Jennifer Hull's "Shook"

Jennifer Hull is a writer and teacher. She grew up in New York, graduated cum laude from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in history, and has a master’s degree in education. She has taught K-12 students as well as college freshmen at the University of New Mexico. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, twin sons, and cocker spaniel.

Hull applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Shook: An Earthquake, a Legendary Mountain Guide, and Everest's Deadliest Day, and reported the following:

If a browser were to open to page 99 of Shook: An Earthquake, A Legendary Mountain Guide and Everest’s Deadliest Day, they would come upon the first page of "Chapter 17: The Khumbu Country Club." At the top of the page is a blog entry by renowned mountain guide and the protagonist of this narrative nonfiction story, Dave Hahn. At the bottom of the page is the first paragraph of the rest of the chapter. The entire page reads as follows:

17 The Khumbu Country Club

April 10, 2015
Posted by: Dave Hahn
Categories: Expedition Dispatches; Everest
Elevation: 17, 575 feet

RMI EXPEDITIONS BLOG

One of the finer days we’ve seen on the trip, weatherwise. Clear skies and calm as anything in the morning, which made us forget the cold. We were out in the glacier again, at our jungle gym of ladders and fixed lines and ice walls… In the afternoon on this fine day, our Base Camp manager, Mark Tucker, took a foursome out for the first day of a planned four-day golf tournament in the mellow section of glacier close to camp. Tuck showed his party around the Khumbu Country club, scoring a hole-in-one in the process. (His partners now each owe him 100 rupees.) Newcomer Robbie came away with the low scholar for the round however, with a nine under par performance.

Best regards,
RMI Guide Dave Hahn

Glacier golf, chess, scrabble, and various versions of poker became popular ways for the team to unwind at Base Camp after mornings of concentrated activity. Peter enjoyed learning to play poker when he wasn’t writing in his journal. Robbie was a natural on the “golf course.” Hans loved a good book. Dave’s favorite game was Scrabble; he had carried a pocket dictionary with him to Base Camp. On the dry-erase board used to communicate messages to the team each day, he scrawled today’s message in red marker: “Learn your two-letter words.” Hao especially liked playing chess when he didn’t have a strong enough Internet connection to get work done on his laptop.

Page 99 of my book is a short page but does give a decent sense of the structure of the story, particularly of the interplay between the protagonist’s first-person blog posts and the third-person “behind the scenes” narration of the story. The overall chapter, however, gives a very accurate idea of the book, beginning with this light and breezy passage listing some of the pleasurable Base Camp activities enjoyed by the climbers and culminating in a detailed and visceral and somewhat horrifying account of what it feels like to be the victim of a slab avalanche versus being the victim of an ice avalanche;

An ice avalanche is a different beast. Like the more common slab avalanche, the first signal of an ice avalanche might be an ominous crack, in this case when a giant, overhanging chunk of ice calves off the snout of a glacier and drops. The chunk of ice, which might be the size of a building, shatters upon impact. This may trigger secondary slab avalanches all around. The ice accelerates down the steep mountain slope, pushing a massive powercloud of snow, rock, and ice pellets ahead of it. Ahead of the powder cloud, an invisible and immense air blast travels fast enough to easily uplift and overturn a train car. A victim of an ice avalanche is lifted from the hurricane-wind force of the blast and then hurled back down on the ice, rocks, and glacial moraine…

The chapter illuminates just how high the stakes are for the climbers, contrasted with the less serious diversions they use to happily distract themselves as they nervously and patiently bide their time at Base Camp, waiting out storms.

Visit Jennifer Hull's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen M. Johnson-Weiner's "The Lives of Amish Women"

Karen M. Johnson-Weiner is a Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of anthropology at SUNY Potsdam. She is the author of Train Up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools and New York Amish: Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State and a coauthor of The Amish.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Lives of Amish Women, and reported the following:

Those opening to page 99 of The Lives of Amish Women will find themselves at the end of a discussion of wifely submission. Part of a section entitled “When Submission is a One-Way Street” in Chapter 3, “Marriage and Ever After,” that page begins with a quote from an Amish woman who felt alone and was having suicidal thoughts until “looking back I can see that God was with me, and my husband did listen if I spoke, even if he didn’t understand, he did care.” Reading page 99 alone, one becomes aware that Amish women have diverse opinions of what it means to be a submissive wife, that submission is also important for men, that Amish churches often find it difficult to deal with church members who pay lip service to biblical teachings, and that change and assimilation in the Amish world may exacerbate problems by redefining male and female roles in the church-community.

However, the broader discussion explores the complicated place of gender in Amish society, highlighting the tension between a divine hierarchy that makes women submissive to men and the understanding that the church is the body of Christ in which there is neither male nor female. As the book makes clear, Amish communities resolve this tension in diverse ways as each responds to the profound social, economic, and technological changes going on in the non-Amish world with which they must interact daily.

In short, page 99 reflects important issues raised in The Lives of Amish Women, so in that sense the book passes the test. However, because page 99 focuses particularly on submission and abuse, the book also fails the test. Page 99 suggests a darkness to women’s lives that the rest of the book does not support. Page 99 also fails to capture the breadth and depth of the experience of Amish females, and their active role in maintaining and shaping the spiritual and economic health of their church-communities.

Committed to remaining separate from the secular world, even as they must interact with it daily, Amish life is shaped by the tension between faith and worldliness. Each church-community is a unique response to the challenge of living in the world while resisting assimilation to it. As a result, today’s diverse Amish church-communities may be as different from each other as they are from their non-Amish neighbors. Nevertheless, Amish women’s lives reflect a continuity in which daughters grow up to live lives much like those of their mothers and grandmothers, engaging in many of the same activities: gardening, homemaking, and childrearing. Yet, as church-communities change technologically and grow to depend more on economic engagement with the non-Amish world to feed families, Amish women may also find themselves owning businesses and working in factories. In some communities, technological changes and greater economic integration may make women’s work easier, but women may also be working more independently than their sisters in communities more insistent on keeping traditional ways. How is an Amish woman farming with her husband and living in a home without running water or indoor plumbing similar to or different from an Amish woman who runs a large business employing many of her neighbors, enjoys solar power, and works on a computer? This book explores Amish women’s lives, looking at the contexts in which they grow up, the activities in which they engage, the values they come to espouse as members of particular church-communities, and the roles they define for themselves.

Learn more about The Lives of Amish Women at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jon T. Coleman's "Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America"

Jon T. Coleman is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award from the Western History Association, and Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation.

Coleman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America, and reported the following:

Opening Nature Shock to page 99 may disappoint a reader hoping to encounter a lost person. Instead of a crazed hiker or a hyperventilating backwoodsperson, we meet a thoroughly anchored New Hampshire woman named Miriam Newton who made history by staying put and jotting daily notes in a journal.

Miriam Newton kept a diary for sixty years. In it, she collected a handful of natural occurrences that swerved from the norm. The weather events that drew her attention tended to uproot trees, lift houses, and stun people. The Dark Day lived alongside freak whirlwinds, cold snaps, wild thunderstorms, and “dreadful gales.” Against these outbursts, Newton banked hundreds of uneventful dates. She paused to write terse descriptions of daily life, marking a pattern in time that absorbed the shock of the occasional disruption.

Newton’s appearance, however, comes at a pivotal moment in the book. In Nature Shock, I recount many dramatic episodes of people who got totally lost, but I also explore the shifting conception of what it meant to get lost. Over five centuries, I argue, North Americans traveled from relational space, where people navigated by their relationships to one another, to individual space, where people understood their position on earth by the coordinates provided by mass media, transportation grids, and commercial networks. The best vantage point to see this transition and thereby understand its consequences is on the edge of those spaces where people sometimes got terribly lost. I call the experience of utter bewilderment nature shock.

In her eighteenth-century diary, Miriam Newton patrolled the edges of relational space. She noted the comings and goings of neighbors, the passing of the seasons, and the changes in the weather. She described the remarkable day in May in 1780 when an “uncommon darkness” blotted out the midday sun and Thaddeus Hastings lost his way in the woods. Through her keeping track, Newton along with hundreds of other New England diarists mapped the out of bounds for her family and community. Getting lost in relational spaces was as much about losing connection with other people as it was becoming geographically disoriented. Newton’s diary helped spin a web of connections that held people in place, and it epitomized the social nature of nature shock throughout most of American history. Page 99 is the perfect introduction to a key concept of the book, especially since relational space may seem strange to those of us who are used to navigating alone with aid of a blue dot pulsing on a display screen.

Learn more about Nature Shock at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Pinto's "Infamous Bodies"

Samantha Pinto is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic, and coeditor of Writing beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, and reported the following:

What is it possible to feel when encountering Black women’s sexuality in the public sphere and historical record? What are the unacknowledged possibilities of Black vulnerability? What can texts--and critical readings of them-- that fall outside of diagnosing resistance or complicity do in the study of Black feminism, and in the thinking of the political? Page 99 of Infamous Bodies starts with a thick description of a Saturday Night Live sketch with Maya Rudolph as Sally Hemings and Robert De Niro as Thomas Jefferson— the climax of the sketch being when Jefferson asks her when she gets off of work and she deadpans “uh, never.” What do we do with this moment in a historically white show with overwhelmingly white writers, where liberties are taken with historical accuracy to think about the ludicrous idioms of seduction appended to our understanding of sexuality when faced with enslaved women’s sexual lives (following Saidiya Hartman, Brenda Stevenson, Ann Laura Stoler, and Emily Owens)? The humor of this scene exposes that logic, calls it out, and yet underscores the inevitability of Hemings’s sexual entanglement with Jefferson—coerced, forced, terrorized, privately contracted, ambivalent, and/or wholly expected sexual experiences between white enslavers and Black women were the “normal” of antebellum life.

My book, like the work of Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Racquel Gates, Jennifer Nash, Aida Levy-Hussen, Kali Gross, and Nicole Fleetwood, investigates the difficult political binds of “bad” representation of Blackness, and Black women in particular. On page 99, I ask what organizing around Black feminism’s complex and competing desires might look like— around those affects and attachments that don’t fit or can’t be disciplined into critical scripts of recognizably good politics. Early Black women celebrities, with their repeated public histories re-performed in art, culture, literature, and criticism, give us a glimpse into alternate genealogies of the political in the modern world— Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta. They help us see a black feminist politics invested in black women’s vulnerability as the base of all political subjectivity, not the lack that needs to be repaired to attain it, or ascend to it. My book delves into difficult moments of representation, consistently troubling the link between Black self-authorship and resistance (and Black performance beyond Black authorship as complicity, tragedy, minstrelsy) in order to ask what work pleasure, desire, humor, and ambition might do alongside and always tethered to histories and regimes of racial-sexual terror.

The understandable mood of the field of Black Studies and the ethical world is decidedly not bent toward humor right now, nor should it be. Infamous Bodies does not aim to wholesale diagnose and cure, but to gently press on assumed certainties and well-worn arcs of anti-Racist, Black Feminist, and Black Studies narratives to imagine, even briefly, what other scenes, affects, and attachments might bring to these fields, and to thinking about this dire political moment. What if Black study brought significant critical eyes to the attachments brought to the table in criticism that delimit the questions we are wil

ling to ask or perform, and that tacitly discipline our texts, our tastes, our readings? In embracing the “radical temporariness” of embodied existence that these five early Black women celebrities performed in their moments and in their popular repetitions, Infamous Bodies and its page 99 try to imagine different horizons and trajectories for the political that take Black feminist thought as its foundation, not its savior.

Visit Samantha Pinto's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ming Hsu Chen's "Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era"

Ming Hsu Chen is Associate Professor of Law, Political Science, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is Faculty-Director of the Immigration and Citizenship Law Program and co-edits the ImmigrationProf blog.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Limits on Formal Citizenship Erode Equality

Temporary visa holders, undocumented immigrants, and DACA recipients are keenly aware of how limitations on their legal status interact with other markers of substantive equality to place them in a subordinate position to formal citizens. In a country where race is linked with inequality, the visible minorities in every legal category recognize the interlocking stereotypes of criminality with unlawful status (for Latinos), economic threat with foreign status (for Asians), and national security threats with terrorism (for Muslims).

The erosion of substantive belonging for those lacking formal citizenship arises in different ways for temporary visa holders and undocumented immigrants that map onto table 5.

Table 5.1 Intersection of formal/substantive for temporary and undocumented immigrants

Would a browser opening to page 99 get a good idea of the whole work?

Yes, page 99 gives a summary of the main argument and a visual for how it plays out. The main argument is that formal citizenship (short hand: legal status) intersects with substantive equality. An immigrant’s placement at the intersection of formal and substantive impacts how well they fit into society (short hand: integration).

This academic argument takes life through the interviews with multiple categories of immigrants whose pathways to citizenship are blocked. On page 99 the focus is temporary visa holders with middling levels of formal citizenship: high skilled workers and international students who are legal and can someday become citizens if they find someone to sponsor a green card, but whose temporary visa restricts their ability to travel, vote, and work. Also, even though these tend to be economically privileged immigrants, their sense of belonging is limited by their temporariness. The story of Dazhen, a Chinese immigrant on an H1-B who is eligible for a green card and deciding whether to apply, bleeds over from page 99 to 100.

Hopefully, the casual reader can appreciate the argument and enjoy the stories in the book. Since I interviewed 100 immigrants, there are 99 more in the book. Earlier in the book, there are green card holders who are almost citizens and yet who do not fully belong: long-time residents eligible to naturalize but who don’t, and refugees who nearly always naturalize but never fully belong. Later on there are undocumented immigrants who lack legal status and the prospect of citizenship, even if the DREAMers among them have lived their whole lives in the United States and feel American.

Learn more about Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Toye's "Winston Churchill: A Life in the News"

Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. He previously worked at the University of Cambridge. He has written widely on modern British and international political and economic history. His critically acclaimed book Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness won him the 2007 Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year Award.

Toye applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Winston Churchill: A Life in the News, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Winston Churchill: A Life in the News is fairly typical of the book as a whole, in that it finds Churchill worrying about his image. It is 1915 and he faces one of the greatest crises of his career. He has been dismissed from his position as head of the Admiralty, though he remains for the time being a Cabinet minister. Churchill’s fall was intimately wrapped up with, though not wholly caused by, the Dardanelles fiasco: the failed naval assault on Turkey for which he attracted considerable blame. The Gallipoli landings that followed had become horribly bogged down, but it was not yet clear that they would fail utterly. As I relate:

Churchill remained obsessed with vindicating his Admiralty record. He buttonholed any journalist who would listen, on one occasion staying up till 2 a.m. to try to prove to an unconvinced Charles Repington [of The Times] that he had been right about Antwerp and the Dardanelles. Churchill showed confidential documents about these and other episodes to [Manchester Guardian editor] C. P. Scott, and even offered to let him take them away to study, before having second thoughts.

However, Churchill’s preoccupation with his own reputation, and his attempts to influence the media, are only one part of the story that the book relates. Churchill, from his early twenties onwards, was a skilful and prolific journalist. He kept up this work, to some degree or another, until the late 1940s. It helped keep him in the public eye and was a means of funding his extravagant lifestyle. Yet there were times too when – usually due to the pressures of office – he gave up writing for the papers for significant periods. The time of Gallipoli overlapped with one of these fallow spots though Churchill would return to journalism later in the war. As C.P. Scott recorded in his diary at the end of 1916:

I urged him to make a business of Parliament and make himself a figure there, but he said the papers (with the exception of the Manchester Guardian) would not report him and on the contrary ill natured remarks were always made, as that ‘There were few members present and no one troubled to come in’ or ‘what a contrast with the days when his rising was the signal for the House to fill’ & so on. Therefore he preferred to find his public in the Press. Then at least every word he wished to say was printed and it took him no longer to write an article for the ‘Sunday Pictorial’ for which he got £250 than to prepare a speech which was not reported.

Thus, the events that are covered on page 99 are quite consistent with Churchill’s long-term behaviour, but they do not fully represent the many ebbs and flows of his long and complex career.

Learn more about Winston Churchill: A Life in the News at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Capozzola's "Bound by War"

Christopher Capozzola is professor of history at MIT. Author of the award-winning Uncle Sam Wants You, he is also a cocurator of “The Volunteers: Americans Join World War I, 1914-1919,” a traveling exhibition that originated at The National WWI Museum and Memorial to commemorate the centennial of the First World War.

Capozzola applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America's First Pacific Century, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Despite their enthusiastic endorsement of Filipino service [in World War I], military officers and Wilson administration officials hesitated when it came time to stand up the [Philippine National] Guard. U.S. Army soldiers who had waited years for promotion opportunities and battlefield glory dreaded the prospect of staying behind in the Pacific to train troops who would likely never see combat, and with more American troops leaving the Philippines on every ship out of Manila, Army officials wondered whether they could really spare experienced officers for training. […]

The bigger obstacle was Jim Crow. The National Defense Act [of 1916] clearly stated that federalized Guard troops would carry their ranks with them into the U.S. Army, so federalizing the Philippine National Guard could potentially mean placing Filipino officers in command of white men. Woodrow Wilson had brought to Washington an administration committed to Philippine independence, but he also drew the color line within the federal bureaucracy. Equally committed to white supremacy and global warfare, and dependent on the votes of southern Democrats on Capitol Hill, Wilson and his officers confronted an impossible dilemma: either leave power in Manila in the hands of an armed and trained Filipinized military unsupervised by the "older and stronger brother" of the U.S. Army—or incorporate the Filipino troops.

Rather than confront this dilemma, they avoided it. Civilian politicians in Washington dragged their heels, military officers in Manila dug theirs in, and only a few insistent voices joined [Filipinos' demands] for action.

The Page 99 Test captures the big themes of Bound by War: two nations, a war, and what's at stake when the United States mobilizes soldiers for service without extending equal rights to them.

You've probably never heard of the Philippine National Guard. That's because it only existed for three months, at the very end of World War I. As an unincorporated territory of the United States, the Philippines didn't have a state militia. Wartime officials in the Philippines—especially leaders of the colony's independence movement—wanted to create one. But the dilemma posed by including soldiers of color into an all-white officer corps delayed its establishment. The Guard first gathered for training on November 18, 1918. That's right: one week after the armistice that had ended the First World War.

On the one hand, this is a familiar story: of dedicated military service of people of color, and of the deeply-rooted racism that accompanied the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. And yet, from a Pacific perspective, this history looks different. Filipinos fought hard to establish the Guard, not because they wanted to win equal citizenship with white Americans, but because they believed the creation of a national army was a stepping stone to Philippine independence. The Philippine National Guard embodies the contradictions of the United States: a nation that thinks like a republic and acts like an empire. I wrote Bound by War to explore these contradictions from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers who served in America's forgotten Filipino forces.

Learn more about Bound by War at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jesse Wegman's "Let the People Pick the President"

Jesse Wegman is a member of the New York Times editorial board, where he has written about the Supreme Court and legal affairs since 2013.

He previously worked as a reporter, editor, and producer at outlets including National Public Radio, The New York Observer, Reuters, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek. He graduated from New York University School of Law in 2005.

Wegman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins a new section of Chapter 3, which focuses on the actual functioning (or dysfunctioning) of the Electoral College in the Republic's early years. On that page I describe how the most significant founders, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, came quickly to understand how poorly designed the system was, and I noted their efforts to change it. Madison proposed amending the Constitution to fix the College in two ways: First, prohibit the winner-take-all rule, which states were widely adopting by the early 19th century, even though the framers never discussed it. Second, eliminate the back-up election procedure in the Constitution's text, which throws any contested election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets a single vote for president. Madison called this an "evil"; Jefferson called it "the most dangerous blot in our Constitution." It has been triggered twice, in 1800 and 1824, and never since. (And I hope never again.)

Page 99 neatly conveys a central pillar of my book's argument: The Electoral College was not, as we were led to believe in school, a crucial component of the framers' brilliant constitutional design. To the contrary, it was a last-minute compromise thrown together by a few delegates in a side room in order to get the Constitution completed and sent to the states for ratification. They didn't fully consider the ways in which it might backfire, and when it started doing so only a few years later, they quickly came to regret the system they'd built.

The book goes into much more detail about the history of the College's adoption, the role of slavery, the role of state power, and the ways the winner-take-all rule has always bedeviled us as a country and made millions of citizens irrelevant to the outcome of the election, but this basic idea is very important: The founders were brilliant political thinkers, and they got a lot of things right. They were also flawed, biased human beings who got a lot of things wrong. The Electoral College was one of these things. We will never be able to fulfill the framers' original vision of a nation in which all people are equal until we treat people that way in the process of choosing our leader.

I like what's on Page 99 because it illustrates a feature of my book that many readers have told me they appreciate: the excavation of the "backstory" of the constitutional convention and of the framers' conflicted feelings about their creation. Our history has too often been told in an overly neat way, and I believe a lot of the myths and misconceptions that burden us today are the result of what we've left out. My book is an attempt to bring that complexity back into the picture, in a way that regular readers can relate to, and to demystify the Electoral College in particular, so that we may soon advance our democracy forward once again, toward a nation in which all people are equal.

Visit Jesse Wegman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katja M. Guenther's "The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals"

Katja M. Guenther is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Making Their Place (2010). Her research focuses on gender, social movements, human-animal relationships, and the state.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals is one of several places in the text where I reflect on my relationship to the research I conducted as a volunteer at a high-intake, high-kill public animal shelter that I call the Pacific Animal Welfare Center, or PAW. On this page, I specifically focus on how fostering dogs from PAW for animal rescue groups who would find homes for them shifted my thinking about how kill shelters like PAW often justify putting dogs and cats to sleep: there are simply not enough homes for all of the shelter animals, and too many shelter animals are unadoptable. On page 99, I also begin a discussion about how fostering dogs deepened my appreciation for members of this species in ways that undercut PAW’s—and our society’s—dominant messaging that not all shelter animals can find homes and that their deaths are a tragic but necessary reality of the human relationship with companion animals.

The content of page 99 doesn’t reflect the core elements of the analysis I present in The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, but it still provides the reader with a good idea of the whole work. The text on this page makes clear that this is a book about animals without homes, and that I am an author who is problematizing myths about these animals and the humans with whom their lives intersect. Importantly, this page, among many others, illuminates how I approached the research and research site, and how my experiences changed me and my own views. People often take the path of least resistance when faced with complex problems: identify and accept the simplest explanation that best resonates with existing explanations for similar problems. In the context of animal sheltering in the United States, there are a number of such easy explanations that have become dominant myths, including that some people (especially poor people of color) are “irresponsible” guardians for animals, some animals (notably pit bulls) are dangerous and pose a particular risk to public safety, and some animals (particularly those who are most vulnerable because of their health, age, behavior, or breed) must die in shelters. What page 99 makes clear is that I questioned and came to doubt these easy explanations, to instead discover that these myths reflect and reinforce hierarchies of race, class, gender, species, and breed.

Visit Katja M. Guenther's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth Austin's "The Jews and the Reformation"

Kenneth Austin is a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Bristol, UK, and the author of From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Jews and the Reformation, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Jews and the Reformation falls four pages from the end of chapter 4, ‘People of the Book’, which is concerned with the relationship between the Reformed religion (more commonly known as ‘Calvinism’) and Judaism, in the sixteenth century. Over the previous couple of pages I provided a number of examples intended to demonstrate that members of the Reformed faith often looked to the fortunes of the Jews in the Old Testament as models for their own experiences. On page 99 I then move on to propose a couple of reasons which might explain this phenomenon. First, I argue that this was one manifestation of the profound attention devoted to the Bible by Calvinists in this period. While the Reformation as a whole had encouraged Christians to give renewed attention to the bible (encapsulated in the famous Latin tag ‘sola scriptura’ – ‘by the scriptures alone’), some groups were principally concerned with the message of salvation that they found in the New Testament; but members of the Reformed faith gave almost equal attention to the Old Testament, contending that the two parts of the bible needed to be seen as a unified whole. Secondly, I argue that this identification with the Jews of the Old Testament was linked to their theology, and particularly the Reformed idea of providence, according to which God was responsible for everything – good and bad – which happened to an individual or a community. The relatively limited successes of the Calvinists by the 1560s had been a source of great disappointment, and might have suggested that God was not on their side; but the Old Testament showed how the Israelites, God’s chosen people – a role that the Calvinists assumed for themselves – had previously been subjected to great difficulties, and their message rejected. Indeed, the identification with the Jews of the Old Testament allowed the Calvinists to transform their apparent lack of success into evidence of their special status.

At least in certain respects, the page 99 experiment does work for my book. In The Jews and the Reformation, I am attempting to discuss the different ways in which different groups – Protestant (Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist etc.) and Catholic – viewed Jews and Judaism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, in the wake of the Reformation. In particular I was keen that Martin Luther (the founder of the Reformation, and often the only Protestant figures whose (abhorrent) views on Jews are discussed in discussions of this theme, should be considered as part of a much broader spectrum of viewpoints. It is therefore quite a relief that there is no mention of Luther on this page! Secondly, in the book I am trying to reflect the views both of leading theologians and the experiences of their ‘ordinary’ followers. This theme of identification between members of the Reformed faith and biblical Jews (exemplified by the fact that many Calvinists were given names such as Abraham, which were derived from the Old Testament) nicely illustrates how this intersection between the two groups might happen. Third, the theme of identification demonstrates some of the complexities and nuance which characterised Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in this period. Certainly, the anti-Semitic (or, more correctly for this period, anti-Jewish) dimension needs to be properly acknowledged and understood, but it should be seen, in my view, as part of a wider range of sometimes complementary, and sometimes contradictory, Christian attitudes. Of course, given that my book aims to open up the wide variety of Christian attitudes towards Jews, Jewish culture and the Hebrew language, across a diverse group of Christian confessions, and across a period of approximately two centuries, much of this complexity is not revealed in a single page; even so, this exercise does a remarkably good job of drawing attention to some of the most important and recurring themes in my book.

Learn more about The Jews and the Reformation at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue