that I try to explain philosophical theories in everyday language, and to draw lots of disparate philosophical ideas together to bring them to bear on birth.

This page might, though, give the impression that I dwell heavily on ‘the great’ philosophers – the canon of mainly male, white, European authors. But actually some of my most important influences are recent female and feminist authors and I want to open up philosophy beyond the canon. That said, I do spend quite some time with the classic existentialists including Sartre and Heidegger – so this page again reflects that.

In another way, too, page 99 is revealing about what I’m doing in this book more broadly. I argue that, being born, we begin life as helpless, dependent babies and infants who remain heavily dependent on adult care and education throughout childhood and beyond. Hence my claim on page 99 that we receive cultural traditions and practices from adults in the corners of the world we’ve been born into, and that we inherit cultures from generations before us.

I argue in Being Born that we’ve over-valued autonomy, agency, and independence compared to dependency, reception, and inheritance. We’ve over-stressed the individual’s agency to shape his or her life. By comparison, we’ve neglected the extent to which individuals receive cultural frameworks of meaning and value from others, and only learn to exercise agency and creativity by navigating within these prior frameworks. As we are born, we receive first and only second do we become able to create.

Learn more about Being Born at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel Fleischacker's "Being Me Being You"

Samuel Fleischacker is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of many books, including On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion and The Good and the Good Book: Revelation as a Guide to Life.

Fleischacker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is by no means the single page that best encapsulates what I am trying to say in Being Me Being You (that would be page 37, or maybe pages 35-37). But it does include the very first thoughts that led me to write this book.

I had been at a rally calling for empathy between Jews and Palestinians, just before the outbreak of the 2014 Gaza war, and the rabbi who had summoned me there whispered to me suddenly that she wanted me to speak. Racking my brains for something to say, I decided to make use of the conception of empathy in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A much discussed feature of Smith’s theory of empathy is that it is biased — it goes out most strongly to our family and close friends, more weakly to our neighbors and ethnic groups, and only faintly to all of humankind. Many contemporary writers criticize empathy for this reason, urging us to do justice and act kindly on the basis of rational principles rather than sentiment.

But Smith brings out an advantage of the circular structure of empathy: that our close circles of empathy include the people we know best, and can therefore most effectively help. We can best translate our empathy into action within these close circles, and make sure that our action is directed to the needs of the people we are trying to help. So we should not feel bad about caring most for our close circles. Rather, if we want people to broaden their empathy, we should work through these circles: we should use the fact that people close to us are most likely to trust us in order to urge them to get beyond their biases. This is especially true in circumstances of hostility. Jews need to talk to fellow Jews about having greater empathy for Palestinians, and Palestinians need to talk to fellow Palestinians about having greater empathy for Jews.

I was surprised by the warm response that this point got from people in the crowd — it had seemed fairly obvious to me. But then it occurred to me that it seemed obvious only because I have been reading and thinking about Smith for so many years. That led me to think that using Smith to address contemporary moral issues might be a good idea. The result is this book. And on page 99, you can hear an echo of the comments that inspired me to write it: “A Smithian solution to [the] problem [of the circles of empathy] is to use the warm feelings our near and dear feel toward us as a framework in which we can effectively correct one another’s biases. The very love and security we feel for those in our close circles makes us more likely to listen to moral correction that comes from these circles than we are to admonitions from outsiders.”

Learn more about Being Me Being You at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Divine Teaching and the Way of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mo Moulton's "The Mutual Admiration Society"

Mo Moulton is currently a senior lecturer in the history department of the University of Birmingham. They earned their PhD in history from Brown University in 2010 and taught in the History & Literature program at Harvard University for six years. Their previous book, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England, was named a 2014 “Book of the Year” by History Today and was the runner-up for the Royal History Society’s 2015 Whitfield Prize for first book in British or Irish history.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their latest book, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, and reported the following:

The reader who opens The Mutual Admiration Society to page 99 enters Dorothy L. Sayers’s life story at a dramatic moment. Sayers has given birth, in secret, to her son early in 1924. As page 99 begins, I’m explaining the very limited options to the single mother of a child born out of wedlock in this era in Britain, when legal adoptions were not possible and life as an independent single mother almost impossible for someone of Sayers’s background. Sayers herself makes the decision to ask her cousin, Ivy Shrimpton, to take the child; Shrimpton had already been earning a living fostering children. At first Sayers pretends she’s asking “for a friend” but, before she actually delivers her son to Ivy’s care, she comes clean and begs for discretion. The page ends as Sayers returns to London alone: “Her keys were locked inside her flat, and she had to wait to get the charlady’s spare set, sitting by herself at the cinema until the charlady returned.”

In many ways, the test completely fails for my book. I began researching The Mutual Admiration Society after reading one of Sayers’s most beloved novels, Gaudy Night (1935), which is set in a thinly-disguised women’s college at Oxford University. I was moved by the portrayal of this community of women and their commitment to intellectual integrity. But when I began to research Sayers, I found relatively little information about her friendships and collaborations with women. By contrast, the story of her son’s birth has been told and retold, ever since writer Janet Hitchman first revealed it to the world in her somewhat salacious 1976 biography.

In The Mutual Admiration Society, I want to move past seeing Sayers either as a lonely genius or through the lens of her relationships to men as a mother, lover, daughter, or wife. The book traces her lifelong friendships with a literary criticism group she founded at Oxford. They called themselves the ‘Mutual Admiration Society’ in order, she joked, to stop anyone else calling them that first. They were each remarkable in their own ways. In addition to Sayers, the book focuses on Muriel St. Clare Byrne, popular historian and playwright; Charis Frankenburg, midwife, birth control advocate, and Justice of the Peace; and Dorothy Rowe, English teacher and founding member of the cutting-edge Bournemouth Little Theatre Club.

I believe this group transformed its members. In that sense, page 99 isn’t such a bad starting point. It finds Sayers at her most alienated—she commented that having married lovers was a strain in part because it meant losing friends or lying to them. But in the late 1920s, she rekindled those friendships. With Byrne, in particular, she collaborated on a play (Busman’s Honeymoon) and a set of essays, including the one made famous under the title “Are Women Human?” (spoiler: she said yes). Those collaborations helped her to find a way from being a writer of light detective fiction and an advertising copywriter, to being the author who is still admired today for her rich novels, her incisive theological work, and her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I wish page 99 reflected more of the Mutual Admiration Society: but on balance, perhaps a page that shows Sayers, in her most difficult hour, reaching out to another woman for help does capture something essential about the book, and about her life.

Learn more about The Mutual Admiration Society at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Marsh's "The Emotional Life of the Great Depression"

John Marsh is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality and Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry. In addition to these, he is the editor of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941.

Marsh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Emotional Life of the Great Depression, and reported the following:

If readers turn to page 99 of The Emotional Life of the Great Depression, they will find the closing pages of a discussion about the polio epidemic that struck New York City in 1931. Although this epidemic afflicted fewer people than the more famous 1916 outbreak, thanks in part to the development of the iron lung, it nevertheless left its mark on the city. (The borough of Brooklyn took the brunt of it.) In the spring and summer of 1931, slightly more than 4,000 people, most of them children, contracted the disease, and 490 of them died.

The polio outbreak refutes the famous assertion by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his First Inaugural Address that during the 1930s the only thing Americans “had to fear was fear itself.” In fact, I argue, Americans had plenty to fear during the decade, and I use the polio outbreak—as well as a Cleveland serial murderer who preyed on petty criminals and the homeless—to inquire into how fear works. I argue that fear comes in two forms: terror, or the fear of a sudden, specific stimuli (a snake in the grass, for example); and dread, the fear of a looming, prospective threat. Polio represents the latter form of fear. Thousands of people succumbed to the disease, but many more people feared that they or, more likely, their children, would contract it. As with polio, many of our fears have to do with the body, with “what illnesses, injuries, and, finally, death might do to our physical selves,” as I put it. As polio also demonstrates, we tend to fear what lies beyond our control. Fear thus exposes our helplessness; it infantilizes us. In this sense, I write, “polio prefigures another prominent fear of the Great Depression—perhaps the prominent fear of the Great Depression: unemployment,” and page 99 looks forward to the rest of the chapter, which discusses white-collar unemployment in the 1930s and a particularly weird H.P. Lovecraft short story.

On the one hand, readers might not get an entirely accurate representation of the book from page 99 alone. In the book as a whole, I explore how Americans responded emotionally to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. I do so by documenting emotions most people do not usually associate with the decade, including righteousness, panic, awe, love, and hope. But fear, perhaps almost as much as despair, is an emotion that most people do associate with that decade. Indeed, fear may be the quintessential emotion of the decade. That does not make it any less interesting, of course, but that chapter, and that page, do not quite do justice to one of the motives for the book, which is to tell a different story about the Great Depression than most people have heard by telling a different story about the emotional life of the decade.

On the other hand, the page does represent how I try to tell this new story about the Great Depression, which is not—or not only—by recounting the most familiar narratives about the decade but by examining texts and incidents that often receive only passing mention, if that, in histories of the decade. In other words, the book tries to make the Great Depression new by turning to its ephemera, from comic books to stock investment manuals to, yes, polio outbreaks in Brooklyn. These pages about polio also illustrate my attitude toward emotion more generally. That is, I try not to judge whether people were right to feel what they felt did during the 1930s. (For example, in terms of what to fear, polio had nothing on measles, which annually killed more people than all but the mostly deadly of polio outbreaks.) Rather, I seek to understand what Americans felt during the 1930s, and how what they felt can help us understand this crucial decade. Following contemporary psychologists, I argue that emotion helps people appraise their environment and adapt their purposes to it. In that respect, emotions simultaneously tell us a lot about the people who experience those emotions and the world that elicited them. Viewed from this perspective, emotions make an ideal entry into understanding the past. And readers will find that perspective animating almost every page of the book, including, and perhaps especially, page 99.

Learn more about The Emotional Life of the Great Depression at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin R. Cohen's "Pure Adulteration"

Benjamin R. Cohen is associate professor at Lafayette College. He is the author of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside and coeditor of Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement.

Cohen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food, and reported the following:

This page is the heart of the great butter v. margarine debate. It was 1886 because, yes, margarine was a problem as long ago as the 1880s. The pro-butter folks were dairy types. They were agrarians stoking fears of margarine to defend their industry. On the other side, pro-margarine folks saw their product as a difference in degree, not kind. To quote the Illinois congressman chairing the congressional hearings that come up on page 99, the pro-margarine faction said don’t worry so much, margarine is fine, you won’t get sick, it’s simply “the result of a combination of beef and pork fats, butter, cream, and milk with coloring matter…which is similar to that universally used by farmers and dairies engaged in the manufacture of butter for the coloring of that product.” Chicago was the main meatpacking center, which was thus also the main beef and pork fat center, which was the main way to make margarine, which was why the congressman was so defensive. Margarine was cheaper too, so its supporters also claimed to care about the poor. That’s what they’re getting to on this page.

I’d say the Page 99 Test is fair enough. It lands readers in the middle of fights over health, class, and nature. You’d be dropped into a comment about all the places banning meat from the USA. You’d also find out that the original name for margarine was beurre economique. And you might be encouraged to flip the page and hear more about cheating, deception, and corruption as key terms in the debate. I bet, though, that readers would want to back up two pages to roll into this one knowing it was hashing out “the war on oleomargarine.”

The book deals with the difficulty of knowing the difference between natural and artificial, real and fake, pure and adulterated. Those are big categories. Pure Adulteration anchors them with reference to arguments over food identity. Page 99 is in the middle of the first of three large case studies—margarine, cottonseed oil (fake olive oil and lard), and glucose (fake sugar)—that each get at the presumed real/fake contrasts. Those new products were contentious because they were manufactured rather than harvested, a process that some people thought went too far. The story the book tells is who gets to decide how far is too far and how the answer to that changed over the second half of the nineteenth century.

Learn more about Pure Adulteration at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Burt Solomon's "The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt"

Burt Solomon is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. In 1991 he won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. His nonfiction books include the acclaimed Where They Ain't, a history of baseball in the 1890s.

The Murder of Willie Lincoln is Solomon's first novel.

Solomon applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt, his new novel featuring John Hay, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Still, I had to admire Conan Doyle’s skill at creating a mood and the easy-to-swallow implausibility of a plot that made even less sense than this mystery of mine. I marveled even more at Sherlock Holmes and his formidable powers of observation, the subtlety of his logic, the fierceness of his brain. These were not my strengths. I could be staring at a tub of lard and (as Clara enjoyed pointing out) see everything except the lard. I was reasonably confident that two plus two equals four and even that twenty-five squared was … I had to think … six hundred and a little more. But I could never match Sherlock in sheer brainpower. Nor did I share Vidocq’s flair for disguises or his talent for infiltrating the forces of villainy.

So what in the hell was I good at? I don’t mean as a husband or as a father or even as a secretary of state. My deficiencies in each of those roles are no secret, at least to me . Nor is the pain that they cause, the clench in my stomach when I make mistakes. Of which I have made more than my share. I’d like to think that comes from reaching so high, trying so hard, but I’m probably just excusing my shortcomings. Am I a perfectionist? Don’t make me laugh. At times I stand astonished at how imperfect I am. Let me count the ways. (Oh no, allow me.) As the chief diplomat for a self-consciously virile nation, I’ve been clever but not as blustery—my stick isn’t as big—as Theodore would like. As a husband … my faults—of the heart, not of the flesh—grind like wet, cold sand.

As a father … My throat clutched. It’s so easy being a father of girls. You tell them how pretty they are, which is even easier if you don’t have to pretend, and you keep their heads from swelling unduly; you find them husbands, or they find husbands for themselves, and your duty is done. With a son, however, your job is to turn him from a boy into a man. This requires molding and the sort of intervention that any red-blooded boy would resist. Only later would he see the benefit, and surely he did. He seemed to be happy at the end—he seemed to be—and Lord knows I hope he was. Until then, I had never felt old.

A cool question: Does page 99 give a good or an inaccurate impression of my book?

The answer is yes.

It is simultaneously unrepresentative of how most of the book reads, yet it’s also crucial in understanding the main character.

Let me explain.

This passage is probably the longest soliloquy in the book—all of it self-reflection, lacking any dialogue or action in a story that includes a fair amount of both. Yet what comes through, I’d like to think, is the essence of my detective and narrator, John Hay—his sardonic wit, his painful self-awareness of his personal flaws, even as he searches for confidence as a detective, as a husband, and as a father grieving for his son.

In fact, I’d say the biggest difference between this book and my previous one, The Murder of Willie Lincoln, is the depth of Hay’s character as I’ve tried to portray it. In part it’s because he is 63 instead of 23, and Hay himself was deeper (and maybe I am, too). This is nowhere so clear as on page 99, where Hay leaves himself vulnerable to the reader. At times I stand astonished at how imperfect I am. … Until then, I had never felt old. He is telling you the raw truth of who he is.

Visit Burt Solomon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bonnie G. Smith's "Women in World History"

Bonnie G. Smith is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She has written widely on women and gender history and her most recent publications include The Making of the West (2013), Women's Studies: The Basics (2013) and The Gender of History (2012).

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women in World History: 1450 to the Present, and reported the following:

Page 99 works fairly well for Women in World History. That page features conquests by the Spanish and Portuguese in the so-called new world of the 16th century, especially noting the attacks on local people’s beliefs in gender complementarity. A “religious police state” of priestly and scriptural domination replaced somewhat more balanced gender interactions. The book as a whole weaves patterns of gender hierarchy and gender complementarity throughout. Women’s inventive responses to the domination are alluded to on page 99 and these interventions thread their detailed way through the book. Women across the globe devised, invented, poeticized, schemed, and, yes, assassinated.

Also on page 99, the Manchu conquerors of China (1644) slash away at the Ming regime’s political and social order. There’s lots of bloodshed and violence, a good deal of it inflicted on women—again a revisionist theme of the book. Women don’t sit peacefully at home rocking the cradle in wartime. The massive bloodshed in history includes female as well as male blood.

The workings of culture—foreign and domestic—is another thread in the book. Conquest, as with the Iberians, focuses on physical mastery but also needs to impose cultural mastery. Page 100 finishes the story by describing the ways in which the Manchus worked to change Chinese culture. Page 100 rounds out page 99 by showing how drastically the Manchus, like conquerors down to the present, did impose their way of life on women as well as men. Following James Patterson’s dictum, I’ll leave readers in suspense as to what and how they did it.

How does page 99 differ from the rest of the book? It presents no individual women’s voices, their works of fiction and the arts, their own exercise of power at the top of the political heap, their exuberance, fortitude, and despair as humans. These infuse the book’s journey through women’s global past. To date, scholars and journalists write history as forged from an array of men’s deeds and thoughts—all taken as uniquely fascinating. Page 99 is only a sliver of Women in World History’s competing vision: a rich, complicated, surprising, and diverse narrative of women’s pasts across the globe.

Learn more about Women in World History at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Eric Goff's "The Physics of Krav Maga"

John Eric Goff is a professor of physics and the chair of the physics department at the University of Lynchburg. The author of Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports, he holds a black belt in karate and a purple belt in Krav Maga.

Goff applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Physics of Krav Maga, and reported the following:

When I was invited to write for the Page 99 Test in 2010 after my first book came out (Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), I had to confess to only then learning of Ford Madox Ford’s test. My second book, The Physics of Krav Maga (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) was released in November 2019. I could not wait for my book to arrive so that I could see what was on page 99!

Krav Maga is an Israeli martial arts system. Krav Maga is grittier than most other martial-arts systems because it emphasizes street fighting, hostage situations, and other niceties. My book may be the first scientific look at Krav Maga. To ensure that I could share the joy of physics with as many people as possible, my book is free of equations. It emphasizes conceptual physics, has many pictures, and even has a link to videos of many of the techniques that I discussed.

We all have at least a modicum of intuitive physics within us. Most may lack all the scientific jargon, but we intuitively know that gravity helps us while we walk because each time we extend a leg to take a step, the leg falls to the ground. I build on such simple ideas to use physics to help understand why Krav Maga is so effective.

Readers could likely turn to any page in my book, read a paragraph, and not feel as if they were missing something from earlier in the book. Page 99 is like that and, in fact, epitomizes my book. The figure on that page shows that my talented instructor, Mr. Clifton Abercrombie of Warrior Success Academy in Forest, Virginia, has the middle-aged, ever-so-slightly pear-shaped book author in a wrist lock. A movie icon in the upper left of the photo directs readers to where they may see a short video of the technique.

I discuss the page 99 photo using the concept of moment of inertia. There is a great, physics-based reason why the technique is so effective! One more nugget appears in the photo on page 99. An image of a hex key has been superimposed on the photo. Readers who have used a hex key should immediately understand why the technique works well. I hope readers will have “Ah ha!” moments on page 99 – and throughout the rest of my book.

Learn more about the book and author at John Eric Goff's website.

The Page 99 Test: Gold Medal Physics.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Stahel's "Retreat from Moscow"

David Stahel is the author of several books on Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union. He completed an MA in war studies at King’s College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. In his research he has concentrated primarily on the German military in World War II. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Retreat from Moscow is a map with just six lines of text below it! That may not sound like much to work with, especially if one assumes we might condense the whole book into it, but here goes…

What we learn on page 99 is that Soviet attacks against German lines in the winter of 1941-1942 were proving extremely costly. My analysis then tells the readers: “Clearly, German experience and tactical superiority, identifying where the Red Army was likely to attack and positioning itself for maximum advantage, ensured victory despite the corps’ tired and deprived troops.” Uncanny. This a central theme of the book and why a renewed focus on the winter of 1941-1942 was in order.

The orthodox narrative in this winter period is one of almost unrelenting German crisis, retreat and defeat. Almost by default, the advancing Red Army is declared triumphant without any real assessment of what was or was not achieved. In my reassessment, I consider two fundamental, but neglected factors.
Firstly, strategic intensions. Germany adopted a new approach to the war in the east on 8 December 1941 with Hitler issuing a new War Directive (No. 39), which stipulated going over to the defensive and holding the eastern front by defending major Soviet population centres which were deemed vital for communication, transport and supply. If we cut to the chase and ask, did the Germans manage to hold their front, while defending these vital Russian cities? The answer is yes. Of all the important population centres Kursk, Orel, Briansk, Kaluga, Viaz’ma, Rzhev and Smolensk only one (Kaluga) was lost. Conversely, Soviet plans issued by Stalin directed that Army Group Centre (the centre of Germany’s Eastern Front) be destroyed. This did not happen. In fact, not a single German army (there were six in Army Group Centre), nor a corps or even a division was eliminated from the German order of battle. So German strategic intensions were successful, while the Soviets attempted far too much and failed in their objectives.

The second conceptual point is what the respective cost of these winter operations were. The Red Army lacked staff work, experienced officers and heavy weaponry, which meant countless attacks with waves of men, hit German defences. In just three months, the Soviets suffered 1.6 million casualties, while the Germans lost 262,524 men – a 6:1 ratio. As my analysis above captures, German tactical and operational proficiency at the local level translated into huge and disproportion losses.

During the winter of 1941-1942 the German army was clearly forced into a retreat, but I would challenge the reader to consider that as the only, or even the best, measure of who suffered a defeat.

Learn more about Retreat from Moscow at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Hemsoll's "Emulating Antiquity"

David Hemsoll is senior lecturer in the Department of Art History, Curating, and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes towards the end of the book’s first chapter, which deals with the architecture of 15th-century Florence. It specifically concerns Giuliano da Sangallo’s Palazzo Gondi before continuing with his Palazzo Strozzi, explaining Palazzo Gondi’s place in Florentine palace architecture, noting its relationship to earlier palaces, and its new debts to classical antiquity. The page also includes illustrations of Giuliano’s drawing of an ancient cornice (for comparison with one of Palazzo Gondi on the previous page), and of the surviving model for Palazzo Strozzi and the palace as executed. The page provides a flavour of what the book deals with, but it does not provide much sense of its underlying argument and purpose.

The page is true to the book’s aims insofar as it deals directly with major works by one of the leading Renaissance architects that are covered and in that it assesses their dependency on the antique. It does not, however, provide much sense of any underlying philosophy and design method, which, for all the architects discussed (Brunelleschi, Giuliano da Sangallo, Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, etc.), is the book’s primary objective, and which in the case of Giuliano da Sangallo is set out in subsequent pages. The book, in fact, explores Renaissance architecture as a succession of distinct design approaches, underpinned by identifiable theoretical stances, which explain how and why antique-inspired architecture in one period differed from that in another, and how and why an architect working in Florence took a very different approach from one working in Rome. Fundamental to this argument are the Renaissance buildings themselves, and the ancient or more modern works that inspired them, which is why the book’s numerous illustrations are so important to its unfolding story.

The book, therefore, is intended to provide an evidence-based account that explains the evolution of ‘Renaissance’ architecture over the course of a century and a half. Along the way, it brings new clarity, hitherto lacking, to the ideology underpinning the schemes of Brunelleschi at the start of the fifteenth century and his Florentine followers, about the momentous adaptations to previous approaches made by Bramante, Raphael and younger practitioners from the start of the sixteenth century (chapter two) , and about the new outlook eventually instigated by Michelangelo (chapter three), which resulted in an irreconcilable division between those who rejected ancient authority, and those who continued to respect it.

Learn more about Emulating Antiquity at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue